A Fountain Sealed

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

"Poor things," was her thought,—her own self-pity had part only in its inclusiveness,—"summer is over for all of us."

And with the thought, girlishly, still girlishly, she hid her face upon her arms as she stood there, murmuring:—"Ah, I hate, I hate getting old."

A step at the door roused her. She turned to see Jack entering.

Jack looked very nice in the tans and russets of his riding-tweeds and gaiters. The chill air had brought a clear color to his cheeks; the pale gold of his hair,—one unruly lock, as usual, over-long, lying across his forehead,—shone like sunlight; his gray eyes looked as deep and limpid as a mountain pool.

Valerie was very, very glad to see him. He embodied the elixir, the color, the freshness of the world to-day: and oh how young—how young—how fortunately, beautifully young he looked;—that was the thought that met him from the contrast of the mirror.

She gave him her hands in welcome, and they sat down near a window where the sunlight fell upon them and the breeze blew in upon them, she on a little sofa, among chintz cushions, he on a low chair beside her; and while they talked, that excitement, that pain and expectancy grew in Jack.

The summer was over and, soon, it must be, she would go. With a wave of sadness that sucked him back and swept him forward in a long, sure ache, came the knowledge, deeper than before, of his own desolation. But, sitting there beside her in the October sunlight; feeling, with the instinct, so quick, so sensitive in him, that it was in sadness he had found her, the desolation wasn't so much for himself as for her, what she represented and stood for. He, too, seeing her face with the blooming rose beside it, had known her piercing thought.

She was going; but in other senses, too. She had begun to go; and all the sacrifices, the relinquishments, the acceptances of the summer, were the first steps of departure. She had done with things and he, who had not yet done with them, was left behind. Already the signs of distance were upon her—he saw them as she had seen them—her distance from the world of youth, of hope, of effort.

A thin veil, like the sad-sweet haze over the purpling hills, seemed to waver between them; the veil that, for all its melting elusiveness, parts implacably one generation from another. Its dimness seemed to rest on her bright hair and to hover in her bright eyes; to soften, as with a faint melancholy, the brightness of her smile. And it was as if he saw her, with a little sigh, unclasp her hands, that had clung to what she fancied to be still her share of life,—unclasp her hands, look round her with a slight amaze at the changed season where she found herself, and, after the soundless pause of recognition, bend her head consentingly to the quiet, obliterating snows of age. And once more his own change, his own initiation to subtler standards, was marked by the fact that when the old, ethical self, still over-glib with its assurances, tried to urge upon him that all was for the best in a wonderful world, ventured to murmur an axiom or so as to the grace, the dignity, the added spiritual significance of old age, the new self, awakened to tragedy, turned angry eyes upon that vision of the rose in the devastated garden, and once more muttered, in silence:—"Damn!"

They had talked of the past and of the coming marriage, very superficially, in their outer aspects; they had talked of his summer wanderings and of the Pakenhams' visit to Vermont. She had given him tea and she had told him of her plans for the winter;—she had given up the New York house, and had taken a little flat near Mrs. Wake's, that she was going to move to in a few days from now. And Jack said at last, feeling that with the words he dived from shallows into deeps:—"And—when are you going back?—back to England?"