A Fountain Sealed

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

While he waited now, he had paused at last before two portraits. He had often so paused while waiting for Imogen. To-night it was with a new curiosity.

They hung opposite the Correggio and on either side of the great mirror that rose from the mantelpiece to the cornice. One was of a young man dressed in the fashion of twenty-five years before, dressed with a rather self-conscious negligence. He was pale, earnest, handsome, though his nose was too small and his eyes too large. A touch of the histrionic was in his attitude, in his dark hair, tossed carelessly, in the unnecessarily weighty and steady look of his dark eyes, even in the slight smile of his firm, full lips, a smile too well-adapted, as it were, to the needs of any interlocutor. Beneath his arm was a book; a long, distinguished hand hanging slackly. Jack turned away with a familiar impatience. In twenty-five years Mr. Upton had changed very little. It was much the same face that he had known; in especial, the slack, self-conscious hand, the smile—always so much more for himself than for you—were familiar. The hand, the necktie, the smile, so deep, so dark, so empty, were all, Jack was inclined to suspect, that there had ever been of Mr. Upton.

The other portrait, painted with the sleek convention of that earlier epoch, was of a woman in a ball-dress. The portrait was by a French master and under his brush the sitter had taken on the look of a Feuillet heroine. She was gay, languid, sentimental, and extraordinarily pretty. Her hair was dressed in a bygone fashion, drawn smoothly up from the little ears, coiled high and falling across her forehead in a light, straight fringe. Her wonderful white shoulders rose from a wonderfully low white bodice; a bracelet of emeralds was on her arm, a spray of jasmine in her fingers; she was evidently a girl, yet in her apparel was a delicate splendor, in her gaze a candid assurance, that marked her as an American girl. And she expressed charmingly, with sincerity as it were, a frivolous convention. This was Miss Cray, a year or so before her marriage with Mr. Upton. The portrait had been painted in Paris, where, orphaned, lovely, but not largely dowered, she had, under the wing of an aunt domiciled in France for many years and bearing one of its oldest names, failed to make the brilliant match that had been hoped for her. This touch of France in girlhood echoed an earlier impress. Imogen had told him that her mother had been educated for some years in a French convent, deposited there by pleasure-loving parents during European wanderings, and Imogen had intimated that her mother's frequent returns to her native land had never quite effaced alien and regrettable points of view. Before this portrait, Jack was accustomed, not to impatience, but to a gaze of rather ironic comprehension. It had always explained to him so much. But to-night he found himself looking at it with an intentness in which was a touched curiosity; in which, also, and once more he was vexed with himself for feeling it, was an anxiety, almost a fear. Of course it hadn't been like, even then, he was surer than ever of that to-night, with his memory of the pale face smiling down at him and at Imogen from the deck of the great steamer. The painter had seen the mask only; even then there had been more to see. And sure, as he had never been before, of all that there must have been besides to see, he wondered with a new wonder how she had come to marry Mr. Upton.

He glanced back at him. Handsome? Yes. Distinguished? Yes; there was no trace of the shoddy in his spiritual histrionics. He had been fired by love, no doubt, far beyond his own chill complacency. Such a butterfly girl, falling with, perhaps, bruised wings from the high, hard glare of worldly ambitions, more of others for her than her own for herself—of that he felt, also quite newly sure to-night—such a girl had thought Mr. Upton, no doubt, a very noble creature and herself happy and fortunate. And she had been very young.

He was still looking up at Miss Cray when Imogen came in. He felt sure, from his first glance at her, that nothing had happened, during the interval of his abstention, to deepen her distress. In her falling and folding black she was serene and the look of untroubled force he knew so well was in her eyes. She had taken the measure of the grown-up butterfly and found it easy of management. He felt with relief that the mother could have threatened none of the things they held dear. And, indeed, in his imagination, her spirit seemed to flutter over them in the solid, solemn room, reassuring through its very lightness and purposelessness.

"I am so glad to see you," Imogen said, after she had shaken his hand and they had seated themselves on the sofa that stretched along the wall under the Correggio. "I have been sorry about the other day."

"Oh!" he answered vaguely, not quite sure for what the regret was.

"I ought to have mastered myself; been more able to play the trivial part, as you did; that was such real kindness in you, Jack, dear. I couldn't have pretended gaiety, but I didn't intend to cast a gloom. It only became that, I suppose, when I was—so hurt."

He understood now. "By there not being gloom enough?"

"If you like to put it so. To see her smile like that!"