A Fountain Sealed

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

"Is it anything that I've done?" she questioned. "Have I seemed cross this afternoon? I was a little cross, I know. Do forgive me, dear."

Enveloped as she was in her mother's arms, so near that she could feel the warmth and smoothness of her shoulder through the fine texture of her gown, so near that a fresh fragrance, like that from a bank of violets, seemed to breathe upon her, Imogen found it a little difficult to control the discomfort that the contact aroused in her. "Of course I forgive you, dear mama," she said, in a voice that had regained its composure. "But, oh no!—it was not at all for that—I hardly noticed it. It's nothing that you can help, dear."

"But I can't bear to have you cry and not know what's the matter."

"Your knowing wouldn't help me, would it?" said Imogen, with a faint smile, lifting her hand to press her handkerchief to her eyes.

"No, of course not; but it would help me—for my sake, then."

"Then, if it helps you, it was papa I was thinking of. I miss him so." And with the words, that placed before her suddenly a picture of her own desolation, a great sob again shook her. "I'm so lonely now, so lonely." Her mother held her, not speaking, though Imogen now felt that she, too, wept, and a greater bitterness rose in her at the thought that it was not for her dead father that the tears fell but in pure weak sympathy and helplessness. She, herself, was the only lonely one. She alone, remembered. She alone longed for him. In this sharpened realization of her own sorrow she forgot that it had not been the actual cause of her grief.

"Poor darling; poor child," her mother said at last. "Imogen, I know that I've failed, in so much. But I want so to make up for things, if I can; to be near you; to fill the loneliness a little; to have you love me, too, with time."

"Love you, my dear mother? Why, I am full of love for you. Haven't you felt that?" Imogen drew herself away to look her grieved wonder into her mother's eyes. "Oh, mama, how little you know me!"

Valerie, flushed, the tears on her cheeks, oddly shaken from her usual serenity, still clasped her daughter's hands and still spoke on. "I know, I know,—but it's not in the way it ought to be. It's not your fault, Imogen; it's mine; it must be the mother's fault if she can't make herself needed. Only you can't know how it all began, from so far back—that sense that you didn't need me. But I shirked; I know that I shirked. Things seemed too hard for me—I didn't know how to bear them. Perhaps you might have come almost to hate me, if I had stayed, as things were. I'm not making any appeal. I'm not trying to force anything. But I so want you to know how I long to have my chance—to begin all over again. I so want you to help."

Imogen, troubled and confused by her mother's soft yet almost passionate eagerness, that seemed to pull her down to some childish, inferior place, just as her mother's arms had drawn down her head to an attitude incongruous with its own benignant loftiness, had yet been able, while she spoke, to gather her thoughts into a keen, moral concentration upon her actual words. She was accustomed, in moments of moral stress, to a quick lifting of her heart and mind for help and insight toward the highest that she knew, and she felt herself pray now, "Help me to be true, to her, for her." The prayer seemed to raise her from some threatened abasement, and from her regained height she spoke with a sense of assured revelation. "We can't have things by merely wanting, them. To gain anything we must work for it. You left us. We didn't shut you out. You were different.—You are different."