A Fountain Sealed

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

Her fragrant branch of life that had bloomed so fully and freshly in her hand, a scepter and a fairy wand of beneficence, had withered to a thorny scourge for her own shoulders. She looked about her, before her. She realized with a new, a cutting keenness, that Jack was very rich and she very poor. The chill of poverty had hardly reached her as yet, the warm certainty of its cessation had wrapped her round too closely; but it reached her now, and the thought of that poverty, unrelieved, perhaps, for all her life, the thought of the comparative obscurity to which it would consign her, filled her with a real panic; and, as before, the worst part of the panic was that she should feel it, she, the scorner of material things. Suppose, just suppose, that no one else came. Everything grew gray at the thought. Charities, friends, admiration, these were poor substitutes for the happy power and pride that as a rich man's adored wife would have been hers. And the fact that had transformed her blossoming branch into the thorny scourge was that Jack's adored wife she would never be. His humbled, his submissive, his chastened and penitent wife,—yes, on those terms; yes, she could see it, the future, like a sunny garden which one could only reach by squeezing oneself through some painfully narrow aperture. The fountains, the flowers, the lawns were still hers—if she would stoop and crawl; and for Imogen the mere imagining of herself in such a posture brought a hot blush to her forehead. Not only would she have scorned such means of reaching the life of ample ease and rich benevolence, but they were impossible to her nature. A garden that one must crouch to enter was a prison. Better, far better, her barren, dusty, lonely life than such humiliation; such apostasy.

She faced it all often, the future, the panic, during the last days of preparation for the tableaux, days during which, with a still magnanimity, she fulfilled the tasks that she had undertaken. She would not throw up her part because her mother and Jack had so cruelly injured her; it was now for her father and for the crippled children alone that she did it.

Sitting in her bedroom with its many books and photographs, the big framed one of her father over her bed, she promised him, her eyes on his, that she would have strength to face it all, for all her life if necessary. "It was too easy, I see that now," she whispered to him. "I had made no real sacrifices for our thing. The drop of black blood had never yet been crushed out of my heart,—for when you died, it was submission that was asked of me, not sacrifice. It was easy, dear, to give myself to the work we believed in—to be tired, and strong, and glad for it—to live out bravely into the world—when you were beside me and when all the means of work were in my hand. But now I must relinquish something that I could only keep by being false to myself—to you—to the right. And I must go uphill—'yes, uphill to the very end'—accepting poverty, loneliness, the great need of love, unanswered. But I won't falter or forget, darling father. As long as I live I will fight our fight. Even if the way is through great darkness, I carry the light in my heart."

The noble pathos of such soliloquies brought her to tears, but the tears, she felt, were strengthening and purifying. After drying them, after reading some of the deeply marked passages in the poets that he and she,—and, oh, alas! alas! she and Jack, lost Jack—had so often read together, she would go down-stairs, descend into the dusty, thorny arena again, feeling herself uplifted, feeling a halo of sorrowful benignity about her head. And this feeling was so assured that those who saw her at these moments were forced, to some extent, to share it.

Toward her mother, toward Jack, she showed a gentle, a distant courtesy; to Mary a heartbreaking sweetness. Mary, perhaps, needed to have pettier impressions effaced, and certain memories could but fade before Imogen's august head and unfaltering eyes.

If she had been wrong in that strange little scene of the Antigone, Mary was convinced that her intention had been high. Jack had hurt her too much; that was it; and, besides, how could she know what had gone on behind the scenes, passages between mother and daughter that had made Imogen's attitude inevitable. So Mary argued with herself, sadly troubled. "Oh, Imogen, please tell me," she burst forth one day, the day before the tableaux, when she was sitting with Imogen in the latter's room; "what is it that makes you so sad? Why are you so displeased with Jack? You haven't given him up, Imogen!"

Imogen passed her hand softly over Mary's hair, recalling, as she did so, that the gesture was a favorite one with her father.

"Won't you, can't you tell me?" Mary pleaded.

"It is so difficult, dear. Given him up? No, I never do that with people I have cared for; but he is no longer the Jack I cared for. He is changed, Mary."

"He adores you as much as ever,—of course I've always known how he adored you; it made me so happy, loving you both as I do; and he still adores you I'm sure. He is always watching you. He changes color when you come into the room."