"She is very lovely, your mother, as you say," Jack commented, feeling a little breathless over this silent meeting of forces that he must think of as hostile, and finding nothing better to say.
Imogen, who had continued steadily to wave her muff, welcoming, but for her part unsmiling, answered, "Yes."
"I hope that she won't mind my being here, in the way, after a fashion," said Jack.
"She won't mind," said Imogen.
He knew the significance of her voice; displeasure was in its gentleness, a quiet endurance of distress. It struck him then, in a moment, that it was rather out of place for Mrs. Upton to smile so radiantly at such a home-coming. Not that the smile had been a gay one. It had shone out after her search for her daughter's face; for the finding of it and for him it had continued to shine. It was like sunlight on a sad white day of mist; it did not dispel mournfulness, it seemed only to irradiate it. But—to have smiled at all. With Imogen's eyes he saw, suddenly, that tears would have been the more appropriate greeting and, in looking back at the girl once more, he saw that her own, as if in vicarious atonement, were running down her cheeks. She, then, felt a doubled suffering and his heart hardened against the woman who had caused it.
The two travelers had disappeared and the decks were filled with the jostling hurry of final departure. Jack and Imogen moved to take their places by the long gangway that slanted up from the dock.
He said nothing to her of her tears, silent before this subtle grief; perhaps, for all his love and sympathy, a little disconcerted by its demonstration, and it was Imogen who spoke, murmuring, as they stood together, looking up, "Poor, poor papa."
Yes, that had been the hurt, to see her dead put aside, almost forgotten, in the mother's over-facile smile.
The passengers came trooping down the gangway, with an odd buoyancy of step caused by the steep incline, and Jack, for all his expectancy, had eyes, appreciative and critical, for the procession of his country-people. Stout, short men, embodying purely economic functions, with rudimentary features, slightly embossed, as it were, upon pouch-like faces. Thin, young men, whose lean countenances had somewhat the aspect of steely machinery, apt for swift, ruthless, utilitarian processes. Bloodless old men, many of whom looked like withered, weary children adorned with whitened hair. The average manhood of America, with its general air of cheap and hasty growth, but varied here and there by a higher type; an athletic collegian, auspiciously Grecian in length of limb, width of brow, deep placidity of eye; varied by a massive senatorial head or so, tolerant, humorous, sagacious; varied by a stalwart Westerner, and by the weedier scholar, sensitive, self-conscious, too much of the spiritual and too little of the animal in the meager body and over-intelligent face.
There was a certain discrepancy, in dress and bodily well-being, between the feminine and the masculine portion of the procession; many of the heavy matrons, wide-hipped, well-corseted, benignant and commanding of mien, were ominously suggestive, followed as they were by their fragile husbands, of the female spider and her doomed, inferior, though necessary, mate. The young girls of the happier type resembled Imogen Upton in grace, in strength, in calm and in assurance; the less fortunate were sharp, sallow, anxious-eyed; and the children were either rosy, well-mannered, and confident, or ill-mannered, over-mature, but also, always, confident.
Highly equipped with every graceful quality of his race, not a touch of the male spider about him, Eddy's head appeared at last, proud, delicate and strong. His mother, carrying a small dog, was on his arm, and, as she emerged before the eyes that watched for her, she was smiling again at something that Eddy had said to her. Then her eyes found them, Jack and Imogen, so near now, sentinels before the old life, that her smile, her aspect, her very loveliness, seemed to menace, and Jack felt that she caught a new gravity from the stern gentleness of Imogen's gaze; that she adjusted her features to meet it; that, with a little shock, she recognized the traces of weeping on her daughter's face and saw, in his own intentionally hardened look, that she had tuned herself to a wrong pitch and had been, all unconsciously, jarring.
He couldn't but own that her readjustment, if readjustment it was, was very beautifully done. Tears rose in her eyes, too. He saw, as she neared them, that her face was pale and weary; it looked ever so gently, ever so sadly, perhaps almost timidly, at her daughter, and as she came to them she put out her hand to Imogen, laid hold on her and held her without speaking while they all moved away together.
The tears of quick sympathy had risen to Jack's own eyes and he stood apart while the mother and daughter kissed. After that, and when they had gone on a little before him and Eddy, Mrs. Upton turned to him, and if she readjusted herself she didn't, as it were, retract, for the smile again rested on him while Eddy presented him to her. He saw then that she had suffered, though with a suffering different from any that he would have thought of as obvious. How or what she had suffered he could not tell, but the pale, weary features, for all their smile, reassured him. She wasn't, at all events, a heartless, a flippant woman.
Eddy and Mrs. Upton's maid remained behind to do battle with the custom-house, and Jack, with Imogen and her mother, got into the capacious cab that was waiting for them.
The streets in this mean quarter were deep in mud. The snow everywhere had been trampled into liquid blackness, and the gaunt horses that galloped along the wharfs dragging noisy vans and carts were splashed all over. It might have been some sordid quarter of an Italian town that they drove through, so oddly foreign were the disheveled houses, their predominant color a heavy, glaring red. Men in white uniforms were shoveling snow from the pavements. The many negro countenances in the hurrying crowds showed blue tints in the bitter air. Coming suddenly to a wide, mean avenue, when the carriage lurched and swayed on the street-car tracks, they heard, mingled in an inconceivably ugly uproar, the crash and whine of the cable-cars about them, and the thunder of the elevated-railway above their heads.
Jack, sensitive to others' impressions, wondered if this tumultuous ugliness made more dreary to Mrs. Upton the dreary circumstances of her home-coming. There was no mitigation of dreariness to be hoped for from Imogen, who was probably absorbed in her own bitter reflections. She gazed steadily out of the window, replying only with quiet monosyllables to her mother's tentative questions; her face keeping its look of endurance. One could infer from it that had she not so controlled herself she must have wept, and sitting before the mother and daughter Jack felt much awkwardness in his position. If their meeting were not to be one with more conventional surface he really ought not to have been invited to share it. Imogen, poor darling, had all his sympathy; she hadn't reckoned with the difficulties; she hadn't reckoned with that hurting smile, with the sharp reawakening of the vicarious sense of wrong; but, all the same, before her look, her silence, he could but feel for her mother, and feel, too, a keener discomfort from the fact that his inopportune presence must make Mrs. Upton's discomfort the greater.
Mrs. Upton stroked her tiny dog, who, fulfilling all Jack's conceptions of costly frivolity, was wrapped in a well-cut coat, in spite of which he was shivering, from excitement as much as from cold, and her bright, soft gaze went from him to Imogen. She didn't acquiesce for long in the silence. Leaning forward to him presently she began to ask him questions about Boston, the dear old great-aunt; to make comments, some reminiscent, some interrogative, upon the scenes they passed through; to lead him so tactfully into talk that he found himself answering and assenting almost as fluently as if Imogen in her corner had not kept those large, sad eyes fixed on the passing houses. So mercifully did her interest and her ease lift him from discomfort that, with a sharp twinge of self-reproach, he more than once asked himself if Imogen found something a little disloyal in his willingness to be helped. One couldn't, all the same, remain at the dreadful depth where her silence plunged them; such depths were too intimate. Mrs. Upton had felt that. It was because she was not intimate that she smiled upon him; it was because she intended to hold them both firmly on the surface that she was so kind. He watched her face with wonder, and a little fear, for which he was angry with himself. He noted the threegrains de beautéand the smile that seemed to break high on her cheek, in a small nick, like that on the cheek of a Japanese doll. She frightened him, made him feel shy, yet made him feel at ease, too, as though her own were contagious; and his impression of her was softly permeated with the breath of violets. Jack disapproved of perfumes; but he really couldn't tell whether it wasn't Mrs. Upton's gaze only, the sweet oddity of her smile, that, by some trick of association, suggested the faint haze of fragrance.
They reached the long, far sweep of Fifth Avenue, piled high with snow—dazzling in white, blue, gold—on either side, and they turned presently into a street of brownstone houses, houses pleasant, peaceful, with an air of happy domesticity.
Mrs. Upton's eyes, while the cab advanced with many jolts among the heaps of snow, fixed themselves on one of these houses, and Jack fancied that he saw in her glance a whole army of alarmed memories forcibly beaten back. Here she had come as a bride and from here, not three weeks ago, her dead husband had gone with only his children beside him. Now, if ever, she should feel remorse. Whether she did or not he could not tell, but the eyes with which she greeted her old home were not happy.
Imogen, as they alighted, spoke at last, asking him to stay to lunch. He recognized magnanimity in her glance. He had seemed to ignore her hurt, and she forgave him, understanding his helplessness. But though her mother seconded her invitation with, "Do, you must be so tired and hungry, after all these hours," Jack excused himself. Already he thought, a woman with such a manner as Mrs. Upton's—if manner were indeed the word for such a gliding simplicity—must wonder what in the name of heaven he did there. She was simple, she was gliding; but she was not near.
"May I come in soon and see you?" he said to Imogen while they paused at the foot of the stone steps. And, with at last her own smile, sad but sweet, for him, she answered, "As soon as you will, dear Jack. You know how much of strength and comfort you mean to me."
Jack, however, did not go for three or four days, giving them plenty of time, as he told himself, to get used to each other's excesses or lacks of grief. And as he waited for Imogen in the long drawing-room that had been the setting of so many of their communings, he wondered what adjustment the mother and daughter had come to.
The aspect of the drawing-room was unchanged; changelessness had always been for him its characteristic mark; in essentials, he felt sure, it had not changed since the days of old Mrs. Upton, the present Mrs. Upton's long deceased mother-in-law. Only a touch here and there showed the passage of time. It was continuous with the dining-room, so that it was but one long room that crossed all the depth of the house, tall windows at the back, heavily draped, echoing dimly the windows of the front that looked out upon the snowy, glittering street. The inner half could be shut away by folding-doors, and its highly polished sideboard, chairs, table, a silver épergne towering upon it, glimmered in a dusky element that relegated it, when not illuminated for use, to a mere ghostly decorativeness. By contrast, the drawing-room was vivid. Its fringed and buttoned furniture,—crimson brocade set in a dark carved wood, the dangling lusters of the huge chandelier, the elaborate Sèvres vases on the mantelpiece, flanking a bronze clock portentously gloomy, expressed old Mrs. Upton's richly solid ideals; but these permanent uglinesses distressed Jack less than the pompous and complacent taste of the later additions. A pretentious cabinet of late Italian Renaissance work stood in a corner; the dark marble mantelpiece, that looked like a sarcophagus, was incongruously draped with an embroidered Italian cope, and a pseudo-Correggio Madonna, encompassed with a wilderness of gilt frame, smiled a pseudo-smile from the embossed paper of the walls. It was one of Jack's little trials to hear Imogen refer to this trophy with placid conviction.
Yet, for all its solemn stupidity, the room was not altogether unpleasing; it signified something, were it only an indifference to fashion, It was, funnily, almost Spartan, for all the carving, the cushioning, the crimson, so little concession did it make to other people's standards or to small, happy minor uses. Mr. Upton and his daughter had not changed it because they had other things to think of; and they thought of these things not in the drawing-room but in the large library up-stairs. There one could find the personal touches, that, but for the cope, the cabinet, the Correggio, were lacking below. There the many photographs from the Italian primitives, the many gracious Donatello and Delia Robbia bas-reliefs, expressed something of Imogen, too, though Jack always felt that Imogen's esthetic; side expressed what was not very essential in her.
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!"
Jack was sorry for her, yet, at the same time, sorry for the butterfly.
"Yes, I know how you must have felt. But, it was natural, you know. One smiles involuntarily at a meeting, however sad its background. I believe thatyouwould have smiled if she hadn't."
Imogen's clear eyes were upon him while he thus shared with her his sense of mitigations and she answered without a pause: "Yes, I could have smiled at her. That would have been different."
"You mean—that you had a right to smile?"
"I can't see how shecould," said Imogen in a low voice, not answering his question; thinking, probably, that it answered itself. And she went on: "I was ready, you know, to help her to bear it all, with my whole strength; but, and it is that that still hurts me so, she doesn't seem to know that she needs help. She doesn't seem to be bearing anything."
Jack was silent, feeling here that they skirted too closely ground upon which, with Imogen, he never ventured. He had brought from his study of the portraits a keener sense of how much Mrs. Upton had to bear no longer.
"But," Imogen continued, oddly echoing his own sense of deeper insights, "I already understand her so much better than I've ever done. I've never come so near. Never seen so clearly how little there is to see. She's still essentially that, you know," and she pointed to the French portrait that, with softly, prettily mournful eyes, gazed out at them.
"The butterfly thing," Jack suggested rather than acquiesced.
"The butterfly thing," she accepted.
But Jack went on: "Not only that, though. There is, I'm very sure, more to see. She is so—so sensible."
"Sensible?" again Imogen accepted. "Well, isn't that portrait sensible? Doesn't that lovely, luxurious girl see and want all the happy, the easy things of life? It is sensible, of course, clearly to know what they are, and firmly to make for them. That's just what I recognize now in her, that all she wants is to make things easy, toglisser."
"Yes, I can believe that," he murmured, a little dazed by her clear decisiveness; he often felt Imogen to be so much more clear-sighted, so much more clever than himself when it came to judgments and insights, that he could only at the moment acquiesce, through helplessness. "I suppose that is the essential—the desire of ease."
"And it hurts you that I should be able to see it, to say it, of my mother." Her eyes, with no hardness, no reproach, probed him, too. She almost made him feel unworthy of the trust she showed him.
"No," he said, smiling at her, "because I know that it's only to a friend who so understands you, who so cares for all that comes into your life."
"Only to such a friend, indeed," she returned gently.
"Have they been hard, these days?" he asked her, atoning to himself for the momentary shrinking that she had detected.
"Yes, they have," she answered, "and the more so from my seeing all her efforts to keep them soft; as if it was easeIwanted! But I have faced it all."
"What else has there been to face?"
She said nothing for some moments, looking at him with a thoughtful openness that, he felt, was almost marital in its sharing of silence.
"She's against everything, everything," she said at last.
"You mean in the way we feared?—that she'll try to change things?"
"She'll not seem to try. She'll seem to accept. But she's against my country; against my life; against me."
"Well, if she accepts, or seems to, that will make it easy for you. There will be nothing to fight, to oppose."
"Don't use her word, Jack. She will make it easy on the surface; but it's that that will be so hard for me to bear; the surface ease over the hidden discord."
"You may resolve the discord. Give her time to grow her roots. How can you expect anything but effort now, in this soil that she can't but associate with mistakes and sorrows?"
"The mistakes and sorrows were in her, not in the soil," said Imogen; "but don't think that though I find it hard, I don't face it; don't think that through it all I haven't my faith. That is just what I am going to do: give her time, and help her to grow with all the strength and love there is in me."
Something naughty, something rebellious and dissatisfied in him was vaguely stirring and muttering; he feared that she might see into him again and give it a name, although he could only have given it the old name of a humorous impatience with her assured rightness. Really, she was so over-right that she almost irked and irritated him, dear and beloved as she was. One could only call it over-rightness, for wasn't what she said the simple truth, just as he had always seen it, just as she had always known that, with her, he saw it? She had this queer, light burden suddenly on her hands, so much more of a burden for being so light, and if her own weight and wisdom became a little too emphatic in dealing with it, how could he reproach her? He didn't reproach her, of course; but he was afraid lest she should see that he found her, well, a little funny.
"What does she do with herself?" he asked, turning hastily from his consciousness of amusement.
Imogen's pearly face, bent on him with such confidence, made him, once more, ashamed of himself.
"She has seen a good many of her friends. We have had quite a stream of fashionable, furbelowed dames trooping up the steps; very few of them people that papa and I cared to keep in touch with; you know his dislike for the merely pleasure-seeking side of life. And she has seen the dear Delancy Pottses, too, and was very nice to them, one of the cases of seeming to accept; I saw well enough that they were no more to her than quaint insects she must do her duty by. And she has been very busy with business, closeted every day with Mr. Haliwell. And she takes a walk with me when I can spare the time, and for the rest of the day she sits in her room dressed in a wonderful tea-gown and reads French memoirs, just as she used always to do."
Jack was smiling, amused, now, in no way that needed hiding, by her smooth flow of description. "You must take her down to the girls' club some day," he suggested, "and to see your cripples and all the rest of it. Get her interested, you know; give her something else to think of besides French memoirs."
"Indeed, I'm going to try to. Though among my girls I'm not sure that she would be a very wise experiment. Such anondulée,parfumée, polished person with such fashionable mourning would be, perhaps, a little resented."
"You dress very charmingly, yourself, my dear Imogen."
"Oh, but quite differently. Mamma's is fashion at its very flower of subtle discretion. My clothes, why, they are of any time you will." She swept aside her wing-like sleeves to show the Madonna-like lines of her dress. "A factory girl could wear just the same shape if she wanted to."
"And she doesn't want to, foolish girl? She wants to wear your mother's kind instead?"
"She would dimly recognize it as the unattainable perfection of what she wants. It would pierce."
"Make for envy, you think?"
"Well, I can't see that she would do them anygood," said Imogen, now altogether in her lighter, happier mood, "but since they may dohergood I must, I think, take her there some day."
"And am I to do her some good? Am I to see her to-night?" Jack asked, feeling that though her humor a little jarred on him he could do nothing better than echo it. Imogen, now, had one of her frankest, prettiest looks.
"Do you know, she is almost too discreet, poor dear," she said. "She wants me to see that she perfectly understands and sympathizes with the American freedom as to friendships between men and women, so that she vacates the drawing-room for my people just as a farmer's wife would do for her daughter's young men. She hasn't asked me even a question about you, Jack!"
Her gaiety so lifted and warmed him that he was prompted to say that Mrs. Upton would have to, very soon, if the answer to a certain question that he wanted to ask Imogen were what he hoped for. But the jocund atmosphere of their talk seemed unfit for such a grave allusion and he repressed the sally.
When Jack went away, after tea, Imogen remained sitting on the sofa, looking up from time to time at the two portraits, while thoughts, quiet and mournful, but not distressing, passed through her mind. An interview with Jack usually left her lapped about with a warm sense of security; she couldn't feel desolate, even with the greatness of her loss so upon her, when such devotion surrounded her. One deep need of her was gone, but another was there. Life, as she felt it, would have little meaning for her if it had not brought to her deep needs that she, and she alone, could satisfy. With Jack's devotion and Jack's need to sustain her, it wasn't difficult to bear with a butterfly. One had only to stand serenely in one's place and watch it hover. It was, after all, as if she had strung herself to an attitude of strength only to find that no weight was to come crushing down upon her. The pain was that of feeling her mother so light.
"Poor papa," Imogen murmured more than once, as she gazed up into the steady eyes; "what a fate it was for you—to be hurt all your life by a butterfly." But he had been far, far too big to let it spoil anything. He turned all pain to spiritual uses. What sorrow there was had always been, most of all, for her.
And then—and here was the balm that had perfumed all her grief with its sacred aroma—she, Imogen, had been there to fill the emptiness for him. She had always been there, it seemed to her, as, in her quiet, sad retrospect, she looked back, now, to the very beginnings of consciousness. From the first she had felt that her place was by his side; that, together they stood for something and against somebody. In this very room, so unchanged—she could even remember the same dull thump of the bronze clock, the blazing fire, the crimson curtains drawn on a snowy street,—had happened the earliest of the episodes that her memory recalled as having so placed her, so defined her attitude, even for her almost babyish apprehension. She had brought down her dolls from her nursery, after tea, and ranged them on the sofa, while her father walked up and down the room, his hands in his pockets, his head thrown back, reciting something to himself, some poem, or stately fragment of antique oratory. He paused now and then as he passed her and laid his hand upon her head and smiled down at her. Then the lovely lady of the portrait,—just like the portrait in Imogen's recollection,—had come, all in white, with wonderful white shoulders, holding a fan and long white gloves in her hand, and, looking round from her dolls, small Imogen had known in a moment that displeasure was in the air. "You are not dressed!" Those had been her mother's first words as she paused on the threshold; and then, echoing her father's words with amazement and anger, "You are not coming!"
The dialogue that followed, vivid on her mother's side as sparks struck from steel, mild as milk on her father's, had been lost upon her; but through it all she had felt that he must be right, in his gentleness, and that she, in her vividness, must be wrong. She felt that for herself, even before, turning as if from an unseemly contest, her father said, looking down at her with a smile that had a twinge of tension, "Youwould rather go and see sick and sorry people who wanted you, than the selfish, the foolish, the overfed,—wouldn't you, beautiful little one?"
She had answered quickly, "Yes, papa," and had kept her eyes on him, not looking at her mother, knowing in her childish soul that in so answering, so looking, she shared some triumph with him.
"I'll say you're suddenly ill, then?" had come her mother's voice, but with a deadened note, as though she knew herself defeated.
"Lie? No. I must ask you, Valerie, never to lie for me. Say the truth, thatI must go to a friend who needs me; the truth won't hurt them."
"But it's unbelievable, your breaking a dinner engagement, at the last hour, for such a reason," the wife had said.
"Unbelievable, I've no doubt, to the foolish, the selfish, the over-fed. Social conventions and social ideals will always go down for me, Valerie, before realities, such realities as brotherhood and the need of a lonely human soul."
While he spoke he had lifted, gently, Imogen's long, fair curls, and smoothed her head, his eyes still holding her eyes, and when her mother turned sharply and swept out of the room, the sense of united triumph had made him bend down to her and made her stretch her arms tip to him, so that, in their long embrace, he seemed to consecrate her to those "realities" that the pretty, foolish mother flouted. That had been her initiation and her consecration.
After that, it could not have been many years after, though she had brought to it a far more understanding observation, the next scene that came up for her was a wrangle at lunch one day, over the Delancy Pottses—if wrangle it could be called when one was so light and the other so softly stern. Imogen by this time had been old enough to know for what the Pottses counted. They were discoveries of her father's, Mr. Potts a valuable henchman in that fight for realities to which her father's life was dedicated. Mr. Potts wrote articles in ethical reviews about her father's books—they never seemed to be noticed anywhere else—and about his many projects for reform and philanthropy. Both he and Mrs. Potts adored her father. He lent them, indeed, all their significance; they were there, as it were, only for the purpose of crystallizing around his magnetic center. And of these good people her mother had said, in her crisp, merry voice, "I hate 'em,"—disposing of the whole question of value, flipping the Pottses away into space, as it were, and separating herself from any interest in them. Even then little Imogen had comprehendingly shared her father's still indignation for such levity. Hate the excellent Pottses, who wrote so beautifully of her father's books, so worshiped all that he was and did, so tenderly cherished her small self? Imogen felt the old reprobation as sharply as ever, though the Pottses had become, to her mature insight, rather burdensome, the poor, good, dull, pretentious dears, and would be more so, now that their only brilliant function, that of punctually, coruscatingly, and in the public press, adoring her father, had been taken from them. One need have no illusion as to the quality of their note; it lacked distinction, serving only, in its unmodulated vehemence, the drum-like purpose of calling attention to great matters, of reverberating, so one hoped, through lethargic consciousness.
But Imogen loved the Pottses, so she told herself. To be sure of loving the Pottses was a sort of pulse by which one tested one's moral health. She still went religiously at least twice in every winter to their receptions—funny, funny affairs, she had to own it—with a kindly smile and a pleasant sense of benign onlooking at oddity. One met there young girls dressed in the strangest ways and affecting the manners of budding Margaret Fullers—young writers or musicians or social workers, and funny frowsy, solemn young men who talked, usually with defective accents, about socialism and the larger life over ample platefuls of ice-cream. Sweetness and light, as Mrs. Potts told Imogen, was the note she tried for in her reunions, and high endeavor and brotherly love.
Mrs. Potts was a small, stout woman, who held herself very straight indeed; her hands, on festive occasions, folded on a lace handkerchief before her. She had smooth, black hair, parted and coiled behind, and a fat face, pale fawn-color in tint, encompassing with waste of cheek and chin such a small group of features—the small, straight nose, the small, sharp eyes, the small, smiling mouth—all placed too high, and spanned, held together, as it were, by apince-nezfirmly planted, like a bow-shaped ornament pinning a cluster of minute trinkets on a large cushion.
Mr. Delancy Potts was tall, limp, blond, and, from years of only dubious recognition, rather querulous. He had a solemn eye under a fringe of whitened eyebrow, a long nose, that his wife often fondly alluded to as "aristocratic" (they were keen on "blood," the Delancy Pottses), and a very retreating chin that one saw sometimes in disastrous silhouette against the light. Draped in the flowing fullness of hair and beard, his face showed a pseudo-dignity.
Imogen saw the Pottses with a very candid eye, and her mind drifted from that distant disposal of them to the contrast of the recent meeting, recalling their gestures and postures as they sat, with an uneasy assumption of ease, before her mother, of whom, for so many years, they had disapproved more, almost, than they disapproved of municipal corruption and "the smart set." As onlooker she had been forced to own that her mother's manner toward them had been quite perfect. She had accepted them as her husband's mourners; had accepted them as Imogen's friends; had, indeed, so thoroughly accepted them, in whatever capacity they were offered to her, that Imogen felt that a slight enlightenment would be necessary, and that her mother must be made to feel that her own, even her father's acceptance of the Pottses, had had always its reservations.
And some acceptances, some atonements, came too late. The Pottses had not been the only members of the little circle gathered about her father who had called forth her mother's wounding levity. She had taken refuge on many other occasions in the half-playful, half-decisive, "I hate 'em," as if to throw up the final barrier of her own perversity before pursuit. Not that she hadn't been decent enough in her actual treatment, it was rather that she would never take the Pottses, or any of the others—oddities she evidently considered them-seriously; it was, most of all, that she would never let them come near enough to try to take her seriously. She held herself aloof, not disdainful, but indifferently gay, from her father's instruments, her father's friends, her father's aims.
Later on, as Imogen grew into girlhood, her mother lost most of the gaiety and all of the levity. Imogen guessed that storms, more violent than any she was allowed to witness, intervened between young rebellion and the cautious peace, the hostility that no longer laughed and no longer lost its temper, but that, quiet, kind, observant, went its own way, leaving her father to go his. The last memory that came up for her was of what had followed such a storm. It seemed to mark an epoch, to close the chapter of struggle and initiate that of acceptance. What the contest had been she never knew, but she remembered in every detail its sequel, remembered lying in bed in her placid, fire-lit room and hearing in her mother's room next hers the sound of violent sobbing.
Imogen had felt, while she listened, a vague, alarmed pity, a pity mingled with condemnation. Her father never lost his self-control and had taught her that to do so was selfish; so that, as she listened to the undisciplined grief, and thought that it might be well for her to go in to her mother and console her, she thought, too, of the line that, tenderly, she would say to her—for Imogen, now, was fourteen years old, with an excellent taste in poetry:
"The gods approveThe depth, but not the tumult, of the soul."
It was a line her father often quoted to her and she always thought of him when she thought of it.
But, just as she was rising to go on this errand of mercy, her father himself had come in. He sat down in silence by her bed and put out his hand to hers and then she seemed to understand all from the very contrast that his silence made. The sobs they listened to were those of a passionate, a punished child, of a child, too, who could use unchildlike weapons, could cut, could pierce; she must not leave her father to go to it. After a little while the sobs were still and, as her father, without speaking, sat on, stroking her hair and hand, the door softly opened and her mother came in. Imogen could see her, in her long white dressing-gown, with her wide braids falling on either side, all the traces of weeping carefully effaced. She often came in so to kiss Imogen good-night, gently, and with a slight touch of shyness, as though she knew herself shut away from the inner chamber of the child's heart, and the moment was their tenderest, for Imogen, understanding, though powerless to respond, never felt so sorry or so fond as then. But to-night her mother, seeing them there together hand in hand, seeing that they must have listened to her own intemperate grief,—their eyes gravely, unitedly judging her told her that,—seeing that her husband, as at the very beginning, had found at once his ally, drew back quickly and went away without a word. Whatever the cause of contest, Imogen knew that in this silent confrontation of each other in her presence was the final severance. After that her mother had acquiesced.
She acquiesced, but she yielded nothing, confessed nothing. One couldn't tell whether she, too, judged, but one suspected it, and the dim sense of an alien standard placed over against them more and more closely drew Imogen and her father together for mutual sustainment. If, however, her mother judged, she never expressed judgment; and if she felt the need of sustainment, she never claimed it. It would, indeed, have been rather fruitless to claim it from the fourth member of the family group. Eddy seemed so little to belong to the group. As far as he went, to be sure, he went always with her and against his father, but then Eddy never went far enough to form any sort of a bulwark. A cheerful, smiling, hard young pagan, Eddy, frankly bored by his father, coolly fond of his mother, avoiding the one, but capable of little effective demonstration toward the other. Eddy liked achievement, exactitude, a serene, smiling outlook, and was happily absorbed in his own interests.
So it had all gone on,—Imogen traced it, sitting there in her quiet corner, holding balances in fair, firm hands,—her mother drifting into a place of mere conventionality in the family life; and Imogen, even now, could not see quite clearly whether it had been she who had judged and abandoned her husband, or he who had judged and put her aside. In either case she could sum it up, her eyes lifted once more to the portrait's steady eyes, with, "Poor, wonderful papa."
He was gone, the dear, the wonderful one, and she was left single-handed to carry on his work. What this work was loomed largely, though vaguely, for her. The three slender volumes, literary and ethical, were the only permanent testament that her father had given to the world; and dealing, as in the main they did, with ultimate problems, their keynote an illumined democracy that saw in most of the results as yet achieved by his country a base travesty of the doctrine, the largeness of their grasp was perhaps a trifle loose. Imogen did not see it. Her appreciation was more of aims than of achievements; but she felt that her father's writings were the body, only, of his message; its spirit lived—lived in herself and in all those with whom he had come in fruitful—contact. It was to hand on the meaning of that spirit that she felt herself dedicated. Perfect, unflinching truth; the unfaltering bearing witness to all men of his conception of right; the seeing of her own personality as but an instrument in the service of good—these were the chief words of the gospel. Life in its realest sense meant only this dedication. To serve, to love, to be the truth. Her eyes on her father's pictured eyes, Imogen smiled into them, promising him and herself that she would not fail.
It was in the library next morning that Valerie asked Imogen to join her, and the girl, who had come into the room with her light, soft step, paused to kiss her mother's forehead before going to the opposite seat.
"Deep in ways and means, mamma dear?" she asked her. "Why, you are quite a business woman." "Quite," Valerie replied. "I have been going over things with Mr. Haliwell, you know." She smiled thoughtfully at Imogen, preoccupied, as the girl could see, by what she had to say.
Imogen was slightly ruffled by the flavor of assurance that she felt in her mother, as of someone who, after gently and vaguely fumbling about for a clue to her own meaning in new conditions, had suddenly found something to which she held very firmly. Imogen was rejoiced for her that she should find a field of real usefulness-were it only that of housekeeping and seeing to weekly bills; but there was certainly a touch of the inappropriate, perhaps of the grotesque, in any assumption on her mother's part of maturity and competence. She therefore smiled back at her with much the same tolerantly interested smile that a parent might bestow on a child's brick-building of a castle.
"I'm so glad that you have that to give yourself to, mama dear," she said. "You shall most certainly be our business woman and add figures and keep an eye on investment to your heart's content. I know absolutely nothing of the technical side of money—I've thought of it only as an instrument, a responsibility, a power given me in trust for others."
Valerie, whose warmth of tint and softness of outline seemed dimmed and sharpened, as though by a controlled anxiety, glanced at her daughter, gravely and a little timidly. And as, in silence, she lightly dotted her pen over the paper under her hand, uncertain, apparently, with what words to approach the subject, it was Imogen, again, who spoke, kindly, but with a touch of impatience.
"We mustn't be too long over our talk, dear. I must meet Miss Bocock at twelve."
"Miss Bocock?" Valerie was vague. "Have I met her?"
"Not yet. She is aprotégéeof mine—English—a Newnham woman—a folk-lorist. I heard of her from some Boston friends, read her books, and induced her to come over and lecture to us this winter. We are arranging about the lectures now. I've got up a big class for her—when I say 'I,' I mean, of course, with the help of all my dear, good friends who are always so ready to back me up in my undertakings. She is an immensely interesting woman; ugly, dresses tastelessly; but one doesn't think of that when one is listening to her. She has a wonderful mind; strong, disciplined, stimulating. I'm very happy that I've been able to give America to her and her to America."
"She must be very interesting," said Valerie. "I shall like hearing her. We will get through our business as soon as possible so that you may keep your appointment." And now, after this digression, she seemed to find it easier to plunge. "You knew that your father had left very little money, Imogen."
Imogen, her hands lightly folded in her lap, sat across the table, all mild attention.
"No, I didn't, mama. We never talked about money, he and I."
"No; still—you spent it."
"Papa considered himself only a steward for what he had. He used his money, he did not hoard it, mama dear. Indeed, I know that his feeling against accumulations of capital, against all private property, unless used for the benefit of all, was very strong."
"Yes," said Valerie, after a slight pause, in which she did not raise her eyes from the paper where her pen now drew a few neat lines. "Yes. But he has left very little for Eddy, very little for you; it was that I was thinking of."
At this Imogen's face from gentle grew very grave.
"Mama dear, I don't think that you and papa would have agreed about the upbringing of a man. You have the European standpoint; we don't hold with that over here. We believe in equipping the man, giving him power for independence, and we expect him to make his own way. Papa would rather have had Eddy work on the roads for his bread than turn him into afainéant."
Valerie drew her lines into a square before saying, "I, you know, with Mr. Haliwell, am one of your trustees. He tells me that your father gave you a great deal."
"Whatever I asked. He had perfect trust in me. Our aims were the same."
"And how did you spend it? Don't imagine that I'm finding fault."
"Oh, I know that you couldn't well do that!" said Imogen with a smile a little bitter. "I spent very little on myself." And she continued, with somewhat the manner of humoring an exacting child: "You see, I helped a great many people; I sent two girls to college; I sent a boy—such a dear, fine boy—for three years' art-study in Paris; he is getting on so well. There is my girls' club on the East side, my girls' club in Vermont; there is the Crippled Children's Home,—quite numberless charities I'm interested in. It's been one thing after another, money has not lacked,—but time has, to answer all the claims upon me. And then," here Imogen smiled again, "I believe in the claims of the self, too, when they are disciplined and harmonized into a larger experience. There has been music to keep up; friends to see and to make things nice for; flowers to send to sick friends; concerts to send poor friends to; dinners and lunches to give so that friends may meet—all the thousand and one little things that a large, rich life demands of one."
"Yes, yes," said Valerie, who had nodded at intervals during the list. "I quite see all that. You are a dear, generous child and love to give pleasure; and your father refused you nothing. It's my fault, too. My more mercenary mind should have been near to keep watch. Because, as a, result, there's very little, dear, very, very little."
"Oh, your being here would not have changed our ideas as to the right way to spend money, mama. Don't blame yourself for that. We should have bledyou, too!"
"Oh, no, you wouldn't," Valerie said quickly. "I've too much of the instinctive, selfish mother-thing in me to have allowed myself to be bled for cripples and clubs and artistic boys. I don't care about them a bit compared to you and Eddy. But this is all beside the mark. The question now is, What are we to do? Because that generous, expensive life of yours has come to an end, for the present at all events."
Imogen at this sat silent for some moments, fixing eyes of deep, and somewhat confused, cogitation upon her mother's face.
"Why—but—I supposed that youhadminded for Eddy and me, mama," she said at last.
"I have very little money, Imogen."
Imogen hesitated, blushing a little, before saying, "Surely you were quite rich when papa married you."
"Hardly rich; but, yes, quite well off."
"And you spent it all—on yourself?"
Valerie's color, too, had faintly risen. "Not so much on myself, Imogen, though I wish now that I had been more economical; but I was ignorant of your father's rather reckless expenditure. In the first years of my marriage, before the selfish mother-thing was developed in me, I handed a good deal of my capital over to him, for his work, his various projects; in order to leave him as free for these projects as possible, I educated you and Eddy—that, too, came out of my capital. And the building of the house in Vermont swallowed a good deal of money."
Imogen's blush had deepened. "Of course," she said, "there is no more reckless expenditure possible—since you use the term, mama—than keeping up two establishments for one family; that, of course, was your own choice. But, putting that aside, you must surely, still, have a good deal left. See how you live; see how you are taken care of, with a maid,—I've never had a maid, papa, as you know, thought them self-indulgences,—see how you dress," she cast a glance upon the refinements of her mother's black.
"How I dress, my child! May I ask what that dress you have on cost you?"
"I believe only in getting the best. This, for the best, was inexpensive.One hundred dollars."
"Twenty pounds," Valerie translated, as if to impress the sum more fully on her mind. "I know that clothes over here are ruinous. Now mine cost only eight pounds and was made by a very little woman in London."
Imogen cast another glance, now of some helpless wonder, at the dress.
"Of course you are so clever about such things; I shouldn't wish to spend my thought—and I couldn't spend my time—on clothes. And then the standard of wages is so scandalously low in Europe; I confess that I would rather not profit by it."
"I am a very economical woman, Imogen," said Valerie, with some briskness of utterance. "My cottage in Surrey costs me fifty pounds a year. I keep two maids, my own maid, a cook, a gardener; there's a pony and trap and a stable-boy. I have friends with me constantly and pay a good many visits. Yet my income is only eight hundred pounds a year."
"Eight hundred—four thousand dollars," Imogen translated, a note of sharp alarm in her voice. "That, of course, would not be nearly enough for all of us."
"Not living as you have, certainly, dear."
"But papa? Surely papa has left something! He must have made money at his legal practice."
"Never much. His profession was always a by-issue with him. I find that his affairs are a good deal involved; when all the encumbrances are cleared off, we think, Mr. Haliwell and I, that we may secure an amount that will bring our whole income to about five thousand dollars a year. If we go on living in New York it will require the greatest care to be comfortable on that. We must find a flat somewhere, unless you cared to live in England, where we could be very comfortable indeed, without effort, on what we have."
Imogen was keeping a quiet face, but her mother, with a pang of helpless pity and compunction, saw tears near the surface, and that, to control them, she fixed herself on the meaning of the last words. "Live out of my own country! Never!"
"No, dear, I didn't think that you would want to; I didn't want it for you, either; I only suggested it so that you might see clearly just where we stand, and in case you might prefer it, with our limited means."
Imogen's next words broke out even more vehemently. "I can't leave this house! Ican't! It is my home." The tears ran down her face.
"My poor darling!" her mother exclaimed. She rose quickly and came round the table to her, putting her arm around her and trying to draw her near.
But Imogen, covering her eyes with one hand, held her off. "It's wrong.It's unfair. I should have been told before."
"Imogen,Idid not know. I was not admitted to your father's confidence.I used to speak to you sometimes, you must remember, about being careful."
"I never thought about it. I thought he made a great deal—I thought you had a great deal of money," Imogen sobbed.
"Itismy fault, in one sense, I know," her mother said, still standing beside her, her hand on her shoulder. "If I had been here I could have prevented some of it. But—it has seemed so inevitable." The tears rose in Valerie's eyes also; she looked away to conquer them. "Don't blame me too much, dear. I shall try to do my best now. And then, after all, it's not of such tragic importance, is it? We can be very happy with what we have."
Imogen wept on: "Leave my home!"
"There, there. Don't cry so. We won't leave it. We will manage somehow. We will stay on here, for a time at least—until you marry, Imogen. You will probably marry," and Valerie attempted a softly rallying smile, "before so very long."
But the attempt was an unfortunately timed one. "Oh, mama! don't—don't—bring your horrible European point of view intothat, too!" cried Imogen.
"What point of view? Indeed, indeed, dear, I didn't mean to hurt you, to be indiscreet—"
"The economic, materialistic, worldly point of view—that money problems can be solved by a thing that is sacred, sacred!" Imogen passionately declared, her face still hidden.
Her mother now guessed that the self-abandonment was over and that, with recovered control, she found it difficult to pick up her usual dignity. The insight added to her tenderness. She touched the girl's hair softly, said, in a soothing voice, that she had meant nothing, nothing gross or unfeeling, and, seeing that her nearness was not, at the moment, welcome, returned to her own place at the other end of the table.
Imogen now dried her eyes. In the consternation that her mother's statements had caused her there had, indeed, almost at once, arisen the consoling figure of Jack Pennington, and she did not know whether she were the more humiliated by her own grief, for such a mercenary cause, or by this stilling of it, this swift realization that the cramped life need last no longer, for herself, than she chose. To feel so keenly the need of escape was to feel herself imprisoned by the new conditions; for never, never for one moment, must the need of escape weigh with her in her decision as to Jack's place in her life. She must accept the burden, not knowing that it would ever be lifted, and with this acceptance the sense of humiliation left her, so that she could more clearly see that she had had a right to her dismay. Her crippled life would hurt not only herself, but all that she meant to others—her beneficence, her radiance, her loving power; so hurt it, that, for one dark moment, had come just a dart of severity toward her father. The memory of her mother's implied criticism had repulsed it; dear, wonderful, transcendentalist, she must be worthy of him and not allow her thoughts, in their coward panic, to sink to the mother's level. This was the deepest call upon her courage that had ever come to her. Calls to courage were the very breath of the spiritual life. Imogen lifted her heart to the realm of spirit, where strength was to be found, and, though her mother, with those implied criticisms, had pierced her, she could now, with her recovered tranquility of soul, be very patient with her. In a voice slightly muffled and uncertain, but very gentle, she said that she thought it best to live on in the dear home. "We must retrench in other places, mama. I would rather give up almost anything than this.Heis here to me." Her tears rose again, but they were no longer tears of bitterness. "It would be like leaving him."
"Yes, dear, yes; that shall be as you wish," said Valerie, who was deeply considering what these retrenchments should be. She, too, was knowing a qualm of humiliation over self-revelations. She had not expected that it would be really so painful, in such trivial matters, to adjust herself to the most ordinary maternal sacrifices. It only showed her the more plainly how fatal, how almost fatal, it was to the right impulses, to live away from family ties; so that at their first pressure upon her, in a place that sharply pinched, she found herself rueful.
For the first retrenchment, of course, must be the sending back to England of her dear, staunch Felkin, who had taken such care of her for so many years. Her heart was heavy with the thought. She was very fond of Felkin, and to part with her would be, in a chill, almost an ominous way, like parting with the last link that bound her to "over there." Besides,—Valerie was a luxurious woman,—unpleasant visions went through her mind of mud to be brushed off and braid to be put on the bottoms of skirts; stockings to darn-she was sure that it was loathsome to darn stockings; buttons to keep in their places; all the thousand and one little rudiments of life, to which one had never had to give a thought, looming, suddenly, in the foreground of one's consciousness. And how very tiresome to do one's own hair. Well, it couldn't be helped. She accepted the accompanying humiliation, finding no refuge in Imogen's spiritual consolations.
"Eddy leaves Harvard this spring and goes into Mr. Haliwell's office. He will live with us here, then. And we can be very economical about food and clothes; I can help little dressmakers with yours, you know," she said, smiling at her child.
"Everything, mama, everything must be done, rather than leave this house."
"We mustn't let the girls' clubs suffer, either," Valerie attempted further to lighten the other's gloomy resolution. "That's one of the first claims."
"I must balance all claims, with justice. I have many other calls upon me, dear, and it will need earnest thought to know which to eliminate."
"Well, the ones you care about most are the ones we'll try to fit in."
"My caring is not the standard, mama. The ones that need me most are the ones I shall fit in."
Imogen rose, drawing a long, sighing breath. Under her new and heavy burden, her mother, in these suggestions for the disposal of her life, was glib, assured. But the necessity for tenderness and forbearance was strongly with her. She went round the table to Valerie, pressed her head to her breast and kissed her forehead, saying, "Forgive me if I have seemed hard, darling."
"No, dear, no; I quite understood all you felt," Valerie said, returning the kiss. But, after Imogen had left her, she sat for a long time, very still, her hand only moving, as she traced squares and circles on her paper.
Jack thought that he had never seen Imogen looking graver than on that night when he came again. Her face seemed calm only because she so compressed and controlled all sorts of agitating things. Her mother was with her in the lamp-lit library and he guessed already that, in any case, Imogen, before her mother, would rarely show gaiety and playfulness. Gaiety and playfulness would seem to condone the fact that her mother found so little need of help in "bearing" the burden of her regret and of her self-reproach. But, allowing for that fact, Imogen's gravity was more than negative. It confronted him like a solemn finger laid on firmly patient lips; he felt it dwell upon him like solemn eyes while he shook hands with Mrs. Upton, whom he had not seen since the morning of her arrival.
Mrs. Upton, too, was grave, after a fashion; but her whole demeanor might be decidedly irritating to a consciousness so burdened with a sense of change as Imogen 'a evidently was. Even before that finger, those eyes, into which he had symbolized Imogen's manner, Mrs. Upton's gravity could break into a smile quite undisturbed, apparently, by any inappropriateness. She sat near the lamp crocheting; soft, white wool sliding through her fingers and wave after wave of cloudy substance lengthening a tiny baby's jacket, so very small a jacket that Jack surmised it to be a gift for an expectant mother. He further surmised that Mrs. Upton would be very nice to expectant mothers; that they would like to have her abound.
Mrs. Upton would not curb her smile on account of Imogen's manner, nor would she recognize it to the extent of tacitly excluding her from the conversation. She seemed, indeed, to pass him on, in all she said, to Imogen, and Jack, once more, found his situation between them a little difficult, for if Mrs. Upton passed him on, Imogen was in no hurry to receive him. He had, once or twice, the sensation of being stranded, and it was always Mrs. Upton who felt his need and who pushed him off into the ease of fresh questions.
He was going back to Boston the next day and asked Imogen if he could take any message to Mary Osborne.
"Thank you, Jack," said Imogen, "but I write to Mary, always, twice a week.She depends on my letters."
"When is she coming to you again?"
"I am afraid she is not to come at all, now."
"You're not going away?" the young man asked sharply, for her voice of sad acceptance implied something quite as sorrowful.
"Oh, no!" Imogen answered, "but mama does not feel that I can have my friend here now."
Jack, stranded indeed, looked his discomfort and, glancing at Mrs. Upton, he saw it echoed, though with, a veiled echo. She laid down her work; she looked at her daughter as though to probe the significance of her speech, and, not finding her clue, she sat rather helplessly silent.
"Well," said Jack, with attempted lightness, "I hope that I'm not exiled, too."
"Oh, Jack, how can you!" said Imogen. "It is only that we have discovered that we are very, very poor, and one's hospitable impulses are shackled. Mama has been so brave about it, and I don't want to put any burdens upon her, especially burdens that would be so uncongenial to her as dear, funny Mary. Mama could hardly care for that typical New England thing. Don't mind Jack, mama; he is such a near friend that I can talk quite frankly before him."
For Mrs. Upton was now gathering up her innocent work, preparatory, it was evident, to departure.
"You are not displeased, dear!" Imogen protested as she rose, not angry, not injured—Jack was trying to make it out—but full of a soft withdrawal. "Please don't go. I so want you and Jack to see something of each other."
"I will come back presently," said Mrs. Upton. And so she left them. Jack's thin face had flushed.
"She means thatshewon't talk quite frankly before you, you see," said Imogen. "Don't mind, dear Jack, she is full of these foolish little conventionalities; she cares so tremendously about the forms of things; I simply pay no attention; that's the best way. But it's quite true, Jack; I don't know that I can afford to have my friends come and stay with me any more. Apparently mama and papa, in their so different ways, have been very extravagant; and I, too, Jack, have been extravagant. I never knew that I mustn't be. The money was given to me as I asked for it—and there were so many, so many claims,—oh, I can't say that I'm sorry that it is gone as it went. 'But now that we are very poor, I want it to be my pleasures, rather than hers, that are cut off; she depends so upon her pleasures, her comforts. She depends more upon her maid, for instance, than I do even upon my friends. To go without Mary this winter will be hard, of course, but our love is founded on deeper things than seeing and speaking; and mama would feel it tragic, I'm quite sure, to have to do up her own hair."
"Good heaven, my dear Imogen! if you are so poor, surely she can learn to do up her own hair!" Jack burst out, the more vehemently from the fact that Mrs. Upton's unprotesting, unexplanatory departure had, to his own consciousness, involved him with Imogen in a companionship of crudity and inappropriateness. She would not interfere with their frankness, but she would not be frank with them. She didn't care a penny for what his impression of her might be. Imogen might fit as many responsibilities upon her shoulders as she liked and, with her long training in a school of reticences and composures, she would remain placid and indifferent. So Jack worked it out, and he resented, for Imogen and for himself, such tact and such evasion. He wished that they had been more crude, more inappropriate. Thank heaven for crudeness if morality as opposed to manners made one crude. He entrenched himself in that morality now, open-eyed to its seeming priggishness, to say, "And it's a bigger question than that of her pleasures and yours, Imogen. It's a question of right and wrong. Mary needs you. Your mother ought not to keep a maid if other people's needs are to be sacrificed to her luxuries."
Imogen was looking thoughtfully into the fire, her calmness now not the result of mastery; her own serene assurance was with her.
"I've thought of all that, Jack; I've weighed it, and though I feel it, as you do, a question of right and wrong, I don't feel that I can force it upon her. It would be like taking its favorite doll from a child. She is trying, I do believe, to atone; she is trying to do her duty by making, as it were,une acte de présence; one wants to be very gentle with her; one doesn't want to make things more difficult than they must already seem. Poor, dear little mama. But as for me, Jack, it's more than pleasures that I have to give up. I have to say no to some of those claims that I've given my life to. It's like cutting into my heart to do it."
She turned away her head to hide the quiet tears that rose involuntarily, and by the sight of her noble distress, by the realization, too, of such magnanimity toward the trivial little mother, Jack's inner emotion was pushed, suddenly, past all the bolts and barriers. Turning a little pale, he leaned forward and took her hand, stammering as he said: "Dear, dearest Imogen, you know—you know what I want to ask—whenever you will let me speak; you know the right I want to claim—"
It had come, the moment of avowal; but they had glided so quietly upon it that he felt himself unprepared for his own declaration. It wad Imogen's tranquil acceptance, rather than his own eagerness, that made the situation seem real.
"I know, dear Jack, of course I know," she said. "It has been a deep, a peaceful joy for a long time to feel that I was first with you. Let it rest there, for the present, dear Jack."
"I've not made anything less joyful or less peaceful for you by speaking?"
"No, no, dear. It's only that I couldn't think of it, for some time yet."
"You promise me that, meanwhile, you will think of me, as your friend, just as happily as before?"
"Just as happily, dear Jack; I could never, as long as you are you and I am I, think of you in any other way." And she went on, with her tranquil radiance of aspect, "I have always meant, you know, to make something of my life before I chose what to do with it."
Jack, too, thought Imogen's life a flower so precious that it must be placed where it could best bloom; but, feeling in her dispassionateness a hurt to his hope that it would best bloom in his care, he asked: "Mightn't the making something of it come after the choice, dear?"
Very clear as to what was her own meaning, Imogen shook her lovely, unconfused head. "No, only the real need could rightly choose, and one can only know the real need when one has made the real self."
These were Jack's own views, but, hearing them from her lips, they chilled.
"It seems to me that your self, already, is very real," he said, smiling a little ruefully. And Imogen now, though firm, was very wonderful, for, leaning to him, she put for a moment her hand on his and said, smiling back with the tranquil tenderness: "Not yet, not quite yet, Jack; but we trust each other's truth, and we can't but trust,—I do, dear Jack, with all my heart,—that it can never part us."
He kissed her hand at that, and promised to trust and to be patient, and Imogen presently lifted matters back into their accustomed place, saying that he must help her with her project for building a country home for her crippled children. She had laid the papers before him and they were deep in ways and means when a sharp, imperious scratching at the door interrupted them.
Imogen's face, as she raised it, showed a touch of weary impatience. "Mamma's dog," she said. "He can't find her. Let him scratch. He will go away when no one answers."