"Highest? Why should it fortify my soul to know that truth is 'so' if 'so' happens to be some man-devouring dragon of a world-power?"
"Clough assumed, of course, that the truth was high—as it might be, even if it devoured one."
"I've no use for a truth that would have no better use for me," smiled Valerie, and on this he tried to draw her on, from her rejection of such heroism, to some exposal of her own conception of truth, her own opinions about life, a venture in which he always failed. Not that she purposely eluded. She listened, grave, interested, but, when the time came for her to make her contribution, fingering about, metaphorically, in a purse, which, though not at all empty, contained, apparently, a confused medley of coinage. If she could have found the right coin, she would have tendered it gladly; but she seemed to consider a vague chink as all that could be really desired of her, to take it for granted that he knew that he had lost nothing of any value.
* * * * *
Sometimes he and Mrs. Upton, Tison trotting at their heels, took walks together, passing down the steep old streets, austere and cheerful, to the gardens and along the wide avenue with its lines of trees and broad strip of turf, on and out to the bridge that spanned the river. They enjoyed together the view of the pale expanse of water, placidly flowing in the windless sunshine, and, when they turned to come back, their favorite aspect of the town. They could see it, then, silhouetted in the vague grays and reds of its old houses, climbing from the purplish maze of tree-tops in the Common, climbing with a soft, jostling irregularity, to where the dim gold bubble of the State House dome rounded on the sky. It almost made one think, so silhouetted, of a Dürer etching.
"Dear place," Mrs. Upton would sigh restfully, and that she was resting in all her stay here, resting from the demands, the adjustments, of her new life, he was acutely aware. Resting from Imogen. Yes, why shouldn't he very simply face that fact? He, too, felt, for the first time, that Imogen had rather tired him and that he was glad of this interlude before taking up again the unresolved discord where they had left it. Imogen's last word about her mother had been that very ominous "Wait and see," and Jack felt that the discord had grown, more complicated from the fact that, quite without waiting, he saw a great deal that Imogen, apparently, did not. He had seen so much that he was willing to wait for whatever else he was to see with very little perturbation of mind, and that, in the meanwhile, as many Sir Basils as it pleased Mrs. Upton to have write to her should do so.
But Mrs. Upton talked a great deal about Imogen, so much that he came to suspect her of adjusting the conversation to some supposed craving in himself. She had never asked a question about his relations with her daughter, accepting merely with interest any signs they might choose to give her, but insinuating no hint of an appeal for more than they might choose to give. She probably took for granted what was the truth of the situation, that it rested with Imogen to make it a definite one. She did not treat him as an accepted lover, nor yet as a rejected one; she discriminated with the nicest delicacy. What she allowed herself to see, the ground she went upon, was his deep interest, his deep attachment. In that light he was admitted by degrees to an intimacy that he knew he could hardly have won so soon on his own merits. She had observed him; she had thought him over; she liked him for himself; but, far more than this, she liked him for Imogen. He often guessed, from a word or look, at a deep core of feeling in her where her repressed, unemphatic, yet vigilant, maternity burned steadily. From her growing fondness for him he could gage how fond she must be of Imogen. The nearness that this made for them was wholly delightful to Jack, were it not embittered by the familiar sense, sharper than ever now, of self-questioning and restlessness. A year ago, six months ago—no, three months only, just before her own coming—how exquisitely such sympathy, such understanding would have fitted into all his needs. He could have talked to her, then, by the hour, frankly, freely, joyously, about Imogen. And the restlessness now was to feel that it was just because of her coming, because of the soft clear light that she had so unconsciously, so revealingly, diffused, that things had, in some odd way, taken on a new color, so that the whole world, so that Imogen especially, looked different, so that he couldn't any longer be frank, altogether. It would have been part of the joy, three months ago, to talk over his loving perception of Imogen's little foibles and childishnesses, to laugh, with a loving listener, over her little complacencies and pomposities. He had taken them as lightly as that, then. They had really counted for nothing. Now they had come to count for so much, and all because of that clear, soft light, that he really couldn't laugh at them. He couldn't laugh at them, and since he couldn't do that he must keep silence over them, and as a result the talks about Imogen with Imogen's mother were, for his consciousness, a little random and at sea. Imogen's mother confidently based their community on a shared vision, and that he kept back his real impression of what he saw was made all the worse by his intuition that she, too, kept back hers, that she talked from his supposed point of view, as it were, and didn't give him a glimmer of her own. She loved Imogen, or, perhaps, rather, she loved her daughter; but what did she think of Imogen? That was the question that had grown so sharp.
* * * * *
On the day before he and Mrs. Upton went back together to New York, Jack gave a little tea that was almost a family affair. Cambridge had been one of their expeditions, in Rose Packer's motor-car, and there Eddy Upton had given them tea in his room overlooking the elms of the "Yard" at Harvard. Jack's tea was in some sort a return, for Eddy and Rose both were there and that Rose, in Eddy's eyes, didn't count as an outsider was now an accepted fact.
Eddy had taken the sudden revelation of his poverty with great coolness, and Jack admired the grim resolution with which he had cut down expenses while relaxing in no whit his hold on the nonchalant beauty. Poverty would, to a certain extent, bar him out from Rose's sumptuous world, and Rose did not seem to take him very seriously as a suitor; but it was evident that Eddy did not intend to remain poor any longer than he could possibly help it and evident, too, that his assurance in regard to sentimental ambitions had its attractions for her. They chaffed and sparred with each other and under the flippant duel there flashed now and then the encounters of a real one. Rose denied the possession of a heart, but Eddy's wary steel might strike one day to a defenceless tenderness. She liked him, among many others, very much. And she was, as she frequently declared, in love with his mother. Jack never took Rose seriously; she remained for him a pretty, trivial, malicious child; but to-day he was pleased by the evidences of her devotion.
The little occasion, presided over by Valerie, bloomed for him. Everybody tossed nosegays, everybody seemed happy; and it was Rose, sitting in a low chair beside Mrs. Upton's sofa, who summed it up for him with the exclamation, "I do so love being with you, Mrs. Upton! What is it you do to make people so comfortable?"
"She doesn't do anything, people who do things make one uncomfortable," remarked Eddy, lounging in his chair and eating sandwiches. "She is, that's all."
"What is she then," Rose queried, her eyes fixed with a fond effrontery on Valerie's face. "She's like everything nice, I know; nice things to look at, to hear, to taste, to smell, to touch. Let us do her portrait, Eddy, you know the analogy game. What flower does she remind you of? and what food? Acacia; raspberries and cream. What musical instrument? What animal? Help me, Jack."
"The musical instrument is a chime of silver bells," said Jack, while Valerie looked from one to the other with amused interest. "And the animal is, I think, a bird; a bright, soft-eyed bird, that flits and poises on tall grasses."
"Yes; that does. And now we will do you, Jack. You are like a very nervous, very brave dog."
"And like a Christmas rose," said Valerie, "and like a flute."
"And the food he reminds me of," finished Eddy, "is baked beans."
"Good," said Rose. "Now, Imogen. What flower is she like? Jack, you will tell us."
Jack looked suddenly like the nervous dog, and Rose handsomely started the portrait with, "Calla lily."
"That's it," Eddy agreed. "And the food she's like is cold lemon-shape, you know the stuff I mean; and her animal,—there is no animal for Imogen; she is too loftily human."
"Her instrument is the organ," Rose finished, as if to end as handsomely as she had begun; "the organ playing the Pilgrims' March from 'Tannhäuser.'"
"Excellent," said Eddy.
These young people had done the portrait without help and after the slight pause with which their analogies were received Jack swiftly summed up Rose asPâte-de-foie-gras, gardenia, a piano, and a toy Pomeranian.
"Thanks," Rose bowed; "I enjoy playing impudence to your dignity."
"What's Imogen up to just now?" Eddy asked, quite unruffled by Jack's reflections on his beloved. "When did you see her last, Jack?"
"I went down for a dress-rehearsal the day before yesterday." Jack had still the air of the nervous dog, walking cautiously, the hair of its back standing upright.
"Oh, the Cripple-Hellenic affair. How Imogen loves running a show."
"And how well she does it," said Rose. "What a perfect queen she would have made. She would have laid corner-stones; opened bazaars; visited hospitals, and bowed so beautifully from a carriage—with such a sense of responsibility in the quality of her smile."
"How inane you are, Rose," said Jack. "Nothing less queen-like, in that decorative sense, than Imogen, can be imagined. She works day and night for this thing in which you pretty young people get all the sixpences and she all the kicks. To bear the burden is all she does, or asks to do."
"Why, my dear Jack," Rose opened widely candid eyes, "queens have to work like fun, I can tell you. And who under the sun would think of kicking Imogen?"
"Besides," said Eddy, rising to saunter about the room, his hands in his pockets, "Imogen isn't so superhuman as your fond imagination paints her, my dear Jack. She knows that the most decorative rôle of all is just that, the weary, patient Atlas, bearing the happy world on his shoulders."
Mrs. Upton, in her corner of the sofa, had been turning the leaves of a rare old edition, glancing up quietly at the speakers while the innocent ripples slid on from the afternoon's first sunny shallows to these ambiguous depths. It was now in a voice that Jack had never heard from her before that she said, still continuing to turn, her eyes downcast:
"How excessively unkind and untrue, Eddy."
If conscious of unkindness, Eddy, at all events, didn't resort to artifice as Rose,—Jack still smarted from it,—had done. He continued to smile, taking, up a small, milky vase to examine it, while he answered in his chill, cheerful tones: "Don't be up in arms, mama, because one of your swans gives the other a fraternal peck. Imogen and I always peck at each other; it's not behind her back alone that I do it. And I'm saying nothing nasty. It's only people like Imogen who get the good works of the world done at all. If they didn't love it, just; if they didn't feel the delight in it that an artist feels in his work, or that Rose feels in dancing better and looking prettier than any girl in a ball-room,—that any one feels in self-realization,—why, the cripples would die off like anything."
"It's a very different order of self-realization"; Mrs. Upton continued to turn her leaves.
Jack knew that she was deeply displeased, and mingled with his own baffled vexation was the relief of feeling himself at one with her, altogether at one, in opposition to this implied criticism of Imogen. Together they shared the conviction—was it the only one they shared about Imogen?—that she simply cared about being good more than about anything else in the world; together they recognized such a purpose and such a longing as a high and an ennobling one.
The tone of her last remark had been final. The talk passed at once away from Imogen and turned on Jack's last acquisitions in white porcelain and on his last piece of work, just returned from a winter exhibition. Eddy went with him into the studio to see it and Mrs. Upton and Rose were left alone. It was then that Mrs. Upton, touching the other's shoulder so that she looked up from the fur she was fastening, said, "You are not a nice little girl, Rose."
The "little girl" stared. Anything so suave yet so firmly intended as unpleasant had never been addressed to her. For once in her life she was at a loss; and after the stare she flushed scarlet, the tears rushing to her eyes.
"Oh, Mrs. Upton," she faltered, "what do you mean?"
"Hitting in the dark isn't a nice thing to do."
"Hitting in the dark?"
"Yes. You know quite well."
"Oh, but really, really,—I didn't mean—" Rose almost wailed. There was no escape from those clear eyes. They didn't look sad or angry; they merely penetrated, spreading dismay within her.
Mrs. Upton now took the flushed face between her hands and gravely considered it. "Didn'tyou?" she asked.
Rose could look back no longer. Before that gaze a sense of utter darkness descended upon her. She felt, helplessly, like a naughty, cowering child. Her eyes dropped and the tears rolled down her cheeks.
"Please, please forgive me. I didn't dream you'd understand. I didn't mean anybody to understand, except, perhaps, Eddy. I don't know why, it's odious of me—but Imogen does irritate me, just a little, just because she is so good, you know—so lovely."
But this, too, Mrs. Upton penetrated. "Whether Imogen is so good and lovely that she irritates you is another matter. But, whatever you may think of her, don't,"—and here she paused a little over the proper expressing of Rose's misdeed,—"don't call her a calla lily," she found. And she finished, "Especially not before her mother, who is not so blind to your meaning as we must hope that Jack is."
Poor Rose looked now like the naughty child after a deserved chastisement.
"Oh, I am so miserable"; this statement of smarting fact was all she found to say. "And I do care for you so. I would rather please you than any one.—Can't you forgive me?"
But at this point the darkness was lifted, for Mrs. Upton, smiling at last, put her arms around her, kissed her, and said, "Be a nice little girl."
Imogen, during this fortnight of her mother's absence, had time to contemplate her impressions of change.
Their last little scene together had emphasized her consciousness of the many things that lay beneath it.
Her mother had felt that the tears on that occasion were in part a result of the day's earlier encounter, muffled though it was, over Sir Basil, and had attempted, on ground of her own choosing, to lure her child away from the seeing, not only of Sir Basil—he was a mere symbol—but of all the things where she must know that Imogen saw her as wrong.
"She wanted to blur my reason with instinct; to mesh me in the blind filial thing," Imogen reflected. In looking back she could feel with satisfaction that her reason had dominated the scene as a lighthouse beacon shines steadily over tossing and ambiguous waters. Satisfaction was in the vision; the deep content of having, as she would have expressed it, "been true to her light." But it was only in this vision of her own stability of soul that satisfaction lay.
In Jack's absence, and in her mother's, she could gage more accurately what her mother had done to Jack. She had long felt it, that something different growing vaguely in him—so vaguely that it was like nothing with a definite edge or shape, resembling, rather, a shadow of the encompassing gloom, a shadow that only her own far-reaching beams revealed. As the light hovers on the confines of the dark she had felt—a silence.
He was silent—he watched. That was the summing up of the change. He really seemed to convey to her through his silence that he understood her now, or was coming to, better than he had ever done before, better than she understood herself. And with the new understanding it was exactly as if he had found that his focus was misdirected. He no longer looked up; Imogen knew that by the fact that when, metaphorically, her eyes were cast down to meet with approbation and sweet encouragement his upturned admiration, vacancy, only, met their gaze. He no longer—so her beam pierced further and further—looked at her on a level, with the frankness of mere mutual need and trust. No; such silence, such watchfulness implied superiority. The last verge of shadow was reached when she could make out that he looked at her from an affectionate, a paternal,—oh, yes, still a very lover-like,—height, not less watchful for being tender; not less steady for being, still, rather puzzled. Beyond that she couldn't pierce. It was indeed a limit denoting a silent revolution in their relationship. When she came to the realization, Imogen, starting back, indignant through all her being, promised herself that if he looked down she, at all events, would never lend herself to the preposterous topsy-turvydom by looking up. She would firmly ignore that shift of focus. She would look straight before her; she would look, as she spoke, the truth. She "followed her gleam." She stood beside her beacon. And she told herself that her truth, her holding to it, might cost her a great deal.
It was not that she feared to lose him,—if she chose to keep him; but it might be that there were terms on which she would not care to keep him. If, it was still an almost unimaginable "if," he could not, would not come once more to see clearly, then, as lover, he must be put aside, and even as friend learn that she had little use for a friendship so warped from its old attitude.
Under this stoic resolve there was growing in poor Imogen a tossing of confused pain and alarm. She could see change so clearly, but causes were untraceable, an impalpable tangle.
Why was it so? What had happened? What, above all, had her mother done toJack?
It was all about her mother that change centered, from her that it came. It was a web, a complexity of airy filaments that met her scrutiny. Here hovered her mother's smile, here her thoughtful, observant silences. There Sir Basil's letter; Felkin's departure; all the blurred medley of the times when she had talked to Jack and Mary and her mother had listened. A dimness, a haze, was over all, and she only escaped it, broke through it, when, fighting her way out to her own secure air and sunlight, she told herself,—as, at all events, the nearest truth to hand,—that it was about Jack, over him, that the web had been spun: the web of a smile that claimed nothing, yet that chained men; the web of a vague, sweet silence, that judged nothing, yet softly blighted, through its own indifference, all other people's enthusiasms. And again and again, during these days of adjustment to the clear and the confused vision, Imogen felt the salt hot tears burning in her throat and eyes.
When Jack and her mother were both back again and he and she united in the mechanical interests of the tableaux, now imminent, the strangest loneliness lay in the fact that she could no longer share her grief, her fear, her anger, with Jack, He was there, near her; but he was, far, far away; and she must control any impulse that would draw him near.
She put him to the test; she measured his worth by his power of recognition, his power of discrimination between her mother's instinctive allurements and her own high demand. But while with her mind and soul, as she told herself, she thus held him away, she was conscious of the inner wail of loneliness and unconscious that, under the steady resolution, every faculty, every charm she possessed, was spinning and stretching itself out to surround and hold him.
She made no appeal, but he would feel her quiet sadness weigh upon him; she made no reproach, but she knew that he could but be full of pity for her weariness, of love for her devotedness, when her pale profile bent by lamplight over all the tedious work of the tableaux; knew that her patient "Good-night, dear Jack,—I'm too tired to stay and talk," must smite him with compunction and uneasiness.
It was no direct communication; she used symbols to convey to him the significance that he seemed to be forgetting. She took him to one of Miss Bocock's lectures, gently disowning praise for her part in their success. She took him to the hospital for cripple children, where the nurses smiled at her and the children clambered, crutches and all, into her lap,—she knew how lovely she must look, enfolding cripple children. She took both her mother and him to her Girls' Club on the East side, where they saw her surrounded by adoring gratitude and enthusiasm, where she sat hand in hand with her "girls," all sympathy, all tenderness, all interest,—all the things that Jack had loved her for and that he still, of course, loved her for. Here she must seem to him like a sister of charity, carrying high her lamp of love among these dark lives. And she was careful that their reflected light should shine back upon her. "I want you to know a dear friend of mine, Jack, Miss Mc-Ginty; and this, Evangeline, is my friend, Mr. Pennington,"—so she would lead him up to one of the girls, bold and gay of eye, highly decorated of person. She knew that she left her reputation in safe hands with Evangeline. "Are you a friend of Miss Upton's? She'sfine. We're all just crazy about her." She had, as she went from them, the satisfaction of hearing so much of Evangeline's crude but sincere pæon; they were all "just crazy" about her.
And a further shining of light suggested itself to her.
"Mamma darling," she said, as they were going home in the clashing, clattering "elevated," "you mustn't think me naughty, but I had to ask them—my own particular girls—to go with us to the Philharmonic. They are becoming so interested in their music and it will be a treat for them, will really mean something in their lives, will really live for them,inthem."
Mrs. Upton leaned forward to listen in the mingled uproar of banging doors and vociferous announcements from the conductor. A look of uncertainty crossed her face and Imogen hastened to add: "No, it's not the extravagance you think. I had a splendid idea. I'm going to sell that old ring that Grandmamma Cray left me. Rose told me once that I could get a lot of money for it."
Swiftly flushing, her brows knitted, the din about them evidently adding to her perturbation, Mrs. Upton, with a sharpness of utterance that Jack had never heard from her, said: "Your sapphire ring? Your grandmother's ring? Indeed, indeed, Imogen, I must ask you not to do that!"
"Why, mama dear, why?" Imogen's surprise was genuine and an answering severity was checked by Jack's presence.
"It was my mother's ring."
"But what better use could I make of it, mama? I rarely wear any ring but the beautiful pearl that papa gave me."
"I couldn't bear to have you sell it."
"But, mama dear, why? I must ask it. How can I sacrifice so much for a mere whim?"
"I must ask you to yield to a mere whim, then. Pray give up the thought. We will find the money in some other way."
"Of course, mama, if you insist, I must yield," Imogen said, sinking back in her seat beside the attentive Jack, and hoping that her mournful acquiescence might show in its true light to him, even if her mother's sentimental selfishness didn't. And later, when he very prettily insisted on himself entertaining the club-girls at the Philharmonic, she felt that, after all, no one but her mother had lost in the encounter. The girls were to have their concert (though they might have had many such, had not her mother so robbed them, there was still that wound) and she was to keep her ring; and she was not sorry for that, for it did go well with the pearl. Above all, Jack must have appreciated both her generous intention and her relinquishing of it. Yet she had just to test his appreciation.
"Indeed I do accept, Jack. I can't bear to have them disappointed for a childish fancy, like that of poor mama's, and we have no right to afford it by any other means. Isn't it strange that any one should care more for a colored bit of stone than for some high and shining hours in those girls' gray lives?"
But Jack said: "Oh, I perfectly understand what she felt about it. It was her mother's ring. She probably remembers seeing it on her mother's hand." So Imogen had, again, to recognize the edge of the shadow.
They, all of them, Jack, Mary, and her mother, went with her and her girls to the concert. Jack had taken two boxes in the semicircle that sweeps round Carnegie Hall, overhanging the level sea of heads below. Rose Packer, just come to town, was next them, with the friends she was visiting in New York, two pretty, elaborately dressed girls, frothing with youthful high spirits, and their mother, an abundant, skilfully-girthed matron. The Langleys were very fashionable and very wealthy; their houses in America, England, Italy, their yachts and motorcars, their dances and dinners, furnished matter for constant and uplifted discourse in the society columns of the English-speaking press all over the world. Every one of Imogen's factory girls knew them by name and a stir of whispers and nudges announced their recognition.
Mrs. Langley leaned over the low partition to clasp Mrs. Upton's hand,—they had known each other since girlhood,—and to smile benignly upon Imogen, casting a glance upon the self-conscious, staring girls, whose clothing was a travesty of her own consummate modishness as their manners at once attempted to echo her sweetness and suavity.
"What a nice idea," she murmured to Imogen; "and to have them hear it in the best way possible, too. Not crowded into cheap, stuffy seats."
"That would hardly have been possible, since I do not myself care to hear music in cheap seats. What is not good enough for me is not good enough for my friends. To-day we all owe our pleasure to Mr. Pennington."
Mrs. Langley, blandly interested in this creditable enlightenment, turned to Jack with questioning about the tableaux.
"We are all so much interested in Imogen's interests, aren't we? It's such an excellent idea. My girls are so sorry that they can't be in them. Rose tells me, Imogen, that there was some idea of your doing Antigone."
"None whatever," said Imogen, with no abatement of frigidity. She disapproved of leaders of fashion.
"I only meant," Rose leaned forward, "that we wanted you to, so much,"
"And can't you persuade her? You would look so well, my dear child. Talk her over, Valerie, you and Mr. Pennington." Mrs. Langley looked back at her friend.
"It would hardly do just now, I think," Valerie answered.
"But for a charity—" Mrs. Langley urged her mitigation with a smile that expressed, to Imogen's irritated sensibilities, all the trite conformity of the mammon-server.
"I don't think it would do," Valerie repeated.
"Pray don't think my motive in refusing a conventional one," said Imogen, with an irrepressible severity that included her mother as well as Rose and Mrs. Langley. These two sank back in their seats and the symphony began.
Resting her cheek on her hand, her elbow on her knee, Imogen leaned forward, as if out of the perplexing, weary world into the sphere of the soul. She smiled deeply at one of her girls while she fell into the listening harmony of attitude, and her delicate face took on a look of rapt exaltation.
Jack was watching her, she knew; though she did not know that her own consciousness of the fact effectually prevented her from receiving as more than a blurred sensation the sounds that fell upon her ear.
She adjusted her face, her attitude, as a painter expresses an idea through the medium of form, and her idea was to look as though feeling the noblest things that one can feel. And at the end of the first movement, the vaguely heard harmony without responding to the harmony of this inner purpose, the music's tragic acceptance of doom echoing her own deep sense of loneliness, the strange new sorrow tangling her life, tears rose beautifully to her eyes; a tear slid down her cheek.
She put up her handkerchief quietly and dried it, glancing now at Jack beside her. He was making a neat entry in a note-book, technically interested in the rendering by a new conductor. The sight struck through her and brought her soaring sadness to earth. Anger, deep and gnawing, filled her. He had not seen her tears, or, if he had, did not care that she was sad. It was little consolation for her hurt to see good Mary's eyes fixed on her with wide solicitude. She smiled, ever so gravely and tenderly, at Mary, and turned her eyes away.
A babble of silly enthusiasm had begun in the Langley box and Rose had just effected a change of seat that brought her next to her adored Mrs. Upton and nearer her dear Mary. Imogen almost felt that hostile forces had clustered behind her back, especially as Jack turned in his chair to talk to Mary and her mother.
"Just too lovely!" exclaimed one of the younger Miss Langleys, in much the same vernacular as that used by Imogen'sprotégées.
She looked round at these to see one yawning cavernously, on the cessation of uncomprehended sound; while another's eyes, drowsed as if by some narcotic, sought the relief of visual interest in the late-comers who filed in below. A third sat in an attitude of sodden preoccupation, breathing heavily and gazing at the Langleys and at Rose, who wore to-day a wonderful dress. Only a rounded little Jewess, with eyes of black lacquer set in a fat, acquiline face, quite Imogen's least favorite of her girls, showed a proper appreciation. She was as intent and as preoccupied as Jack had been.
The second movement began, a movement hurrying, dissatisfied, rising in appeal and aspiration, beaten back; turning upon itself continually, continually to rise again,—baffled, frustrated, yet indomitable. And as Imogen listened her features took on a mask-like look of gloom. How alone she was among them all.
She was glad in the third movement, her mind in its knotted concentration catching but one passage, and that given with a new rendering, to emphasize her displeasure by a little shudder and frown. An uproar of enthusiasm arose after the movement and Imogen heard one of the factory girls behind her, in answer to a question from her mother, ejaculate "Fine!"
When her mother leaned to her, with the same "Wasn't it splendid?" Imogen found relief in answering firmly, "I thought it insolent."
"Insolent? That adagio bit?"—Jack, evidently, had seen her symptoms of distress.—"Why, I thought it a most exquisite interpretation."
"So did I," said Mrs. Upton rather sadly from behind.
"It hurt me, mama dear," said Imogen. "But then I know this symphony so well, love it so much, that I perhaps feel intolerantly toward new readings."
As the next, and last, movement began, she heard Rose under her breath yet quite loud enough, murmur, "Bunkum!" The ejaculation was nicely modulated to reach her own ears alone.
With a deepened sense of alienation, Imogen sat enveloped by the unheard thunders of the final movement. Yes, Rose would hide her impertinence from others' ears. Imogen had noted the growing tenderness, light and playful, between her mother and the girl. Behind her, presently, she rustled in all her silks as she leaned to whisper something to Mrs. Upton—"You will come and have tea with me,—at Sherry's,—all by ourselves?" Imogen caught.
Her mother was not the initiator, but her acquiescence was an offense, and to Imogen, acutely conscious of the whispered colloquy, each murmur ran needles of anger into her stretched and vibrating nerves. At last she turned eyes portentously widened and a prolonged "Ss-s-s-h" upon them.
"Peopleoughtn'tto whisper," Jack smiled comprehendingly at her, when they reached the end of the symphony; the rest of the movement having been occupied, for Imogen, with a sense of indignant injury.
She had caught his attention, then, with her reproof. There was sudden balm in his sympathy. The memory of the unnoticed tear still rankled in her, but she was able to smile back. "Some people will always be the money-lenders in the temple."
At once the balm was embittered. She had trusted too much to his sympathy. He flushed his quick, facile flush, and she was again at the confines of the shadow. Really, it was coming to a pass when she could venture no least criticism, even by implication, of her mother.
But, keeping up her smile, she went on: "You don't feel that? To me, music is a temple, the cathedral of my soul. And the chink of money, the bartering of social trivialities, jars on me like a sacrilege."
He looked away, still with the flush. "Aren't we all, more or less, worshipers or money-lenders by turn? My mind often strays."
"Not to the glitter of common coin," she insisted, urging with mildness his own better self upon him; for, yes, rather than judge her mother he would lower his own ideal. All the more reason, then, for her to hold fast to her own truth, and see its light place him where it must. If he now thought her priggish,—well, thatdidplace him.
"Oh, yes, it does, often," he rejoined; but now he smiled at her as though her very solemnity, her very lack of humor, touched him; it was once more the looking down of the shifted focus. Then he appealed a little.
"You mustn't be too hard on people for not feeling as you do—all the time."
Consistency did not permit her an answer, for the next piece had begun.
When the concert was over, Mrs. Langley offered the hospitality of her electric brougham to three of them. Rose and her girls were going to a tea close by. Imogen said that she preferred walking and Jack said that he would go with her; so Mary and Mrs. Upton departed with Mrs. Langley and, the factory girls dispatched to their distances by subway, the young couple started on their way down crowded Fifth Avenue.
It was a bright, reverberating day, dry and cloudless, and, as they walked shoulder to shoulder, their heels rang metallically on the frosty pavements. Above the sloping canon of the avenue, the sky stretched, a long strip of scintillating blue. The "Flat-Iron" building towered appallingly into the middle distance like the ship prow of some giant invasion. The significance of the scene was of nothing nobly permanent, but it was exhilarating in its expression of inquisitive, adventurous life, shaping its facile ideals in vast, fluent forms.
Imogen's face, bathed in the late sunlight, showed its usual calm; inwardly, she was drawn tight and tense as an arrow to the bow-head, in a tingling readiness to shoot far and free at any challenge.
A surface constraint was manifested in Jack's nervous features, but she guessed that his consciousness had not reached the pitch of her own acuteness, and made him only aware of a difference as yet unadjusted between them. Indeed, with a quiet interest that she knew was not assumed, he presently commented to her on the odd disproportion between the streaming humanity and its enormous frame.
"If one looks at it as a whole it's as inharmonious as a high, huge stage with its tiny figures before the footlights. It's quite out of scale as a setting for the human form. It's awfully ugly, and yet it's rather splendid, too."
Imogen assented.
"We are still juggling with our possibilities," said Jack, and he continued to talk on of the American people and their possibilities—his favorite topic—so quietly, so happily, even, that Imogen felt suddenly a relaxation of the miserable mood that had held her during all the afternoon.
His comradely tone brought her the sensation of their old, their so recent, relation, complete, unflawed, once more. An impulse of recovery rose in her, and, her mind busy with the sweet imagination, she said presently, reflectively, "I think I will do your Antigone after all."
Completely without coquetry, and sincerely innocent of feminine wiles, Imogen had always known, sub-consciously as it were, for the matter seldom assumed the least significance for her, that Jack delighted in her personal appearance. She saw herself, suddenly, in all the appealing youth and beauty of the Grecian heroine, stamping on his heart, by means of the outer manifestation, that inner reality to which he had become so strangely blind. It was to this revelation of reality that her thought clung, and an added impulse of mere tenderness had helped to bring the words to her lips. In her essential childishness where emotion and the drama of the senses were concerned, she could not have guessed that the impulse, with its tender mask, was the primitive one of conquest, the cruel female instinct for holding even where one might not care to keep. At the bottom of her heart, a realm never visited by her unspotted thoughts, was a yearning, strangely mingled, to be adored, and to wreak vengeance for the faltering in adoration that she had felt. Ah, to bind him!—to bind him, helpless, to her! That was the mingled cry.
Jack looked round at her, as unconscious as she of these pathetic and tigerish depths, but though his eye lighted with the artist's delight in the vision that he had relinquished reluctantly, she saw, in another moment, that he hesitated.
"That would be splendid, dear,—but, can you go back on what you said?"
"Why not? If I have found reason to reconsider my first decision?"
"What reason? You mustn't do it just to please me, you know; though it's sweet of you, if that is the reason. Your mother, you see, agreed with you. I hadn't realized that she would mind. You know what she said, just now."
Jack had flushed in placing his objection, and Imogen, keeping grave, sunlit eyes upon him, felt a flush rise to her own cheeks.
"Do you feel her minding, minding in such a way, any barrier?" She was able to control the pain, the anger, that his hesitation gave her, the quick humiliation, too, and she went on with only a deepening of voice:
"Perhaps that minding of hers is part of my reason. I have no right, I see that clearly now, to withhold what I can do for our cause from any selfish shrinking. I felt, in that moment when she and Mrs. Langley debated on the conventional aspect of the matter, that I would be glad, yes, glad, to give myself, since my refusal is seen in the same category as any paltry, social scruple. It was as if a deep and sacred thing of one's heart were suddenly dragged out and exhibited like a thickness of black at the edge of one's note-paper.
"Will you understand me, Jack, when I say that I feel that I can in no way so atone to that sacred memory for the interpretation that was an insult; in no way keep it so safe, as by making it this offering of myself. It is for papa that I shall do it. He would have wished it. I shall think of him as I stand there, of him and of the children that we are helping."
She spoke with her deliberate volubility, neither hesitating nor hurrying, her meaning, for all its grandiloquence of setting, very definite, and Jack looked a little dazed, as though from the superabundance of meaning.
"Yes, I see,—yes, you are quite right," he said. He paused for a moment, going over her chain of cause and effect, seeking the particular link that the new loyalty in him had resented. And then, after the pause, finding it: "But I don't believe your mother meant it like that," he added.
His eyes met Imogen's as he said it, and he almost fancied that something swordlike clashed against his glance, something that she swiftly withdrew and sheathed. It was earnest gentleness alone that answered him.
"What do you think she did mean then, Jack? Please help me to see if I'm unfair. I only long to be perfectly fair. How can I do for her, unless I am?"
His smoldering resentment was quenched by a sense of compunction and a rising hope.
"That's dear of you, Imogen," he said. "Youare, I think, unfair at times. It's difficult to lay one's finger on it."
"But pleasedolay your finger on it—as heavily as you can, dear Jack."
"Well, the simile will do for my impression. The finger you lay onheris too heavy. You exaggerate things in her—over-emphasize things."
She was holding herself, forcing herself to look calmly at this road he pointed out to her, the only road, perhaps, that would lead her back to her old place with him. "Admirable things, you think, if one saw them truly?"
"I don't know about admirable; but warm, sweet—at the worst, harmless. I'm sure, to-day, that she only meant it for you, for what she felt must be your shrinking. Of course she had her sense of fitness, too, a fitness that we may, as you feel, overlook when we see the larger fitness. But her intention was perfectly,"—he paused, seeking an expression for the intention and repeated,—"Sweet, warm, harmless."
Imogen felt that she was holding herself as she had never held herself.
"Don't you think I see all that, Jack?"
"Well, I only meant that I, since coming to know her, really know her, inBoston, see it most of all."
"And you can't see, too, how it must stab me to have papa—papa—put, through her trivial words, into the category of black-edged paper?"
Her voice had now the note of tears.
"But shedoesn't," he protested.
"Can you deny that, for her, he counts for little more than the mere question of convention?"
Jack at this was, perforce, silent. No, he couldn't altogether deny it, and though it did not seem to him a particularly relevant truth he could but own that to Imogen it might well appear so. He did not answer her, and there the incident seemed to end. But it left them both with the sense of frustrated hope, and over and above that Jack had felt, sharper than ever before, the old shoot of weariness for "papa" as the touchstone for such vexed questions.
Mrs. Upton expressed no displeasure, although she could not control surprise, when she was informed of Imogen's change of decision, and Jack, watching her as usual, felt bound, after the little scene of her quiet acquiescence, to return with Imogen, for a moment, to the subject of their dispute. Imogen had asked him to help her to see and however hopeless he might feel of any fundamental seeing on her part, he mustn't abandon hope while there was a stone unturned.
"That's what it really was," he said to her. "Youdosee, don't you?—to respond to whatever she felt you wanted."
Imogen stared a little. "Of what are you talking, Jack?"
"Of your mother Antigone—the black edge. It wasn't the black edge."
She had understood in a moment and was all there, as fully equipped with forbearing opposition as ever.
"It wasn'teventhe black edge, you mean? Even that homage to his memory was unreal?"
"Of course not. I mean that she wanted to do what you wanted."
"And does she think, do you think, it'sthatI want,—a suave adaptation to ideals she doesn't even understand? No doubt she attributes my change to girlish vanity, the wish to shine among the others. If that was what I wanted, that would be what she would want, too."
"Aren't you getting away from the point a little?" he asked, baffled and confused, as he often was, by her measured decisiveness.
"It seems to me that I amonthe point.—The point is that she cared so little abouthim—in either way."
This was what he had foreseen that she would think.
"The point is that she cares so much for you," he ventured his conviction, fixing his eyes, oddly deepened with this, his deepest appeal, upon her.
But Imogen, as though it were a bait thrown out and powerless to allure, slid past it.
"To gain things we mustworkfor them. It's not by merely caring, yielding, that one wins one's rights. Mama is a very 'sweet, warm, harmless' person; I see that as well as you do, Jack." So she put him in his place and he could only wonder if he had any right to feel so angry.
The preparations for the new tableau were at once begun and a few days after their last uncomfortable encounter, Jack and Imogen were again together, in happier circumstances it seemed, for Imogen, standing in the library while her mother adjusted her folds and draperies, could but delight a lover's eye. Mary, also on view, in her handmaiden array,—Mary's part was a small one in the picture of the restored Alcestis,—sat gazing in admiration, and Jack walked about mother and daughter with suggestion and comment.
"It's perfect, quite perfect," he declared, "that warm, soft white; and you have done it most beautifully, Mrs. Upton. You are a wonderfulcostumière."
"Isn't my chlamys a darling?" said Valerie happily from below, where she knelt to turn a hem.
"Mama won't let us forget that chlamys," Imogen said, casting a look of amusement upon her mother. "She is so deliciously vain about it." Imogen was feeling a thrill of confidence and hope. Jack's eyes, as they rested upon her, had shown the fondest admiration. She was in the humor, so rare with her of late, of gaiety and light assurance. And she thirsted for words of praise and delight from Jack.
"No wonder that she is vain," Jack returned. "It has just the look of that heavenly garment that blows back from the Victory of Samothrace. The hair, too, with those fillets, you did that, I suppose."
"Yes, I did. I do think it's an achievement. It has the carven look that one wants. Imogen's hair lends itself wonderfully to those long, sweeping lines."
But, Jack, once having expressed his admiration for Imogen, seemed tactlessly bent on emphasizing his admiration for the mere craftswoman of the occasion.
"Well, it's as if you had formed the image into which I'm to blow the breath of life. I'm really uncertain, yet, as to the best attitude." Imogen was listening to this with some gravity of gaze. "Do take that last position we decided upon, Imogen. And do you, Mary, take the place of the faltering old Oedipus for a moment. Look down, Imogen; yes, a strong, brooding tenderness of look."
"Ah, she gets it wonderfully," said Valerie, still at her hem.
"Not quite deep or still enough," Jack objected. "Stand back, Mary, please, while we work at the expression. No, that's not it yet."
"But it's lovely, so. You would have found fault with Antigone herself,Jack," Mrs. Upton protested.
"Jack is quite right, mama, pray don't laugh at his suggestions. I understand perfectly what he means." Imogen glanced at herself in the mirror with a grave effort to assume the expression demanded of her. "Is this better, Jack?"
"Yes—no;—no, you can't get at all what I mean," the young man returned, so almost pettishly that Valerie glanced up at him with a quick flush.
Imogen's resentment, if she felt any, did not become apparent. She accepted condemnation with dignified patience.
"I'm afraid that is the best I can do now, though I'll try. Perhaps on the day of the actual performance it will come more deeply to me. There, mama darling, that will do; it's quite right now. I can't put myself into it while you sew down there. I can hardly think that I'm brooding over my tragic father while I see your pins and needles. Now, Jack, is this better?" With perfect composure she once more took the suggested attitude and expression.
Mrs. Upton, her dusky flush deepened, rose, stumbling a little from her long stooping, and, steadying herself with her hand on a table, looked at the new effort.
"No,—it's worse. It's complacent—self-conscious," burst from Jack. "You look as if you were thinking far more about your own brooding than about your father. Antigone is self-forgetting; absolutely self-forgetting." So his rising irritation found impulsive, helpless expression. In the slight silence that followed his words he was aware of the discord that he had crashed into an apparent harmony. He glanced almost furtively at Mrs. Upton. Had she seen—did she guess—the anger, for her, that had broken into these peevish words? She met his eyes with her penetrating depth of gaze, and Imogen, turning to them, saw the interchange; saw Jack abashed and humble, not before her own forbearance but before her mother's wonder and severity.
Resentment had been in her, keen and sharp, from his first criticism; nay, from his first ignoring of her claim to praise. It rose now to a flood of righteous indignation. Sweeping round upon them in her white draperies, casting aside—as in a flash she saw it—petty subterfuge and petty fear, coldly, firmly, she questioned him:
"I must ask you whether this is mere ill-temper, Jack, or whether you intentionally wish to wound me. Pray let me have the truth."
Speechless, confused, Jack gazed at her.
She went on, gaining, as she spoke, her usual relentless fluency.
"If you would rather that some one else did the Antigone, pray say so frankly. It will be a relief to me to give up my part. I am very tired. I have a great deal to do. You know why I took up the added burden. My motives make me quite indifferent to petty, personal considerations. All that, from the first, I have had in mind, was to help, to the best of my poor ability. Whom would you rather have? Rose?—Mary?—Clara Bartlett?—Why not mama? I will gladly help any one of them with all that I have learnt from you as to dress and pose. But I cannot, myself, go on with the part if such malignant dissatisfaction is to be wreaked upon me."
Jack felt his head rise at last from the submerging flood.
"But, Imogen, indeed,—I do beg your pardon. It was odious of me to speak so. No one can do the part but you."
"Why say that, Jack, when you have just told me that I do it worse and worse?"
"It was only a momentary impression. Really, I'm ashamed of myself."
"But it's your impression that is the standard in those tableaux. How can I do the part if I contradict your conception?"
"You can't. I was in a bad temper."
"And why, may I ask, were you in a bad temper?"
The gaze from her serene yet awful brows was bent upon him, but under it, in a sudden reaction from its very serenity, its very awfulness, a firm determination rose in him to meet it. Turning very red but eyeing Imogen very straight: "I thought you inconsiderate, ungrateful, to your mother, as you often are," he said.
For a long moment Imogen was silent, glancing presently at Mary—scarlet with dismay, her hastily adjusted eye-glasses in odd contrast to her classic draperies—and then turning her eyes upon her mother who, still standing near the table, was frowning and looking down.
"Well, mama dear," she asked, "what have you to say to this piece of information? Have I, all unconsciously, been unkind? Have I been ungrateful? Do you share Jack's sense of injury?"
Mrs. Upton looked up as though from painful and puzzling reflection. "My dear Imogen," she said, "I think that you and Jack are rather self-righteous young people, far too prone to discussing yourselves. I think that you were a little inconsiderate; but Jack has no call to take up my defense or to express any opinion as to our relations. Of course you will do the Antigone, and of course, when he recovers his temper,—and I believe he has already,—he will be very glad that you should. And now let's have no more of this foolish affair."
None of them had ever heard her make such a measured, and, as it were, such a considered speech before, and the unexpectedness of it so wrought upon them that it reduced not only Jack but even the voluble Antigone to silence. But in Jack's silence was an odd satisfaction, even an elation. He didn't mind his own humiliation—that of an officious little boy put in a corner—one bit; for there in the corner opposite was Imogen, actually Imogen, and the sight of it gave him a shameful pleasure.
Meanwhile Mrs. Upton calmly resumed her work at the hem, finished it, turned her daughter about and pronounced it all quite right.
"Now get into warmer clothes and come down to tea, which will be here directly," she said.
Imogen, by now, was recovered from the torpor of her astonishment.
"Mary, will you come with me, I'll want your help." And then, as Mary, whom alone she could count as an ally, joined her, she paused before departure, gathering her chlamys about her. "If I am silent, mama, pray don't imagine that it is you who have silenced me," she said. "I certainly could not think of defending myself to you. My character, with all its many faults, speaks for itself with those who understand me and what I aim at. All I ask of you, mama, is not to imagine, for a moment, that you are one of those."
So Antigone, white, smiling, wrathful, swept away, Mary behind her, round-eyed and aghast, and Valerie was left confronting the overwhelmed Jack.
He could find not one word to say, and for some moments Valerie, too, stood silent, slipping her needle back and forth in her fingers and looking hard at the carpet.
"It's all my fault!" Jack burst out suddenly. "Blundering, silly fool thatI am! Do say that you forgive me."
She did not look at him, but, still slipping her needle with the minute, monotonous gesture back and forth, she nodded.
"But say it," Jack protested. "Scold me as much as you please. It's all true; I'm a prig, I know. But say that you forgive me."
A smile quivered on her cheek, and putting out her hand she answered: "There's nothing to forgive, Jack. I lost my temper, too. And it's all mere nonsense."
He seized her hand, and then, only then, realized from something in the quiver of the smile, something muffled in the lightness of her voice, that she was crying.
"Oh!" broke from him; "oh! what brutes we are!"
She had drawn her hand from his in a moment, had turned from him while she swiftly put her handkerchief to her eyes, and after the passage of the scudding rain-cloud she confronted him clearly once more.
"Why, it's all my fault,—don't you know,—from the beginning," she said.
He understood her perfectly. She had never been so near him.
"Youknowthat's not true," he said. And then, at last, his eyes, widely upon her, told her on which side his sympathies were enlisted in the long-drawn contest between,—not between poor Imogen and herself, that was a mere result—but between herself and her husband.
And that she understood his understanding became at once apparent to him. He had never seen her blush as she blushed then, and when the deep glow had passed she became very white and looked very weary, almost old.
"No, I don't know it, Jack," she said. "And you, certainly, do not. And now, dear Jack, don't let us speak of this any more. Will you help me to clear this table for the tea-things."
* * * * *
So this, for Imogen, was the result of her loving impulse during the frosty walk down Fifth Avenue. All her sweet, wordless appeals had been in vain. Jack had admired her as he might have admired a marionette; her beauty had meant less to him than her mother's dressmaking; and as she sat alone in her room on that afternoon, having gently and firmly sent Mary down to tea with the ominous message that she cared for none, she saw that the shadow between her and Jack loomed close upon them now, the shadow that would blot out all their future, as a future together. And Imogen was frightened, badly frightened, at the prospect of that empty future.
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 forourthing. 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."
"He, too, knows and feels what ominous destinies are hanging over us, Mary." The deeply marked passages had been in Maeterlinck that day. "We are parted, perhaps forever, because he sees at last that I will not stoop. When one has grown up, all one's life, straight, facing the sunrise, one cannot bend and look down."
"Youstoop! Why it's that that he would never let you do!"
"No? You think that, after the other day?Hehas stooped, Mary, to other levels. He breathes a different air from mine now. I cannot follow him into his new world."
"You mean?—you mean?—" Mary faltered.
Imogen's clear eyes told her what she meant; it did not need the slow acquiescence of her head nor the articulated, "Yes, I mean mama.—Poor mama. A little person can make great sorrows, Mary."
But now Mary's good, limpid eyes, unfaltering and candid as a child's, dwelt on her with a new hope. "But, Imogen, it's just that:isshe so little? She isn't like you, of course. She can't lift and sustain, as you can. She doesn't stand for great things, as you do and as your father did. But I seem to feel more and more how much she could be to you.—It only needs-moreunderstanding; and, if that's all, I really believe, Imogen darling, that you and Jack will be all right again. Perhaps," Mary went on with a terrible unconsciousness, "perhaps he has come to understand, already, better than you do,—I thought that, really, the other day,—and it's that that makes the sense of division. You are at different places of understanding. And he hasn't to remember, and get over, all the mistakes, the faults in her past; and perhaps it's because of that that he sees the present reality more clearly than you do. Jack is such a wonderful person for seeing therealself of people."
Imogen's steady gaze, during this speech, continued to rest unwaveringly upon her; Mary felt no warning in it and, when she had done, waited eagerly for some echo to her faith.
But when Imogen spoke, it was in a voice that revealed to her her profound miscalculation.
"Youdo not understand, Mary.Yousee nothing. Her present self is her past self, unchanged, unashamed, unatoned for. It is her mistakes, her faults, that Jack now stands for. It is her mistakes and faults thatImust stand for, if I am to be beside him again. That would be the stooping that I meant. I fear that not only Jack but you are blinded, Mary. I fear that it is not only Jack but you that she is taking from me." Her voice was calm, but the steely edge of an accusation was in it.
Mary sat aghast. "Taking me from you! Oh, Imogen, you don't mean that you won't care for me if I get fond of her!"
The crudely simple interpretation brought the blood to Imogen's cheeks. "I mean that you can hardly be fond of us both. It is notIwho will cease to care." Under the accusation was now an added note of pain and of appeal. All Mary's faiths rallied to that appeal.
"Imogen!" she said, timidly, like the wrong-doer she felt herself to be, taking the other's hand; "dear, brave, wonderful Imogen,—howcanyou—howcanyou say it! Why there is hardly any one in the world who has counted to me as you have. Why, your mother is like a sweet child beside you! She hasn't faiths; she hasn't that healing, strengthening thing that I've always so felt in you. She could nevermeanwhat you do. Oh, Imogen! you won't think such dreadful things, will you? You do forgive me if I have blundered and hurt you?"
Imogen drew in the fragrant incense with long breaths; it revived her, filled her veins with new courage, new hope. The two girls kissed solemnly. They were going out together and they presently went down-stairs hand in hand. But as an after-flavor there lingered for Imogen, like a faint, flat bitterness after the incense, a suspicion that Mary, in wafting her censer with such energy, had been seeking to fill her own nostrils, also, with the sacred old aroma, to find, as well as give, the intoxication of faith.