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 to
Jack?
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's _fine_. 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, _in_
them."
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's _protégées_.
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.
"People _oughtn't_ to 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, that _did_ place 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. "You _are_, I think, unfair at
times. It's difficult to lay one's finger on it."
"But please _do_ lay your finger on it--as heavily as you can, dear Jack."
"Well, the simile will do for my impression. The finger you lay on _her_ is
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, in
Boston, 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 she _doesn'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.