"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't _even_ the 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's _that_ I 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 am _on_ the point.--The point is that she cared so
little about _him_--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 must _work_ for 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 wonderful
_costumière_."
"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 that
I 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.
"You _know_ that'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 for _our_ thing. The drop of black blood had never yet been
crushed out of my heart,--for when you died, it was submission that was
asked of me, not sacrifice. It was easy, dear, to give myself to the work
we believed in--to be tired, and strong, and glad for it--to live out
bravely into the world--when you were beside me and when all the means of
work were in my hand. But now I must relinquish something that I could
only keep by being false to myself--to you--to the right. And I must go
uphill--'yes, uphill to the very end'--accepting poverty, loneliness, the
great need of love, unanswered. But I won't falter or forget, darling
father. As long as I live I will fight our fight. Even if the way is
through great darkness, I carry the light in my heart."
The noble pathos of such soliloquies brought her to tears, but the tears,
she felt, were strengthening and purifying. After drying them, after
reading some of the deeply marked passages in the poets that he and
she,--and, oh, alas! alas! she and Jack, lost Jack--had so often read
together, she would go down-stairs, descend into the dusty, thorny arena
again, feeling herself uplifted, feeling a halo of sorrowful benignity
about her head. And this feeling was so assured that those who saw her at
these moments were forced, to some extent, to share it.
Toward her mother, toward Jack, she showed a gentle, a distant courtesy;
to Mary a heartbreaking sweetness. Mary, perhaps, needed to have pettier
impressions effaced, and certain memories could but fade before Imogen's
august head and unfaltering eyes.
If she had been wrong in that strange little scene of the Antigone, Mary
was convinced that her intention had been high. Jack had hurt her too much;
that was it; and, besides, how could she know what had gone on behind
the scenes, passages between mother and daughter that had made Imogen's
attitude inevitable. So Mary argued with herself, sadly troubled. "Oh,
Imogen, please tell me," she burst forth one day, the day before the
tableaux, when she was sitting with Imogen in the latter's room; "what is
it that makes you so sad? Why are you so displeased with Jack? You haven't
given him up, Imogen!"
Imogen passed her hand softly over Mary's hair, recalling, as she did so,
that the gesture was a favorite one with her father.
"Won't you, can't you tell me?" Mary pleaded.
"It is so difficult, dear. Given him up? No, I never do that with people I
have cared for; but he is no longer the Jack I cared for. He is changed,
Mary."
"He adores you as much as ever,--of course I've always known how he adored
you; it made me so happy, loving you both as I do; and he still adores you
I'm sure. He is always watching you. He changes color when you come into
the room."
"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."
"_You_ stoop! Why it's that that he would never let you do!"
"No? You think that, after the other day? _He_ has 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: _is_ she 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-more _understanding_; 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 the _real_ self 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.
"_You_ do not understand, Mary. _You_ see 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 that _I_
must 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 not _I_ who 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,--how _can_
you--how _can_ you 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 never _mean_ what 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.