"Mind!" she repeated, a thunderous echo.
"You dislike it so?"
"Dislike? You use strangely inapt words."
He had another parenthetic shoot of impatience with her dreadful
articulateness; had Imogen always talked so much like the heroine of a
novel with a purpose?
"I only meant--can't you put up with it?"
"Put up with it? Can I do anything else? What power have I over her?
You don't seem to understand. I have passed beyond caring that she
makes herself petty, ridiculous; as a woman of her age must in marrying
again--the clutch of fading life at the happiness it has forfeited. Let
her clutch if she chooses; let her marry if she chooses, whom she chooses,
yes, when she chooses. But don't you see how it shatters my every hope of
her,--my every ideal of her? And don't you see how my heart is pierced by
the presence of that man in my father's house, the house that she abandoned
and cast a shadow upon? How filled with bitter shame and anguish I am when
I see him there, in that house, sacred to my grief and to my
memories--making love to my mother?"
No, really, never, never had he heard Imogen so fluent and so dramatically
telling; and never had he been so unmoved by the feeling under the fluency.
It was as if he could believe in none.
He remained silent and Imogen continued: "When she came back, I believed
that it was with an impulse of penitence; with the wish, shallow though I
knew that it must be in such a nature, to atone to me for the ruin that she
had made in his life. I was all tenderness and sympathy for her, all a
longing to help and sustain her--as you must remember. But now! It fulfils
all that I had feared and suspected in her--and more than all! She left
England, she came here, that the conventions might be observed; and,
considering them observed enough for her purpose, she receives her suitor,
eight months after my father's lonely death,-in the house where _my_ heart
breaks and bleeds for him, where _I_ mourn for him, where _I_--alone, it
seems--feel him flouted and betrayed! And she talks of her love for me!"
Jack was wondering that her coherent passion did not beat him into helpless
acquiescence; but, instead, he found himself at once replying, "You don't
see fairly. You exaggerate it all. She was unhappy with your father. For
years he made her unhappy. And now, if she can care for a man who can make
her happy, she has a right, a perfect right, to take her happiness. As for
her loving you, I don't believe that any one loves you more truly. It's
your chance, now, to show your love for her."
Imogen stood still and looked at him from the black disk of her parasol.
"I think I've suspected this of you, too, Jack," she said. "Yes, I've
suspected, in dreadful moments of revelation, how far your undermining has
gone. And you say you are not changed!"
"Would you ask your mother never to marry again?"
"I would--if she were in any way to redeem her image in my eyes. But,
granting to the full that one must make concessions to such creatures of
the senses, I would ask her, at the very least, to have waited."
"Creatures of the senses!" Jack repeated in a helpless gasp; such words, in
their austere vocabulary, were hardly credible. "Do you know what you are
saying, you arrogant, you heartless girl?"
Her face seemed to flash at him like lightning from a black cloud, and with
the lightning a reality that had lacked before to leap to her voice:
"Ah! At last--at last you are saying what you have felt for a long time!
At last I know what you think of me! So be it! I don't retract one jot or
tittle of what I say. Mama is a perfectly moral woman, if you actually
imagine some base imputation; but she lives for the pleasant, the pretty,
the easy. She doesn't love this man's soul--nor care if he has one.
Her love for him is a parody of the love that my father taught me to
understand and to hold sacred. She loves his love for her; his 'delightful'
appearance. She loves his place and name and all the power and leisure of
the life he can give her. She loves the world--in him; and in that I mean
and repeat that she is a creature of the senses. And if, for this, you
think me arrogant and heartless, you do not trouble in one whit my vision
of myself, but you do, forever, mar my vision of you."
They stood face to face in the soft sweet air under an arch of wistaria; it
seemed a place to plight a troth, not to break one; but Jack knew that, if
he would, he could not have kept the truth from her. It held him, looked
from him; he was, at last, inevitably, to speak it.
"Imogen," he said, "I don't want to talk to you about your mother; I don't
want to defend her to you; I'm past that. I'll say nothing of your summing
up of her character,--it's grotesque, it's piteous, such assurance! But
I do tell you straight what I've come to feel of you--that you are a
cold-blooded, self-righteous, self-centered girl. And I'll say more: I
think that your bringing-up, the artificiality, the complacent theory of
it, is your best excuse; and I think that you'll never find any one so
generous and so understanding of you as your mother. If this mars me in
your eyes, I can't help it."
For a moment, in her deep anger,--horror running through it, too, as though
the very bottom had dropped out of things and she saw emptiness beneath
her,--she thought that she would tell him to leave her there, forever. But
Imogen's intelligence was at times a fairly efficacious substitute for
deeper promptings; and humiliation, instead of enwrapping her mind in a
flare of passionate vanity, seemed, when such intellectual apprehension
accompanied it, to clarify, to steady her thoughts. She saw, now, in the
sudden uncanny illumination, that in all her vehemence of this afternoon
there had been something fictitious. The sorrow, the resentment on her
father's account, she had, indeed, long felt; too long to feel keenly.
Her disapproval of the second marriage was already tinctured by a certain
satisfaction; it would free her of a thorn in the flesh, for such her
mother's presence in her life had become, and it would justify forever her
sense of superiority. It was all the clearest cause for indignation that
her mother had given her, and, seeing it as such, she had longed to make
Jack share her secure reprobation; but she hadn't, really, been able to
feel it as she saw it. It solved too many problems and salved too many
hurts. So now, standing there under the arch of wistaria, she saw through
herself; saw, at the very basis of her impulse, the dislocation that
had made its demonstration dramatic and unconvincing. Dreadful as the
humiliation was, her lips growing parched, her throat hot and dry with it,
her intelligence saw its cause too clearly for her to resent it as she
would have resented one less justified. There was, perhaps, something to
be said for Jack, disastrously wrong though he was; and, with all her
essential Tightness, there was, perhaps, something to be said against her.
She could not break, without further reflection, the threads that still
held them together.
So, at the moment of their deepest hostility, Jack was to have his sweetest
impression of her. She didn't order him away in tragic tones, as he almost
expected; she didn't overwhelm him with an icy torrent of reproach and
argument. Instead, as she stood there against her halo of black, the long
regard of her white face fixed on him, her eyes suddenly filled with tears.
She didn't acquiesce for a moment, or, for a moment, imply him anything but
miserably, pitiably wrong; but in a voice from which every trace of anger
had faded she said: "Oh Jack, how you hurt me!"
The shock of his surprise was so great that his cheeks flamed as though she
had struck him. Answering tears sprang to his eyes. He stammered, could not
speak at first, then got out: "Forgive me. I'd no business to say it. It's
lovely of you, Imogen, not just to send me off."
She felt her triumph, her half-triumph, at once. "Why, Jack, if you think
it, why should I forgive you for saying what, to you, seems the truth? You
have forgotten me, Jack, almost altogether; but don't forget that truth is
the thing that I care most for. If you must think these things of me--and
not only of me, of a dearer self, for I understand all that you meant--I
must accept the sorrow and pain of it. When we care for people we must
accept suffering because of them. Perhaps, in time, you may come to see
differently."
He knew, though she made him feel so abashed, that he could take back none
of the "things" he thought; but as she had smiled faintly at him he
answered with a wavering smile, putting out his hand to hers and holding it
while he said: "Shall we agree, then, to say nothing more about it! To be
as good friends--as the truth will let us?"
He had never hurt her as at that moment of gentleness, compunction, and
inflexibility, and thought, for a moment, was obscured by a rush of bitter
pain that could almost have cast her upon his breast, weeping and suppliant
for all that his words shut the door on--perhaps forever.
But such impulses were swiftly mastered in poor Imogen. Gravely pressing
his hand, she accepted the cutting compact, and, over her breathless sense
of loss, held firm to the spiritual advantage of magnanimity and courage.
He judged himself, not her, in letting her go, if he was really letting
her go; and she must see him wander away into the darkness, alone, leaving
her alone. It was tragic; it was nearly unendurable; but this was one of
life's hard lessons; her father had so often told her that they must be
unflinchingly faced, unflinchingly conquered. So she triumphed over the
weak crying out of human need.
They walked on slowly again, both feeling a little "done." Neither spoke
until, at the entrance of the park, and just before leaving its poetry for
the screaming prose of the great city, Imogen said: "One thing I want to
tell you, Jack, and that is that you may trust mama to me. Whatever I may
think of this happiness that she is reaching out for, I shall not make it
difficult or painful for her to take it. My pain shall cast no shadow on
her gladness."
Jack's face still showed its flush and his voice had all the steadiness of
his own interpretation, the steadiness of his refusal to accept hers, as he
answered, "Thanks, Imogen; that's very right of you."