Chapter 11

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.

XIII

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. "You _do_ see, 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'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."

* * * * *