"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 role 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 enn.o.bling one.

The tone of her last remark had been final. The talk pa.s.sed 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't_ you?" 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 chastis.e.m.e.nt.

"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."

XII

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, m.u.f.fled 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 encompa.s.sing 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 att.i.tude.

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 Boc.o.c.k'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 grat.i.tude 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 paeon; 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."