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 pa.s.sed 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 th.o.r.n.y 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 subst.i.tutes 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 th.o.r.n.y 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 n.o.ble 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 pa.s.sages 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, th.o.r.n.y arena again, feeling herself uplifted, feeling a halo of sorrowful benignity about her head. And this feeling was so a.s.sured 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, pa.s.sages between mother and daughter that had made Imogen's att.i.tude 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sages 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.

XIV

"Sir Basil!" Valeria exclaimed.

She rose from the tea-table, where she and Jack and Mrs. Wake were sitting, to meet the unexpected new-comer.

A gladness that Jack had never seen in her seemed to inundate her face, her figure, her outstretched hands; she looked young, she looked almost childlike, as she smiled at her friend over their clasp, and Jack saw, by the light of that transfiguration, how gray these last months must have been to her, how strangely bereft of response and admiration, how without savor or sweetness. He saw, and with the insight came a sharp stir of bitterness against the new-comer, who threw them all like this into a dull background, and, at the same time, a real echo of her gladness, that she should have it.

He actually, in the sharp, swift twist of feeling, hardly remembered Imogen's forecasts and warnings, hardly remembered that Mrs. Upton's gladness and Sir Basil's beaming gaze put Imogen quite dreadfully in the right. He did not think of Imogen at all, nor of the desecration of the house of mourning by this gladness, so absorbed was he in watching it, in sharing it, and in being hurt by it.

"Mrs. Wake, of course, is an old friend," Valerie said, leading Sir Basil up to the tea-table; "and here is a new one--Jack Pennington, whom you must quite know already, I've written so much about him. Sit down here. Tell me all about everything. Why this sudden appearance? Why no hint of it? Is it meant as a surprise for us?"

"Well, Frances and Tom were coming over, you knew that--"

"Of course. I wrote Frances a steamer letter the day before yesterday. You got in this morning with them then? They said not a word of your coming when I last heard from them."

"I only decided to join them at the last minute. I thought that it would be good fun to drop upon you like this, so I didn't write. It _is_ good to see you again." Sir Basil, while his beam seemed to include the room and its inmates, included them unseeingly; he had eyes, it was evident, only for her. He went on to give her messages from the Pakenhams, in New York but for a week on their way to Canada and eager to see her at once. They would have come with him had they not been rather knocked up by the early rise on the steamer and by the long wait at the custom-house.

"You must all come with me to-morrow to our tableaux," said Valerie.

"Imogen is in them. She is out this afternoon, so you will see her for the first time at her loveliest. She is to be Antigone."

"Oh, so I sha'n't see her till to-morrow. I've always been a bit afraid of Miss Upton, you know," said Sir Basil, with a smile at Jack.

"Well, the first impression will be a rea.s.suring one," said Valerie.

"Antigone is the least alarming of heroines."

"I don't know about that," Sir Basil objected, folding a slice of bread and b.u.t.ter, "A bit gruesome, don't you think?"

"Gruesome?"

"She stuck so to her own ideas, didn't she? Awfully rough on the poor fellow who wanted to marry her, insisting like that on burying her brothers."

Valerie laughed. "Well, but that sense of duty is hardly gruesome; it would have been horridly gruesome to have left her brothers unburied."

"You'll worst me in an argument, of course," Sir Basil replied, looking fondly at her; "but I maintain that she's a dreary young lady. Of course I don't mean to say that she wasn't an exceedingly good girl, and all that sort of thing, but a bit of a prig, you must allow."