Now I had imagined, in my narrow way, that a spoilt beauty was always a tyrant to her maid."
"Oh, so her maid"s gone! How does she do her hair, then?"
"Do her hair, Jack? What a funny question. As we all do, of course, with her wits and her hands, I suppose. Any one with common-sense can do their hair."
Jack kept silence, reflecting on the picture that Imogen had drawn for him--the child bereft of its toy. Had it given it up willingly, or had it been forced to relinquish it by the pressure of circ.u.mstance? Remembering his own stringent words, he felt a qualm of compunction. Had he armed Imogen for this ruthlessness?
The l.u.s.trous folds of Mrs. Upton"s hair, at lunch, rea.s.sured him as to her fitness to do without Felkin in that particular, but his mind still dwelt on the picture of the crying child and he asked Imogen, when he was next alone with her, how the departure of Felkin had been effected.
"You couldn"t manage to let her keep the toy, then?"
"The toy?" Imogen was blank.
He enlightened her. "Her maid, you know, who had to do her hair."
"Oh, Felkin! No," Imogen"s face was a little quizzical, "it couldn"t be managed. I thought it over, what you said about sacrificing other people"s needs to her luxuries, and felt that you were right. So I put it to her, very, very gently, of course, very tactfully, so that I believe that she thinks that it was she who initiated the idea. Perhaps she _had_ intended from the first to send her back; it was so obvious that a woman as poor as she is ought not to have a maid. All the same, I felt that she was a little vexed with me, poor dear. But, apart from the economical question, I"m glad I insisted. It"s so much better for her not to be so dependent on another woman. It"s a little degrading for both of them, I think."
Jack, who theoretically disapproved of all such undemocratic gauds, was sure that Mrs. Upton was much better off without her maid; yet something of the pathos of that image remained with him--the child deprived of its toy; something, too, of discomfort over that echo of her father that he now and then detected in Imogen"s serene sense of rightness.
This discomfort, this uneasy sense of echoes, returned more than once in the days that followed. Mrs. Upton seemed, as yet, to have made very little difference in the situation; she had glided into it smoothly, un.o.btrusively--a silken shadow; when she was among them it was of that she made him think; and in her shadowed quietness, as of a tranquil mist at evening or at dawn, he more and more came to feel a peace and sweetness.
But it was always in this sweetness and this peace that the contrasting throb of restlessness stirred.
He saw her at the meals he frequently attended, meals where the conversation, for the most part, was carried on by Imogen. Mrs. Wake, also a frequent guest, was a very silent one, and Mary an earnest listener.
If Imogen"s talk had ceased to be very interesting to Jack, that was only because he knew it so well. He knew it so well that, while she talked, quietly, fluently, dominatingly, he was able to remain the dispa.s.sionate observer and to wonder how it impressed her mother. Jack watched Mrs.
Upton, while Imogen talked, leaning her head on her hand and raising contemplative eyes to her daughter. Those soft, dark eyes, eyes almost somnolent under their dusky brows and half-drooped lashes,--how different they were from Imogen"s, as different as dusk from daylight. And they were not really sad, not really sleepy, eyes; that was the surprise of them when, after the downcast mystery, they raised to one suddenly their penetrating intelligence. The poetry of their aspect was constantly contradicted by the prose of their glance. But she did more than turn her own poetry into prose, so he told himself; she turned other people"s into prose, too. Her glance became to him a running translation into sane, almost merry, commonplace, of Imogen"s soarings. He knew that she made the translation and he knew that it was a prose one, but its meaning she kept for herself. It was when, now and then, he felt that he had hit upon a word, a phrase, that the discomfort, the bewilderment, came; and he would then turn resolutely to Imogen and grasp firmly his own conception of her essential meaning, a meaning that could bear any amount of renderings.
She was so beautiful, sitting there, the girl he loved, her pearly face and throat, her coronet of pale, bright gold, rising from the pathetic blackness, that it might well be that the mother felt only his own joy in her loveliness and could spare no margin of consciousness for critical comment. She was so lovely, so young, so good; so jaded, too, with all the labor, the giving of herself, the long thoughts for others; why shouldn"t she be dominant and a.s.sured? Why shouldn"t she even be didactic and slightly complacent? If there was sometimes a triteness in her p.r.o.nouncements, a lack of humor, of spontaneity, in her enthusiasms, surely no one who loved her could recognize them with any but the tenderest of smiles. He felt quite sure that Mrs. Upton recognized them with nothing else. He felt quite sure that the "deepest" thing in Mrs. Upton was the most intense interest in Imogen; but he felt sure, too, that the thing above it, the thing that gazed so quietly, so dispa.s.sionately, was complete indifference as to what Imogen might be saying. Didn"t her prose, with its unemphatic evenness, imply that some enthusiasms went quite without saying and that some questions were quite disposed of for talk just because they were so firmly established for action? When he had reached this point of query, Jack felt rising within him that former sense of irritation on Imogen"s behalf, and on his own. After all, youthful triteness and enthusiasm were preferable to indifference. In the stress of this irritation he felt, at moments, a shock of keen sympathy for the departed Mr. Upton, who had, no doubt, often felt that disconcerting mingling of interest and indifference weigh upon his dithyrambic ardors. He often felt very sorry for Mr. Upton as he looked at his widow. It was better to feel that than to feel sorry for her while he listened to Imogen. It did not do to realize too keenly, through Imogen"s echo, what it must have been to listen to Mr. Upton for a lifetime. When, on rare occasions, he had Mrs.
Upton to himself, his impulse always was to "draw her out," to extract from her what were her impressions of things in general and what her att.i.tude toward life. She must really, by this time, have enough accepted him as one of themselves to feel his right to hear all sorts of impressions. He was used to talking things over, talking them, indeed, over and over; turning them, surveying them, making the very most of all their possible significance, with men and women to whom his relationship was half brotherly and wholly comradely, and whom, in the small, fresh, clear world, where he had spent his life, he had known since boyhood. It was a very ethical and intellectual little world, this of Jack"s, where impressions pa.s.sed from each to each, as if by right, where some suspicion was felt for those that could not be shared, and where to keep anything so worth while to oneself was almost to rob a whole circle. Reticence had the distinct flavor of selfishness and uncertainty of mind, the flavor of laxity. If one were earnest and ardent and disciplined one either knew what one thought, and shared it, or one knew what one wanted to think, and one sought it.
Jack suspected Mrs. Upton of being neither earnest, nor ardent, nor disciplined; but he found it difficult to believe that, as a new inmate of his world, she couldn"t be, if only she would make the effort, as clear as the rest of it, and that she wasn"t as ready, if manipulated with tact and sympathy, to give and to receive.
Wandering about the drawing-room, while, as usual in her leisure moments, she crocheted a small jacket, Tison in her lap, he wondered, for instance, what she thought of the drawing-room. He knew that it was very different from the drawing-room in her Surrey cottage, and very different from the drawing-rooms with which, as he had heard from Imogen, she was familiar in the capitals of Europe. Mrs. Upton was, to-day, crocheting a blue border as peacefully as though she had faced pseudo-Correggios and crimson brocade and embossed wall-paper all her life, so that either her tastes shared the indifference of her intelligence or else her power of self-control was commendably complete.
"I hope that you are coming to Boston some day," he said to her on this occasion, the occasion of the blue border. "I"d like so much to show you my studio there, and my work. I"m not such an idler as you might imagine."
Mrs. Upton replied that she should never for a moment imagine him an idler and that since she was going to Boston to stay with his great-aunt, a dear but too infrequently seen friend of hers, she hoped soon for the pleasure of seeing his work. "I hear that you are very talented," she added.
Jack, who considered that he was, did not protest with a false modesty, but went on to talk of the field of art in general, and questioning her, skeptical as to her statement that her artistic tastes were a mere medley, he put together by degrees a conception of vague dislikes and sharp preferences. But, in spite of his persistence in keeping her to Chardin and j.a.panese prints, she would pa.s.s on from herself to Imogen, emphasizing her satisfaction in Imogen"s great interest in art. "It"s such a delightful bond between people," And Mrs. Upton, with her more than American parental discretion, smiled her approval of such bonds.
Jack reflected some moments before saying that Imogen knew, perhaps, more than she cared. He didn"t think that Imogen had, exactly, the esthetic temperament. And that there was no confidential flavor in these remarks he demonstrated by adding that it was a point he and Imogen often discussed; he had often told her that she should try to feel more and to think less, so that Valerie might amusedly have recalled Imogen"s explanation to her of the fundamental frankness that made lovers in America such "remarkable young men." Jack"s frankness, evidently, would be restrained by neither diffidence nor affection. She received his diagnosis of her daughter"s case without comment, saying only, after a moment, while she turned a corner of her jacket, "And you are of the artistic temperament, I suppose?"
"Well, yes," he owned, "in a sense; though not in that in which the word has been so often misused. I don"t see the artist as a performing acrobat nor as an anarchist in ethics, either. I think that art is one of the big aspects of life and that through it one gets hold of a big part of reality."
Mrs. Upton, mildly intent on her corner, looked acquiescent.
"I think," Jack went on, "that, like everything else in life worth having, it"s a harmony only attained by discipline and by sacrifice. And it"s essentially a social, not a selfish attainment; it widens our boundaries of comprehension and sympathy; it reveals brotherhood. The artist"s is a high form of service."
He suspected Mrs. Upton, while he spoke, of disagreement; he suspected her, also, of finding him sententious; but she continued to look interested, so that, quite conscious of his didactic purpose and amused by all the things he saw in their situation, he unfolded to her his conception of the artist"s place in the social organism.
She said, finally, "I should have thought that art was much more of an end in itself."
"Ah, there we come to the philosophy of it," said Jack. "It _is_, of course, a sort of mysticism. One lays hold of something eternal in all achievement; but then, you see, one finds out that the eternal isn"t cut up into sections, as it were--art here, ethics there--intellect yonder; one finds out that all that is eternal is bound up with the whole, so that you can"t separate beauty from goodness and truth any more than you can divide a man"s moral sense from his artistic and rational interests."
"Still, it"s in sections for us, surely? What very horrid people can be great artists," Mrs. Upton half questioned, half mused.
"Ah, I don"t believe it! I don"t believe it!" Jack broke out. "You"ll find a flaw in his art, if you find a moral chaos in him. It must be a harmony!"
The corner was long since turned, and on a simple stretch of blue Mrs.
Upton now looked up at him with a smile that showed him that whether she liked what he said or not, she certainly liked him. It was here that the slight bewilderment came in, to feel that he had been upholding some unmoral doctrine she would have smiled in just the same way; and the bewilderment was greater on feeling how much he liked her to like him. Over the didactic intentions, a boyish, an answering, smile irradiated his face.
"I"m not much of a thinker, but I suppose that it does all come together, somehow," she said.
"I"m sure that you make a great deal of beauty, wherever you are," Jack answered irrelevantly. "I"ve heard that your cottage in England is so charming. Mrs. Wake was telling me about it."
"It is a dear little place."
He remembered, suddenly, that the room where they talked contradicted his a.s.sertion, and, glancing about it furtively, his eye traversed the highly glazed surface of the Correggio. Mrs. Upton"s glance followed his. "I don"t think I ever cared, so seriously, about beauty," she said, smiling quietly.
"I lived, you see, for a good many years in this room, just as it is."
There was no pathos in her voice. Jack brought it out for her.
"I am sure you hated it!"
"I thought it ugly, of course; but I didn"t mind so much as all that. I didn"t mind, really, so much as you would."
"Not enough to try to have it right?"
He was marching his ethics into it, and, with his question, he felt now that he had brought Mr. Upton right down from the wall and between them.
Mr. Upton had not minded the room at all, or had minded only in the sense that he made it a matter of conscience not to mind. And aspects of it Mr.
Upton had thought beautiful. And that Mrs. Upton felt all this he was sure from the very vagueness of her answer.
"That would have meant caring more for beauty than for more important things in life."
He knew that it was in horribly bad taste, but he couldn"t help having it out, now that he had, involuntarily, gone so far. "If you like Chardin, I"m sure that that hurts you," and he indicated the pseudo-Correggio, this time openly.
She followed his gesture with brows of mildly lifted inquiry, "You mean it"s not genuine?"
"That, and a great deal more. It"s imitation, and it"s bad imitation; and, anyway, the original would be out of place here--on that wall-paper."
But Mrs. Upton wouldn"t be clear; wouldn"t be drawn; wouldn"t, simply, share. She shook her head; she smiled, as though he must accept from her her lack of proper feeling, repeating, "I didn"t like it, but, really, I never minded much." And he had to extract what satisfaction he could from her final, vague summing-up. "It went with the chairs--and all the rest."
X
"Mama," said Imogen, "who is Sir Basil?" She had picked up a letter from the hall table as she and Jack pa.s.sed on their way up-stairs after their walk, and she carried it into the library with the question.
Mrs. Upton was making tea beside the fire, Mrs. Wake and Mary with her, and as Imogen held out the letter with its English stamp and masculine handwriting a dusky rose-color mounted to her face. Indeed, in taking the letter from her daughter"s hand, her blush was so obvious that a slight silence of recognized and shared embarra.s.sment made itself felt.