"Mama won"t let us forget that chlamys," Imogen said, casting a look of amus.e.m.e.nt 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 a.s.surance. 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 att.i.tude." 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 a.s.sume 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 att.i.tude 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-gla.s.ses in odd contrast to her cla.s.sic 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 p.r.o.ne 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 m.u.f.fled 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 pa.s.sage 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.