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 Bocock'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 gratitude 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 pæon; 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.