A Fountain Sealed Part 16

"Of course, mama, if you insist, I must yield," Imogen said, sinking back in her seat beside the attentive Jack, and hoping that her mournful acquiescence might show in its true light to him, even if her mother's sentimental selfishness didn't. And later, when he very prettily insisted on himself entertaining the club-girls at the Philharmonic, she felt that, after all, no one but her mother had lost in the encounter. The girls were to have their concert (though they might have had many such, had not her mother so robbed them, there was still that wound) and she was to keep her ring; and she was not sorry for that, for it did go well with the pearl.

Above all, Jack must have appreciated both her generous intention and her relinquishing of it. Yet she had just to test his appreciation.

"Indeed I do accept, Jack. I can't bear to have them disappointed for a childish fancy, like that of poor mama's, and we have no right to afford it by any other means. Isn't it strange that any one should care more for a colored bit of stone than for some high and shining hours in those girls'

gray lives?"

But Jack said: "Oh, I perfectly understand what she felt about it. It was her mother's ring. She probably remembers seeing it on her mother's hand."

So Imogen had, again, to recognize the edge of the shadow.

They, all of them, Jack, Mary, and her mother, went with her and her girls to the concert. Jack had taken two boxes in the semicircle that sweeps round Carnegie Hall, overhanging the level sea of heads below. Rose Packer, just come to town, was next them, with the friends she was visiting in New York, two pretty, elaborately dressed girls, frothing with youthful high spirits, and their mother, an abundant, skilfully-girthed matron. The Langleys were very fashionable and very wealthy; their houses in America, England, Italy, their yachts and motorcars, their dances and dinners, furnished matter for constant and uplifted discourse in the society columns of the English-speaking press all over the world. Every one of Imogen's factory girls knew them by name and a stir of whispers and nudges announced their recognition.

Mrs. Langley leaned over the low part.i.tion to clasp Mrs. Upton's hand,--they had known each other since girlhood,--and to smile benignly upon Imogen, casting a glance upon the self-conscious, staring girls, whose clothing was a travesty of her own consummate modishness as their manners at once attempted to echo her sweetness and suavity.

"What a nice idea," she murmured to Imogen; "and to have them hear it in the best way possible, too. Not crowded into cheap, stuffy seats."

"That would hardly have been possible, since I do not myself care to hear music in cheap seats. What is not good enough for me is not good enough for my friends. To-day we all owe our pleasure to Mr. Pennington."

Mrs. Langley, blandly interested in this creditable enlightenment, turned to Jack with questioning about the tableaux.

"We are all so much interested in Imogen's interests, aren't we? It's such an excellent idea. My girls are so sorry that they can't be in them. Rose tells me, Imogen, that there was some idea of your doing Antigone."

"None whatever," said Imogen, with no abatement of frigidity. She disapproved of leaders of fashion.

"I only meant," Rose leaned forward, "that we wanted you to, so much,"

"And can't you persuade her? You would look so well, my dear child. Talk her over, Valerie, you and Mr. Pennington." Mrs. Langley looked back at her friend.

"It would hardly do just now, I think," Valerie answered.

"But for a charity--" Mrs. Langley urged her mitigation with a smile that expressed, to Imogen's irritated sensibilities, all the trite conformity of the mammon-server.

"I don't think it would do," Valerie repeated.

"Pray don't think my motive in refusing a conventional one," said Imogen, with an irrepressible severity that included her mother as well as Rose and Mrs. Langley. These two sank back in their seats and the symphony began.

Resting her cheek on her hand, her elbow on her knee, Imogen leaned forward, as if out of the perplexing, weary world into the sphere of the soul. She smiled deeply at one of her girls while she fell into the listening harmony of att.i.tude, and her delicate face took on a look of rapt exaltation.

Jack was watching her, she knew; though she did not know that her own consciousness of the fact effectually prevented her from receiving as more than a blurred sensation the sounds that fell upon her ear.

She adjusted her face, her att.i.tude, as a painter expresses an idea through the medium of form, and her idea was to look as though feeling the n.o.blest things that one can feel. And at the end of the first movement, the vaguely heard harmony without responding to the harmony of this inner purpose, the music's tragic acceptance of doom echoing her own deep sense of loneliness, the strange new sorrow tangling her life, tears rose beautifully to her eyes; a tear slid down her cheek.

She put up her handkerchief quietly and dried it, glancing now at Jack beside her. He was making a neat entry in a note-book, technically interested in the rendering by a new conductor. The sight struck through her and brought her soaring sadness to earth. Anger, deep and gnawing, filled her. He had not seen her tears, or, if he had, did not care that she was sad. It was little consolation for her hurt to see good Mary's eyes fixed on her with wide solicitude. She smiled, ever so gravely and tenderly, at Mary, and turned her eyes away.

A babble of silly enthusiasm had begun in the Langley box and Rose had just effected a change of seat that brought her next to her adored Mrs.

Upton and nearer her dear Mary. Imogen almost felt that hostile forces had cl.u.s.tered behind her back, especially as Jack turned in his chair to talk to Mary and her mother.

"Just too lovely!" exclaimed one of the younger Miss Langleys, in much the same vernacular as that used by Imogen's _protegees_.

She looked round at these to see one yawning cavernously, on the cessation of uncomprehended sound; while another's eyes, drowsed as if by some narcotic, sought the relief of visual interest in the late-comers who filed in below. A third sat in an att.i.tude of sodden preoccupation, breathing heavily and gazing at the Langleys and at Rose, who wore to-day a wonderful dress. Only a rounded little Jewess, with eyes of black lacquer set in a fat, acquiline face, quite Imogen's least favorite of her girls, showed a proper appreciation. She was as intent and as preoccupied as Jack had been.

The second movement began, a movement hurrying, dissatisfied, rising in appeal and aspiration, beaten back; turning upon itself continually, continually to rise again,--baffled, frustrated, yet indomitable. And as Imogen listened her features took on a mask-like look of gloom. How alone she was among them all.

She was glad in the third movement, her mind in its knotted concentration catching but one pa.s.sage, and that given with a new rendering, to emphasize her displeasure by a little shudder and frown. An uproar of enthusiasm arose after the movement and Imogen heard one of the factory girls behind her, in answer to a question from her mother, e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e "_Fine!_"

When her mother leaned to her, with the same "Wasn't it splendid?" Imogen found relief in answering firmly, "I thought it insolent."

"Insolent? That adagio bit?"--Jack, evidently, had seen her symptoms of distress.--"Why, I thought it a most exquisite interpretation."

"So did I," said Mrs. Upton rather sadly from behind.

"It hurt me, mama dear," said Imogen. "But then I know this symphony so well, love it so much, that I perhaps feel intolerantly toward new readings."

As the next, and last, movement began, she heard Rose under her breath yet quite loud enough, murmur, "Bunk.u.m!" The e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n was nicely modulated to reach her own ears alone.

With a deepened sense of alienation, Imogen sat enveloped by the unheard thunders of the final movement. Yes, Rose would hide her impertinence from others' ears. Imogen had noted the growing tenderness, light and playful, between her mother and the girl. Behind her, presently, she rustled in all her silks as she leaned to whisper something to Mrs. Upton--"You will come and have tea with me,--at Sherry's,--all by ourselves?" Imogen caught.

Her mother was not the initiator, but her acquiescence was an offense, and to Imogen, acutely conscious of the whispered colloquy, each murmur ran needles of anger into her stretched and vibrating nerves. At last she turned eyes portentously widened and a prolonged "Ss-s-s-h" upon them.

"People _oughtn't_ to whisper," Jack smiled comprehendingly at her, when they reached the end of the symphony; the rest of the movement having been occupied, for Imogen, with a sense of indignant injury.

She had caught his attention, then, with her reproof. There was sudden balm in his sympathy. The memory of the unnoticed tear still rankled in her, but she was able to smile back. "Some people will always be the money-lenders in the temple."

At once the balm was embittered. She had trusted too much to his sympathy.

He flushed his quick, facile flush, and she was again at the confines of the shadow. Really, it was coming to a pa.s.s when she could venture no least criticism, even by implication, of her mother.

But, keeping up her smile, she went on: "You don't feel that? To me, music is a temple, the cathedral of my soul. And the c.h.i.n.k of money, the bartering of social trivialities, jars on me like a sacrilege."

He looked away, still with the flush. "Aren't we all, more or less, worshipers or money-lenders by turn? My mind often strays."

"Not to the glitter of common coin," she insisted, urging with mildness his own better self upon him; for, yes, rather than judge her mother he would lower his own ideal. All the more reason, then, for her to hold fast to her own truth, and see its light place him where it must. If he now thought her priggish,--well, that _did_ place him.

"Oh, yes, it does, often," he rejoined; but now he smiled at her as though her very solemnity, her very lack of humor, touched him; it was once more the looking down of the shifted focus. Then he appealed a little.

"You mustn't be too hard on people for not feeling as you do--all the time."

Consistency did not permit her an answer, for the next piece had begun.

When the concert was over, Mrs. Langley offered the hospitality of her electric brougham to three of them. Rose and her girls were going to a tea close by. Imogen said that she preferred walking and Jack said that he would go with her; so Mary and Mrs. Upton departed with Mrs. Langley and, the factory girls dispatched to their distances by subway, the young couple started on their way down crowded Fifth Avenue.

It was a bright, reverberating day, dry and cloudless, and, as they walked shoulder to shoulder, their heels rang metallically on the frosty pavements. Above the sloping canon of the avenue, the sky stretched, a long strip of scintillating blue. The "Flat-Iron" building towered appallingly into the middle distance like the ship prow of some giant invasion. The significance of the scene was of nothing n.o.bly permanent, but it was exhilarating in its expression of inquisitive, adventurous life, shaping its facile ideals in vast, fluent forms.

Imogen's face, bathed in the late sunlight, showed its usual calm; inwardly, she was drawn tight and tense as an arrow to the bow-head, in a tingling readiness to shoot far and free at any challenge.

A surface constraint was manifested in Jack's nervous features, but she guessed that his consciousness had not reached the pitch of her own acuteness, and made him only aware of a difference as yet unadjusted between them. Indeed, with a quiet interest that she knew was not a.s.sumed, he presently commented to her on the odd disproportion between the streaming humanity and its enormous frame.

"If one looks at it as a whole it's as inharmonious as a high, huge stage with its tiny figures before the footlights. It's quite out of scale as a setting for the human form. It's awfully ugly, and yet it's rather splendid, too."

Imogen a.s.sented.