XX
In the morning Mrs. Bowen received a note from her banker covering a despatch by cable from America. It was from Imogene’s mother; it acknowledged the letters they had written, and announced that she sailed that day for Liverpool. It was dated at New York, and it was to be inferred that after perhaps writing in answer to their letters, she had suddenly made up her mind to come out.
“Yes, that is it,” said Imogene, to whom Mrs. Bowen hastened with the despatch. “Why should she have telegraphed to you?” she asked coldly, but with a latent fire of resentment in her tone.
“You must ask her when she comes,” returned Mrs. Bowen, with all her gentleness. “It won’t be long now.”
They looked as if they had neither of them slept; but the girl’s vigil seemed to have made her wild and fierce, like some bird that has beat itself all night against its cage, and still from time to time feebly strikes the bars with its wings. Mrs. Bowen was simply worn to apathy.
“What shall you do about this?” she asked.
“Do about it? Oh, I will think. I will try not to trouble you.”
“Imogene!”
“I shall have to tell Mr. Colville. But I don’t know that I shall tell him at once. Give me the despatch, please.” She possessed herself of it greedily, offensively. “I shall ask you not to speak of it.”
“I will do whatever you wish.”
“Thank you.”
Mrs. Bowen left the room, but she turned immediately to reopen the door she had closed behind her.
“We were to have gone to Fiesole tomorrow,” she said inquiringly.
“We can still go if the day is fine,” returned the girl. “Nothing is changed. I wish very much to go. Couldn’t we go today?” she added, with eager defiance.
“It’s too late today,” said Mrs. Bowen quietly. “I will write to remind the gentlemen.”
“Thank you. I wish we could have gone today.”
“You can have the carriage if you wish to drive anywhere,” said Mrs. Bowen.
“I will take Effie to see Mrs. Amsden.” But Imogene changed her mind, and went to call upon two Misses Guicciardi, the result of an international marriage, whom Mrs. Bowen did not like very well. Imogene drove with them to the Cascine, where they bowed to a numerous military acquaintance, and they asked her if Mrs. Bowen would let her join them in a theatre party that evening: they were New-Yorkers by birth, and it was to be a theatre party in the New York style; they were to be chaperoned by a young married lady; two young men cousins of theirs, just out from America, had taken the box.
When Imogene returned home she told Mrs. Bowen that she had accepted this invitation. Mrs. Bowen said nothing, but when one of the young men came up to hand Imogene down to the carriage, which was waiting with the others at the gate, she could not have shown a greater tolerance of his second-rate New Yorkiness if she had been a Boston dowager offering him the scrupulous hospitalities of her city.
Imogene came in at midnight; she hummed an air of the opera as she took off her wraps and ornaments in her room, and this in the quiet of the hour had a terrible, almost profane effect: it was as if some other kind of girl had whistled. She showed the same nonchalance at breakfast, where she was prompt, and answered Mrs. Bowen’s inquiries about her pleasure the night before with a liveliness that ignored the polite resolution that prompted them.
Mr. Morton was the first to arrive, and if his discouragement began at once, the first steps masked themselves in a reckless welcome, which seemed to fill him with joy, and Mrs. Bowen with silent perplexity. The girl ran on about her evening at the opera, and about the weather, and the excursion they were going to make; and after an apparently needless ado over the bouquet which he brought her, together with one for Mrs. Bowen, she put it into her belt, and made Colville notice it when he came: he had not thought to bring flowers.
He turned from her hilarity with anxious question to Mrs. Bowen, who did not meet his eye, and who snubbed Effie when the child found occasion to whisper: “I think Imogene is acting very strangely, for her; don’t you, mamma? It seems as if going with those Guicciardi girls just once had spoiled her.”
“Don’t make remarks about people, Effie,” said her mother sharply. “It isn’t nice in little girls, and I don’t want you to do it. You talk too much lately.”
Effie turned grieving away from this rejection, and her face did not light up even at the whimsical sympathy in Colville’s face, who saw that she had met a check of some sort; he had to take her on his knee and coax and kiss her before her wounded feelings were visibly healed. He put her down with a sighing wish that someone could take him up and soothe his troubled sensibilities too, and kept her hand in his while he sat waiting for the last of those last moments in which the hurrying delays of ladies preparing for an excursion seem never to end.
When they were ready to get into the carriage, the usual contest of self-sacrifice arose, which Imogene terminated by mounting to the front seat; Mr. Morton hastened to take the seat beside her, and Colville was left to sit with Effie and her mother. “You old people will be safer back there,” said Imogene. It
