CHAPTER XXXI.
"To-day, remember. You promised that I should see it to-day," Elfrida reminded Kendal, dropping instantly into the pose they had jointly decided on. "I know I'm late, but you will not punish me by another postponement, will you?"
Kendal looked sternly at his watch. "A good twenty minutes, mademoiselle," he returned aggrievedly. "It would be only justice—poetic justice—to say no. But I think you may, if we get on to-day."
He was already at work, turning from the texture of the rounded throat which occupied him before she came in, to the more serious problem of the nuances of expression in the face. It was a whim of his, based partly upon a cautiousness, of which he was hardly aware, that she should not see the portrait in its earlier stages, and she had made a great concession of this. As it grew before him, out of his consciousness, under his hand, he became more and more aware that he would prefer to postpone her seeing it, for reasons which he would not pause to define. Certainly they were not connected with any sense of having failed to do justice to his subject. Kendal felt an exulting mastery over it which was the most intoxicating sensation his work had ever brought him. He had, as he painted, a silent, brooding triumph in his manipulation, in his control. He gave himself up to the delight of his insight, the power of his reproduction, and to the intense satisfaction of knowing that out of the two there grew something of more than usually keen intrinsic interest within the wide creed of his art. He worked with every nerve tense upon his conception of what he saw, which so excluded other considerations that now and then, in answer to some word of hers that distracted him, he spoke to her almost roughly. At which Elfrida, with a little smile of forgiving comprehension, obediently kept silence. She saw the artist in him dominant, and she exulted for his sake. It was to her delicious to be the medium of his inspiration, delicious and fit and sweetly acceptable. And they had agreed upon a charming pose.
Presently Kendal lowered his brush impatiently. "Talk to me a little," he said resentfully, ignoring his usual preference that she should not talk because what she said had always power to weaken the concentration of his energy. "There is a little muteness about the lips. Am I very unreasonable? But you don't know what a difficult creature you are."
She threw up her chin in one of her bewitching ways and laughed. "I wouldn't be too simple," she returned. She looked at him with the light of her laughter still in her eyes, and went on: "I know I must be difficult —tremendously difficult; because I, whom you see as an individual, am so many people. Phases of character have an attraction for me—I wear one to-day and another to-morrow. It is very flippant, but you see I am honest about it. And it must make me difficult to paint, for it can be only by accident that I am the same person twice."
Without answering Kendal made two or three rapid strokes. "That's better," he said, as if to himself. "Go on talking, please. What did you say?"
"It doesn't seem to matter much," she answered, with a little pout. "I said 'Baa, baa, black sheep, have you any wool?'"
"No, you didn't," returned Kendal as they laughed together. "You said something about being like Cleopatra, a creature of infinite variety, didn't you? About having a great many disguises—" absently. "But—"
Kendal fell into the absorbed silence of his work again, leaving the sentence unfinished. He looked up at her with a long, close, almost intimate scrutiny, under which and his careless words she blushed hotly.
"Then I hope you have chosen my most becoming disguise," she cried imperiously, jumping up. "Now, if you please, I will see."
She stood beside the canvas with her eyes upon his face, waiting for a sign from him. He, feeling, without knowing definitely why, that a critical moment had come between them, rose and stepped back a pace or two, involuntarily pulling himself together to meet what she might say. "Yes, you may look," he said, seeing that she would not turn her head without his word; and waited.
Elfrida took three or four steps beyond the easel and faced it. In the first instant of her gaze her face grew radiant. "Ah," she said softly, "how unconscionably you must hare flattered me! I can't be so pretty as that."
A look of relief shot across Kendal's face. "I'm glad you like it," he said briefly. "It's a capital pose."
The first thing that could possibly be observed, about the portrait was its almost dramatic loveliness. The head was turned a little, and the eyes regarded something distant, with a half wishful, half deprecating dreaminess. The lips were plaintively courageous, and the line of the lifted chin and throat helped the pathetic eyes and annihilated the heaviness of the other features. It was as if the face made an expressive effort to subdue a vitality which might otherwise have been aggressive; but while the full value of this effect of spiritual pose was caught and rendered, Kendal had done his work in a vibrant significant chord of color that strove for the personal force beneath it and brought it out.
Elfrida dropped into the nearest chair, clasped her knees in her hands, and bending forward, earnestly regarded the canvas with a silence that presently became perceptible. It seemed to Kendal at first, as he stood talking to her of its technicalities, that she tested the worth of every stroke; then he became aware that she was otherwise occupied, and that she did not hear him. He paused and stepped over to where, standing behind her chair, he shared her point of view. Even the exaltation of his success did not prevent his impatient wonder why his relation with this girl must always be so uncomfortable.
Then as he stood in silence looking with her, it seemed that he saw with her, and the thing that he had done revealed itself to him for the first time fully, convincingly, with no appeal. He looked at it with curious, painful interest, but without remorse, even in the knowledge that she saw it too, and suffered. He realized exultingly that he had done better work than he thought —he might repent later, but for the moment he could feel nothing but that. As to the girl before him, she was simply the source and the reason of it—he was particularly glad he had happened to come across her.
He had echoed her talk of disguises, and his words embodied the unconscious perception under which he worked. He had selected a disguise, and, as she wished, a becoming one. But he had not used it fairly, seriously. He had thrown it over her face like a veil, if anything could be a veil which rather revealed than hid, rather emphasized than softened, the human secret of the face underneath. He realized now that he had been guided by a broader perception, by deeper instincts, in painting that. It was the real Elfrida.
There was still a moment before she spoke. He wondered vaguely how she would take it, and he was conscious of an anxiety to get it over. At last she rose and faced him, with one hand, that trembled, resting on the back of the chair. Her face wore a look that was almost profound, and there was an acknowledgment in it, a degree of submission, which startled him.
"So that is how you have read me," she said, looking again at the portrait "Oh, I do not find fault; I would like to, but I dare not. I am not sure enough that you are wrong—no, I am too sure that you are right. I am, indeed, very much preoccupied with myself. I have always been—I shall always be. Don't think I shall reform after this moral shock as people do in books. I am what I am. But I acknowledge that an egotist doesn't make an agreeable picture, however charmingly you apologize for her. It is a personality of stone, isn't it?—implacable, unchangeable. I've often felt that."
Kendal was incapable of denying a word of what she said. "If it is any comfort to you to know it," he ventured, "hardly any one will see in it what you—and I—see."
"Yes," she said, with a smile, "that's true. I shan't mind its going to the Academy."
She sat down again and looked fixedly at the picture, her chin propped in her hand. "Don't you feel," she said, looking up at him with a little childish gesture of confidence, "as if you had stolen something from me?"
"Yes," Kendal declared honestly, "I do. I've taken something you didn't intend me to have."
"Well, I give it you—it is yours quite freely and ungrudgingly. Don't feel that way any more. You have a right to your divination," she Added bravely.
"I would not withhold it if I could. Only—I hope you find something good in it. I think, myself, there is something."
Her look was a direct interrogation, and Kendal flinched before it. "Dear creature," he murmured, "you are very true to yourself."
"And to you," she pleaded, "always to you too. Has there ever been anything but the clearest honesty between us? Ah, my friend, that is valuable—there are so few people who inspire it."
She had risen again, and he found himself shame-facedly holding her hand. His conscience roused itself and smote him mightily. Had there always been this absolute single-mindedness between them?
"You make it necessary for me to tell you," he said slowly, "that there is one thing between us you do not know. I saw you at Cheynemouth on the stage."
"I know you did," she smiled at him. "Janet Cardiff let it out, by accident I suppose you came, like Mr. Cardiff, because you—disapproved. Then why didn't you remonstrate with me? I've often wondered." Elfrida spoke softly, dreamily. Her happiness seemed very near. Her self-surrender was so perfect and his understanding, as it always had been, so sweet, that the illusion of the moment was cruelly perfect She raised her eyes to Kendal's with an abandonment of tenderness in them that quickened his heart-beats, man that he was.
"Tell me, do you want me to give it up—my book—last night I finished it—my ambition?"
She was ready with her sacrifice or for the instant; she believed herself to be, and it was not wholly without an effort that he put it away. On the pretence of picking up his palette knife he relinquished her hand.
"It is not a matter upon which I have permitted myself a definite opinion," he said, more coldly than he intended, "but for your own sake I should advise it."
For her own sake! The room seemed full of the echo of his words. A blank look crossed the girl's face; she turned instinctively away from him and picked up her hat. She put it on and buttoned her gloves without the faintest knowledge of what she was doing; her senses were wholly occupied with the comprehension of the collapse that had taken place within her. It was the single moment of her life when she differed, in any important way, from the girl Kendal had painted. Her self-consciousness was a wreck, she no longer controlled it; it tossed at the mercy of her emotion. Her face was very white and painfully empty, her eyes wandered uncertainly around the room, unwilling above all things to meet Kendal's again. She had forgotten about the portrait.
"I will go, then," she said simply, without looking at him, and this time, with a flash, Kendal comprehended again. He held the door open for her mutely, with the keenest pang his pleasant life had ever brought him, and she passed out and down the dingy stairs.
On the first landing she paused and turned. "I will never be different," she said aloud, as if he were still beside her, "I will never be different!" She unbuttoned one of her gloves and fingered the curious silver ring that gleamed uncertainly on her hand in the shabby light of the staircase. The alternative within it, the alternative like a bit of brown sugar, offered itself very suggestively at the moment. She looked around her at the dingy place she stood in, and in imagination threw herself across the lowest step. Even at that miserable moment she was aware of the strong, the artistic, the effective thing to do. "And when he came down he might tread on me," she said to herself, with a little shudder. "I wish I had the courage. But no—it might hurt, after all. I am a coward, too."
She had an overwhelming realization of impotence in every direction. It came upon her like a burden; under it she grew sick and faint. At the door she stumbled, and she was hardly sure of her steps to her cab, which was drawn up by the curbstone, and in which she presently went blindly home.
By ten o'clock that night she had herself, in a manner, in hand again. Her eyes were still wide and bitter, and the baffled, uncomprehending look had not quite gone out of them, but a line or two of cynical acceptance had drawn themselves round her lips. She had sat so long and so quietly regarding the situation that she became conscious of the physical discomfort of stiffened limbs. She leaned back in her chair and put her feet on another, and lighted a cigarette.
"No, Buddha," she said, as if to a confessor, "don't think it of me. It was a lie, a pose to tempt him on. I would never have given it up—never! It is more to me —I am almost sure—than he is. It is part of my soul, Buddha, and my love for him—oh, I cannot tell!"
She threw the cigarette away from her and stared at the smiling image with heavy eyes in silence. Then she went on:
"But I always tell you everything, little bronze god, and I won't keep back even this. There was a moment when I would have let him take me in his arms and hold me close, close to him. And I wish he had—I should have had it to remember. Bah! why is my face hot! I might as well be ashamed of wanting my dinner!"
Again she dropped into silence, and when next she spoke her whole face had hardened.
"But no! He thinks that he has read me finally, that he has done with me, that I no longer count! He will marry some red-and-white cow of an Englishwoman who will accept herself in the light of a reproductive agent and do her duty by him accordingly. As I would not—no! Good heavens, no! So perhaps it is as well, for I will go on loving him, of course, and some day he will come back to me, in his shackles, and together, whatever we do, we will make no vulgar mess of it. In the meantime, Buddha, I will smile, like you.
"And there is always this, which is the best of me. You agree, don't you, that it is the best of me?" She fingered the manuscript in her lap. "All my power, all my joy, the quintessence of my life! I think I shall be angry if it has a common success, if the people like it too well. I only want recognition for it—recognition and acknowledgment and admission. I want George Meredith to ask to be introduced to me!" She made rather a pitiful effort to smile. "And that, Buddha, is what will happen."
Mechanically she lighted another cigarette and turned over her first rough pages—a copy had gone to Rattray—looking for passages she had wrought most to her satisfaction. They left her cold as she read them, but she was not unaware that the reason of this lay elsewhere; and when she went to bed she put the packet under her pillow and slept a little better for the comfort of it.
CHAPTER XXXII.
In the week that followed Janet Cardiff's visit to Elfrida's attic, these two young women went through a curious reapproachment. At every step it was tentative, but at every step it was also enjoyable. They made sacrifices to meet on most days; they took long walks together, and arranged lunches at out-of-the-way restaurants; they canvassed eagerly such matters of interest in the world that supremely attracted them as had been lying undiscussed between them until now. The intrinsic pleasure that was in each for the other had been enhanced by deprivation, and they tasted it again with a keenness of savor which was a surprise to both of them. Their mutual understanding of most things, their common point of view, reasserted itself more strongly than ever as a mutual possession; they could not help perceiving its value. Janet made a fairly successful attempt to drown her sense of insincerity in the recognition. She, Janet, was conscious of a deliberate effort to widen and deepen the sympathy between them. An obscure desire to make reparation, she hardly knew for what, combined itself with a great longing to see their friendship the altogether beautiful and perfect thing its mirage was, and pushed her on to seize every opportunity to fortify the place, she had retaken. Elfrida had never found her so considerate, so appreciative, so amusing, so prodigal of her gay ideas, or so much inclined to go upon her knees at shrines before which she sometimes stood and mocked. She had a special happiness in availing herself of an opportunity which resulted in Elfrida's receiving a letter from the editor of the St. George's asking her for two or three articles on the American Colony in Paris, and only very occasionally she recognized, with a subtle thrill of disgust, that she was employing diplomacy in every action, every word, almost every look which concerned her friend. She asked herself then despairingly how it could last and what good could come of it, whereupon fifty considerations, armed with whips, drove her on.
Perhaps the most potent of these was the consciousness that in spite of it all she was not wholly successful, that as between Elfrida and herself things were not entirely as they had been. They were cordial, they were mutually appreciative, they had moments of expansive intercourse; but Janet could not disguise to herself the fact that there was a difference, the difference between fit and fusion. The impression was not a strong one, but she half suspected her friend now and then of intently watching her, and she could not help observing how reticent the girl had become upon certain subjects that touched her personally. The actress in Elfrida was nevertheless constantly supreme, and interfered with the trustworthiness of any single impression. She could not resist the pardoning role; she played it intermittently, with a pretty impulsiveness that would have amused Miss Cardiff more if it had irritated her less. For the certainty that Elfrida would be her former self for three days together Janet would have dispensed gladly with the little Bohemian dinner in Essex Court in honor of her book, or the violets that sometimes dropped out of Elfrida's notes, or even the sudden but premeditated occasional offer of Elfrida's lips.
Meanwhile the Halifaxes were urging their western trip upon her, Lady Halifax declaring roundly that she was looking wretchedly, Miss Halifax suggesting playfully the possibility of an American heroine for, her next novel. Janet, repelling both publicly, admitted both privately. She felt worn out physically, and when she thought of producing another book her brain responded with a helpless negative. She had been turning lately with dogged conviction to her work as the only solace life was likely to offer her, and anything that hinted at loss of power filled her with blank dismay. She was desperately weary and she wanted to forget, desiring, besides, some sort of stimulus as a flagging swimmer desires a rope.
One more reason came and took possession of her common sense. Between her father and Elfrida she felt herself a complication. If she could bring herself to consent to her own removal, the situation, she could not help seeing, would be considerably simplified. She read plainly in her father that the finality Elfrida promised had not yet been given—doubtless an opportunity had not yet occurred; and Janet was willing to concede that the circumstances might require a rather special opportunity. When it should occur she recognized that delicacy, decency almost, demanded that she should be out of the way. She shrank miserably from the prospect of being a daily familiar looker-on at the spectacle of Lawrence Cardiff's pain, and she had a knowledge that there would be somehow an aggravation of it in her person. In a year everything would mend itself more or less, she believed dully and tried to feel. Her father would be the same again, with his old good-humor and criticism of her enthusiasms, his old interest in things and people, his old comradeship for her. John Kendal would have married Elfrida Bell— what an idyll they would make of life together!—and she, Janet, would have accepted the situation. Her interest in the prospective pleasures on which Lady Halifax expatiated was slight; she was obliged to speculate upon its rising, which she did with all the confidence she could command. She declined absolutely to read Bryce's "American Commonwealth," or Miss Bird's account of the Rocky Mountains, or anybody's travels in the Orient, upon all of which Miss Halifax had painstakingly fixed her attention; but one afternoon she ordered a blue serge travelling-dress and refused one or two literary, engagements for the present, and the next day wrote to Lady Halifax that she had decided to go. Her father received her decision with more relief than he meant to show, and Janet had a bitter half-hour over it. Then she plunged with energy into her arrangements, and Lawrence, Cardiff made her inconsistently happy again with the interest he took in them, supplemented by an extremely dainty little travelling-clock. He became suddenly so solicitous for her that she sometimes quivered before the idea that he guessed all the reasons that were putting her to flight, which gave her a wholly unnecessary pang, for nothing would have astonished Lawrence Cardiff more than to be confronted, at the moment, with any passion that was not his own.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
Kendal, as the door closed behind Elfrida on the afternoon of her last sitting, shutting him in with himself and the portrait on the easel, and the revelation she had made, did his best to feel contrition, and wondered that he was so little successful. He assured himself that he had been a brute; yet in an uncompromising review of all that he had ever said or done in connection with Elfrida he failed to satisfy his own indignation with himself by discovering any occasion upon which his brutality had been particularly obvious. He remembered with involuntary self-justification how distinctly she had insisted upon camaraderie between them, how she had spurned everything that savored of another standard of manners on his, part, how she had once actually had the curious taste to want him to call her "old chap," and how it had grated. He remembered her only half-veiled invitation, her challenge to him to see as much as he cared, and to make what he could of her. He was to blame for accepting, but he would have been a conceited ass if he had thought of the danger of a result like this. In the midst of his reflections an idea came to him about the portrait, and he observed, with irritation, after giving it a few touches, that the light was irretrievably gone for the day.
Next morning he worked for three hours at it without a pang, and in the afternoon with relaxed nerves and a high heart, he took his hat and turned his face toward Kensington Square. The distance was considerable, but he walked lightly, rapidly, with a conscious enjoyment of that form of relief to his wrought nerves, his very limbs drawing energy from the knowledge of his finished work. Never before had he felt so completely the divine sense of success, and though he had worked at the portrait with passionate concentration from the beginning, this realization had come to him only the day before, when, stepping back to look with Elfrida, he saw what he had done. Troubled as the revelation was, in it he saw himself a master. He had for once escaped, and he felt that the escape was a notable one, from the tyranny of his brilliant-technique. He had subjected it to his idea, which had grown upon the canvas obscure to him under his own brush until that final moment, and he recognized with astonishment how relative and incidental the truth of the treatment seemed in comparison with the truth of the idea.
With the modern scornful word for the literary value of paintings on his lips, Kendal was forced to admit that in this his consummate picture, as he very truly thought it, the chief significance lay elsewhere than in the brushing and the color—they were only its dramatic exponents—and the knowledge of this brought him a new and glorious sense of control. It had already carried him further in power, this portrait, it would carry him further in place, than anything he had yet done; and the thought gave a sparkle to the delicious ineffable content that bathed his soul. He felt that the direction of his walk intensified his eager physical joy in it. He was going to Janet with his success, as he had always gone to her. As soon as the absorbing vision of his work had admitted another perception, it was Janet's sympathy, Janet's applause, that had mingled itself with his certain reward. He could not say that it had inspired him in the least, but it formed a very essential part of his triumph. He could wish her more exacting, but this time he had done something that should make her less easy to satisfy in the future. Unconsciously he hastened his steps through the gardens, switching off a daisy head now and then with his stick as he went, and pausing only once, when he found himself, to his utter astonishment, asking a purely incidental errand boy if he wanted sixpence.
Janet, in the drawing-room, received him with hardly a quickening of pulse. It was so nearly over now; she seemed to have packed up a good part of her tiresome heart-ache with the warm things Lady Halifax had dictated for the Atlantic. She had a vague expectation that it would reappear, but not until she unlocked the box, in mid-ocean, where it wouldn't matter so much. She knew that it was only reasonable and probable that she should see him again before they left for Liverpool She had been expecting this visit, and she meant to be unflinching with herself when she exchanged farewells with him. She meant to make herself believe that the occasion was quite an ordinary one—also until afterward, when her feeling about it would be of less consequence.
"Well," she asked directly, with a failing heart as she saw his face, "what is your good news?"
Kendal laughed aloud; it was delightful to be anticipated.
"So I am unconsciously advertising it," he said. "Guess!"
His tone bad the vaunting glory of a lover's—a lover new to his lordship, with his privileges still sweet upon his lips. Janet felt a little cold contraction about her heart, and sank quickly into the nearest arm-chair. "How can I guess," she said, looking beyond him at the wall, which she did not see, "without anything to go upon? Give me a hint."
Kendal laughed again. "It's very simple, and you know something about it already."
Then she was not mistaken—there was no chance of it. She tried to look at him with smiling, sympathetic intelligence, while her whole being quivered in anticipation of the blow that was coming. "Does it—does it concern another person?" she faltered.
Kendal looked grave, and suffered an instant's compunction. "It does—it does indeed," he assured her. "It concerns Miss Elfrida Bell very much, in a way. Ah!" he went on impatiently, as she still sat silent, "why are you so unnaturally dull, Janet? I've finished that young woman's portrait, and it is more—satisfactory—than I ever in my life dared hope that any picture of mine would be."
"Is that all?"
The words escaped her in a quick, breath of relief. Her face was crimson, and the room seemed to swim.
"All!" she heard Kendal say reproachfully. "Wait until you see it!" He experienced a shade of dejection, and there was an instant's silence between them, during which it seemed to Janet that the world was made over again. "That young woman!" She disloyally extracted the last suggestion of indifference out of the phrase, and found it the sweetest she had heard for months. But her brain whirled with the effort to decide what it could possibly mean.
"I hope you have made it as beautiful as Elfrida is," she cried, with sharp self-reproof. "It must have been difficult to do that."
"I have made it—what she is, I think," he answered, again with that sudden gravity. "It is so like my conception of her which I have never felt permitted to explain to you, that I feel as if I had stolen a march upon her. You must see it. When will you come? It goes in the day after to-morrow, but I can't wait for your opinion till it's hung."
"I like your calm reliance upon the Committee," Janet laughed. "Suppose—"
"I won't. It will go on the line," Kendal returned confidently. "I did nothing last year that I will permit to be compared with it. Will you come to-morrow?"
"Impossible; I haven't two consecutive minutes to-morrow.
We sail, you know, on Thursday."
Kendal looked at her blankly. "You sail? On Thursday?"
"I am going to America, Lady Halifax and I. And Elizabeth, of course. We are to be away a year. Lady Halifax is buying tickets, I am collecting light literature, and Elizabeth is in pursuit of facts. Oh, we are deep in preparation. I thought you knew."
"How could I possibly know?"
"Elfrida didn't tell you, then?"
"Did she know?"
"Oh yes, ten days ago."
"Odd that she didn't mention it."
Janet told herself that it was odd, but found with some surprise that it was not more than odd. There had been a time when the discovery that she and her affairs were of so little consequence to her friend would have given her a wondering pang; but that time seemed to have passed. She talked lightly on about her journey; her voice and her thoughts, had suddenly been freed. She dilated upon the pleasures she anticipated as if they had been real, skimming over the long spaces of his silence, and gathering gaiety as he grew more and more sombre. When he rose to go their moods had changed: the brightness and the flush were hers, and, his face spoke only of a puzzled dejection, an anxious uncertainty.
"So it is good-by," he said, as she gave him her hand, "for a year!"
Something in his voice made her look up suddenly, with such an unconscious tenderness in her eyes as he had never seen in any other woman's. She dropped them before he could be quite certain he recognized it, though his heart was beating in a way which told him there had been no mistake.
"Lady Halifax means it to be a year," she answered—and surely, since it was to be a year, he might keep her hand an instant longer.
The full knowledge of what this woman was to him seemed to descend upon John Kendal then, and he stood silent under it, pale and grave-eyed, baring his heart to the rush of the first serious emotion life had brought him, filled with a single conscious desire—that she should show him that sweetness in her eyes again. But she looked wilfully down, and he could only come closer to her, with a sudden muteness upon his ready lips, and a strange new-born fear wrestling for possession of him. For in that moment Janet, hitherto so simple, so approachable, as it were so available, had become remote, difficult, incomprehensible. Kendal invested her with the change in himself, and quivered in uncertainty as to what it might do with her. He seemed to have nothing to trust to but that one glance for knowledge of the girl his love had newly exalted; and still she stood before him looking down. He took two or three vague steps into the middle of the room, drawing her with him. In their nearness to each other the silence between them held them intoxicatingly, and he had her in his arms before he found occasion to say, between his lingering kisses upon her hair, "You can't go, Janet. You must stay—and marry me."
* * * * * * * *
"I don't know," wrote Lawrence Cardiff in a postscript to a note to Miss Bell that evening, "that Janet will thank me for forestalling her with such all-important news, but I can't resist the pleasure of telling you that she and Kendal got themselves engaged, without so much as a 'by your leave' to me, this afternoon. The young man shamelessly stayed to dinner, and I am informed that they mean to be married in June. Kendal is full of your portrait; we are to see it to-morrow. I hope he has arranged that we shall have the advantage of comparing it with the original."
CHAPTER XXXIV.
"Miss Cardiff's in the lib'ry, sir," said the housemaid, opening, the door for Kendal next morning with a smile which he did not find too broadly sympathetic. He went up the stairs two steps at a time, whistling like a schoolboy.
"Lady Halifax says," he announced, taking immediate possession of Janet where she stood, and drawing her to a seat beside him on the lounge, "that the least we can do by way of reparation is to arrange our wedding-trip in their society. She declares she will wait any reasonable time; but I assured her delicately that her idea of compensation was a little exaggerated."
Janet looked at him with an, absent smile. "Yes, I think so," she said, but her eyes were preoccupied, and the lover in him resented it.
"What is it?" he asked. "What has happened, dear?"
She looked down at an open letter in her hand, and for a moment said nothing. "I don't know whether I ought to tell you; but it would be a relief."
"Can there be anything you ought not to tell me?" he insisted tenderly.
"Perhaps, on the other hand, I ought," she said reflectively. "It may help you to a proper definition of my character, and then—you may think less of me. Yes, I think I ought."
"Darling, for Heaven's sake don't talk nonsense!"
"I had a letter—this letter—a little while ago, from
Elfrida Bell." She held it out to him. "Read it."
Kendal hesitated and scanned her face. She was smiling now; she had the look of half-amused dismay that might greet an ineffectual blow. He took the letter.
"If it is from Miss Bell," he said at a suggestion from his conscience, "I fancy, for some reason, it is not pleasant."
"No," she replied, "it is not pleasant."
He unfolded the letter, recognizing the characteristic broad margins and the repressed rounded perpendicular hand with its supreme effort after significance, and his thought reflected a tinge of his old amused curiosity. It was only a reflection, and yet it distinctly embodied the idea that he might be on the brink of a further discovery. He glanced at Janet again: her hands were clasped in her lap, and she was looking straight before her with smilingly grave lips and lowered lids, which nevertheless gave him a glimpse of retrospection. He felt the beginnings of indignation, yet he looked back at the letter acquisitively; its interest was intrinsic.
"I feel that I can no longer hold myself in honor," he read, "if I refrain further from defining the personal situation between us as it appears to me. That I have let nearly three weeks go by without doing it you may put down to my weakness and selfishness, to your own charm, to what you will; but I shall be glad if you will not withhold the blame that is due me in the matter, for I have wronged you, as well as myself, in keeping silence.
"Look, it is all here in a nutshell. Nothing is changed. I have tried to believe otherwise, but the truth is stronger than my will. My opinion of you is a naked, uncompromising fact I cannot drape it or adorn it, or even throw around it a mist of charity. It is unalterably there, and in any future intercourse with you, such intercourse as we have had in the past, I should only dash myself forever against it. I do not clearly see upon what level you accepted me in the beginning, but I am absolutely firm in my belief that it was not such as I would have tolerated if I had known. To-day at all events I am confronted with the proof that I have not had your confidence—that you have not thought it worth while to be single-minded in your relation to me. From a personal point of view there is more that I might say, but perhaps that is damning enough, and I have no desire to be abusive. It is on my conscience to add, moreover, that I find you a sophist, and your sophistry a little vulgar. I find you compromising with your ambitions, which in themselves are not above reproach from any point of view. I find you adulterating what ought to be the pure stream of ideality with muddy considerations of what the people are pleased to call the moralities, and with the feebler contamination of the conventionalities—"
"I couldn't smoke with her," commented Janet, reading over his shoulder. "It wasn't that I objected in the least, but it made me so very—uncomfortable, that I would never try a second time."
Kendal's smile deepened, and he read on without answering, except by pressing her finger-tips against his lips.
"I should be sorry to deny your great cleverness and your pretensions to a certain sort of artistic interpretation. But to me the artist bourgeois is an outsider, who must remain outside. He has nothing to gain by fellowship with me, and I—pardon me—have much to lose.
"So, if you please, we will go our separate ways, and doubtless will represent, each to the other, an experiment that has failed. You will believe me when I say that I am intensely sorry. And perhaps you will accept, as sincerely as I offer it, my wish that the future may bring you success even more brilliant than you have already attained." Here a line had been carefully scratched out. "What I have written I have written under compulsion. I am sure you will understand that.
"Believe me,
"Yours sincerely,
"ELFRIDA BELL.
"P.S.—I had a dream once of what I fancied our friendship might be. It is a long time ago, and the days between have faded all the color and sweetness out of my dream—still, I remember that it was beautiful. For the sake of that vain imagining, and because it was beautiful, I will send you, if you will allow me, a photograph of a painting which I like, which represents art as I have learned to kneel to it."
Kendal read this communication through with a look of keen amusement until he came to the postscript. Then he threw back his head and laughed outright. Janet's face had changed; she tried to smile in concert, but the effort was rather piteous. "Oh, Jack," she said, "please take it seriously." But he laughed on, irrepressibly.
She tried to cover his lips. "Don't shout so!" she begged, as if there were illness in the house or a funeral next door, and he saw something in her face which stopped him.
"My darling, it can't hurt—it doesn't, does it?"
"I'd like to say no, but it does, a little. Not so much as it would have done a while ago."
"Are you going to accept Miss Bell's souvenir of her shattered ideal? That's the best thing in the letter —that's really supreme!" and Kendal, still broadly mirthful, stretched out his hand to take it again; but Janet drew it back.
"No," she said, "of course not; that was silly of her.
But a good deal of the rest is true, I'm afraid, Jack."
"It's damnably impudent," he cried, with, sudden anger. "I suppose she believes it herself, and that's the measure of its truth. How dare she dogmatize to you about the art of your work! She to you!"
"Oh, it isn't that I care about. It doesn't matter to me, how little she thinks of my aims and my methods. I'm quite content to do my work with what artistic conception I've got without analyzing its quality—I'm thankful enough to have any. Besides, I'm not sure about the finality of her opinion—"
"You needn't be!" Kendal interrupted, with scorn.
"But what hurts—like a knife—is that part about my insincerity. I haven't been honest with her—I haven't! From the very beginning I've criticised her privately. I've felt all sorts of reserves and qualifications about her, and concealed them—for the sake of—of I don't know what—the pleasure I had in knowing her, I suppose."
"It seems to me pretty clear, from this precious communication, that she was quietly reciprocating," Kendal said bluntly.
"That doesn't clear me in the least. Besides, when she had made up her mind she had the courage to tell me what she thought; there was some principle in that. I—I admire her for doing it, but I couldn't, myself."
"Thank the Lord, no. And I wouldn't be too sure, if I were you, darling, about the unmixed heroism that dictates her letter. I dare say she fancied it was that, but—"
Janet's head leaped up from his shoulder. "Now you are unjust to her," she cried. "You don't know Elfrida, Jack. If you think her capable of assuming a motive—"
"Well, do you know what I think?" said Kendal, with an irrelevant smile, glancing at the letter in her hand. "I think she has kept a copy."
Janet looked at him with reproachful eyes, which nevertheless had the relief of amusement in them. "Don't you?" he insisted.
"I—dare say."
"And she thoroughly enjoyed writing as she did. The phrases read as if she had rolled them under her tongue. It was a coup, don't you see?—and the making of a coup, of any kind, at any expense, is the most refined joy which life affords that young woman."
"There's sincerity in every line."
"Oh, she means what she says. But she found an exquisite gratification in saying it which you cannot comprehend, dear. This letter is a flower of her egotism, as it were—she regards it with natural ecstasy, as an achievement."
Janet shook her head. "Oh no, no" she cried miserably. "You can't realize the—the sort of thing there was between us, dear, and how it should have been sacred to me beyond all tampering and cavilling, or it should not have been at all. It isn't that I didn't know all the time that I was disloyal to her, while she thought I was sincerely her friend. I did! And now she has found me out, and it serves me perfectly right—perfectly."
Kendal reflected for a moment, and then he brought comfort to her from his last resource.
"Of course the intimacy between two girls is a wholly different thing, and I don't know whether the relation between Miss Bell and myself affords any parallel to it—"
"Oh, Jack! And I thought—"
"What did you think, dearest?"
"I thought," said Janet, in a voice considerably muffled by contact with his tweed coat collar, "that you were perfectly madly in love with her."
"Heavens!" Kendal cried, as if the contingency had been physically impossible. "It is a man's privilege to fall in love with a woman, darling—not with an incarnate idea."
"It's a very beautiful idea."
"I'm not sure of that—it looks well from the outside.
But it is quite incapable of any growth or much, change,"
Kendal went on musingly, "and in the end—Lord, how a
man would be bored!"
"You are incapable of being fair to her," came from the coat collar.
"Perhaps. I have something else to think of—since yesterday. Janet, look up!"
She looked up, and for a little space Elfrida Bell found oblivion as complete as she could have desired between them. Then—
"You were telling me—" Janet said.
"Yes. Your Elfrida and I had a sort of friendship too—it began, as you know, in Paris. And I was quite aware that one does not have an ordinary friendship with her—it accedes and it exacts more than the common relation. And I've sometimes made myself uncomfortable with the idea that she gave me credit for a more faultless conception of her than I possessed; for the honest, brutal truth is, I'm afraid, that I've only been working her out. When the portrait was finished I found that somehow I had succeeded. She saw it, too, and so I fancy my false position has righted itself. So I haven't been sincere to her either, Janet. But my conscience seems fairly callous about it. I can't help reflecting that we are to other people pretty much what they deserve that we shall be. We can't control our own respect."
"I've lost hers," Janet repeated, with depression, and
Kendal gave an impatient groan.
"I don't think you'll miss it," he said.
"And, Jack, haven't you any—compunctions about exhibiting that portrait?"
"Absolutely none." He looked at her with candid eyes. "Of course if she wished me to I would destroy it. I respect her property in it so far as that. But so long as she accepts it as the significant truth it is, I am entirely incapable of regretting it. I have painted her, with her permission, as I saw her, as she is. If I had given her a, squint or a dimple, I could accuse myself; but I have not wronged her or gratified myself by one touch of misrepresentation."
"I am to see it this afternoon," said Janet. Unconsciously she was looking forward to finding some measure of justification for herself in the portrait; why, it would be difficult to say.
"Yes; I put it into its frame with my own hands yesterday. I don't know when anything has given me so much pleasure. And so far as Miss Bell is concerned," he went on, "it is an unpleasant thing to say, but one's acquaintance with her seems more and more to resolve itself into an opportunity for observation, and to be without significance other than that. I tell you frankly I began to see that when I found I shared what she called her friendship with Golightly Ticke. And I think, dear, with people like you and me, any more serious feeling toward her is impossible."
"Doesn't it distress you to think that she believes you incapable of speaking of her like this?"
"I think," said Kendal slowly, "that she knows how I would be likely to speak of her."
"Well," Janet returned, "I'm glad you haven't reason to suffer about her as I do. And I don't know at all how to answer her letter."
"I'll tell you," Kendal replied. He jumped up and brought her a pen and a sheet of paper and a blotting pad, and sat down again beside her, holding the ink bottle. "Write 'My dear Miss Bell.'"
"But she began her letter, without any formality."
"Never mind; that's a cheapness that you needn't imitate, even for the sake of politeness. Write 'My dear Miss Bell.'"
Janet wrote it.
"'I am sorry to find,'" Kendal dictated slowly, a few words at a time, "'that the flaws in my regard for you are sufficiently considerable—to attract your attention as strongly as your letter indicates. The right of judgment in so personal a matter—is indisputably yours, however—and I write to acknowledge, not to question it.'"
"Dear, that isn't as I feel."
"It's as you will feel," Kendal replied ruthlessly. "Now add: 'I have to acknowledge the very candid expression of your opinion of myself—which does not lose in interest—by the somewhat exaggerated idea of its value which appears to have dictated it,—and to thank you, for your extremely kind offer to send me a picture. I am afraid, however—even in view of the idyllic considerations you mention—I cannot allow myself to take advantage of that—"
"On the whole I wouldn't allude to the shattered ideal—"
"Oh-no, dear. Go on."
"Or the fact that you probably wouldn't be able to hang it up," he added grimly. "Now write 'You may be glad to know that the episode in my life—which your letter terminates—appears to me to be of less importance than you perhaps imagine it—notwithstanding a certain soreness over its close.'"
"It doesn't, Jack."
"It will. I wouldn't say anything more, if I were you; just 'yours very truly, Janet Cardiff.'"
She wrote as he dictated, and then read the letter slowly over from the beginning. "It sounds very hard, dear," she said, lifting eyes to his which he saw were full of tears, "and as if I didn't care."
"My darling," he said, taking her into his arms, "I hope you don't—I hope you won't care, after to-morrow. And now, don't you think we've had enough of Miss Elfrida Bell for the present?"
CHAPTER XXXV.
At three o'clock, an hour before he expected the Cardiffs, John Kendal ran up the stairs to his studio. The door stood ajar, and with a jealous sense of his possession within, he reproached himself for his carelessness in leaving it so. He had placed the portrait the day before where all the light in the room fell upon it, and his first hasty impression of the place assured him that it stood there still. When he looked directly at it he instinctively shut the door, made a step or two forward, closed his eyes and so stood for a moment, with his hands before them. Then, with a groan, "Damnation!" he opened them again and faced the fact. The portrait was literally in rags: They hung from the top of the frame and swung over the bottom of it Hardly enough of the canvas remained unriddled to show that it had represented anything human. Its destruction was absolute—fiendish, it seemed to Kendal.
He dropped into a chair and stared with his knee locked in his hands.
"Damnation!" he repeated, with a white face. "I'll never approach it again;" and then he added grimly, still speaking aloud, "Janet will say I deserved it."
He had not an instant's doubt of the author of the destruction, and he remembered with a flash in connection with it the little silver-handled Algerian dagger that pinned one of Nadie Palicsky's studies against the wall of Elfrida's room. It was not till a quarter of an hour afterward that he thought it worth while to pick up the note that lay on the table addressed to him, and then he opened it with a nauseated sense of her unnecessary insistence.
"I have come here this morning," Elfrida had written, "determined to either kill myself or IT. It is impossible, I find, notwithstanding all that I said, that both should continue to exist. I cannot explain further, you must not ask it of me. You may not believe me when I tell you that I struggled hard to let it be myself. I had such a hideous doubt as to which had the best right to live. But I failed there—death is too ghastly. So I did what you see. In doing it I think I committed the unforgivable sin—not against you, but against art. It may be some satisfaction to you to know that I shall never wholly respect myself again in consequence." A word or two scratched out, and then: "Understand that I bear no malice toward you, have no blame for you, only honor. You acted under the very highest obligation—you could not have done otherwise. * * * * * And I am glad to think that I do not destroy with your work the joy you had in it. * * *"
Kendal noted the consideration of this final statement with a cynical laugh, and counted the asterisks. Why the devil hadn't he locked the door? His confidence in her had been too ludicrous. He read the note half through once again, and then with uncontrollable impatience tore it into shreds. To have done it at all was hideous, but to try and impress herself in doing it was disgusting. He reflected, with a smile of incredulous contempt, upon what she had said about killing herself, and wondered, in his anger, how she could be so blind to her own disingenuousness. Five asterisks—she had made them carefully—and then the preposterousness about what she had destroyed and what she hadn't destroyed; and then more asterisks. What had she thought they could possibly signify—what could anything she might say possibly signify?
In a savage rudimentary way he went over the ethical aspect of the affair, coming to no very clear conclusion. He would have destroyed the thing himself if she had asked him, but she should have asked him. And even in his engrossing indignation he could experience a kind of spiritual blush as he recognized how safe his concession was behind the improbability of its condition. Finally he wrote a line to Janet, informing her that the portrait had sustained an injury, and postponing her and her father's visit to the studio. He would come, in the morning to tell her about it, he added, and despatched the missive by the boy downstairs, post-haste, in a cab. It would be to-morrow, he reflected, before he could screw himself up to talking about it, even to Janet. For that day he must be alone with his discomfiture.
* * * * *
In the days of his youth and adversity, long before he and the public were upon speaking terms, Mr. George Jasper had found encouragement of a substantial sort with Messrs. Pittman, Pitt & Sanderson, of Ludgate Hill, which was a well-known explanation of the fact that this brilliant author clung, in the main, to a rather old-fashioned firm of publishers when the dimensions of his reputation gave him a proportionate choice. It explained also the circumstance that Mr. Jasper's notable critical acumen was very often at the service of his friend Mr. Pitt—Mr. Pittman was dead, as at least one member of a London publishing firm is apt to be—in cases where manuscripts of any curiously distinctive character, from unknown authors, puzzled his perception of the truly expedient thing to do. Mr. Arthur Rattray, of the Illustrated Age, had personal access to Mr. Pitt, and had succeeded in confusing him very much indeed as to the probable success of a book by an impressionistic young lady friend of his, which he called "An Adventure in Stage-Land," and which Mr. Rattray declared to have every element of unconventional interest. Mr. Pitt distrusted unconventional interest, distrusted impressionistic literature, and especially distrusted books by young lady friends. Rattray, nevertheless showed a suspicious indifference to its being accepted, and an irritating readiness to take it somewhere else, and Mr. Pitt knew Rattray for a sagacious man. And so it happened that, returning late from a dinner where he had taken refuge from being bored entirely-to extinction in two or three extremely indigestible, dishes, Mr. George Jasper found Elfrida's manuscript in a neat, thick, oblong paper parcel, waiting for him on his dressing-table. He felt himself particularly wide awake, and he had a consciousness that the evening had made a very small inroad upon his capacity for saying clever things. So he went over "An Adventure in Stage-Land" at once, and in writing his opinion of it to Mr. Pitt, which he did with some elaboration, a couple of hours later, he had all the relief of a revenge upon a well-meaning hostess, without the reproach of having done her the slightest harm. It is probable that if Mr. Jasper had known that the opinion of the firm's "reader" was to find its way to the author, he would have expressed himself in terms of more guarded commonplace, for we cannot believe that he still cherished a sufficiently lively resentment at having his hand publicly kissed by a pretty girl to do otherwise; but Mr. Pitt had not thought it necessary to tell him of this condition, which Rattray, at Elfrida's express desire, had exacted. As it happened, nobody can ever know precisely what he wrote, except Mr. Pitt, who has forgotten, and Mr. Arthur Rattray, who tries to forget; for the letter, the morning after it had been received, which was the morning after the portrait met its fate, lay in a little charred heap in the fireplace of Elfrida's room, when Janet Cardiff pushed the screen aside at last and went in.
Kendal had come as he promised, and told her everything. He had not received quite the measure of indignant sympathy he had expected, and Janet had not laughed at the asterisks. On the other hand, she had sent him away, with unnatural gravity-of demeanor, rather earlier than he meant to go, and without telling him why. She thought, as she directed the cabman to Essex Court, Fleet Street, that she would tell him why afterward; and all the way there she thought of the most explicit terms in which to inform Elfrida that her letter had been the product of hardness of heart, that she really felt quite differently, and had come to tell her, purely for honesty's sake, how she did feel.
After a moment of ineffectual calling on the other side of the screen, her voice failed her, and in dumb terror that would not be reasoned away it seemed that she saw the outlines of the long, still, slender figure under the bed draperies, while she still looked helplessly at a flock of wild geese flying over Fugi Yama. Buddha smiled at her from the table with a kind of horrid expectancy, and the litter, of papers round him, in Elfrida's handwriting, mixed their familiarity with his mockery. She had only to drag her trembling limbs a little further to know that the room was pregnant with the presence of death. Some white tuberoses in a vase seemed to make it palpable with their fragrance. She ran wildly to the window and drew back the curtain; the pale sunlight flooding in gave a little white nimbus to a silver ring upon the floor.
The fact may not be without interest that six months afterward "An Adventure in Stage-Land" was published by Messrs. Lash and Black, and met with a very considerable success. Mr. Arthur Rattray undertook its disposal, with the consent of Mr. and Mrs. Leslie Bell, who insisted, without much difficulty, that he should receive a percentage of the profits for his trouble. Mr. Rattray was also of assistance to them when, as soon as the expense could be managed, these two middle-aged Americans, whose grief was not less impressive because of its twang, arrived in London to arrange that their daughter's final resting-place should be changed to her native land. Mr. Bell told him in confidence that while he hoped he was entirely devoid of what you may call race prejudice against the English people, it didn't, seem as if he could let anybody belonging to him lie under the British flag for all time, and found it a comfort that Rattray understood. Sparta is divided in its opinion whether the imposing red granite monument they erected in the cemetery, with plenty of space left for the final earthly record of Leslie and Margaret Bell, is not too expensive considering the Bells' means, and too conspicuous considering the circumstances. It has hitherto occurred to nobody, however, to doubt the appropriateness of the texts inscribed upon it, in connection with three little French words which Elfrida, in the charmingly apologetic letter which she left for her parents, commanded to be put there—"Pas femme-artiste." Janet, who once paid a visit to the place, hopes in all seriousness that the sleeper underneath is not aware of the combination.
Miss Kimpsey boards with the Bells now, and her relation to them has become almost daughterly. The three are swayed, to the extent of their several capacities, by what one might call a cult of Elfrida—her death has long ago been explained by the fact that a grandaunt of Mrs. Bell's suffered from melancholia.
Mr. and Mrs, John Kendal's delightful circle of friends say that they live an idyllic life in Devonshire. But even in the height of some domestic joy a silence sometimes falls between them still. Then, I fancy, he is thinking of an art that has slipped away from him, and she of a loyalty she could not hold. The only person whose equanimity is entirely undisturbed is Buddha. In his place among the mournful Magdalens of Mrs. Bell's drawing-room in Sparta, Buddha still smiles.