A Daughter of To-Day Part 15

CHAPTER XIX.

I have mentioned that Miss Bell had looked considerations of sentiment very full in the face at an age when she might have been expected to be blus.h.i.+ng and quivering before them, with downcast countenance. She had arrived at conclusions about them--conclusions of philosophic contumely, indifference, and some contempt. She had since frequently talked about them to Janet Cardiff with curious disregard of time, and circ.u.mstance, mentioning her opinion in a Strand omnibus, for instance, that the only dignity attaching to love as between a man and a woman was that of an artistic idea. Janet had found Elfrida possessed of so savage a literalism in this regard that it was only in the most hardily adventurous of the moods of investigation her friend inspired that she cared to combat her here. It was not, Janet told herself, that she was afraid to face the truth in any degree of nakedness; but she rose in hot inward rebellion against Elfrida's borrowed psychological cynicisms--they were not the truth, Tolstoi had not all the facts, perhaps from pure Muscovite inability to comprehend them all The spirituality of love might be a western product--she was half inclined to think it was; but at all events it existed, and it was wanton to leave out of consideration a thing that made all the difference. Moreover, if these things ought to be probed--and Janet was not of serious opinion that they ought to be--for her part she preferred to obtain advices thereon from between admissible and respectable book-covers.

It hurt her to hear them drop from Elfrida's lips--lips so plainly meant for all tenderness. Janet had an instinct of helpless anger when she heard them; the woman in her rose in protest, less on behalf of her s.e.x than on behalf of Elfrida herself, who seemed so blind, so willing to revile, so anxious to reject. "Do you really hope you will marry?" Elfrida had asked her once; and Janet had answered candidly, "Of course I do, and I want to die a grandmother too." "_Vraiment!_" exclaimed Miss Bell ironically, with a little shudder of disgust, "I hope you may!"

That was in the very beginning of their friends.h.i.+p, however, and so vital a subject could not remain, outside the relations which established themselves more and more intimately between them as the days went on. Janet began to find herself constantly in the presence of a temptation to bring the matter home to Elfrida personally in one way or another, as young women commonly do with other young women who are obstinately unorthodox in these things--to say to her in effect, "Your turn will come when _he_ comes! These pseudo-philosophies will vanish when _he_ looks at them, like snow in spring. You will succ.u.mb--you will succ.u.mb!" But she never did. Something in Elfrida's att.i.tude forbade it. Her opinions were not vagaries, and she held them, so far as they had a personal application, haughtily. Janet felt and disliked the tacit limitation, and preferred to avoid the clash of their opinions when she could. Besides, her own ideas upon the subject had latterly retired irretrievably from the light of discussion. She had one day found it necessary to lock the door of her soul upon them; in the new knowledge that had taken sweet possession of her she recognized that they were no longer theoretical, that they must be put away. She challenged herself to sit in a jury upon Love, and found herself disqualified.

The discovery had no remarkable effect upon Janet. She sometimes wasted an hour, pen in hand, in inconsequent reverie, and worked till midnight to make up; and she took a great liking for impersonal conversations with Miss Halifax about Kendal's pictures, methods and meanings.

She found dining in Royal Geographical circles less of a bore than usual, and deliberately laid herself out to talk well. She looked in the gla.s.s sometimes at a little vertical line that seemed to be coming at the corners of her mouth, and wondered whether at twenty-four one might expect the first indication of approaching old-maidenhood.

When she was paler than usual she reflected that the season was taking a good deal out of her. She was bravely and rigidly commonplace with Kendal, who told her that she ought to drop it and go out of town--she was not looking well. She drew closer to her father, and at the same time armed her secret against him at all points.

Janet would have had any one know rather than he. She felt that it implied almost a breach of faith, of comrades.h.i.+p, to say nothing of the complication of her dignity, which she wanted upheld in his eyes before all others. In reality she made him more the sovereign of her affections and the censor of her relations than nature designed Lawrence Cardiff to be in the parental connection.

It gave him great pleasure that he could make his daughter a friend, and accord her the independence of a friend; it was a satisfaction to him that she was not obtrusively filial. Her feeling for Kendal, under the circ.u.mstances, would have hurt him if he bad known of it, but only through his sympathy and his affection--he was unacquainted with the jealousy of a father. But in Janet's eyes they made their little world together, indispensable to each other as its imaginary hemispheres. She had a quiet pain, in the infrequent moments when she allowed herself the full realization of her love for Kendal, in the knowledge that she, of her own motion, had disturbed its unities and its ascendancies.

Since that evening at Lady Halifax's, when Janet saw John Kendal reddening so unaccountably, she had felt singularly more tolerant of Elfrida's theories. She combated them as vigorously as ever, but she lost her dislike to discussing them. As it became more and more obvious that Kendal found in Elfrida a reward for the considerable amount of time he spent in her society, so Janet arrived at the point of encouraging her heresies, especially with their personal application. She took secret comfort in them; she hoped they would not change, and she was too honest to disguise to herself the reason. If Elfrida cared for him, Janet a.s.sured herself, the case would be entirely different--she would stamp out her own feeling without mercy, to the tiniest spark. She would be glad, in time, to have crushed it for Elfrida, though it did seem that it would be more easily done for a stranger, somebody she wouldn't have to know afterward. But if Elfrida didn't care, as a matter of principle Janet was unable to see the least harm in making her say so as often as possible. They were talking together in Mr.

Cardiff's library late one June afternoon, when it seemed to Janet that the crisis came, that she could never again speak of such matters to Elfrida without betraying herself.

Things were growing dim about the room, the trees stood in dusky groups in the square outside. There was the white glimmer of the tea-things between them, and just light enough to define the shadows round the other girl's face, and write upon it the difference it bore, in Janet's eyes, to every other face.

"Oh!" Elfrida was saying, "it does make life more interesting, I admit--up to a certain point. And I suppose it's to be condoned from the point of view of the species. Whoever started us, and wants us to go on, excuses marriage, I suppose. And of course the men are not affected by it. But for women, it is degrading --horrible. Especially for women like you and me, to whom life may mean something else. Fancy being the author of babies when one could be the author of books! _Don't_ tell me you'd rather!"

"I!" said Janet "Oh, I'm out of it. But I approve the principle."

"Besides, the commonplaceness, the eternal routine, the being tied together, the--the domestic virtues! It must be death, absolute death, to any fineness of nature. No,"

Elfrida went on decisively, "people with anything in them that is worth saving may love as much as they feel disposed, but they ought to keep their freedom. And some of them do nowadays."

"Do you mean," said Janet slowly, "that they dispense with the ceremony?"

"They dispense with the condition. They--they don't go so far."

"I thought you didn't believe in Platonics," Janet answered, with wilful misunderstanding.

"You know I don't believe in them. Any more," Elfrida added lightly, "than I believe in this exaltation you impute to the race of a pa.s.sion it shares with--with the mollusks. It's pure self-flattery."

There was a moment's silence. Elfrida clasped her hands behind her head and turned her face toward the window so that all the light that came through softly gathered in it. Janet felt the girl's beauty as if it were a burden, pressing with literal physical weight upon her heart She made a futile effort to lift it with words. "Frida," she said, "you are beautiful to--to hurt to-night Why has n.o.body ever painted a creature like you?"

It was as if she touched an inner spring of the girl's nature, touched it electrically. Elfrida leaned forward consciously with s.h.i.+ning eyes. "Truly am I, Janetta?

Ah--to-night! Well, yes, perhaps to-night, I am. It is an effect of chiaroscuro. But what about always--what about generally, Janetta? I have such horrid doubts. If it weren't for my nose I should be satisfied--yes, I think I should be satisfied. But I _can't_ deceive myself about my nose, Janetta; it's thick!"

"It isn't a particularly spiritually-minded nose," Janet laughed. "But console yourself, it's thoughtful."

Elfrida put her elbows on her knees and framed her face with the palms of her hands. "If I am beautiful to-night you ought to love me. Do you love me, Janetta? Really _love_ me? Could you imagine," she went on, with a whimsical spoiled shake of her head, "any one else doing it?"

Janet's fingers closed tightly on the arm of her chair.

Was it coming already, then?

"Yes," she said slowly, "I could imagine it well."

"More than one?" Elfrida insisted prettily. "More than two or three? A dozen, perhaps?"

"Quite a dozen," Janet smiled. "Is that to be the limit of your heartless proceedings?"

"I don't know how soon one would grow tired of it. Maybe in three or four years. But for now--it is very amusing."

"Playing with fire?"

"Bah!" Elfrida returned, going back to her other mood.

"I'm not inflammable. But-to that extent, if you like, I value what you and the poets are pleased to call love.

It's part of the game; one might as well play it all.

It's splendid to win--anything. It's a kind of success."

"Oh, I know," she went on after an instant. "I have done it before--I shall do it again, often! It is worth doing--to sit within three feet of a human being who would give all he possesses just to touch your hand--and to tacitly dare him to do it."

"Stop, Elfrida!"

"Shan't stop, my dear. Not only to be able to check any such demonstration yourself, with a movement, a glance, a turn of your head, but without even a sign, to make your would-be adorer check it himself! And to feel as still and calm and superior to it all! Is that nothing to you?"

"It's less than nothing. It's hideous!"

"I consider it a compensation vested in the few for the wrongs of the many," Elfrida replied gaily. "And I mean to store up all the compensation in my proper person that I can."

"I believe you have had more than your share already,"

Janet cried.

"Oh no! a little, only a little. Hardly anything here--people fall in love in England in such a mathematical way. But there is a callow artist on the _Age_, and Golightly Ticke has become quite mad lately, and Solomon --I mean Mr. Rattray--will propose next week--he thinks I won't dare to refuse the sub-editor. How I shall laugh at him! Afterward, if he gives me any trouble, I shall threaten to write up the interview for the _Pictorial News_. On the whole though, I dare say I'd better not suggest such a thing; he would want it for the _Age_.

He is equal to any personal sacrifice for the _Age_."

"Is, that all?" asked Janet, turning away her head.

"You are thinking of John Kendal! Ah, there it becomes exciting. From what you see, Janetta _mia_, what should you _think?_ Myself, I don't quite know. Don't you find him rather--a good deal--interested?"

Janet had an impulse of thankfulness for the growing darkness. "I--I see him so seldom!" she said. Oh, it was the last time, the very last time that she would ever let Elfrida talk like this.

"Well, I think so," Elfrida went on coolly. "He fancies he finds me curious, original, a type--just now. I dare say he thinks he takes an anthropological pleasure in my society! But in the beginning it is all the same thing, my dear, and in the end it will be all the same thing.

This delicious Loti," and she picked up "Aziade"--"what an anthropologist he is--with a feminine bias!"

Janet was tongue-tied. She struggled with herself for an instant, and then, "I _wish_ you'd stay and dine," she said desperately.

"How thoughtless of me!" Elfrida replied, jumping up.

"You ought to be dressing, dear. No, I can't; I've got to sup with some ladies of the Alhambra to-night--it will make such lovely copy. But I'll go now, this very instant."

Half-way downstairs Janet, in a pa.s.sion of helpless tears, heard Elfrida's footsteps pause and turn. She stepped swiftly into her own room and locked the door. The footsteps came tripping back into, the library, and then a tap sounded on Janet's door. Outside Elfrida's voice said plaintively, "I had to come back. Do you love me--are you quite sure you love me?"

"You humbug!" Janet called from within, steadying heir voice with an effort, "I'm not at all sure. I'll tell you to-morrow!"

"But you do!" cried Elfrida, departing. "I know you do."