A Daughter of To-Day Part 24

"Well?" she said. She was held there partly by her sense of pity and partly by her desire to see the last, the very last of it.

"Go!" he returned, with a shrinking of pain at the word, "I cannot."

"_Pauvre ami!_" she said softly, and then she turned, and her light steps sounded back to him through the length of the hall.

She walked more slowly when she reached the pavement outside, and one who met her might have thought she indulged in a fairly pleasant reverie. A little smile curved about the corners of her mouth, half compa.s.sionate, half amused and triumphant. She had barely time to banish it when she heard Cardiff's step beside her, and his voice.

"I had to come after you," he said; "I've let you carry off my stick."

She looked at him in mischievous challenge of his subterfuge, and he added frankly, with a voice that shook a little notwithstanding--

"It's of no use--I find I must accept your compromise.

It is very good of you to be willing to make one. And I can't let you go altogether, Elfrida."

She gave him a happy smile. "And now," she said, "shall we talk of something else?"

CHAPTER XXIX.

March brought John Kendal back to town with a few Devons.h.i.+re studies and a kindling discontent with the three subjects he had in hand for the May exhibitions. It spread over everything he had done for the last six months when he found himself alone with his canvases and whole-hearted toward them. He recognized that he had been dividing his interest, that his ambition had suffered, that his hand did not leap as it had before at the suggestion of some lyric or dramatic possibility of color. He even fancied that his drawing, which was his vulnerable point, had worsened. He worked strenuously for days without satisfying himself that he had recovered ground appreciably, and then came desperately to the conclusion that he wanted the stimulus of a new idea, a subject altogether disa.s.sociated with anything he had done. It was only, he felt, when his spirit was wholly in bondage to the charm of his work that he could do it well, and he needed to be bound afresh. Literally, he told himself, the only thing he had painted in months that pleased him was that mere sketch, from memory, of the Halifax drawing-room episode. He dragged it out and looked at it, under its damaging red stripes, with enthusiasm. Whatever she did with herself, he thought, Elfrida Bell was curiously satisfying from an artistic point of view. He fell into a train of meditation, which quickened presently into a practical idea that set him striding up and down the room.

"I believe she would be delighted!" he said aloud, coming to a sudden standstill; "and, by Jove, it would be a kind of reparation!"

He delved into an abysmal cupboard for a crusted pen and a cobwebby bottle of ink, and was presently sitting among the fragments of three notes addressed, one after the other, to "Dear Miss Bell." In the end he wrote a single line without any formality whatever, and when Elfrida opened it an hour later she read:

"Will you let me paint your portrait for the Academy?

"JOHN-KENDAL.

"P.S.--Or any other exhibition you may prefer."

The last line was a stroke of policy. "She abhors Burlington House," he had reflected.

The answer came next day, and he tore it open with rapid fingers. "I can't think why--but if you wish it, yes.

But why not for the Academy, since you are disposed to do me that honor?"

"Characteristic," thought Kendal grimly, as he tore up the note. "She can't think why. But I'm glad the Academy doesn't stick in her pretty throat--I was afraid it would. It's the potent influence of the Private View."

He wrote immediately in joyful grat.i.tude to make an appointment for the next day, went to work vigorously about his preparations, and when he had finished smoked a series of pipes to calm the turbulence of his antic.i.p.ations. As a neighboring clock struck five he put on his coat. Janet must know about this new idea of his; he longed to tell her, to talk about it over the old-fas.h.i.+oned Spode cup of tea she would give him--Janet was a connoisseur in tea. He realized as he went downstairs how much of the pleasure of his life was centering in these occasional afternoon gossips with her, in the mingled delight of her interest and the fragrance and the comfort of that half-hour over the Spode tea-cup.

The a.s.sociation brought him a reminiscence that sent him smiling to the nearest confectioner's shop, where he ordered a supply of Italian cakes against the next day that would make an ample provision for the advent of half a dozen unexpected visitors to the studio. He would have to do his best with afternoon sittings, Elfrida was not available in the morning; and he thought compa.s.sionately that his sitter must not be starved. "I will feed her first," he thought ironically, remembering her keen childish enjoyment of sugared things. "She will pose all the better for some tea." And he walked on to Kensington Square.

CHAPTER x.x.x.

"Janet," said Lawrence Cardiff a week later at breakfast, "the Halifaxes have decided upon their American tour. I saw Lady Halifax last night and she tells me they sail on the twenty-first. They want you to go with them. Do you feel disposed to do it?"

Mr. Cardiff looked at his daughter with eyes from which the hardness that entered them weeks before in the Temple Courts had never quite disappeared. His face was worn and thin, its delicacy had sharpened, and he carried about with him an habitual abstraction. Janet, regarding him day after day in the light of her secret knowledge, gave herself up to an inward storm of anger and grief and anxiety. Elfrida's name had been tacitly dropped between them, but to Janet's sensitiveness she was constantly and painfully to be reckoned with in their common life. Lawrence Cardiff's moods were accountable to his daughter obviously by Elfrida's influence. She noted bitterly that his old evenness of temper, the gay placidity that made so delightful a basis for their joint happiness, had absolutely disappeared. Instead, she found her father either irritable or despondent, or inspired by a gaiety which she had no hand in producing, and which took no account of her. That was the real pain. Janet was keenly distressed at the little drama of suffering that unfolded itself daily before her, but her disapproval of its cause very much blunted her sense of its seriousness.

She had, besides, a grown-up daughter's repulsion and impatience for a parental love-affair, and it is doubtful whether she would have brought her father's to a happy conclusion without a very severe struggle if she had possessed the power to do it. But this exclusion gave her a keener pang; she had shared so much with him before, had been so important to him always. And now he could propose, with perfect equanimity that she should go to America with the Halifaxes.

"But you could not get away by the twenty-first," she returned, trying to take it for granted that the idea included him.

"Oh, I don't propose going," Mr. Cardiff returned from behind his newspaper.

"But, daddy, they intend to be away for a year."

"About that. Lady Halifax has arranged a capital itinerary.

They mean to come back by India."

"And pray what would become of you all by yourself for a year, sir?" asked Janet brightly. "Besides, we were always going to do that trip together." She had a stubborn inward determination not to recognize this difference that had sprung up between them. It was only a phase, she told herself, of her father's miserable feeling just now; it would last another week, another fortnight, and then things would be as they had been before. She would not let herself believe in it, hurt as it might.

Mr. Cardiff lowered his paper. "Don't think of that," he said over the top of it. "There is really no occasion.

I shall get on very well. There is always the club, you know. And this is an opportunity you ought not to miss."

Janet said nothing, and Lawrence Cardiff went back to his newspaper. She tried to go on with her breakfast, but scalding tears stood in her eyes, and she could not swallow. She was unable to command herself far enough to ask to be excused, and she rose abruptly and left the room with her face turned carefully away.

Cardiff followed her with his eyes and gave an uncomprehending shrug. He looked at his watch; there was still half an hour before he need leave the house. It brought him an uncomfortable thought that he might go and comfort Janet--it was evident that something he had said had hurt her--she was growing absurdly hypersensitive.

He dismissed the idea--Heaven only knew into what complications it might lead them. He spent the time instead in a restless walk up and down the room, revolving whether Elfrida Bell would or would not be brought to reconsider her refusal to let him take her to "Faust"

that night--he never could depend upon her.

Janet had not seen John Kendal since the afternoon he came to her radiant with his intention of putting all of Elfrida's elusive charm upon canvas, full of its intrinsic difficulties, eager for her sympathy, depending on her enthusiastic interest. She had disappointed him--she did her best, but the sympathy and enthusiasm and interest would not come. She could not tell him why--her broken friends.h.i.+p was still sacred to her for what it had been.

Besides, explanations were impossible. So she listened and approved with a strained smile, and led him, with a persistence he did not understand, to talk of other things. He went away chilled and baffled, and he had not come again. She knew that he was painting with every nerve tense and eager, in oblivion to all but his work and the face that inspired it. Elfrida, he told her, was to give him three sittings a week, of an hour each, and he complained of the scantiness of the dole. She could conjure up those hours, all too short for his delight in his model and his work. Surely it would not be long now!

Elfrida cared, by her own confession--Janet felt, dully, there could now be no doubt of that--and since Elfrida cared, what could be more certain than the natural issue?

She fought with herself to accept it; she spent hours in seeking for the indifference that might come of accustoming herself to the fact. And when she thought of her father she hoped that it might be soon.

There came a day when Lawrence Cardiff gave, his daughter the happiness of being almost his other self again. He had come downstairs with a headache and a touch of fever, and all day long he let her take care of him submissively, with the old pleasant grat.i.tude that seemed to re-establish their comrades.h.i.+p. She had a joyful secret wonder at the change, it was so sadden and so complete; but their sympathetic relation rea.s.serted itself naturally and at once, and she would not let herself question it. In the evening he sent her to her room for a book of his, and when she brought it to him where he lay upon the lounge in the library he detained her a moment.

"You mustn't attempt to read without a lamp now, daddy,"

she said, touching his forehead lightly with her lips.

"You will damage your poor old eyes."

"Don't be impertinent about my poor old eyes, miss," he returned, smiling. "Janet, there is something I think you ought to know."

"Yes, daddy." The girl felt herself turning rigid.

"I want you to make friends with Elfrida again. I have every reason to believe--at all events some reason to believe--that she will become my wife." Her knowing already made it simpler to say.

"Has--has she promised, daddy?"

"Not exactly. But I think she will, Janet." His tone was very confident. "And of course you must forgive each other any little heart-burnings there may have been between you."

Any little heart-burnings! Janet had a quivering moment of indecision. "Oh, daddy! she won't! she won't!" she cried tumultuously, and hurried out of the room. Cardiff lay still, smiling pityingly. What odd ideas women managed to get into their heads about one another! Janet thought Elfrida would refuse her overtures if she made them.

How little she knew Elfrida--his just, candid, generous Elfrida!

Janet flung herself upon her bed and faced the situation, dry-eyed, with burning cheeks. She could always face a situation when it admitted the possibility of anything being done, when there was a chance for resolution and action. Practical difficulties nerved her; it was only before the blankness of a problem of pure abstractness that she quailed--such a problem as the complication of her relation to John Kendal and to Elfrida Bell. She had shrunk from that for months, had put it away habitually in the furthest corner of her consciousness, and had done her best to make it stay there. She discovered how sore its fret had been only with the relief she felt when she simplified it at a stroke that afternoon on which everything came to an end between her and Elfrida. Since the burden of obligation their relation imposed had been removed Janet had a.n.a.lyzed her friends.h.i.+p, and had found it wanting in many ways to which she had been wilfully blind before. The criticism she had always silenced came forward and spoke boldly; and she recognized the impossibility of a whole-hearted intimacy where a need for enforced dumbness existed. All the girl's charm she acknowledged with a heart wrung by the thought that it was no longer for her. She dwelt separately and long upon Elfrida's keen sense of justice, her impulsive generosity, her refined consideration for other people, the delicacy of some of her personal instincts, her absolute sincerity toward herself and the world, her pa.s.sionate exaltation of what was to her the ideal in art. Janet exacted from herself the last jot of justice toward Elfrida in all these things; and then she listened, as she had not done before, to the voice that spoke to her from the very depths of her being, it seemed, and said, "Nevertheless, _no!_" She only half comprehended, and the words brought her a sadness that would be long, she knew, in leaving her; but she listened and agreed.