A Daughter of To-Day by Sara Jeannette Duncan (best affordable ebook reader .TXT) 📖

home-returning satisfaction in her solidity and her ugliness and her low-toned fogs and her great throbbing unostentatious importance, which the more flippant capital seemed to have intensified in him. He ordered the most British luncheon he could think of, and reflected upon the superiority of the beer. He read the leaders in the _Standard_ through to the bitter end, and congratulated himself and the newspaper that there was no rag of an absurd _feuilleton_ to distract his attention from the importance of the news of the day. He remembered all sorts of acquaintances that Paris had foamed over for months; his heart warmed to a certain whimsical old couple who lived in Park Street and went out to walk every morning after breakfast with their poodle. He felt disposed to make a formal call upon them and inquire after the poodle. It was--perhaps with an unconscious desire to make rather more of the idyl of his homecoming that he went to see the Cardiffs instead, who were his very old friends, and lived in Kensington Square.

As he turned out of Kensington High Street into a shoppy little thoroughfare, and through it to this quiet, neglected high-nosed old locality, he realized with an added satisfaction that he had come back to Thackeray's London. One was apt, he reflected, with a charity which he would not have allowed himself always, to undervalue Thackeray in these days. After all, he once expressed London so well that now London expressed him, and that was something.

Kendal found the Cardiffs--there were only two, Janet and her father--at tea, and the Halifaxes there, four people he could always count on to be glad to see him. It was written candidly in Janet's face--she was a natural creature--as she asked him how he dared to be so unexpected. Lady Halifax cried out robustly from the sofa to know how many pictures he had brought back; and Miss Halifax, full of the timid enthusiasm of the well-brought-up elderly English girl, gave him a sallow but agreeable regard from under her ineffective black lace hat, and said what a surprise it was. When they had all finished, Lawrence Cardiff took his elbow off the mantelpiece, changed his cup into his other hand to shake hands, and said, with his quiet, clean-shaven smile, "So you're back!"

"Daddy has been hoping you would be here soon," said Miss Cardiff. "He wants the support of your presence. He's been daring to enumerate 'Our Minor Artists' in the _Brown Quarterly_, and his position is perfectly terrible. Already he's had forty-one letters from friends, relatives, and picture-dealers suggesting names he has 'doubtless forgotten.' Poor daddy says he never knew them."

"Has he mentioned me?" asked Kendal, sitting down squarely with his cup of tea.

"He has not."

"Then it's in the character of the uncomplaining left-over that I'm wanted, the modest person who waits until he's better. I refuse to act. I'll go over to the howling majority."

"_You_ will never be a minor artist, Mr. Kendal," ventured Miss Halifax.

"Certainly not. You will rise to greatness at a bound," said Lady Halifax, with substantial conviction and an illustrative wave of a fat well-gloved hand with a doubled-up fragment of bread and butter between the thumb and forefinger, "or we shall be much disappointed in you."

"It's rapidly becoming a delicate compliment to have been left out," Mr. Cardiff remarked, with melancholy.

"Some of those you've honored with your recognition are the maddest of all, aren't they, daddy, as we say in America! Dear old thing, you _are_ in a perilous case, and who is to take you round at the Private Views this year--that's the question of the hour! You needn't depend upon me. There won't be a soul on the line that you haven't either put in or left out!"

"It was a fearful thing to write about," Kendal responded comfortably. "He deserves all the consequences. Let him go round alone." Under the surface of his thoughts was a pleased recognition of how little a fresh-colored English girl changes in three years. Looking at Miss Halifax's hat, it occurred to him that it was an agreeable thing not to be eternally "struck" by the apparel of women--so forcibly that he almost said it. "What have you been doing?" he asked Janet.

"Wonders," Lady Halifax responded for her. "I can't think where she gets the energy or the brains--"

"Can't you?" her father interrupted. "Upon my word!" Mr. Cardiff had the serious facial muscles of a comedian, and the rigid discipline he was compelled to give them as a professor of Oriental tongues of London University intensified their effect when it was absurd. The rest laughed, and his cousin went on to say that she wished _she_ had the gift. Her daughter echoed her, looking at Janet in a way that meant she would say it, whatever the consequences might be.

"I must see something," said Kendal, "immediately."

"_See_ something!" exclaimed Lady Halifax. "Well, look in the last number of the _London Magazine_. But you'll please show something first."

"Yes, indeed!" Miss Halifax echoed.

"When will you be ready for inspection?" Mr. Cardiff asked.

"Come on Thursday, all of you. I'll show you what there is."

"Will you give us our tea?" Miss Halifax inquired, with a nervous smile.

"Of course. And there will be buns. You will do me the invaluable service of representing the opinion of the British public in advance. Will Thursday suit?"

"Perfectly," Lady Halifax replied. "The old rooms in Bryanston Street, I suppose?"

"Thursday won't suit us," Janet put in decisively. "No, papa; I've got people coming here to tea. Besides, Lady Halifax is quite equal to representing the whole British public by herself, aren't you, dear?" That excellent woman nodded with a pretence of loftily consenting, and her daughter gave Janet rather a suspicious glance. "Daddy and I will come another day," Janet went on in reassuring tones; "but we shall expect buns too, remember."

Then they talked of the crocuses in Kensington Gardens; and of young Skeene's new play at the Princess's--they all knew young Skeene, and wished him well; and of Framley's forthcoming novel--Framley, who had made his noble reputation by portrait-painting--good old Framley --how would it go?

"He knows character," Kendal said.

"That's nothing now," retorted Lawrence Cardiff. "Does he know where it comes from and where it's going to? And can he choose? And has he the touch? And hasn't he been too long a Royal Academician and a member of the Church of England, and a believer in himself? Oh no! Framley hasn't anything to tell this generation that he couldn't say best on canvas."

"Well," said Lady Halifax disconcertingly, "I suppose the carriage is at the door, Lawrence, but you might just send to inquire. The horses stand so badly, I told Peters he might take them round and round the square."

Cardiff looked at her with amused reproach, and rang the bell; and Janet begged somebody or anybody to have another cup of tea. The Halifaxes always tried Janet.

They went at last, entreating Cardiff, to his annoyance, not to come down the narrow winding stair with them to their carriage. To him no amount of familiar coming and going could excuse the most trivial of such negligences. He very often put Janet into her cab, always if it rained.

The moment they left the room a new atmosphere created itself there for the two that remained. They sought each other's eyes with the pleasantest sense of being together in reality for the first time, and though Janet marked it by nothing more significant than a suggestion that Kendal should poke the fire, there was an appreciable admission in her tone that they were alone and free to talk, which he recognized with great good-will. He poked the fire, and she on her low chair, clasping her knee with both hands, looked almost pretty in the blaze. There had always been between them a distinct understanding, the understanding of good-fellowship and ideas of work, and Kendal saw with pleasure that it was going to be renewed.

"I am dying to tell you about it," he said.

"Paris?" she asked, looking up at him. "I am dying to hear. The people, especially the people. Lucien, what was he like? One hears so much of Lucien--they make him a priest and a king together. And did you go to Barbizon?"

Another in her place might have added, "And why did you write so seldom?" There was something that closed Janet's lips to this. It was the same thing that would not permit her to call Kendal "Jack," as several other people did, though her Christian name had been allowed to him for a long time. It made an awkwardness sometimes, for she would not say "Mr. Kendal" either--that would be a rebuke or a suggestion of inferiority, or what not--but she bridged it over as best she could with a jocose appellative like "signor," "monsieur," or "Mr. John Kendal," in full. "Jack" was impossible, "John" was worse. Yes, with a little nervous shudder, _much_ worse.

He told her about Paris to her fascination; she had never seen it: about the boulevards and the cafes and the men's ateliers, and the vagrant pathos of student life there--he had seen some clean bits of it--and to all of this old story he gave such life as a word or a phrase can give. Even his repressions were full of meaning, and the best--she felt it was the best--he had to offer her he offered in fewest words, letting her imagination riot with them. He described Lucien and the American Colony. He made her laugh abundantly over the American amateur as Lucien managed him. They had no end of fun over these interesting, ingenious, and prodigal people in their relation to Parisian professional circles. He touched on Nadie Palicsky lightly, and perhaps it was because Janet insisted upon an accentuation of the lines--he had sent her a photograph of one of Nadie's best things--that he refrained from mentioning Elfrida altogether. Elfrida, he thought, he would keep till another time. She would need so much explanation; she was too interesting to lug in now, it was getting late. Besides, Elfrida was an exhausting subject, and he was rather done.


CHAPTER XI.

Individually a large number of Royal Academicians pronounced John Kendal's work impertinent, if not insulting, meaningless, affected, or flippant. Collectively, with a corporate opinion that might be discussed but could not be identified, they received it and hung it, smothering a distressful doubt, where it would be least likely to excite either the censure of the right-minded or the admiration of the unorthodox. The Grosvenor gave him a discreet appreciation, and the New received him with joy and thanksgiving. If he had gone to any of the Private Views, which temptation he firmly resisted, he would have heard the British public --for after all the British public is always well represented at a Private View--say discontentedly how much better it would like his pictures if they were only a little more finished. He might even have had the cruel luck to hear one patron of the arts, who began by designing the pictorial advertisements for his own furniture-polish, state that he would buy that twilight effect with the empty fields, if only the trees in the foreground weren't so blurred. Other things, too, he might have heard that would have amused him more as being less commonplace, but pleased him no better, said by people who cast furtive glances over their shoulders to see if anybody that might be the artist was within reach of their discriminating admiration; and here and there, if he had listened well, a