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

her vague question, so absorbed was he in the beauty and the grace and the interest with which she had suddenly invested the high-backed corner she sat in. He felt no desire to analyze her charm. He did not ask himself whether it was the poetry of her eyes and lips, or her sincerity about herself, or the joy in art that was the key to her soul, or all of these, or something that was none of them. He simply allowed himself to be possessed by it and Elfrida saw his pleasure in his eager look and in every line of his delicate features. It was delicious to be able to give such pleasure, she thought. She felt like a thrice spiritualized Hebe, lifting the cup, not to Jove, but to a very superior mortal. She wished in effect, as she looked at him, that he were of her essence--she might be cup-bearer to him always then. It was a graceful and unexacting occupation. But he was not absolutely, and the question was how long--She started as he seemed to voice her thought.

"This can't go on, Elfrida!"

Cardiff had somehow possessed himself of her hand as it lay along the polished edge of the wooden seat. It was a privilege, she permitted him sometimes, with the tacit understanding that he was not to abuse it.

"And why not--for a little while? It is pleasant, I think."

"If you were in love you would know why. You are not, I know--you needn't say so. But it will come, Elfrida--only give it the chance. I would stake my soul on the certainty of being able to make you love me." His confidence in the power of his own passion was as strong as a boy's of twenty.

"If I were in love!" Elfrida repeated slowly, with an absent smile. "And you think it would come afterward. That is an exploded idea, my friend. I should feel as if I were acting out an old-fashioned novel--an old-fashioned _second-rate_ novel."

She looked at him with eyes that invited him to share their laughter, but the smile he gave her was pitiful, if she could have known it. The strain she had bee putting upon him, and promised indefinitely to put upon him, was growing greater than he could bear.

"I am afraid I most ask you to decide," he said. "You have been telling me two things, dear. One thing with your lips and another thing with your eyes--and ways of doing. You tell me that I, must go, but you make it possible for me to stay. For God's sake let it be one or the other."

"I am so sorry. We could be friends of a sort, I think, but I can't marry you."

"You have never told me why."

"Shall I tell you truly, literally--brutally?"

"Of course!"

"Then it is not only because I don't love you--that there is not for me the common temptation to enter a form of bondage which, as I see it, is hateful. That is enough, but it is not all; it is not even the principal thing. It is"--she hesitated--"it is that--that we are different, you and I. It would-be preposterous," she went on hastily, "not to admit that you are infinitely superior--of course--and cleverer and wiser and more important in the world. And that will make me absurd in your eyes when I tell you that my whole life is wrapped up in a sense which I cannot see or feel that you have at all. You have much--oh, a great deal--outside of it, and I have nothing. My life is swayed in obedience to laws that you do not even know of. You can hardly be my friend, completely. As your wife I should suffer and you would suffer, in a false position which could never be altered."

She paused and looked at him seriously, and he felt that she believed what she had said. She had, at all events, given him full permission to go. And he was as far from being able to avail of himself of it as he had been before--further, for every moment those slender fingers rested in his made it more impossible to relinquish them, for always. So, he persisted, with a bitter sense of failure that would not wholly, honestly recognize itself.

"Is Golightly Ticke your friend--completely?"

"More--pardon me--than you could ever be," she answered him, undaunted by the contempt in his tone.

There was silence for a moment between them. Elfrida's wide-eyed gaze wandered appreciatively over the dusky interior, which for the man beside her barely existed.

"What a lot of English character there is here," she said softly. "How dignified it is, and conscientious, and restrained!"

It was as if she had not spoken. Cardiff stared with knit brows into the insoluble problem she had presented to him a moment longer. "_How_ are we so different, Elfrida?" he broke out passionately. "You are a woman and I am a man; the world has dealt with us, educated us, differently, and I am older than I dare say I ought to be to hope for your love. But these are not differences that count, whatever their results may be. It seems to me trivial to speak of such things in this connection, but we like very much the same books, the same people. I grant you I don't know anything about pictures; but surely," he pleaded, "these are not the things that cut a man off from the happiness of a lifetime!"

"I'm afraid--" she began, and then she broke off suddenly. "I _am_ sorry--sorrier than I have ever been before, I think. I should have liked so well to keep your friendship; it is the most chivalrous I know. But if you feel like--like this about it I suppose I must not. Shall we say good-by here and now? Truly I am sorry."

She had risen, and he could find no words to stay her. It seemed that the battle to possess her was over, and that he, had lost. Her desire for his friendship had all the mockery of freedom in it to him--in the agony of the moment it insulted him. With an effort he controlled himself--there should be no more of the futility of words. He must see the last of her some time--let it be now, then. He bent his head over the slender hand he held, brought his lips to it, and then, with sudden passion, kissed it hotly again and again, seeking the warm, uncovered little spot above the fastening. Elfrida snatched it away with a little shiver at the contact, a little angry shiver of surprised nerves. He looked at her piteously, struggling for a word, for any word to send away her repulsion, to bring her back to the mood of the moment before. But he could not find it; he seemed to have drifted hopelessly from her, to have lost all his reckonings.

"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 compassionate, 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 Devonshire 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 disassociated 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 gratitude 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 anticipations. 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-fashioned 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 association brought him a reminiscence that sent him smiling to the nearest