The Farringdons Part 33

Cecil Farquhar bent his six-foot-one down to her five-foot-five. "Are you angry with me?" he whispered.

"I don't know; I think I am."

"But you will let me come and see you, so that you may forgive me, won't you?"

"You don't deserve it."

"Of course I don't; I shouldn't want it if I did. The things we deserve are as unpleasant as our doctor's prescriptions. Please let me come--because we knew each other all those centuries ago, and I haven't forgotten you."

"Very well, then. You'll find my address in the Red Book, and I'm always at home on Sunday afternoons."

As Elisabeth was whirled away into a vortex of gay and well-dressed people, Farquhar watched her for a moment. "She is an attractive woman,"

he said to himself, "though she is not as good-looking as I expected.

But there's charm about her, and breeding; and they say she has an enormous fortune. She is certainly worth cultivating."

Farquhar cultivated the distinguished Miss Farringdon a.s.siduously, and the friends.h.i.+p between them grew apace. Each had a certain attraction for the other; and, in addition, they enjoyed that wonderful freemasonry which exists among all followers of the same craft, and welds these together in a bond almost as strong as the bond of relations.h.i.+p. The artist in Farquhar was of far finer fibre than the man, as is sometimes the case with complex natures; so that one side of him gave expression to thoughts which the other side of him was incapable of comprehending.

He did not consciously pretend that he was better than he was, and he really believed the truths which he preached; but when the G.o.ds serve their nectar in earthen vessels, the vessels are apt to get more credit than they deserve, and the G.o.ds less.

To Elisabeth, Cecil was extremely interesting; and she understood--better than most women would have done--the difference between himself and his art, and how the one must not be measured by the other. The artist attracted her greatly; she had so much sympathy with his ways of looking at life and of interpreting truth; as for the man, she had as yet come to no definite conclusion in her mind concerning him; it was not easy for mankind to fascinate Elisabeth Farringdon.

"I have come to see my mother-confessor," he said to her one Sunday afternoon, when he dropped in to find her alone, Grace Cobham having gone out to tea. "I have been behaving horribly all the week, and I want you to absolve me and help me to be better and nicer."

Elisabeth was the last woman to despise flattery of this sort; an appeal for help of any kind never found her indifferent.

"What have you been doing?" she asked gently.

"It isn't so much what I have been doing as what I have been feeling. I found myself actually liking Lady Silverhampton, simply because she is a countess; and I was positively rude to a man I know, called Edgar Ford, because he lives at the East End and dresses badly. What a falling-off since the days when you and I wors.h.i.+pped the G.o.ds together at Philae, and before money and rank and railways and bicycles came into fas.h.i.+on!

Help me to be as I was then, dear friend."

"How can I?"

"By simply being yourself and letting me watch you. I always feel good and ideal and unworldly when I am near you. Don't you know how dreadful it is to wish to do one thing and to want to do another, and to be torn asunder between the two?"

Elisabeth shook her head. "No; I have never felt like that. I can understand wanting to do different things at different times of one's life, but I can not comprehend how one person can want to do two opposing things at the same time."

"Oh! I can. I can imagine doing a thing, and despising one's self at the time for doing it, and yet not being able to help doing it."

"I have heard other people say that, and I can't understand it."

"Yet you are so complex; I should have thought you would," said Farquhar.

"Yes, I am complex; but not at the same moment. I have two distinct natures, but the two are never on the stage at once. I don't in the least know what St. Paul meant when he said that the evil he would not that he did. I can quite understand doing the evil on Tuesday morning that I would not on Monday afternoon; but I could never do anything and disapprove of it at the same minute."

"That is because you are so good--and so cold."

"Am I?"

"Yes, dear Miss Farringdon; and so amiable. You never do things in a temper."

"But I do; I really have got a temper of my own, though nowadays people seem to find difficulty in believing it. I have frequently done things in a temper before now; but as long as the temper lasts I am pleased that I have done them, and feel that I do well to be angry. When the temper is over, I sometimes think differently; but not till then. As I have told you before, my will is so strong that it and I are never at loggerheads with each other; it always rules me completely."

Farquhar sighed. "I wish I were as strong as you are; but I am not. And do you mean to tell me that there is no worldly side to you, either; no side that hankers after fleshpots, even while the artist within you is being fed with manna from heaven?"

"No; I don't think there is," Elisabeth replied slowly. "I really do not like people any the better for having money and t.i.tles and things like that, and it is no use pretending that I do."

"I do. I wish I didn't, but I can't help it. It is only you who can help me to look at life from the ideal point of view--you whose feet are still wet with the dew of Olympus, and in whom the Greek spirit is as fresh as it was three thousand years ago."

"Oh! I'm not as perfect as all that; far from it! I don't despise people for not having rank or wealth, since rank and wealth don't happen to be the things that interest me. But there are things that do interest me--genius and wit and culture and charm, for instance--and I am quite as hard on the people who lack these gifts, as ever you are on the impecunious n.o.bodies. I confess I am often ashamed of myself when I realize how frightfully I look down upon stupid men and dull women, and how utterly indifferent I am as to what becomes of them. So I really am as great a sn.o.b as you are, though I wear my sn.o.bbery--like my rue--with a difference."

"Not a sn.o.b, dear lady--never a sn.o.b! There never existed a woman with less sn.o.bbery in her composition than you have. That you are impatient of the dull and unattractive, I admit; but so you ought to be--your own wit and charm give you the right to despise them."

"But they don't; that's where you make a mistake. It is as unjust to look down on a man for not making a joke as for not making a fortune.

Though it isn't so much the people who don't make jokes that irritate me, as the people who make poor ones. Don't you know the sort?--would-be wits who quote a remark out of a bound Punch, and think they have been brilliant; and who tell an anecdote crusted with antiquity, which men learned at their mother's knees, and say that it actually happened to a friend of theirs the week before last."

"Oh! they are indeed terrible," agreed Cecil; "they dabble in inverted commas as Italians dabble in garlic."

"I never know whether to laugh at their laboured jokes or not. Of course, it is pretty manners to do so, be the wit never so stale; but on the other hand it encourages them in their evil habits, and seems to me as doubtful a form of hospitality as offering a brandy-and-soda to a confirmed drunkard."

"Dear friend, let us never try to be funny!"

"Amen! And, above all things, let us flee from humorous recitations,"

added Elisabeth. "There are few things in the world more heart-rending than a humorous recitation--with action. As for me, it unmans me completely, and I quietly weep in a remote corner of the room until the carriage comes to take me home. Therefore, I avoid such; as no woman's eyelashes will stand a long course of humorous recitation without being the worse for wear."

"It seems to me after all," Cecil remarked, "that the evil that you would not, that you do, like St. Paul and myself and sundry others, if you despise stupid people, and know that you oughtn't to despise them, at the same time."

"I know I oughtn't to despise them, but I never said I didn't want to despise them--that's just the difference. As a matter of fact, I enjoy despising them; that is where I am really so horrid. I hide it from them, because I hate hurting people's feelings; and I say 'How very interesting!' out of sheer good manners when they talk to me respectively about their cooks if they are women, and their digestions if they are men; but all the time I am inwardly lifting up my eyes, and patting myself on the back, and thanking heaven that I am not as they are, and generally out-Phariseeing the veriest Pharisee that ever breathed."

"It is wonderful how the word 'cook' will wake into animation the most phlegmatic of women!"

"If they are married," added Elisabeth; "not unless. I often think when I go up into the drawing-room at a dinner-party, I will just say the word 'cook' to find out which of the women are married and which single.

I'm certain I should know at once, from the expression the magic word brought to their respective faces. It is only when you have a husband that you regard the cook as the ruling power in life for good or evil."

There was a pause while the footman brought in tea and Elisabeth poured it out; then Farquhar said suddenly--

"I feel a different man from the one that rang at your door-bell some twenty minutes ago. The worldliness has slipped from me like a cast-off sh.e.l.l; now I experience a democratic indifference to my Lady Silverhampton, and a brotherly affection for Mr. Edgar Ford. And this is all your doing!"

"I don't see how that can be," laughed Elisabeth; "seeing that Lady Silverhampton is a friend of mine, and I have never heard of Mr. Edgar Ford."

"But it is; it is your own unconscious influence upon me. Miss Farringdon, you don't know what you have been and what you are to me! It is only since I knew you that I have realized how little all outer things really matter, and how much inner ones do; and how it is a question of no moment who a man is, compared with what a man is. And you will go on teaching me, won't you, and letting me sit at your feet, until the man in me is always what now the artist in me is sometimes?"

"I shall like to help you if I can; I am always longing to help people, and yet so few people ever seem to want my help." And Elisabeth's eyes grew sad.

"I want it--more than I want anything in the world," replied Cecil; and he really meant it, for the artist in him was uppermost just then.

"Then you shall have it."

"Thank you--thank you more than I can ever say."