A Daughter of To-Day Part 9

"Then you _have_ been in London?" he probed, while she looked wistfully at the fringe of a wood in Brittany that stood upon his canvas. Her eyes left the picture and wandered around the room.

"I!" she said again. "In London? Yes, I have been in London. How _splendidly_ different you are!" she said, looking straight at him as if she stated a falling of the thermometer or a quotation from the Stock Exchange.

"But are you sure, _perfectly_ sure," she went on, with dainty emphasis, "that you can stay different? Aren't you the least bit afraid that in the end your work may become--pardon me--commercial, like the rest? Is there no danger?"

"I wish you would sit down," Kendal said ruefully. "I shouldn't feel it so much, perhaps, if you sat down. And pending my acknowledgment of a Londoner's sin in painting in London, it seems to me that you have put yourself under pretty much the same condemnation."

"I have not come to paint," Elfrida answered quickly. "I have put away the insanity of thinking I ever could. I told you that, I think, in a letter. But there are--other things. You may remember that you thought there were."

She spoke with so much repressed feeling that Kendal reproached himself with not having thought carefully enough about it to take her at her letter's word. He took up the card that announced her, and looked again at the lower left-hand corner. "I do remember, but I don't understand. Is this one of them?" he asked.

Something, something absolutely unintentional and of the slightest quality, in his voice operated to lower her estimate of the announcement on the card, and she flushed a little.

"It's--it's a way," she said. "But it was stupid --bourgeois--of me to send up a card--such a card. With most of these people it is necessary; with you, of course, it was hideous! Give it to me, please," and she proceeded to tear it slowly into little bits. "You must pardon me," she went on, "but I thought, you know--we are not in Paris now--and there might be people here. And then, after all, it explains me."

"Then I should like another," Kendal interrupted.

"I'm going to do a descriptive article for the _Age_; the editor wants to call it 'Through the Studios,' or something of that sort--about the artists over here and their ways of working, and their places, and their ideas, and all that, and I thought, if you didn't mind, I should like to begin with you. Though it's rather like taking an advantage."

"But are you going in for this sort of thing seriously?

Have you ever done anything of the sort before? Isn't it an uncommon grind?" Kendal asked, with hearty interest.

"What made you think of it? Of course you may say any mortal thing you want to about me--though I call it treachery, your going over to the critics. And I'm afraid you won't find anything very picturesque here. As you say, we're not in Paris."

"Oh yes, I shall," she replied sweetly, ignoring his questions. "I like pipes and cobwebs and old coats hanging on a nail, and plenty of litter and dust and confusion.

It's much better for work than tapestries and old armour and wood-carvings."

Miss Bell did not open her little black notebook to record these things, however. Instead, she picked up a number of the _London Magazine_ and looked at the t.i.tle of an article pencil-marked on the pale green cover. It was Janet Cardiff's article, and Lady Halifax had marked it.

Elfrida had read it before. It was a fanciful recreation of the conditions of verse-making when Herrick wrote, very pleasurably ironical in its bearing upon more modern poetry-making. It had quite deserved the praise she gave it in the corner which the _Age_ reserved for magazines.

"I want you to understand," she said slowly, "that it is only a way. I shall not be content to stick at this--ordinary--kind of journalistic work. I shall aim at something better--something perhaps even as good as that," she held up the marked article. "I wonder if she realizes how fortunate she is--to appear between the same covers as Swinburne!"

"It is not fortune altogether," Kendal answered; "she works hard."

"Do you know her? Do you see her often? Will you tell her that there is somebody who takes a special delight in every word she writes?" asked Elfrida impulsively.

"But no, of course not! Why should she care--she must hear such things so often. Tell me, though, what is she like, and particularly how old is she?"

Kendal had begun to paint again; it was a compliment he was able to pay only to a very few people. "I shall certainly repeat it to her," he said. "She can't hear such things often enough--n.o.body can. How shall I tell you what she is like! She is tall, about as tall as you are, and rather thin. She has a good color, and nice hair and eyes."

"What colored eyes?"

"Brown, I think. No--I don't know, but not blue. And good eyebrows. Particularly good eyebrows."

"She must be plain," Elfrida thought, "if he has to dwell upon her eyebrows. And how old?" she asked again. "Much over thirty?"

"Oh dear, no! Not thirty. Twenty-four, I should say."

Elfrida's face fell perceptibly. "Twenty-four!" she exclaimed. "And I am already twenty! I shall never catch up to her in four years. Oh, you have made me so unhappy!

I thought she must be _quite_ old--forty perhaps. I was prepared to venerate her. But twenty-four and good eyebrows! It is too much."

Kendal laughed. "Oh, I say!" he exclaimed, jumping up and bringing a journal from the other side of the room, "if you're going in for art criticism, here's something!

Do you see the _Decade?_ The _Decade's_ article on the pictures in last week's number fairly brought me back to town." He held his brush between his teeth and found the place for her. "There! I don't know who did it, and it was the first thing Miss Cardiff asked me when I put in my appearance there yesterday, so she doesn't either, though she writes a good deal for the _Decade_."

Kendal had gone back to work, and did not see that Elfrida was making an effort of self-control, with a curious exaltation in her eyes. "I--I have seen this," she said presently.

"Capital, isn't it!"

"Miss Cardiff asked you who wrote it?" she repeated hungrily.

"Yes; she commissioned me to find out, and if he was respectable to bring him there. Her father said I was to bring him anyway. So I don't propose to find out. The Cardiffs have burned their fingers once or twice already handling obscure genius, and I won't take the responsibility. But it's adorably savage, isn't it?"

"Do you really like it!" she asked. It was her first taste of success, and the savor was very sweet. But she was in an agony of desire to tell him, to tell him immediately, but gracefully, delicately, that she wrote it. How could she say it, and yet seem uneager, indifferent?

But the occasion must not slip. It was a miserable moment.

"Immensely," he replied.

"Then," she said, with just a little more significance in her voice than she intended, "you would rather not find out?"

He turned and met her s.h.i.+ning eyes. She smiled, and he had an instant of conviction. "You," he exclaimed--"you did it! Really?"

She nodded, and he swiftly reflected upon what he had said. "Now criticise!" she begged impatiently.

"I can only advise you to follow your own example," he said gravely. "It's rather exuberantly cruel in places."

"Adorably savage, you _said!_"

"I wasn't criticising then. And I suppose," he went on, with a shade of awkwardness, "I ought to thank you for all the charming things you put in about me."

"Ah!" she returned, with a contemptuous pout and shrug, "don't say that--it's like the others. But," she clinched it notwithstanding, and rather quickly, "will you take me to see Miss Cardiff? I mean," she added, noting his look of consternation, "will you ask her if I may come?

I forget--we are in London."

At this moment the boy from below-stairs knocked with tea and cakes, little Italian cakes in iced jackets and paper boats. "Yes, certainly--yes, I will," said Kendal, staring at the tray, and trying to remember when he had ordered it; "but it's your plain duty to make us both some tea, and to eat as many of these pink-and-white things as you possibly can. They seem to have come down from heaven for you."

They ate and drank and talked and were merry for quite twenty minutes. Elfrida opened her notebook and threatened absurdities of detail for publication in the _Age_; he defied her, tilted his chair back, put his feet on a packing-box, and smoked a cigarette. He placed all the studies he had made after she left Paris before her, and as she finished the last but one of the Italian cakes, they discussed these in the few words from which they both drew such large and satisfying meanings as do not lie at all in the vocabulary of outsiders. Elfrida felt the keenest pleasure of her whole life in the knowledge that Kendal was talking to her more seriously, more carefully, because of that piece of work in the _Decade_; the consciousness of it was like wine to her, freeing her thoughts and her lips. Kendal felt, too, that the plane of their relations was somehow altered. He was not sure that he liked the alteration. Already she had grown less amusing, and the real _camaraderie_ which she constantly suggested her desire for he could not, at the bottom of his heart, truly tolerate with a woman. He was an artist, but he was also an Englishman, and he told himself that he must not let her get into the way of coming there. He felt an obscure inward irritation, which he did not a.n.a.lyze, that she should talk so well and be so charming personally at the same time.

Elfrida, still in the flush of her elation, was putting on her gloves to go, when the room resounded to a masterful double rap. The door almost simultaneously opened far enough to disclose a substantial gloved hand upon the outer handle, and in the tones of confident aggression which habit has given to many middle-aged ladies, a feminine voice said, "May we come in?"

It is not probable that Lady Halifax had ever been so silently, surely, and swiftly d.a.m.ned before. In the fraction of an instant that followed Kendal glanced at the dismantled tray and felt that the situation was atrocious. He had just time to put his foot upon his half-smoked cigarette, and to force a pretence of unconcern into his "Come in! Come in!" when the lady and her daughter entered with something of unceremoniousness.

"Those are appalling stairs--" Lady Halifax observed Elfrida, and came to an instant's astonished halt--"of yours, Mr. Kendal, appalling!" Then as Kendal shook hands with Miss Halifax she faced round upon him in a manner which said definitely, "Explain!" and behind her sharp good-natured little eyes Kendal read, "If it is possible!"

He looked at Elfrida in the silent hope that she would go, but she appeared to have no such intention. He was pushed to a momentary wish that she had got into the cupboard, which he dismissed, turning a deeper brick color as it came and went. Elfrida was looking up with calm inquiry, b.u.t.toning a last glove-b.u.t.ton.

"Lady Halifax," he said, seeing nothing else for it, "this is Miss Bell, from America, a fellow-student in Paris. Miss Bell has deserted art for literature, though,"

he went on bravely, noting an immediate change in his visitor's expression, and the fact that her acknowledgment was quite as polite as was necessary. "She has done me the honor to look me up this afternoon in the formidable character of a representative of the press."

Lady Halifax looked as if the explanation was quite acceptable, though she reserved the right of criticism.

Elfrida took the first word, smiling prettily straight into Lady Halifax's face.

"Mr. Kendal pretends to be very much frightened," she said, with pleasant, modest coolness, and looked at Kendal.

"From America," Lady Halifax repeated, as if for the comfort of the a.s.surance. "I am sure it is a great advantage nowadays to have been brought up in America."