CHAPTER XX.
July thickened down upon London. The society papers announced that with the exception of the few unfortunate gentlemen who were compelled to stay and look after their const.i.tuents" interests, at Westminster, "everybody" had gone out of town, and filled up yawning columns with detailed information as to everybody"s destination. To an inexperienced eye, with the point of view of the top of an Uxbridge Road omnibus for instance, it might not appear that London had diminished more than the extent of a few powdered footmen on carriage boxes; but the census of the London world is after all not to be taken from the top of an Uxbridge Road omnibus. London teemed emptily, the tall houses in the narrow lanes of Mayfair slept standing, the sunlight filtered through a depressing haze and stood still in the streets for hours together.
In the Park the policemen wooed the nursery-maids free from the embarra.s.sing smiling scrutiny of people to whom this serious preoccupation is a diversion. The main thoroughfares were full of "summer sales," St. Paul"s echoed to admiring Transatlantic criticism, and the Bloomsbury boarding-houses to voluble Transatlantic complaint.
The Halifaxes were at Brighton, Lady Halifax giving musical teas, Miss Halifax painting marine views in a little book. Miss Halifax called them "impressions," and always distributed them at the musical teas. The Cardiffs had gone to Scotland for golf, and later on for grouse.
Janet was almost as expert on the links as her father, and was on very familiar terms with a certain Highland moor and one Donald Macleod. They had laid every compulsion upon Elfrida to go with them, in vain; the girl"s sensitiveness on the point of money obligations was intense, and Janet failed to measure it accurately when she allowed herself to feel hurt that their relations did not preclude the necessity for taking any thought as to who paid. Elfrida staid, however, in her by-way of Fleet Street, and did a little bit of excellent work for the _Ill.u.s.trated Age_ every day. If it had not been for the editor-in-chief, Rattray would have extended her scope on the paper; but the editor-in-chief said no, Miss Bell was dangerous, there was no telling what she might be up to if they gave her the reins. She went very well, but she was all the better for the severest kind of a bit. So Miss Bell wrote about colonial exhibitions and popular spectacles, and country outings for babies of the slums, and longed for a fairer field. As midsummer came on there arrived a dearth in these objects of orthodox interest, and Rattray told her she might submit "anything on the nail" that occurred to her, in addition to such work as the office could give her to do. Then, in spite of the vigilance of the editor-in-chief, an odd unconventional bit of writing crept now and then into the _Age_--an interview with some eccentric notability with the piquancy of a page from Gyp, a bit of pathos picked out of the common, streets, a fragment of character-drawing which smiled visibly and talked audibly.
Elfrida in her garret drew a joy from these things. She cut them out and read them over and over again, and put them sacredly away, with Nadie"s letters and a ma.n.u.script poem of a certain Bruynotin"s, and a scrawl from one Hakkoff, with a vigorous sketch of herself, from memory, in pen and ink in the corner of the page, in the little eastern-smelling wooden box which seemed to her to represent the core of her existence. They quickened her pulse, they gave her a curious uplifted happiness that took absolutely no account of any other circ.u.mstance.
There were days when Mrs. Jordan had real twinges of conscience about the quality of Miss Bell"s steak. "But there," Mrs. Jordan would soothe herself, "I might bring her the best sulline, and she wouldn"t know no difference."
In other practical respects the girl was equally indifferent. Her clothes were shabby, and she did not seem to think of replacing them; Mrs. Jordan made preposterous charges for candles, and she paid them without question. She tipped people who did little services for her with a kind of royal delicacy; the girl who scrubbed the landings worshipped her, and the boy who came every day for her copy once brought her a resplendent "b.u.t.ton-hole" consisting of two pink rosebuds and a scarlet geranium, tendering it with a shy lie to the effect that he had found it in the street. She went alone now and again to the opera, taking an obscure place, and she lived a good deal among the foreign art exhibitions of Bond Street. Once she bought an etching and brought it home under her arm. That kept her poor for a month, though she would have been less aware of it if she had not, before the month was out, wanted to buy another. A great Parisian actress had made her yearly visit to London in June, and Elfrida conjuring with the name of the _Ill.u.s.trated Age_, won an appointment from her. The artiste staid only a fortnight--she declared that one half of an English audience came to see her because it was proper and the other because it was sinful, and she found it insupportable--and in that time she asked Elfrida three times to pay her morning visits, when she appeared in her dressing-gown, little unconventional visits "_pour bavarder_." When Miss Bell lacked entertainment during the weeks that followed she thought of these visits, and little smiles chased each other round the corners of her mouth.
She wrote to Janet when she was in the mood--delicious sc.r.a.ps of letters, broad-margined, fantastic, each, so far as charm went, a little literary gem disguised in wilfulness, in a picture, in a diamond-cut cynicism that shone sharper and clearer for the "dainty affectation of its setting." When she was not in the mood she did not write at all. With an instinctive recognition of the demands of any relation such as she felt her friendship with Janet Cardiff to be, she simply refrained, from imposing upon her anything that savored of dullness or commonplaceness. So that sometimes she wrote three or four times in a week and sometimes not at all for a fortnight, sometimes covered pages and sometimes sent three lines and a row of asterisks. There was a fancifulness in the hour as well, that usually made itself felt all through the letter--it was rainy twilight in her garret, or a gray wideness was creeping up behind St Paul"s, which meant that it was morning. To what she herself was actually doing, or to any material fact about her, they made the very slightest reference. Janet, in Scotland, perceived half of this, and felt aggrieved on the score of the other half. She wished, more often than she said she did, that Elfrida were a little more human, that she had a more appreciative understanding of the warm value of common every-day matters between people who were interested in one another. The subtle imprisoned soul in Elfrida"s letters always spoke to hers, but Janet never received so artistic a missive of three lines that she did not wish it were longer, and she had no fund of confidence to draw on to meet her friend"s incomprehensible s.p.a.ces of silence. To cover her real soreness she scolded, chaffed brusquely, affected lofty sarcasms.
"Twelve days ago," she wrote, "you mentioned casually that you were threatened with pneumonia; your communication of to-day you devote to proving that Hector Malot is a carpenter. I agree with you with reservations, but the sequence worries me. In the meantime have you had the pneumonia?"
Her own letters were long and gossiping, full of the scent of the heather and the eccentricities of Donald Macleod; and she wrote them, regularly twice a week, using rainy afternoons for the purpose and every inch of the paper at her disposal. Elfrida put a very few of them into the wooden box, just as she would have embalmed, if she could, a very few of the half-hours they had spent together.
CHAPTER XXI.
John Kendal had turned the key upon his dusty work-room in Bryanston Street among the first of those who, according to the papers, depopulated London in July. He had an old engagement to keep, which took him, with Carew of the _Dial_ and Limley of the Civil Service, to explore and fish in the Norwegian fjords. The project matured suddenly, and he left town without seeing anybody--a necessity which disturbed him a number of times on the voyage. He wrote a hasty line to Janet, returning a borrowed book, and sent a trivial message to Elfrida, whom he knew to be spending a few days in Kensington Square at the time.
Janet delivered it with an intensity of quiet pleasure which she showed extraordinary skill in concealing. "May I ask you to say to Miss Bell--" seemed to her to be eloquent of many things. She looked at Elfrida with inquiry, in spite of herself, when she gave the message, but Elfrida received it with a nod and a smile of perfect indifference. "It is because she does not care--does not care _an iota_," Janet told herself; and all that day it seemed to her that Elfrida"s personality was inexhaustibly delightful.
Afterward, however, one or two letters found their way into the sandal-wood box, bearing the Norwegian postmark.
They came seldomer than Elfrida expected. "_Enfin!_" she said when the first arrived, and she felt her pulse beat a little faster as she opened it. She read it eagerly, with serious lips, thinking how fine he was, and with what exquisite force he brought himself to her as he wrote. "I must be a very exceptional person," she said in her reverie afterward, "to have such things written to me. I must--I _must!_" Then as she put the letter away she reflected that she couldn"t amuse herself with Kendal without treachery to their artistic relationship; there would be somehow an outrage in it. And she would not amuse herself with him; she would sacrifice that, and be quite frank and simple always. So that when it came to pa.s.s--here Elfrida retired into a lower depth of consciousness--there would be only a little pity and a little pain, and no reproach or regret. There was a delay in the arrival of the next letter which Elfrida felt to be unaccountable, a delay of nearly three weeks. She took it with an odd rush of feeling from the hand of the housemaid who brought it up, and locked herself in alone with it.
A few days later, driving through Bryanston Street in a hansom, Elfrida saw the windows of Kendal"s studio wide open. She leaned forward to realize it with a little tumult of excitement at the possibility it indicated, half turned to bid the cabman stop, and rolled on undecided.
Presently she spoke to him.
"Please go back to number sixty-three," she said, "I want to get out there," and in a moment or two she was tripping lightly up the stairs.
Kendal, in his shirt-sleeves, with his back to the door, was bending over a palette that clung obstinately to the hardened round dabs of color he had left upon it six weeks before. He threw it down at Elfrida"s step, and turned with a sudden light of pleasure in his face to see her framed in the doorway, looking at him with an odd shyness and silence. "You spirit!" he cried, "how did you know I had come back?" and he held her hand for just an appreciable instant, regarding her with simple delight. Her tinge of embarra.s.sment became her sweetly, and the pleasure in his eyes made her almost instantly aware of this.
"I didn"t know," she said, with a smile that shared his feeling. "I saw the windows open, and I thought the woman downstairs might be messing about here. They can do such incalculable damage when they really set their minds to it, these _concierge_ people. So I--I came up to interfere.
But it is you!" She looked at him with wide, happy eyes which sent the satisfaction she found in saying that to his inmost consciousness.
"That was extremely good of you," he said, and in spite of himself a certain emphasis crept into the commonplace.
"I hardly realize myself that I am here. It might very well be the Skaagerak outside."
"Does the sea in Norway sound like that?" Elfrida asked, as the roar of London came across m.u.f.fled from Piccadilly.
She made a t.i.ttle theatrical movement of her head to listen, and Kendal"s appreciation of it was so evident that she failed to notice exactly what he answered. "You have come back sooner than you intended?"
"By a month."
"Why!" she asked. Her eye made a soft bravado, but that was lost. He did not guess for a moment that she believed she knew why he had come.
"It was necessary," he answered, with remembered gravity, "in connection with the death of--of a relative, a granduncle of mine. The old fellow went off suddenly last week, and they telegraphed for me. I believe he wanted to see me, poor old chap, but of course it was too late."
"Oh!" said Elfrida gently, "that is very sad. Was it a granduncle you were--fond of?"
Kendal could not restrain a smile at her earnestness.
"I was, in a way. He was a good old fellow, and he lived to a great age--over ninety. He has left me all the duties and responsibilities of his estate," Kendal went on, with sudden gloom. "The Lord only knows what I"ll do with them."
"That makes it sadder," said the girl.
"I should think it did," Kendal replied; and then their eyes met, and they laughed the healthy instinctive laugh of youth when it is asked to mourn fatuously, which is always a little cruel.
"I hope," said Elfrida quickly, "that he has not saddled you with a t.i.tle. An estate is bad enough, but with a t.i.tle added it would ruin you. You would never do any more good work, I am sure--sure. People would get at you--you would take to rearing farm creatures from a sense of duty--you might go into Parliament. Tell me there is no t.i.tle!"
"How do you know all that?" Kendal exclaimed, laughing.
"But there is no t.i.tle--never has been."
Elfrida drew a long sigh of relief, and held him with her eyes as if he had just been s.n.a.t.c.hed away from, some impending danger. "So now you are--what do you say in this country?--a landed proprietor. You belong to the country gentry. In America I used to read about the country gentry in _London Society_--all the contributors and all the subscribers to _London Society_ used to be country gentry, I believe, from what I remember. They were always riding to hounds, and having big Christmas parties, and telling ghost stories about the family, diamonds."
"All very proper," Kendal protested against the irony of her tone.
"Oh, if one would be quite _sure_ that it will not make any difference," Elfrida went on, clasping her knee with her shapely gloved hands. "I should like--I should like to beg you to make me a promise that you will never give up your work--your splendid work!" She hesitated, and looked at him almost with supplication. "But then why should you make such a promise to _me!_"
They were sitting opposite one another in the dusty confusion of the room, and when she said this Kendal got up and walked over to her, without knowing exactly why.
"If I made such a promise," he said, looking down at her, "it would be more binding given to you than to anybody else--more binding and more sacred."
If she had exacted it he would have promised then and there, and he had some vague notion of sealing the vow with his lips upon her hand, and of arranging--this was more indefinite still--that she should always insist, in her sweet personal way, upon its fulfilment. But Elfrida felt the intensity in his voice with a kind of fear, not of the situation--she had a nervous delight in the situation--but of herself. She had a sudden terror in his coming so close to her, in his changed voice, and its sharpness lay in her recognition of it. Why should she be frightened? She jumped up gaily with the question still throbbing in her throat.
"No," she cried, "you shall not promise me. I"ll form a solemn, committee of your friends--your real friends--and we"ll come some day and exact an oath from you, individually and collectively. That will be much more impressive. I must go now," she went on reproachfully, "and you have shown me nothing that you"ve brought back with you. Is there anything here?" In her anxiety to put s.p.a.ce between them she bad walked to the furthest and untidiest corner of the room, where half a dozen canvases leaned with their faces to the wall.
Kendal watched her, tilt them forward one after another with a kind or sick impotence.
"Absolutely nothing!" he cried.
But it was too late--she had paused in her running commentary on the pictures, she was standing looking, absolutely silent, at the last but one. She had come upon it--she had found it--his sketch of the scene in Lady Halifax"s drawing-room.
"Oh yes, there is something!" she said at last, carefully drawing it out and holding it at arm"s length. "Something that is quite new to me. Do you mind if I put it in a better light?" Her voice had wonderfully changed; it expressed a curious interest and self-control. In effect that was all she felt for the moment; she had a dull consciousness of a blow, but did not yet quite understand being struck. She was gathering herself together as she looked, growing conscious of her hurt and of her resentment.
Kendal was silent, cursing himself inwardly for not having destroyed the thing the day after he had let himself do it.
"Yes," she said, placing it on an easel at an oblique angle with the north window of the room, "it is better so."
She stepped back a few paces to look at it, and stood immovable, searching every detail. "It does you credit,"
she said slowly; "immense credit. Oh, it is very clever!"
"Forgive me," Kendal said, taking a step toward her. "I am afraid it doesn"t But I never intended you to see it."
"Is it an order?" she asked calmly. "Ah, but that would not have been fair--not to show it to me first!"
Kendal crimsoned. "I beg," he said earnestly, "that you will not think such a thing possible. I intended to destroy it--I don"t know why I have not destroyed it!"