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Daughter of Today

<h2 id="id00312" style="margin-top: 4em">CHAPTER X.</h2> Kendal mounted to Elfrida's appartement in the Rue Porte Royale to verify the intimation of her departure, or happily to forestall its execution the morning after her note reached him. He found it bare and dusty. A workman was mending the stove; the concierge stood looking on, with her arms folded above the most striking feature of her personality. Every vestige of Elfrida was gone, and the tall windows were open, letting the raw February air blow through. Outside the sunlight lay in squares and triangles on the roofs, and gave the place its finishing touch of characterlessness. Yes, truly, mademoiselle had gone, the evening before. Was monsieur then not aware? The concierge was of opinion that mademoiselle had had bad news, but her tone implied that no news could be quite bad enough to justify the throwing up of such desirable apartments upon such short notice. Mademoiselle had left in such haste that she had forgotten both to say where she was going and to leave an address for letters; and it would not be easy to surpass the consciousness of injury with which the concierge demanded what she was to say to the facteur on the day of the post from America, when there were always four or five letters for mademoiselle. Monsieur would be bien amiable, if he would allow that they should be directed to him. Upon reflection monsieur declined this responsibility. With the faintest ripple of resentment at being left out of Elfrida's confidence, he stated to himself that it would be intrusive. He advised the concierge to keep them for a week or two, during which Miss Bell would be sure to remember to send for them, and turned to go. "Mademoiselle est allee a la Gare du Nord," added the concierge, entirely aware that she was contributing a fact to Kendal's mental speculation, and wishing it had a greater intrinsic value. But Kendal merely raised his eyebrows in polite acknowledgment of unimportant information. "En effet!" he said, and went away. Nevertheless he could not help reflecting that Gare du Nord probably meant Calais, and Calais doubtless meant England, probably London. As he thought of it he assured himself that it was London, and his irritation vanished at the thought of the futility of Elfrida in London. It gave him a half curious, half solicitous amusement instead. He pictured her with her Hungarian peasant's cloak and any one of her fantastic hats in the conventional highways he knew so well, and smiled. "She will have to take herself differently there," he reflected, without pausing to consider exactly what he meant by it, "and she'll find that a bore." As yet he himself had never taken her differently so far as he was aware, and in spite of the obvious provocation of her behavior it did not occur to him to do it now. He reflected with a shade of satisfaction that she knew his London address. When she saw quite fit she would doubtless inform him as to what she was doing and where she might be found. He smiled again at the thought of the considerations which Elfrida would put into the balance against the pleasure of seeing him. They were not humiliating; he was content to swing high on the other side indefinitely; but he admitted to himself that she had taken a pleasure out of Paris for him, and went back to his studio missing it. He went on missing it for quite two days, at the end of which he received an impetuous visit—excessively impetuous considering the delay—from Nadie Palicsky. In its course Mademoiselle Palicsky declared herself robbed and wronged by "cette incomprise d'Americaine," whom she loved—but loved, did he understand? No, it was not probable that he understood—what did a man know of love? As much perhaps as that flame—Kendal permitted himself the luxury of an open fire. Nadie stared into it for a moment with cynical eyes. Under the indirect influence of Kendal's regard they softened. "She always understood. It was a joy to show her anything. She interpreted Bastien Lepage better than I—indeed that is true—but only with her soul, she had no hands. Yes, I loved her, and she was good for me. I drew three breaths in her presence for one in her absence. And she has taken herself away; even in her letter—I had a line too—she was as remote as a star! I hope," continued Nadie, with innocent candor, as she swung her little feet on the corner of Kendal's table, "that you do not love her too. I say prayers to le bon Dieu, about it. I burn candles." "And why?" Kendal asked, with a vigorous twist of his palette knife. "Because you are such a beast," she responded calmly, watching his work with her round cleft chin in the shell of her hand. "That's not bad, you know. That nearest girl sitting on the grass is almost felt. But if you show it to the English they will be so shocked that they will use lorgnettes to hide their confusion. Ah!" she said, jumping down, "here am I wasting myself upon you, with a carriage a l'heure! You are not worth it," and she went. After that it seemed to Kendal that he did not miss Elfrida so much. Certainly it never occurred to him to hasten his departure by a day on her account, and there came a morning when he drove through Bloomsbury and realized that he had not thought about her for a fortnight. The British Museum suggested her to him there—the British Museum, and the certainty that within its massive walls a number of unimaginative young women in collarless sage-green gowns were copying casts of antique sculptures at that moment. But he did not allow himself to suppose that she could possibly be among them. He sniffed London all day with a 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. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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