"Miss Cardiff's in the lib'ry, sir," said the housemaid,
opening, the door for Kendal next morning with a smile
which he did not find too broadly sympathetic. He went
up the stairs two steps at a time, whistling like a
schoolboy.
"Lady Halifax says," he announced, taking immediate
possession of Janet where she stood, and drawing her to
a seat beside him on the lounge, "that the least we can
do by way of reparation is to arrange our wedding-trip
in their society. She declares she will wait any reasonable
time; but I assured her delicately that her idea of
compensation was a little exaggerated."
Janet looked at him with an, absent smile. "Yes, I think
so," she said, but her eyes were preoccupied, and the
lover in him resented it.
"What is it?" he asked. "What has happened, dear?"
She looked down at an open letter in her hand, and for
a moment said nothing. "I don't know whether I ought to
tell you; but it would be a relief."
"Can there be anything you ought not to tell me?" he
insisted tenderly.
"Perhaps, on the other hand, I ought," she said
reflectively. "It may help you to a proper definition of
my character, and then--you may think less of me. Yes,
I think I ought."
"Darling, for Heaven's sake don't talk nonsense!"
"I had a letter--this letter--a little while ago, from
Elfrida Bell." She held it out to him. "Read it."
Kendal hesitated and scanned her face. She was smiling
now; she had the look of half-amused dismay that might
greet an ineffectual blow. He took the letter.
"If it is from Miss Bell," he said at a suggestion from
his conscience, "I fancy, for some reason, it is not
pleasant."
"No," she replied, "it is not pleasant."
He unfolded the letter, recognizing the characteristic
broad margins and the repressed rounded perpendicular
hand with its supreme effort after significance, and his
thought reflected a tinge of his old amused curiosity.
It was only a reflection, and yet it distinctly embodied
the idea that he might be on the brink of a further
discovery. He glanced at Janet again: her hands were
clasped in her lap, and she was looking straight before
her with smilingly grave lips and lowered lids, which
nevertheless gave him a glimpse of retrospection. He
felt the beginnings of indignation, yet he looked back
at the letter acquisitively; its interest was intrinsic.
"I feel that I can no longer hold myself in honor," he
read, "if I refrain further from defining the personal
situation between us as it appears to me. That I have
let nearly three weeks go by without doing it you may
put down to my weakness and selfishness, to your own
charm, to what you will; but I shall be glad if you will
not withhold the blame that is due me in the matter, for
I have wronged you, as well as myself, in keeping silence.
"Look, it is all here in a nutshell. _Nothing is changed_.
I have tried to believe otherwise, but the truth is
stronger than my will. My opinion of you is a naked,
uncompromising fact I cannot drape it or adorn it, or
even throw around it a mist of charity. It is unalterably
there, and in any future intercourse with you, such
intercourse as we have had in the past, I should only
dash myself forever against it. I do not clearly see upon
what level you accepted me in the beginning, but I am
absolutely firm in my belief that it was not such as I
would have tolerated if I had known. To-day at all events
I am confronted with the proof that I have not had your
confidence--that you have not thought it worth while to
be single-minded in your relation to me. From a personal
point of view there is more that I might say, but perhaps
that is damning enough, and I have no desire to be abusive.
It is on my conscience to add, moreover, that I find you
a sophist, and your sophistry a little vulgar. I find
you compromising with your ambitions, which in themselves
are not above reproach from any point of view. I find
you adulterating what ought to be the pure stream of
ideality with muddy considerations of what the people
are pleased to call the moralities, and with the feebler
contamination of the conventionalities--"
"I _couldn't_ smoke with her," commented Janet, reading
over his shoulder. "It wasn't that I objected in the
least, but it made me so very--uncomfortable, that I
would never try a second time."
Kendal's smile deepened, and he read on without answering,
except by pressing her finger-tips against his lips.
"I should be sorry to deny your great cleverness and your
pretensions to a certain sort of artistic interpretation.
But to me the _artist bourgeois_ is an outsider, who must
remain outside. He has nothing to gain by fellowship with
me, and I--pardon me--have much to lose.
"So, if you please, we will go our separate ways, and
doubtless will represent, each to the other, an experiment
that has failed. You will believe me when I say that I
am intensely sorry. And perhaps you will accept, as
sincerely as I offer it, my wish that the future may
bring you success even more brilliant than you have
already attained." Here a line had been carefully scratched
out. "What I have written I have written under compulsion.
I am sure you will understand that.
"Believe me,
"Yours sincerely,
"ELFRIDA BELL.
"P.S.--I had a dream once of what I fancied our friendship
might be. It is a long time ago, and the days between
have faded all the color and sweetness out of my
dream--still, I remember that it was beautiful. For the
sake of that vain imagining, and because it was beautiful,
I will send you, if you will allow me, a photograph of
a painting which I like, which represents art as I have
learned to kneel to it."
Kendal read this communication through with a look of
keen amusement until he came to the postscript. Then he
threw back his head and laughed outright. Janet's face
had changed; she tried to smile in concert, but the effort
was rather piteous. "Oh, Jack," she said, "please take
it seriously." But he laughed on, irrepressibly.
She tried to cover his lips. "_Don't_ shout so!" she
begged, as if there were illness in the house or a funeral
next door, and he saw something in her face which stopped
him.
"My darling, it can't hurt--it doesn't, does it?"
"I'd like to say no, but it does, a little. Not so much
as it would have done a while ago."
"Are you going to accept Miss Bell's souvenir of her
shattered ideal? That's the best thing in the letter
--that's really supreme!" and Kendal, still broadly
mirthful, stretched out his hand to take it again; but
Janet drew it back.
"No," she said, "of course not; that was silly of her.
But a good deal of the rest is true, I'm afraid, Jack."
"It's damnably impudent," he cried, with, sudden anger.
"I suppose she believes it herself, and that's the measure
of its truth. How dare she dogmatize to you about the
art of your work! _She_ to _you_!"
"Oh, it isn't that I care about. It doesn't matter to
me, how little she thinks of my aims and my methods. I'm
quite content to do my work with what artistic conception
I've got without analyzing its quality--I'm thankful
enough to have any. Besides, I'm not sure about the
finality of her opinion--"
"You needn't be!" Kendal interrupted, with scorn.
"But what hurts--like a knife--is that part about my
insincerity. I _haven't_ been honest with her--I haven't!
From the very beginning I've criticised her privately.
I've felt all sorts of reserves and qualifications about
her, and concealed them--for the sake of--of I don't know
what--the pleasure I had in knowing her, I suppose."
"It seems to me pretty clear, from this precious
communication, that she was quietly reciprocating," Kendal
said bluntly.
"That doesn't clear me in the least. Besides, when she
had made up her mind she had the courage to tell me what
she thought; there was some principle in that. I--I admire
her for doing it, but I couldn't, myself."
"Thank the Lord, no. And I wouldn't be too sure, if I
were you, darling, about the unmixed heroism that dictates
her letter. I dare say she fancied it was that, but--"
Janet's head leaped up from his shoulder. "Now you are
unjust to her," she cried. "You don't know Elfrida, Jack.
If you think her capable of assuming a motive--"
"Well, do you know what I think?" said Kendal, with an
irrelevant smile, glancing at the letter in her hand. "I
think she has kept a copy."
Janet looked at him with reproachful eyes, which
nevertheless had the relief of amusement in them. "Don't
you?" he insisted.
"I--dare say."
"And she thoroughly enjoyed writing as she did. The
phrases read as if she had rolled them under her tongue.
It was a _coup_, don't you see?--and the making of a
_coup_, of any kind, at any expense, is the most refined
joy which life affords that young woman."
"There's sincerity in every line."
"Oh, she means what she says. But she found an exquisite
gratification in saying it which you cannot comprehend,
dear. This letter is a flower of her egotism, as it
were--she regards it with natural ecstasy, as an
achievement."
Janet shook her head. "Oh no, no" she cried miserably.
"You can't realize the--the sort of thing there was
between us, dear, and how it should have been sacred to
me beyond all tampering and cavilling, or it should not
have been at all. It isn't that I didn't know all the
time that I was disloyal to her, while she thought I was
sincerely her friend. I did! And now she has found me
out, and it serves me perfectly right--perfectly."
Kendal reflected for a moment, and then he brought comfort
to her from his last resource.
"Of course the intimacy between two girls is a wholly
different thing, and I don't know whether the relation
between Miss Bell and myself affords any parallel to
it--"
"Oh, Jack! And I thought--"
"What did you think, dearest?"
"I thought," said Janet, in a voice considerably muffled
by contact with his tweed coat collar, "that you were
perfectly _madly_ in love with her."
"Heavens!" Kendal cried, as if the contingency had been
physically impossible. "It is a man's privilege to fall
in love with a woman, darling--not with an incarnate
idea."
"It's a very beautiful idea."
"I'm not sure of that--it looks well from the outside.
But it is quite incapable of any growth or much, change,"
Kendal went on musingly, "and in the end--Lord, how a
man would be bored!"
"You are incapable of being fair to her," came from the
coat collar.
"Perhaps. I have something else to think of--since
yesterday. Janet, look up!"
She looked up, and for a little space Elfrida Bell found
oblivion as complete as she could have desired between
them. Then--
"You were telling me--" Janet said.
"Yes. Your Elfrida and I had a sort of friendship too--it
began, as you know, in Paris. And I was quite aware that
one does not have an ordinary friendship with her--it
accedes and it exacts more than the common relation. And
I've sometimes made myself uncomfortable with the idea
that she gave me credit for a more faultless conception
of her than I possessed; for the honest, brutal truth
is, I'm afraid, that I've only been working her out.
When the portrait was finished I found that somehow I
had succeeded. She saw it, too, and so I fancy my false
position has righted itself. So I haven't been sincere
to her either, Janet. But my conscience seems fairly
callous about it. I can't help reflecting that we are to
other people pretty much what they deserve that we shall
be. We can't control our own respect."
"I've lost hers," Janet repeated, with depression, and
Kendal gave an impatient groan.
"I don't think you'll miss it," he said.
"And, Jack, haven't you any--compunctions about exhibiting
that portrait?"
"Absolutely none." He looked at her with candid eyes.
"Of course if she wished me to I would destroy it. I
respect her property in it so far as that. But so long
as she accepts it as the significant truth it is, I am
entirely incapable of regretting it. I have painted her,
with her permission, as I saw her, as she is. If I had
given her a, squint or a dimple, I could accuse myself;
but I have not wronged her or gratified myself by one
touch of misrepresentation."
"I am to see it this afternoon," said Janet. Unconsciously
she was looking forward to finding some measure of
justification for herself in the portrait; why, it would
be difficult to say.
"Yes; I put it into its frame with my own hands yesterday.
I don't know when anything has given me so much pleasure.
And so far as Miss Bell is concerned," he went on, "it
is an unpleasant thing to say, but one's acquaintance
with her seems more and more to resolve itself into an
opportunity for observation, and to be without significance
other than that. I tell you frankly I began to see that
when I found I shared what she called her friendship with
Golightly Ticke. And I think, dear, with people like you
and me, any more serious feeling toward her is impossible."
"Doesn't it distress you to think that she believes you
incapable of speaking of her like this?"
"I think," said Kendal slowly, "that she knows how I
would be likely to speak of her."
"Well," Janet returned, "I'm glad you haven't reason to
suffer about her as I do. And I don't know at all how to
answer her letter."
"I'll tell you," Kendal replied. He jumped up and brought
her a pen and a sheet of paper and a blotting pad, and
sat down again beside her, holding the ink bottle. "Write
'My dear Miss Bell.'"
"But she began her letter, without any formality."
"Never mind; that's a cheapness that you needn't imitate,
even for the sake of politeness. Write 'My dear Miss Bell.'"
Janet wrote it.
"'I am sorry to find,'" Kendal dictated slowly, a few
words at a time, "'that the flaws in my regard for you
are sufficiently considerable--to attract your attention
as strongly as your letter indicates. The right of judgment
in so personal a matter--is indisputably yours, however--and
I write to acknowledge, not to question it.'"
"Dear, that isn't as I feel."
"It's as you will feel," Kendal replied ruthlessly. "Now
add: 'I have to acknowledge the very candid expression
of your opinion of myself--which does not lose in
interest--by the somewhat exaggerated idea of its value
which appears to have dictated it,--and to thank you,
for your extremely kind offer to send me a picture. I am
afraid, however--even in view of the idyllic considerations
you mention--I cannot allow myself to take advantage of
that--"
"On the whole I wouldn't allude to the shattered ideal--"
"Oh-no, dear. Go on."
"Or the fact that you probably wouldn't be able to hang
it up," he added grimly. "Now write 'You may be glad to
know that the episode in my life--which your letter
terminates--appears to me to be of less importance than
you perhaps imagine it--notwithstanding a certain soreness
over its close.'"
"It doesn't, Jack."
"It will. I wouldn't say anything more, if I were you;
just 'yours very truly, Janet Cardiff.'"
She wrote as he dictated, and then read the letter slowly
over from the beginning. "It sounds very hard, dear,"
she said, lifting eyes to his which he saw were full of
tears, "and as if I didn't care."
"My darling," he said, taking her into his arms, "I hope
you don't--I hope you won't care, after to-morrow. And
now, don't you think we've had enough of Miss Elfrida
Bell for the present?"