At three o'clock, an hour before he expected the Cardiffs,
John Kendal ran up the stairs to his studio. The door
stood ajar, and with a jealous sense of his possession
within, he reproached himself for his carelessness in
leaving it so. He had placed the portrait the day before
where all the light in the room fell upon it, and his
first hasty impression of the place assured him that it
stood there still. When he looked directly at it he
instinctively shut the door, made a step or two forward,
closed his eyes and so stood for a moment, with his hands
before them. Then, with a groan, "Damnation!" he opened
them again and faced the fact. The portrait was literally
in rags: They hung from the top of the frame and swung
over the bottom of it Hardly enough of the canvas remained
unriddled to show that it had represented anything human.
Its destruction was absolute--fiendish, it seemed to
Kendal.
He dropped into a chair and stared with his knee locked
in his hands.
"Damnation!" he repeated, with a white face. "I'll never
approach it again;" and then he added grimly, still
speaking aloud, "Janet will say I deserved it."
He had not an instant's doubt of the author of the
destruction, and he remembered with a flash in connection
with it the little silver-handled Algerian dagger that
pinned one of Nadie Palicsky's studies against the wall
of Elfrida's room. It was not till a quarter of an hour
afterward that he thought it worth while to pick up the
note that lay on the table addressed to him, and then he
opened it with a nauseated sense of her unnecessary
insistence.
"I have come here this morning," Elfrida had written,
"determined to either kill myself or IT. It is impossible,
I find, notwithstanding all that I said, that both should
continue to exist. I cannot explain further, you must
not ask it of me. You may not believe me when I tell you
that I struggled hard to let it be myself. I had such a
hideous doubt as to which had the best right to live.
But I failed there--death is too ghastly. So I did what
you see. In doing it I think I committed the unforgivable
sin--not against you, but against art. It may be some
satisfaction to you to know that I shall never wholly
respect myself again in consequence." A word or two
scratched out, and then: "Understand that I bear no malice
toward you, have no blame for you, only honor. You acted
under the very highest obligation--you could not have
done otherwise. * * * * * And I am glad to think that I
do not destroy with your work the joy you had in it.
* * *"
Kendal noted the consideration of this final statement
with a cynical laugh, and counted the asterisks. Why
the devil hadn't he locked the door? His confidence in
her had been too ludicrous. He read the note half through
once again, and then with uncontrollable impatience tore
it into shreds. To have done it at all was hideous, but
to try and impress herself in doing it was disgusting.
He reflected, with a smile of incredulous contempt, upon
what she had said about killing herself, and wondered,
in his anger, how she could be so blind to her own
disingenuousness. Five asterisks--she had made them
carefully--and then the preposterousness about what she
had destroyed and what she hadn't destroyed; and then
more asterisks. What had she thought they could possibly
signify--what could anything she might say possibly
signify?
In a savage rudimentary way he went over the ethical
aspect of the affair, coming to no very clear conclusion.
He would have destroyed the thing himself if she had
asked him, but she should have asked him. And even in
his engrossing indignation he could experience a kind of
spiritual blush as he recognized how safe his concession
was behind the improbability of its condition. Finally
he wrote a line to Janet, informing her that the portrait
had sustained an injury, and postponing her and her
father's visit to the studio. He would come, in the
morning to tell her about it, he added, and despatched
the missive by the boy downstairs, post-haste, in a cab.
It would be to-morrow, he reflected, before he could
screw himself up to talking about it, even to Janet. For
that day he must be alone with his discomfiture.
* * * * *
In the days of his youth and adversity, long before he
and the public were upon speaking terms, Mr. George
Jasper had found encouragement of a substantial sort with
Messrs. Pittman, Pitt & Sanderson, of Ludgate Hill, which
was a well-known explanation of the fact that this
brilliant author clung, in the main, to a rather
old-fashioned firm of publishers when the dimensions of
his reputation gave him a proportionate choice. It
explained also the circumstance that Mr. Jasper's notable
critical acumen was very often at the service of his
friend Mr. Pitt--Mr. Pittman was dead, as at least one
member of a London publishing firm is apt to be--in cases
where manuscripts of any curiously distinctive character,
from unknown authors, puzzled his perception of the truly
expedient thing to do. Mr. Arthur Rattray, of the
_Illustrated Age_, had personal access to Mr. Pitt, and
had succeeded in confusing him very much indeed as to
the probable success of a book by an impressionistic
young lady friend of his, which he called "An Adventure
in Stage-Land," and which Mr. Rattray declared to have
every element of unconventional interest. Mr. Pitt
distrusted unconventional interest, distrusted
impressionistic literature, and especially distrusted
books by young lady friends. Rattray, nevertheless showed
a suspicious indifference to its being accepted, and an
irritating readiness to take it somewhere else, and Mr.
Pitt knew Rattray for a sagacious man. And so it happened
that, returning late from a dinner where he had taken
refuge from being bored entirely-to extinction in two or
three extremely indigestible, dishes, Mr. George Jasper
found Elfrida's manuscript in a neat, thick, oblong paper
parcel, waiting for him on his dressing-table. He felt
himself particularly wide awake, and he had a consciousness
that the evening had made a very small inroad upon his
capacity for saying clever things. So he went over "An
Adventure in Stage-Land" at once, and in writing his
opinion of it to Mr. Pitt, which he did with some
elaboration, a couple of hours later, he had all the
relief of a revenge upon a well-meaning hostess, without
the reproach of having done her the slightest harm. It
is probable that if Mr. Jasper had known that the opinion
of the firm's "reader" was to find its way to the author,
he would have expressed himself in terms of more guarded
commonplace, for we cannot believe that he still cherished
a sufficiently lively resentment at having his hand
publicly kissed by a pretty girl to do otherwise; but
Mr. Pitt had not thought it necessary to tell him of this
condition, which Rattray, at Elfrida's express desire,
had exacted. As it happened, nobody can ever know precisely
what he wrote, except Mr. Pitt, who has forgotten, and
Mr. Arthur Rattray, who tries to forget; for the letter,
the morning after it had been received, which was the
morning after the portrait met its fate, lay in a little
charred heap in the fireplace of Elfrida's room, when
Janet Cardiff pushed the screen aside at last and went in.
Kendal had come as he promised, and told her everything.
He had not received quite the measure of indignant sympathy
he had expected, and Janet had not laughed at the asterisks.
On the other hand, she had sent him away, with unnatural
gravity-of demeanor, rather earlier than he meant to go,
and without telling him why. She thought, as she directed
the cabman to Essex Court, Fleet Street, that she would
tell him why afterward; and all the way there she thought
of the most explicit terms in which to inform Elfrida
that her letter had been the product of hardness of heart,
that she really felt quite differently, and had come to
tell her, purely for honesty's sake, how she did feel.
After a moment of ineffectual calling on the other side
of the screen, her voice failed her, and in dumb terror
that would not be reasoned away it seemed that she saw
the outlines of the long, still, slender figure under
the bed draperies, while she still looked helplessly at
a flock of wild geese flying over Fugi Yama. Buddha smiled
at her from the table with a kind of horrid expectancy,
and the litter, of papers round him, in Elfrida's
handwriting, mixed their familiarity with his mockery.
She had only to drag her trembling limbs a little further
to know that the room was pregnant with the presence of
death. Some white tuberoses in a vase seemed to make it
palpable with their fragrance. She ran wildly to the
window and drew back the curtain; the pale sunlight
flooding in gave a little white nimbus to a silver ring
upon the floor.
The fact may not be without interest that six months
afterward "An Adventure in Stage-Land" was published by
Messrs. Lash and Black, and met with a very considerable
success. Mr. Arthur Rattray undertook its disposal, with
the consent of Mr. and Mrs. Leslie Bell, who insisted,
without much difficulty, that he should receive a percentage
of the profits for his trouble. Mr. Rattray was also of
assistance to them when, as soon as the expense could be
managed, these two middle-aged Americans, whose grief
was not less impressive because of its twang, arrived in
London to arrange that their daughter's final resting-place
should be changed to her native land. Mr. Bell told him
in confidence that while he hoped he was entirely devoid
of what you may call race prejudice against the English
people, it didn't, seem as if he could let anybody
belonging to him lie under the British flag for all time,
and found it a comfort that Rattray understood. Sparta
is divided in its opinion whether the imposing red granite
monument they erected in the cemetery, with plenty of
space left for the final earthly record of Leslie and
Margaret Bell, is not too expensive considering the Bells'
means, and too conspicuous considering the circumstances.
It has hitherto occurred to nobody, however, to doubt
the appropriateness of the texts inscribed upon it, in
connection with three little French words which Elfrida,
in the charmingly apologetic letter which she left for
her parents, commanded to be put there--"_Pas
femme-artiste_." Janet, who once paid a visit to the
place, hopes in all seriousness that the sleeper underneath
is not aware of the combination.
Miss Kimpsey boards with the Bells now, and her relation
to them has become almost daughterly. The three are
swayed, to the extent of their several capacities, by
what one might call a cult of Elfrida--her death has
long ago been explained by the fact that a grandaunt of
Mrs. Bell's suffered from melancholia.
Mr. and Mrs, John Kendal's delightful circle of friends
say that they live an idyllic life in Devonshire. But
even in the height of some domestic joy a silence sometimes
falls between them still. Then, I fancy, he is thinking
of an art that has slipped away from him, and she of a
loyalty she could not hold. The only person whose equanimity
is entirely undisturbed is Buddha. In his place among
the mournful Magdalens of Mrs. Bell's drawing-room in
Sparta, Buddha still smiles.
THE END