Before he had been back in Norway a week Kendal felt his perturbation with regard to Elfrida remarkably quieted and soothed. It seemed to him, in the long hours while he fished and painted, that in the progress of the little drama, from its opening act at Lady Halifax's to its final scene at the studio, he had arrived at something solid and tangible as the basis of his relation toward the girl. It had precipitated in him a power of comprehending her and of criticising her which he had possessed before only, as it were, in solution. Whatever once held him from stating to himself the results of his study of her had vanished, leaving him no name by which to call it. He found that he could smile at her whimsicalities, and reflect upon her odd development, and regret her devouring egotism, without the vision of her making dumb his voluble thought; and he no longer regretted the incident that gave him his freedom. He realized her as he painted her, and the realization visited him less often, much less often, than before.

Even the fact that she knew what he thought gradually became an agreeable one. There would be room for no hypocrisies between them. He wished that Janet Cardiff could have some such experience. It was provoking that she should be still so loyally _avengle_; that he would not be able to discuss Elfrida with her, when he went back to London, from an impersonal point of view. He had a strong desire to say precisely what he thought of her friend to Janet, in which there was an obscure recognition of a duty of reparation--obscure because he had no overt disloyalty to Janet to charge himself with, but none the less present. He saw the intimacy between the two girls from a new point of view; he comprehended the change the months had made, and he had a feeling of some displeasure that Janet Cardiff should have allowed herself to be so subdued, so seconded in it.

Kendal came back a day or two before Elfrida's disappearance, and saw her only once in the meantime.

That was on the evening--which struck him later as one of purposeless duplicity--before the Peach-Blossom Company had left for the provinces, when he and Elfrida both dined at the Cardiffs'. With him that night she had the air of a chidden child; she was silent and embarra.s.sed, and now and then he caught a glance which told him in so many words that she was very sorry, she hadn't meant to, she would never do it again. He did not for a moment suspect that it referred to the scene at Lady Halifax's, and was more than half real. It was not easy to know that even genuine feeling, with Elfrida, required a cloak of artifice. He put it down as a pretty pose, and found it as objectionable as the one he had painted. He was more curious, perhaps, but less disturbed than either of the Cardiffs as the days went by and Elfrida made no sign.

He felt, however, that his curiosity was too irreligious to obtrude upon Janet; besides, his knowledge of her hurt anxiety kept him within the bounds of the simplest inquiry, while she, noting his silence, believed him to be eating his heart out. In the end it was the desire to relieve and to satisfy Janet that took him to the _Age_ office.

It might be impossible for her to make such inquiries, he told himself, but no obligation could possibly attach to him, except--and his heart throbbed affirmatively at this--the obligation of making Janet happier about it.

He could have laughed, aloud when he heard the scheme from Rattray's lips--it so perfectly filled out his picture, his future projection of Elfrida; he almost a.s.sured himself that he had imagined and expected it.

But his desire to relieve Janet was suddenly lost in an upstarting brood of impulses that took him to the railway station with the smile still upon his lips. Here was a fresh development; his interest was keenly awake again, he would go and verify the facts. When his earlier intention reoccurred to him in the train, he dismissed it with the thought that what he had seen would be more effective, more disillusionizing, than what he had merely heard. He triumphed in advance over Janet's disillusion, but he thought more eagerly of the pleasure of proving, with his own eyes, another step in the working out of the problem which he believed he had solved in Elfrida.

"Big house to-night, sir. All the stalls taken," said the young man with the high collar in the box office when Kendal appeared before the window.

"Pit," replied Kendal, and the young man stared.

"Pit did you say, sir? Well, you'll 'ave to look slippy or you won't get a seat there either."

Kendal was glad it was a full house. He began to realize how very much he would prefer that Elfrida should not see him there. From his point of view it was perfectly warrantable--he had no sense of any obligation which would prevent his adding to his critical observation of her--but from Miss Bell's? He found himself lacking the a.s.surance that no importance was to be attached to Miss Bell's point of view, and he turned up his coat collar and pulled his hat over his eyes, and seated himself as obscurely as possible, with a satisfactory sense that n.o.body could take him for a gentleman, mingled with a less agreeable suspicion that it was doubtful whether, under the circ.u.mstances, he had a complete right to the t.i.tle. The overture strung him up more pleasureably than usual, however. He wondered if he should recognize her at once, and what part she would have. He did not know the piece, but of course it would be a small one. He wondered--for, so far as he knew, she had had no experience of the stage--how she could have been got ready in the time to take even a small one. Inevitably it would be a part with three words to say and nothing to sing--probably a maid-servant's. He smiled as he thought how sincerely Elfrida would detest such a personation. When the curtain rose at last Mr. John Kendal searched the stage more eagerly than the presence there of any mistress of her art had ever induced him to do before. The first act was full of gaiety, and the music was very tolerable; but Kendal, scanning one insistent figure and painted face after another, heard nothing, in effect, of what was said or sung--he was conscious only of a strong disappointment when it was over and Elfrida had not appeared.

The curtain went up again to a quick-step, to clinking steel, and the sound of light marching feet. An instant after forty young women were rhythmically advancing and retreating before the footlights, picturesquely habited in a military costume comprising powdered wigs, three-cornered hats, gold-embroidered blue coats, flesh-colored tights, and kid top-boots, which dated uncertainly from the middle ages. They sang, as they crossed their varyingly shapely legs, stamped their feet, and formed into figures no drill-book ever saw, a chorus of which the refrain was

"Oh, it never matters, matters, Though his coat be tatters, tatters, His good sword rust-incrusted and his songs all sung, The maids will flatter, flatter, And foes will scatter, scatter, For a soldier is soldier while his heart is young,"

the last line accompanied by a smiling flirt of their eyes over their shoulders and a kick to the rear as they wheeled, which evoked the unstinted appreciation of the house. The girls had the unvarying pink-and-white surfaces of their profession, but under it they obviously differed much, and the age and emaciation and ugliness among them had its common emphasis in the contrast of their smart masculine attire with the distressingly feminine outlines of their figures. "I should have thought it impossible to make a woman absolutely hideous by a dress that revealed her form," said Kendal to himself, as the jingling and the dancing and the music went on in the glare before him, "but, upon my word--" He paused suddenly. She wasn't absolutely hideous, that tall girl with the plume and the sword, who maneuvered always in front of the company--the lieutenant in charge. Indeed, she was comely every way, slight and graceful, and there was a singular strong beauty in her face, which was enhanced by the rouge and the powder, and culminated in the laugh in her eyes and upon her lips--a laugh which meant enjoyment, excitement, exhilaration.

It grew upon Kendal that none of the chorus girls approached Elfrida in the abandon with which they threw themselves into the representation--that all the others were more conscious than she of the wide-hipped incongruity of their role. To the man who beheld her there in an absolutely new world of light and color and course jest it seemed that she was perfectly oblivious of any other, and that her personality was the most aggressive, the most ferociously determined to be made the most of, on the stage. As the chorus ceased a half-grown youth remarked to his companion in front, "But the orficer's the one, Dave! Ain't she fly!" and the words coming out distinctly in the moment of after-silence when the applause was over, set the pit laughing for two or three yards around.

Whereat Kendal, with an a.s.sortment of feelings which he took small pleasure in a.n.a.lyzing later, got up and went out. People looked up angrily at him as he stumbled over their too numerous feet in doing so--he was spoiling a solo of some pathos by Mr. Golightly Ticke in the character of a princely refugee, a fur-trimmed mantle, and shoes with buckles.

Kendal informed himself with some severity that no possible motive could induce him to make any comment upon Miss Bell to Janet, and found it necessary to go down into Devonshire next day, where his responsibilities had begun to make a direct and persistent attack upon him. It was the first time he had yielded, and he could not help being amused by the remembrance, in the train, of Elfrida's solemn warning about the danger of his growing typical and going into Parliament. A middle-aged country gentleman with broad shoulders and a very red neck occupied the compartment with him, and handled the _Times_ as if the privilege of reading it were one of the few the democratic spirit of the age had left to his cla.s.s. Kendal scanned him with interest and admiration and pleasure. It was an excellent thing that England's backbone should be composed of men like that, he thought and he half wished he were not so consciously undeserving of national vertebral honors himself--that Elfrida's warnings had a little more basis of probability. Not that he wanted to drop his work, but a man owed something to his country, especially when he had what they called a stake in it--to establish a home perhaps, to marry, to have children growing up about him. A man had to think of his old age. He told himself that he must be the lightest product of a flippant time, since these things did not occur to him more seriously; and he threw himself into all that had to be done upon "the place," when he arrived at it, with an energy that disposed its real administrators to believe that his ultimate salvation as a landlord was still possible.

He was talking to Janet Cardiff at one of Lady Halifax's afternoon teas a fortnight later, when their hostess advanced toward them interrogatively. "While I think of it, Janet," said she laying a mittened hand on Miss Cardiff's arm, "what has become of your eccentric little American friend? I sent her a card a month ago, and we've neither heard nor seen anything of her."

"Elfrida Bell--oh, she's out of town, Lady Halifax, and I am rather desolate without her--we see so much of her, you know. But she will be back soon--I dare say I will be able to bring her next Thursday. How delicious this coffee is! I shall have another cup, if it keeps me awake for a week. Oh, you got my note about the concert, dear lady?"

Kendal noticed the adroitness of her chatter with amus.e.m.e.nt.

Before she had half finished Lady Halifax had taken an initial step toward moving off, and Janet's last words received only a nod and a smile for reply.

"You know, then?" said he, when that excellent woman was safely out of earshot.

"Yes, I know," Janet answered, twisting the hanging end of her long-haired boa about her wrist. "I feel as if I oughtn't to, but daddy told me. Daddy went, you know, to try to persuade her to give it up. I _was_ so angry with him for doing it. He might have known Elfrida better. And it was such a--Such a criticism!"

"I wish you would tell me-what you really think," said Kendal audaciously.

Janet sipped her coffee nervously. "I--I have no right to think," she returned. "I am not in Frida's confidence in the matter. But of course she is perfectly right, from, her point of view."

"Ah!" Kendal said, "her point of view."

Janet looked up at him with a sudden perception of the coldness of his tone. In spite of herself it gave her keen happiness, until the reflection came that probably he resented her qualification, and turned her heart to lead. She searched her soul for words.

"If she wants to do this thing, she has taken, of course, the only way to do it well. She does not need any justification--none at all. I wish she were back," Janet went on desperately, "but only for my own sake--I don't like being out of it with her; not for any reason connected with what she is doing."

There was an appreciable pause between them. "Let me put down your cup," suggested Kendal.

Turning to her again, he said gravely, "I saw Miss Bell at Cheynemouth, too." Janet's hands trembled as she fastened the fur at her throat. "And I also wish she were back. But my reason is not, I am afraid, so simple as yours."

"Here is daddy," Janet answered, "and I know he wants to go. I don't think my father is looking quite as well as he ought to. He doesn't complain, but I suspect him of concealed neuralgia. Please give him a lecture upon over-doing--it's the predominant vice of his character!"

CHAPTER XXVI.

Elfrida spent five weeks with the Peach Blossom Company on their provincial tour, and in the end the manager was sorry to lose her. He was under the impression that she had joined them as an aspiring novice, presumably able to gratify that or any other whim. He had guessed that she was clever, and could see that she was extremely good-looking. Before the month was out he was congratulating himself upon his perception much as Rattray had a habit of doing, and was quite ready to give Elfrida every encouragement she wanted to embrace the burlesque stage seriously--it was a thundering pity she hadn't voice enough for comic opera. He had nothing to complain of; the arrangement had been for a few weeks only, and had cost him the merest trifle of travelling expenses; but the day Elfrida went back to town he was inclined to parley with her, to discuss the situation, and to make suggestions for her future plan of action. His att.i.tude of visible regret added another thrill to the joy the girl had in the thought of her undertaking; it marked a point of her success, she thought, at least so far as preliminaries went. Already, as she shrank fastidiously into the corner of a third-cla.s.s travelling-carriage, her project seemed to have reached its original and notable materialization. Chapters pa.s.sed before her eyes as they do sometimes in dreams, full of charm and beauty; the book went through every phase of comedy and pathos, always ringing true. Little half-formed sentences of admirable art rose before her mind, and she hastily barred them out, feeling that she was not ready yet, and it would be mad misery to want them and to have forgotten them. The thought of what she meant to do possessed her wholly, though, and she resigned herself to dreams of the most effective arrangement of her material, the selection of her publisher, the long midnight hours alone with Buddha, in which she should give herself up to the enthralment of speaking with that voice which she could summon, that elusive voice which she lived only, only to be the medium for--that precious voice which would be heard one day, yes, and listened-to.

She was so freshly impressed with the new life-lights, curious, tawdry, fascinating, revolting, above all sharp and undisguised, of the world she had left, that she saw them already projected with a verisimilitude which, if she had possessed the art of it, would have made her indeed famous. Her own power of realization, a.s.sured her on this point--n.o.body could see, not divine but _see_, as she did, without being able to reproduce; the one implied the other. She fingered feverishly the strap of the little hand-bag in her lap, and satisfied herself by unlocking it with a key that hung on a String inside her jacket. It had two or three photographs of the women she knew among the company, another of herself in her stage uniform, a bill of the play, her powder-puff and rouge-box, a sc.r.a.p of gold lace, a young Jew's letter full of blots and devotion, a rather vulgar sapphire bracelet, some artificial flowers, and a quant.i.ty of slips of paper of all sizes covered with her own enigmatically rounded handwriting. She put her hand in carefully and searched--everything was there; and up from the bag came a scent that made her shut her eyes and laugh with its power to bring her experiences back to her. She locked it; carefully again with a quivering sigh--after all she would not have many hours to wait. Presently an idea came to her that she thought worth keeping, and she thrust her hand into her pocket for paper and pencil. She drew out a crumpled oblong sc.r.a.p and wrote on the back of it, then unlocked the little bag again and put it carefully in. Before it had been only the check of the _Ill.u.s.trated Age_ for a fortnight's work; now it was the record of something valuable.

The train rolled into a black and echoing station as the light in the carriage began to turn from the uncertain grayness that came in at the window to the uncertain yellowness that descended from the roof. Boys ran up and down the length of the platform in the foggy gaslit darkness shouting Banbury cakes and newspapers. Elfrida hated Banbury cakes, but she had a consuming hunger and bought some. She also hated English newspapers, but lately some queer new notable Australian things had been appearing in the _St. George's Gazette_--Cardiff had sent them to her--and she selected this journal from the damp lot that hung, over the newsboy's arm, on the chance of a fresh one. The doors were locked and the train hurried on.

Elfrida ate two of her Banbury cakes with the malediction that only this British confection can inspire, and bestowed the rest upon a small boy who eyed her enviously over the back of an adjoining seat She and the small boy and his mother had the carriage to themselves.

There was nothing from the unusual Australian contributor in this number of the _St. George's_, and Elfrida turned its pages with the bored feeling of knowing what else she might expect. "Parliamentary Debates," of course, and the news of London, five lines from America announcing the burning of a New York hotel with hideous loss of life, an article on the situation in Persia, and one on the cultivation of artichokes, "Money," "The Seer of Hawarden," the foreign markets--book reviews. Elfrida thought also that she knew what she might expect here, and that it would be nothing very absorbing. Still, with a sense of tasting criticism in advance, she let her eye travel over the column or two the paper devoted to three or four books of the week. A moment later Janet Cardiff's name in the second paragraph had sprung at her throat, it seemed to Elfrida, and choked her.

She could not see--she could not see! The print was so bad, the light was infernal, the carriage jolted so. She got up and held the paper nearer to the lamp in the roof, staying herself against the end of a seat. As she read she grew paler, and the paper shook in her hand. "One of the valuable books of the year," "showing grasp of character and keen dramatic instinct," "a distinctly original vein," "too slender a plot for perfect symmetry, but a treatment of situation at once nervous and strong,"

were some of the commonplaces that said themselves over and again in her mind as she sank back into her place by the window with the paper lying across her lap.

Her heart beat furiously, her head was in a whirl; she stared hard, for calmness, into the swift-pa.s.sing night outside. Presently she recognized herself to be angry with an intense still jealous anger that seemed to rise and consume her in every part of her being. A success--of course it would be a success if Janet wrote it--she was not artistic enough to fail. Ah, should Janet's friend go so far as to say that? She didn't know--she would think afterward; but Janet was of those who succeed, and there were more ways than one of deserving success. Janet was a compromise; she belonged really to the British public and the cla.s.s of Academy studies from the nude which were always draped, just a little. Elfrida found a bitter satisfaction in this simile, and elaborated it.

The book would be one to be commended for _jeunes filles_, and her lips turned down mockingly in the shadow. She fancied some well-meaning critic saying, "It should be on every drawing-room table," and she almost laughed outright. She thought of a number of other little things that might be said, of the same nature and equally amusing.

Her anger flamed up again at the thought of how Janet had concealed this ambition from her, had made her, in a way, the victim of it. It was not fair--not fair! She could have prepared herself against it; she might have got _her_ book ready sooner, and its triumphant editions might at least have come out side by side with Janet's.

She was just beginning to feel that they were neck and neck, in a way, and now Janet had shot so far ahead, in a night, in a paragraph. She could never, never catch up! And from under her closed eyelids two hot tears started and ran over her cold cheeks. It came upon her suddenly that she was sick with jealousy, not envy, but pure anger at being distanced, and she tried to attack herself about it. With a strong effort she heaped opprobrium and shame upon herself, denounced herself, tried to hate herself. But she felt that it was all a kind of dumb-show, and that under it nothing could change the person she was or the real feeling she had about this--nothing except being first. Ah! then she could be generous and loyal and disinterested; then she could be really a nice person to know, she derided herself. And as her foot touched the little hand-bag on the floor she took a kind of sullen courage, which deserted her when she folded the paper on her lap and was struck again in the face with Lash and Black's advertis.e.m.e.nt on the outside page announcing Janet's novel in letters that looked half a foot long.

Then she resigned herself to her wretchedness till the train sped into the glory of Paddington.

"I hope you're not bad, miss," remarked the small boy's mother as they pushed toward the door together; "them Banburys don't agree with everybody."

The effect upon Elfrida was hysterical. She controlled herself just long enough to answer with decent gravity, and escaped upon the platform to burst into a silent quivering paroxysm of laughter that brought her overcharged feeling delicious relief, and produced an answering smile on the face of a large, good-looking policeman. Her laugh rested her, calmed her, and restored something of her moral tone. She was at least able to resist the temptation of asking the boy at the book-stall where she bought "John Camberwell" whether the volume was selling rapidly or not. Buddha looked on askance while she read it, all night long and well into the morning. She reached the last page and flung down the book in pure physical exhaustion, with the framework of half a dozen reviews in her mind. When she awoke, at two in the afternoon, she decided that she must have another day or two of solitude; she would not let the Cardiffs know she had returned quite yet.

Three days afterward the _Ill.u.s.trated Age_ published a review of "John Camberwell" which brought an agreeable perplexity to Messrs. Lash and Black. It was too good to compress, and their usual advertising s.p.a.ce would not contain it all. It was almost pa.s.sionately appreciative; here and there the effect of criticism was obviously marred by the desire of the writer to let no point of beauty or of value escape divination. Quotations from the book were culled like flowers, with a delicate hand; and there was conspicuous care in the avoidance of any phrase that was hackneyed, any line of criticism that custom had impoverished. It seemed that the writer fashioned a tribute, and strove to make it perfect in every way. And so perfect it was, so cunningly devised and gracefully expressed, with such a self-conscious beauty of word and thought, that its extravagance went unsuspected, and the interest it provoked was its own.

Janet read the review in glow of remorseful affection.

She was appealed to less by the exquisite manipulation with which the phrases strove to say the most and the best, than by the loyal haste to praise she saw behind, them, and she forgave their lack of blame in the happy belief that Elfrida had not the heart for it. She was not in the least angry that her friend should have done her the injustice of what would have been, less adroitly managed, indiscriminate praise; in fact, she hardly thought of the value of the critique at all, so absorbed was she in the sweet sense of the impulse that made Elfrida write it. To Janet's quick forgiveness it made up for everything; indeed, she found in it a scourge for her anger, for her resentment. Elfrida might do what she pleased, Janet would never cavil again; she was sure now of some real possession in her friend. But she longed to see Elfrida, to a.s.sure herself of the warm verity of this. Besides, she wanted to feel her work in her friend's presence, to extract the censure that was due, to take the essence of praise from her eyes and voice and hand.

But she would wait. She had still no right to know that Elfrida had returned, and an odd sensitiveness prevented her from driving instantly to Ess.e.x Court to ask.

The next day pa.s.sed, and the next. Lawrence Cardiff found no reason to share his daughter's scruples, and went twice, to meet Mrs. Jordan on the threshold with the implacable statement that Miss Bell had returned but was not at home. He found it impossible to mention Elfrida to Janet now.

John Kendal had gone back to Devonshire to look after the thinning of a bit of his woodlands--one thing after another claimed his attention there. Janet had a gay note from him now and then, always _en camarade_, in which he deplored himself in the character of an intelligent land-owner, but in which she detected also a growing interest and satisfaction in all that he was finding to do. Janet saw it always with a throb of pleasure; his art was much to her, but the sympathy that bound him to the practical side of his world was more, though she would not have confessed it. She was unconsciously comforted by the sense that it was on the warm, bright, comprehensible side of his interest in life that she touched him--and that Elfrida did not touch him. The idea of the country house in Devonshire excluded Elfrida, and it was an exclusion Janet could be happy in conscientiously, since Elfrida did not care.

CHAPTER XXVII.

Even in view of her popular magazine articles and her literary name Janet's novel was a surprising success.

There is no reason why we should follow the example of all the London critics except Elfrida Bell, and go into the detail of its slender story, and its fairly original, broadly human qualities of treatment, to explain this; the fact will, perhaps, be accepted without demonstration.