A Daughter of To-Day Part 23

"Quite true. I have done three chapters already. What do you think of it? Isn't it a good idea?"

"Do you really want to know?"

"Of course!"

"I think," said Janet slowly, looking into the fire, "that the scheme is a contemptible one, and that you are doing a very poor sort of thing in carrying it out."

"Thanks," Elfrida returned. "We are all pretty much alike, we women, aren't we, after all! Only some of us say so and some of us don't. But I shouldn't have thought you would have objected to my small rivalry _before the fact!_"

Janet sighed wearily, and looked out of the window. "Let me lend you an umbrella," she said; "the rain has come."

"It won't be necessary, thanks," Elfrida returned. "I hear Mr. Cardiff coming upstairs. I shall ask him to take care of me as far as the omnibuses. Good-by!"

CHAPTER XXVIII.

"Oh but--but," cried Elfrida, tragic-eyed, "you don't understand, my friend. And these pretences of mine are unendurable--I won't make another. This is the real reason why I can't go to your house: Janet knows --everything there is to know. I told her--I myself--in a fit of rage ten days ago, and then she said things and I said things, and--and there is nothing now between us any more!"

Lawrence Cardiff looked grave. "I am sorry for that," he said.

A middle-aged gentleman in apparently hopeless love does not confide in his grown-up daughter, and Janet's father had hardly thought of her seriously in connection with this new relation, which was to him so precarious and so sweet. Its realization had never been close enough for practical considerations; it was an image, something in the clouds; and if he still hoped and longed for its materialization there were times when he feared even to regard it too closely lest it should vanish. His first thought at this announcement of Elfrida's was of what it might signify of change, what bearing it had upon her feeling, upon her intention. Then he thought of its immediate results, which seemed to be unfortunate. But in the instant he had for reflection he did not consider Janet at all.

"Ah, yes! It was contemptible--but _contemptible!_ I did it partly to hurt her, and partly, I think, to gratify my vanity. You would not have thought anything so bad of me perhaps?" She looked up at him childishly. They were strolling about the quiet s.p.a.ces of the Temple Courts.

It was a pleasant afternoon in February, the new gra.s.s was pus.h.i.+ng up. They could be quite occupied with one another--they had the place almost to themselves.

Elfrida's well-fitting shabby little jacket hung unb.u.t.toned, and she swung Cardiff's light walking-stick as they sauntered. He, with his eyes on her delicately flushed face and his hands unprofessorially in his pockets, was counting the minutes that were left them.

"You wouldn't have, would you?" she insisted.

"I would think any womanly fault you like of you," he laughed, "but one--the fear to confess it."

Elfrida shut her lips with a little proud smile. "Do you know," she said confidingly, "when you say things like that to me I like you very much--but _very much!_"

"But not enough," he answered her quickly, "never enough, Frida?"

The girl's expression changed. "You are not to call me 'Frida,'" she said, frowning a little. "It has an a.s.sociation that will always be painful to me. When people--disappoint me, I try to forget them in every way I can." She paused, and Cardiff saw that her eyes were full of tears. He had an instant of intense resentment against his daughter. What brutality had she been guilty of toward Elfrida in that moment of unreasonable jealousy that surged up between them? He would fiercely like to know. But Elfrida was smiling again, looking up at him in wilful disregard of her wet eyes.

"Say 'Elfrida' please--all of it."

They had reached the Inner Temple Hall. "Let us go in there and sit down," he suggested. "You must be tired--dear child."

She hesitated and submitted. "Yes, I am," she said.

Presently they were sitting on one of the long dark polished wooden benches in the quiet and the rich light the ages have left in this place, keeping a mutual moment of silence. "How splendid it is!" Elfrida said restlessly, looking at the great carved wooden screen they had come through.

"The man who did that had a joy in his life, hadn't he?

To-day is very cheap and common, don't you think?"

He had hardly words to answer her vague question, so absorbed was he in the beauty and the grace and the interest with which she had suddenly invested the high-backed corner she sat in. He felt no desire to a.n.a.lyze her charm. He did not ask himself whether it was the poetry of her eyes and lips, or her sincerity about herself, or the joy in art that was the key to her soul, or all of these, or something that was none of them. He simply allowed himself to be possessed by it and Elfrida saw his pleasure in his eager look and in every line of his delicate features. It was delicious to be able to give such pleasure, she thought. She felt like a thrice spiritualized Hebe, lifting the cup, not to Jove, but to a very superior mortal. She wished in effect, as she looked at him, that he were of her essence--she might be cup-bearer to him always then. It was a graceful and unexacting occupation. But he was not absolutely, and the question was how long--She started as he seemed to voice her thought.

"This can't go on, Elfrida!"

Cardiff had somehow possessed himself of her hand as it lay along the polished edge of the wooden seat. It was a privilege, she permitted him sometimes, with the tacit understanding that he was not to abuse it.

"And why not--for a little while? It is pleasant, I think."

"If you were in love you would know why. You are not, I know--you needn't say so. But it will come, Elfrida--only give it the chance. I would stake my soul on the certainty of being able to make you love me." His confidence in the power of his own pa.s.sion was as strong as a boy's of twenty.

"If I were in love!" Elfrida repeated slowly, with an absent smile. "And you think it would come afterward.

That is an exploded idea, my friend. I should feel as if I were acting out an old-fas.h.i.+oned novel--an old-fas.h.i.+oned _second-rate_ novel."

She looked at him with eyes that invited him to share their laughter, but the smile he gave her was pitiful, if she could have known it. The strain she had bee putting upon him, and promised indefinitely to put upon him, was growing greater than he could bear.

"I am afraid I most ask you to decide," he said. "You have been telling me two things, dear. One thing with your lips and another thing with your eyes--and ways of doing. You tell me that I, must go, but you make it possible for me to stay. For G.o.d's sake let it be one or the other."

"I am so sorry. We could be friends of a sort, I think, but I can't marry you."

"You have never told me why."

"Shall I tell you truly, literally--brutally?"

"Of course!"

"Then it is not only because I don't love you--that there is not for me the common temptation to enter a form of bondage which, as I see it, is hateful. That is enough, but it is not all; it is not even the princ.i.p.al thing.

It is"--she hesitated--"it is that--that we are different, you and I. It would-be preposterous," she went on hastily, "not to admit that you are infinitely superior--of course--and cleverer and wiser and more important in the world. And that will make me absurd in your eyes when I tell you that my whole life is wrapped up in a sense which I cannot see or feel that you have at all. You have much--oh, a great deal--outside of it, and I have nothing.

My life is swayed in obedience to laws that you do not even know of. You can hardly be my friend, completely.

As your wife I should suffer and you would suffer, in a false position which could never be altered."

She paused and looked at him seriously, and he felt that she believed what she had said. She had, at all events, given him full permission to go. And he was as far from being able to avail of himself of it as he had been before--further, for every moment those slender fingers rested in his made it more impossible to relinquish them, for always. So, he persisted, with a bitter sense of failure that would not wholly, honestly recognize itself.

"Is Golightly Ticke your friend--completely?"

"More--pardon me--than you could ever be," she answered him, undaunted by the contempt in his tone.

There was silence for a moment between them. Elfrida's wide-eyed gaze wandered appreciatively over the dusky interior, which for the man beside her barely existed.

"What a lot of English character there is here," she said softly. "How dignified it is, and conscientious, and restrained!"

It was as if she had not spoken. Cardiff stared with knit brows into the insoluble problem she had presented to him a moment longer. "_How_ are we so different, Elfrida?"

he broke out pa.s.sionately. "You are a woman and I am a man; the world has dealt with us, educated us, differently, and I am older than I dare say I ought to be to hope for your love. But these are not differences that count, whatever their results may be. It seems to me trivial to speak of such things in this connection, but we like very much the same books, the same people. I grant you I don't know anything about pictures; but surely," he pleaded, "these are not the things that cut a man off from the happiness of a lifetime!"

"I'm afraid--" she began, and then she broke off suddenly.

"I _am_ sorry--sorrier than I have ever been before, I think. I should have liked so well to keep your friends.h.i.+p; it is the most chivalrous I know. But if you feel like--like this about it I suppose I must not. Shall we say good-by here and now? Truly I am sorry."

She had risen, and he could find no words to stay her.

It seemed that the battle to possess her was over, and that he, had lost. Her desire for his friends.h.i.+p had all the mockery of freedom in it to him--in the agony of the moment it insulted him. With an effort he controlled himself--there should be no more of the futility of words.

He must see the last of her some time--let it be now, then. He bent his head over the slender hand he held, brought his lips to it, and then, with sudden pa.s.sion, kissed it hotly again and again, seeking the warm, uncovered little spot above the fastening. Elfrida s.n.a.t.c.hed it away with a little s.h.i.+ver at the contact, a little angry s.h.i.+ver of surprised nerves. He looked at her piteously, struggling for a word, for any word to send away her repulsion, to bring her back to the mood of the moment before. But he could not find it; he seemed to have drifted hopelessly from her, to have lost all his reckonings.