Part 33 (1/2)
Cecil Farquhar bent his six-foot-one down to her five-foot-five. ”Are you angry with me?” he whispered.
”I don't know; I think I am.”
”But you will let me come and see you, so that you may forgive me, won't you?”
”You don't deserve it.”
”Of course I don't; I shouldn't want it if I did. The things we deserve are as unpleasant as our doctor's prescriptions. Please let me come--because we knew each other all those centuries ago, and I haven't forgotten you.”
”Very well, then. You'll find my address in the Red Book, and I'm always at home on Sunday afternoons.”
As Elisabeth was whirled away into a vortex of gay and well-dressed people, Farquhar watched her for a moment. ”She is an attractive woman,”
he said to himself, ”though she is not as good-looking as I expected.
But there's charm about her, and breeding; and they say she has an enormous fortune. She is certainly worth cultivating.”
Farquhar cultivated the distinguished Miss Farringdon a.s.siduously, and the friends.h.i.+p between them grew apace. Each had a certain attraction for the other; and, in addition, they enjoyed that wonderful freemasonry which exists among all followers of the same craft, and welds these together in a bond almost as strong as the bond of relations.h.i.+p. The artist in Farquhar was of far finer fibre than the man, as is sometimes the case with complex natures; so that one side of him gave expression to thoughts which the other side of him was incapable of comprehending.
He did not consciously pretend that he was better than he was, and he really believed the truths which he preached; but when the G.o.ds serve their nectar in earthen vessels, the vessels are apt to get more credit than they deserve, and the G.o.ds less.
To Elisabeth, Cecil was extremely interesting; and she understood--better than most women would have done--the difference between himself and his art, and how the one must not be measured by the other. The artist attracted her greatly; she had so much sympathy with his ways of looking at life and of interpreting truth; as for the man, she had as yet come to no definite conclusion in her mind concerning him; it was not easy for mankind to fascinate Elisabeth Farringdon.
”I have come to see my mother-confessor,” he said to her one Sunday afternoon, when he dropped in to find her alone, Grace Cobham having gone out to tea. ”I have been behaving horribly all the week, and I want you to absolve me and help me to be better and nicer.”
Elisabeth was the last woman to despise flattery of this sort; an appeal for help of any kind never found her indifferent.
”What have you been doing?” she asked gently.
”It isn't so much what I have been doing as what I have been feeling. I found myself actually liking Lady Silverhampton, simply because she is a countess; and I was positively rude to a man I know, called Edgar Ford, because he lives at the East End and dresses badly. What a falling-off since the days when you and I wors.h.i.+pped the G.o.ds together at Philae, and before money and rank and railways and bicycles came into fas.h.i.+on!
Help me to be as I was then, dear friend.”
”How can I?”
”By simply being yourself and letting me watch you. I always feel good and ideal and unworldly when I am near you. Don't you know how dreadful it is to wish to do one thing and to want to do another, and to be torn asunder between the two?”
Elisabeth shook her head. ”No; I have never felt like that. I can understand wanting to do different things at different times of one's life, but I can not comprehend how one person can want to do two opposing things at the same time.”
”Oh! I can. I can imagine doing a thing, and despising one's self at the time for doing it, and yet not being able to help doing it.”
”I have heard other people say that, and I can't understand it.”
”Yet you are so complex; I should have thought you would,” said Farquhar.
”Yes, I am complex; but not at the same moment. I have two distinct natures, but the two are never on the stage at once. I don't in the least know what St. Paul meant when he said that the evil he would not that he did. I can quite understand doing the evil on Tuesday morning that I would not on Monday afternoon; but I could never do anything and disapprove of it at the same minute.”
”That is because you are so good--and so cold.”
”Am I?”
”Yes, dear Miss Farringdon; and so amiable. You never do things in a temper.”