The Awkward Age
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Pressed as she was, there was something in his face that momentarily hushed her. “There it is!” she achieved however at last.
“Of ME?” Mitchy went on.
What was in his face so suddenly and strangely—was the look of rising tears—at sight of which, as from a compunction as prompt, she showed a lovely flush. “There it is, there it is,” she repeated. “You ask me for a reason, and it’s the only one I see. Of course if you don’t care,” she added, “he needn’t come up. He can go straight to Nanda.”
Mitchy had turned away again as with the impulse of hiding the tears that had risen and that had not wholly disappeared even by the time he faced about. “Did Nanda know he was to come?”
“Mr. Longdon?”
“No, no. Was she expecting Van—?”
“My dear man,” Mrs. Brook mildly wailed, “when can she have NOT been?”
Mitchy looked hard for an instant at the floor. “I mean does she know he has been and gone?”
Mrs. Brook, from where she stood and through the window, looked rather at the sky. “Her father will have told her.”
“Her father?” Mitchy frankly wondered. “Is HE in it?”
Mrs. Brook had at this a longer pause. “You assume, I suppose, Mitchy dear,” she then quavered “that I put him up—!”
“Put Edward up?” he broke in.
“No—that of course. Put Van up to ideas—!”
He caught it again. “About ME—what you call his suspicions?” He seemed to weigh the charge, but it ended, while he passed his hand hard over his eyes, in weariness and in the nearest approach to coldness he had ever shown Mrs. Brook. “It doesn’t matter. It’s every one’s fate to be in one way or another the subject of ideas. Do then,” he continued, “let Mr. Longdon come up.”
She instantly rang the bell. “Then I’ll go to Nanda. But don’t look frightened,” she added as she came back, “as to what we may—Edward or I—do next. It’s only to tell her that he’ll be with her.”
“Good. I’ll tell Tatton,” Mitchy replied.
Still, however, she lingered. “Shall you ever care for me more?”
He had almost the air, as he waited for her to go, of the master of the house, for she had made herself before him, as he stood with his back to the fire, as humble as a tolerated visitor. “Oh just as much. Where’s the difference? Aren’t our ties in fact rather multiplied?”
“That’s the way I want to feel it. And from the moment you recognise with me—”
“Yes?”
“Well, that he never, you know, really WOULD—”
He took her mercifully up. “There’s no harm done?” Mitchy thought of it.
It made her still hover. “Nanda will be rich. Toward that you CAN help, and it’s really, I may now tell you, what it came into my head you should see our friend here FOR.”
He maintained his waiting attitude. “Thanks, thanks.”
“You’re our guardian angel!” she exclaimed.
At this he laughed out. “Wait till you see what Mr. Longdon does!”
But she took no notice. “I want you to see before I go that I’ve done nothing for myself. Van, after all—!” she mused.
“Well?”
“Only hates me. It isn’t as with you,” she said. “I’ve really lost him.”
Mitchy for an instant, with the eyes that had shown his tears, glared away into space. “He can’t very positively, you know, now like ANY of us. He misses a fortune.”
“There it is!” Mrs. Brook once more observed. Then she had a comparative brightness. “I’m so glad YOU don’t!” He gave another laugh, but she was already facing Mr. Tatton, who had again answered the bell. “Show Mr. Longdon up.”
“I’m to tell him then it’s at your request?” Mitchy asked when the butler had gone.
“That you receive him? Oh yes. He’ll be the last to quarrel with that. But there’s one more thing.”
It was something over which of a sudden she had one of her returns of anxiety. “I’ve been trying for months and months to remember to find out from you—”
“Well, what?” he enquired, as she looked odd.
“Why if Harold ever gave back to you, as he swore to me on his honour he would, that five-pound note—!”
“But which, dear lady?” The sense of other incongruities than those they had been dealing with seemed to arrive now for Mitchy’s aid.
“The one that, ages ago, one day when you and Van were here, we had the joke about. You produced it, in sport, as a ‘fine’ for something, and put it on that table; after which, before I knew what you were about, before I could run after you, you had gone off and ridiculously left it. Of course the next minute—and again before I could turn round—Harold had pounced on it, and I tried in vain to recover it from him. But all I could get him to do—”
“Was to promise to restore it straight to its owner?” Mitchy had listened so much less in surprise than in amusement that he had apparently after a moment re-established the scene. “Oh I recollect—he did settle with me. THAT’S all right.”
She fixed him from the door of the next room. “You got every penny?”
“Every penny. But fancy your bringing it up!”
“Ah I always do, you know—SOME day.”
“Yes, you’re of a rigour—! But be at peace. Harold’s quite square,” he went on, “and I quite meant to have asked you about him.”
Mrs. Brook, promptly, was all for this. “Oh it’s all right.”
Mitchy came nearer. “Lady Fanny—?”
“Yes—HAS stayed for him.”
“Ah,” said Mitchy, “I knew you’d do it! But hush—they’re coming!” On which, while she whisked away, he went back to the fire.
IV
Ten minutes of talk with Mr. Longdon by Mrs. Brookenham’s hearth elapsed for him without his arriving at the right moment to take up the business so richly put before him in his previous interview. No less time indeed could have sufficed to bring him into closer relation with this affair, and nothing at first could have been more marked than the earnestness of his care not to show impatience of appeals that were, for a person of his old friend’s general style, simple recognitions and decencies. There was a limit to the mere allusiveness with which, in Mr. Longdon’s school of manners, a foreign tour might be treated, and Mitchy, no doubt, plentifully showed that none of his frequent returns had encountered a curiosity at once so explicit and so discreet. To belong to a circle in which most of the members might be at any moment on the other side of the globe was inevitably to fall into the habit of few questions, as well as into that of making up for their fewness by their freedom. This interlocutor in short, while Mrs. Brook’s representative privately thought over all he had in hand, went at some length and very charmingly—since it was but a tribute to common courtesy—into the Virgilian associations of the Bay of Naples. Finally, however, he started, his eye having turned to the clock. “I’m afraid that, though our hostess doesn’t appear, I mustn’t forget myself. I too came back but yesterday and I’ve an engagement—for which I’m already late—with Miss Brookenham, who has been so good as to ask me to tea.”
The divided mind, the express civility, the decent “Miss Brookenham,” the escape from their hostess—these were all things Mitchy could quickly take in, and they gave him in a moment his light for not missing his occasion. “I see, I see—I shall make you keep Nanda waiting. But there’s something I shall ask you to take from me quite as a sufficient basis for that: which is simply that after all, you know—for I think you do know, don’t you?—I’m nearly as much attached to her as you are.”
Mr. Longdon had looked suddenly apprehensive and even a trifle embarrassed, but he spoke with due presence of mind. “Of course I understand that perfectly. If you hadn’t liked her so much—”
“Well?” said Mitchy as he checked himself.
“I would never, last year, have gone to stay with you.”
“Thank you!” Mitchy laughed.
“Though I like you also—and extremely,” Mr. Longdon gravely pursued, “for yourself.”
Mitchy made a sign of acknowledgement. “You like me better for HER than you do for anybody else BUT myself.”
“You put it, I think, correctly. Of course I’ve not seen so much of Nanda—if between my age and hers, that is, any real contact is possible—without knowing that she now regards you as one of the very best of her friends, treating you, I find myself suspecting, with a degree of confidence—”
Mitchy gave a laugh of interruption. “That she doesn’t show even to you?”
Mr. Longdon’s poised glasses faced him. “Even! I don’t mind, as the opportunity has come up, telling you frankly—and as from my time of life to your own—all the comfort I take in the sense that in any case of need or trouble she might look to you for whatever advice or support the crisis should demand.”
“She has told you she feels I’d be there?” Mitchy after an instant asked.
“I’m not sure,” his friend replied, “that I ought quite to mention anything she has ‘told’ me. I speak of what I’ve made out myself.”
“Then I thank you more than I can say for your penetration. Her mother, I should let you know,” Mitchy continued, “is with her just now.”
Mr. Longdon took off his glasses with a jerk. “Has anything happened to her?”
“To account for the fact I refer to?” Mitchy said in amusement at his start. “She’s not ill, that I know of, thank goodness, and she hasn’t broken her leg. But something, none the less, has happened to her—that I think I may say. To tell you all in a word, it’s the reason, such as it is, of my being here to meet you. Mrs. Brook asked me to wait. She’ll see you herself some other time.”
Mr. Longdon wondered. “And Nanda too?”
“Oh that must be between yourselves. Only, while I keep you here—”
“She understands my delay?”
Mitchy thought. “Mrs. Brook must have explained.” Then as his companion took this in silence, “But you don’t like it?” he asked.
“It only comes to me that Mrs. Brook’s explanations—!”
“Are often so odd? Oh yes; but Nanda, you know, allows for that oddity. And Mrs. Brook, by the same token,” Mitchy developed, “knows herself—no one better—what may frequently be thought of it. That’s precisely the reason of her desire that you should have on this occasion explanations from a source that she’s so good as to pronounce, for the immediate purpose, superior. As for Nanda,” he wound up, “to be aware that we’re here together won’t strike her as so bad a sign.”
“No,” Mr. Longdon attentively assented; “she’ll hardly fear we’re plotting her ruin. But what then has happened to her?”
“Well,” said Mitchy, “it’s you, I think, who will have to give it a name. I know you know what I’ve known.”
Mr. Longdon, his nippers again in place, hesitated. “Yes, I know.”
“And you’ve accepted it.”
“How could I help it? To reckon with such cleverness—!”
“Was beyond you? Ah it wasn’t my cleverness,” Mitchy said. “There’s a greater than mine. There’s a greater even than Van’s. That’s the whole point,” he went on while his friend looked at him hard. “You don’t even like it just a little?”
Mr. Longdon wondered. “The existence of such an element—?”
“No; the existence simply of my knowledge of your idea.”
“I suppose I’m bound to keep in mind in fairness the existence of my own knowledge of yours.”
But Mitchy gave that the go-by. “Oh I’ve so many ‘ideas’! I’m always getting hold of some new one and for the most part trying it—generally to let it go as a failure. Yes, I had one six months ago. I tried that. I’m trying it still.”
“Then I hope,” said Mr. Longdon with a gaiety slightly strained, “that, contrary to your usual rule, it’s a success.”
It was a gaiety, for that matter, that Mitchy’s could match. “It does promise well! But I’ve another idea even now, and it’s just what I’m again trying.”
“On me?” Mr. Longdon still somewhat extravagantly smiled.
Mitchy thought. “Well, on two or three persons, of whom you ARE the first for me to tackle. But what I must begin with is having from you that you recognise she trusts us.”
Mitchy’s idea after an instant had visibly gone further. “Both of them—the two women up there at present so strangely together. Mrs. Brook must too; immensely. But for that you won’t care.”
Mr. Longdon had relapsed into an anxiety more natural than his expression of a moment before. “It’s about time! But if Nanda didn’t trust us,” he went on, “her case would indeed be a sorry one. She has nobody else to trust.”
“Yes.” Mitchy’s concurrence was grave. “Only you and me.”
“Only you and me.”
The eyes of the two men met over it in a pause terminated at last by Mitchy’s saying: “We must make it all up to her.”
“Is that your idea?”
“Ah,” said Mitchy gently, “don’t laugh at it.”
His friend’s grey gloom again covered him. “But what CAN—?” Then as Mitchy showed a face that seemed to wince with a silent “What COULD?” the old man completed his objection. “Think of the magnitude of the loss.”
“Oh I don’t for a moment suggest,” Mitchy hastened to reply, “that it isn’t immense.”
“She does care for him, you know,” said Mr. Longdon.
Mitchy, at this, gave a wide, prolonged glare. “‘Know’—?” he ever so delicately murmured.
His irony had quite touched. “But of course you know! You know everything—Nanda and you.”
There was a tone in it that moved a spring, and Mitchy laughed out. “I like your putting me with her! But we’re all together. With Nanda,” he next added, “it IS deep.”
His companion took it from him. “Deep.”
“And yet somehow it isn’t abject.”
The old man wondered. “‘Abject’?”
“I mean it isn’t pitiful. In its way,” Mitchy developed, “it’s happy.”
This too, though rather ruefully, Mr. Longdon could take from him. “Yes—in its way.”
“Any passion so great, so complete,” Mitchy went on, “is—satisfied or unsatisfied—a life.” Mr. Longdon looked so interested that his fellow visitor, evidently stirred by what was now an appeal and a dependence, grew still more bland, or at least more assured, for affirmation. “She’s not TOO sorry for herself.”
“Ah she’s so proud!”
“Yes, but that’s a help.”
“Oh—not for US!”
It arrested Mitchy, but his ingenuity could only rebound. “In ONE way: that of reducing us to feel that the desire to ‘make up’ to her is—well, mainly for OUR relief. If she ‘trusts’ us, as I said just now, it isn’t for THAT she does so.” As his friend appeared to wait then to hear, it was presently with positive joy that he showed he could meet the last difficulty. “What she trusts us to do”—oh Mitchy had worked it out!—“is to let HIM off.”
“Let him off?” It still left Mr. Longdon dim.
“Easily. That’s all.”
“But what would letting him off hard be? It seems to me he’s—on any terms—already beyond us. He IS off.”
Mr. Longdon had given it a sound that suddenly made Mitchy appear to collapse under a sharper sense of the matter. “He IS off,” he moodily echoed.
His companion, again a little bewildered, watched him; then with impatience: “Do, please, tell me what has happened.”
He quickly pulled himself round. “Well, he was, after a long absence, here a while since as if expressly to see her. But after spending half an hour he went away without it.”
Mr. Longdon’s watch continued. “He spent the half-hour with her mother instead?”
“Oh ‘instead’—it was hardly that. He at all events dropped his idea.”
“And what had it been, his idea?”
“You speak as if he had as many as I!” Mitchy replied. “In a manner indeed he has,” he continued as if for himself. “But they’re of a different kind,” he said to Mr. Longdon.
“What had it been, his idea?” the old man, however, simply repeated.
Mitchy’s confession at this seemed to explain his previous evasion. “We shall never know.”
Mr. Longdon hesitated. “He won’t tell YOU?”
“Me?” Mitchy had a pause. “Less than any one.”
Many things they had not spoken had already passed between them, and something evidently, to the sense of each, passed during the moment that followed this. “While you were abroad,” Mr. Longdon presently asked, “did you hear from him?”
“Never. And I wrote nothing.”
“Like me,” said Mr. Longdon. “I’ve neither written nor heard.”
“Ah but with you it will be different.” Mr. Longdon, as if with the outbreak of an agitation hitherto controlled, had turned abruptly away and, with the usual swing of his glass, begun almost wildly to wander. “You WILL hear.”
“I shall be curious.”
“Oh but what Nanda wants, you know, is that you shouldn’t be too much so.”
Mr. Longdon thoughtfully rambled. “Too much—?”
“To let him off, as we were saying, easily.”
The elder man for a while said nothing more, but he at last came back. “She’d like me actually to give him something?”
“I dare say!”
“Money?”
Mitchy smiled. “A handsome present.” They were face to face again with more mute interchange. “She doesn’t want HIM to have lost—!” Mr. Longdon, however, on this, once more broke off while Mitchy’s eyes followed him. “Doesn’t it give a sort of measure of what she may feel—?”
He had paused, working it out again with the effect of his friend’s returning afresh to be fed with his light. “Doesn’t what give it?”
“Why the fact that we still like him.”
Mr. Longdon stared. “Do YOU still like him?”
“If I didn’t how should I mind—?” But on the utterance of it Mitchy fairly pulled up.
His companion, after another look, laid a mild hand on his shoulder. “What is it you mind?”
“From HIM? Oh nothing!” He could trust himself again. “There are people like that—great cases of privilege.”
“He IS one!” Mr. Longdon mused.
“There it is. They go through life somehow guaranteed. They can’t help pleasing.”
“Ah,” Mr. Longdon murmured, “if it hadn’t been for that—!”
“They hold, they keep every one,” Mitchy went on. “It’s the sacred terror.”
The companions for a little seemed to stand together in this element; after which the elder turned once more away and appeared to continue to walk in it. “Poor Nanda!” then, in a far-off sigh, came across from him to Mitchy. Mitchy on this turned vaguely round to the fire, into which he remained gazing till he heard again Mr. Longdon’s voice. “I knew it of course after all. It was what I came up to town for. That night, before you went abroad, at Mrs. Grendon’s—”
“Yes?”—Mitchy was with him again.
“Well, made me see the future. It was then already too late.”
Mitchy assented with emphasis. “Too late. She was spoiled for him.”
If Mr. Longdon had to take it he took it at least quietly, only saying after a time: “And her mother ISN’T?”
“Oh yes. Quite.”
“And does Mrs. Brook know it?”
“Yes, but doesn’t mind. She resembles you and me. She ‘still likes’ him.”
“But what good will that do her?”
Mitchy sketched a shrug. “What good does it do US?”
Mr. Longdon thought. “We can at least respect ourselves.”
“CAN we?” Mitchy smiled.
“And HE can respect us,” his friend, as if not hearing him, went on.
Mitchy seemed almost to demur. “He must think we’re ‘rum.’”
“Well, Mrs. Brook’s worse than rum. He can’t respect HER.”
“Oh that will be perhaps,” Mitchy laughed, “what she’ll get just most out of!” It was the first time of Mr. Longdon’s showing that even after a minute he had not understood him; so that as quickly as possible he passed to another point. “If you do anything may I be in it?”
“But what can I do? If it’s over it’s over.”
“For HIM, yes. But not for her or for you or for me.”
“Oh I’m not for long!” the old man wearily said, turning the next moment to the door, at which one of the footmen had appeared.
“Mrs. Brookenham’s compliments, please sir,” this messenger articulated, “and Miss Brookenham is now alone.”
“Thanks—I’ll come up.”
The servant withdrew, and the eyes of the two visitors again met for a minute, after which Mitchy looked about for his hat. “Good-bye. I’ll go.”
Mr. Longdon watched him while, having found his hat, he looked about for his stick. “You want to be in EVERYTHING?”
Mitchy, without answering, smoothed his hat down; then he replied: “You say you’re not for long, but you won’t abandon her.”
“Oh I mean I shan’t last for ever.”
“Well, since you so expressed it yourself, that’s what I mean too. I assure you I shan’t desert her. And if I can help you—!”
“Help me?” Mr. Longdon interrupted, looking at him hard.
It made him a little awkward. “Help you to help her, you know—!”
“You’re very wonderful,” Mr. Longdon presently returned. “A year and a half ago you wanted to help me to help Mr. Vanderbank.”
“Well,” said Mitchy, “you can’t quite say I haven’t.”
“But your ideas of help are of a splendour—!”
“Oh I’ve told you about my ideas.” Mitchy was almost apologetic. Mr. Longdon had a pause. “I suppose I’m not indiscreet then in recognising your marriage as one of them. And that, with a responsibility so great already assumed, you appear fairly eager for another—!”
“Makes me out a kind of monster of benevolence?” Mitchy looked at it with a flushed face. “The two responsibilities are very much one and the same. My marriage has brought me, as it were, only nearer to Nanda. My wife and she, don’t you see? are particular friends.”
Mr. Longdon, on his side, turned a trifle pale; he looked rather hard at the floor. “I see—I see.” Then he raised his eyes. “But—to an old fellow like me—it’s all so strange.”
“It IS strange.” Mitchy spoke very kindly. “But it’s all right.”
Mr. Longdon gave a headshake that was both sad and sharp. “It’s all wrong. But YOU’RE all right!” he added in a different tone as he walked hastily away.
BOOK TENTH. NANDA
I
Nanda Brookenham, for a fortnight after Mr. Longdon’s return, had found much to think of; but the bustle of business became, visibly for us, particularly great with her on a certain Friday afternoon in June. She was in unusual possession of that chamber of comfort in which so much of her life had lately been passed, the redecorated and rededicated room upstairs in which she had enjoyed a due measure both of solitude and of society. Passing the objects about her in review she gave especial attention to her rather marked wealth of books; changed repeatedly, for five minutes, the position of various volumes, transferred to tables those that were on shelves and rearranged shelves with an eye to the effect of backs. She was flagrantly engaged throughout indeed in the study of effect, which moreover, had the law of an extreme freshness not inveterately prevailed there, might have been observed to be traceable in the very detail of her own appearance. “Company” in short was in the air and expectation in the picture. The flowers on the little tables bloomed with a consciousness sharply taken up by the glitter of nick-nacks and reproduced in turn in the light exuberance of cushions on sofas and the measured drop of blinds in windows. The numerous photographed friends in particular were highly prepared, with small intense faces, each, that happened in every case to be turned to the door. The pair of eyes most dilated perhaps was that of old Van, present under a polished glass and in a frame of gilt-edged morocco that spoke out, across the room, of Piccadilly and Christmas, and visibly widening his gaze at the opening of the door, at the announcement of a name by a footman and at the entrance of a gentleman remarkably like him save as the resemblance was on the gentleman’s part flattered. Vanderbank had not been in the room ten seconds before he showed ever so markedly that he had arrived to be kind. Kindness therefore becomes for us, by a quick turn of the glass that reflects the whole scene, the high pitch of the concert—a kindness that almost immediately filled the place, to the exclusion of everything else, with a familiar friendly voice, a brightness of good looks and good intentions, a constant though perhaps sometimes misapplied laugh, a superabundance almost of interest, inattention and movement.
The first thing the young man said was that he was tremendously glad she had written. “I think it was most particularly nice of you.” And this thought precisely seemed, as he spoke, a flower of the general bloom—as if the niceness he had brought in was so great that it straightway converted everything to its image. “The only thing that upset me a little,” he went on, “was your saying that before writing it you had so hesitated and waited. I hope very much, you know, that you’ll never do anything of that kind again. If you’ve ever the slightest desire to see me—for no matter what reason, if there’s ever the smallest thing of any sort that I can do for you, I promise you I shan’t easily forgive you if you stand on ceremony. It seems to me that when people have known each other as long as you and I there’s one comfort at least they may treat themselves to. I mean of course,” Van developed, “that of being easy and frank and natural. There are such a lot of relations in which one isn’t, in which it doesn’t pay, in which ‘ease’ in fact would be the greatest of troubles and ‘nature’ the greatest of falsities. However,” he continued while he suddenly got up to change the place in which he had put his hat, “I don’t really know why I’m preaching at such a rate, for I’ve a perfect consciousness of not myself requiring it. One does half the time preach more or less for one’s self, eh? I’m not mistaken at all events, I think, about the right thing with YOU. And a hint’s enough for you, I’m sure, on the right thing with me.” He had been looking all round while he talked and had twice shifted his seat; so that it was quite in consonance with his general admiring notice that the next impression he broke out with should have achieved some air of relevance. “What extraordinarily lovely flowers you have and how charming you’ve made everything! You’re always doing something—women are always changing the position of their furniture. If one happens to come in in the dark, no matter how well one knows the place, one sits down on a hat or a puppy-dog. But of course you’ll say one doesn’t come in in the dark, or at least, if one does, deserves what one gets. Only you know the way some women keep their rooms. I’m bound to say YOU don’t, do you?—you don’t go in for flower-pots in the windows and half a dozen blinds. Why SHOULD you? You HAVE got a lot to show!” He rose with this for the third time, as the better to command the scene. “What I mean is that sofa—which by the way is awfully good: you do, my dear Nanda, go it! It certainly was HERE the last time, wasn’t it? and this thing was there. The last time—I mean the last time I was up here—was fearfully long ago: when, by the way, WAS it? But you see I HAVE been and that I remember it. And you’ve a lot more things now. You’re laying up treasure. Really the increase of luxury—! What an awfully jolly lot of books—have you read them all? Where did you learn so much about bindings?”