Mitchy was on his feet in the apartment in which their host had left them, and he had at first for this question but an expressive motion of the shoulders in respect to everything in the room. “See, judge, guess, feel!”
But it was as if Vanderbank, before the fire, consciously controlled his own attention. “Oh I don’t care a hang!”
This passage took place in the library and as a consequence of their having confessed, as their friend faced them with his bedroom light, that a brief discreet vigil and a box of cigars would fix better than anything else the fine impression of the day. Mitchy might at that moment, on the evidence of the eyes Mr. Longdon turned to them and of which his innocent candle-flame betrayed the secret, have found matter for a measure of the almost extreme allowances he wanted them to want of him. They had only to see that the greater window was fast and to turn out the library lamp. It might really have amused them to stand a moment at the open door that, apart from this, was to testify to his conception of those who were not, in the smaller hours, as HE was. He had in fact by his retreat—and but too sensibly—left them there with a deal of midnight company. If one of these presences was the mystery he had himself mixed the manner of our young men showed a due expectation of the others. Mitchy, on hearing how little Vanderbank “cared,” only kept up a while longer that observant revolution in which he had spent much of his day, to which any fresh sense of any exhibition always promptly committed him, and which, had it not been controlled by infinite tact, might have affected the nerves of those in whom enjoyment was less rotary. He was silent long enough to suggest his fearing that almost anything he might say would appear too allusive; then at last once more he took his risk. “Awfully jolly old place!”
“It is indeed,” Van only said; but his posture in the large chair he had pushed toward the open window was of itself almost an opinion. The August night was hot and the air that came in charged and sweet. Vanderbank smoked with his face to the dusky garden and the dim stars; at the end of a few moments more of which he glanced round. “Don’t you think it rather stuffy with that big lamp? As those candles on the chimney are going we might put it out.”
“Like this?” The amiable Mitchy had straightway obliged his companion and he as promptly took in the effect of the diminished light on the character of the room, which he commended as if the depth of shadow produced were all this companion had sought. He might freshly have brought home to Vanderbank that a man sensitive to so many different things, and thereby always sure of something or other, could never really be incommoded; though that personage presently indeed showed himself occupied with another thought.
“I think I ought to mention to you that I’ve told him how you and Mrs. Brook now both know. I did so this afternoon on our way back from church—I hadn’t done it before. He took me a walk round to show me more of the place, and that gave me my chance. But he doesn’t mind,” Vanderbank continued. “The only thing is that I’ve thought it may possibly make him speak to you, so that it’s better you should know he knows. But he told me definitely Nanda doesn’t.”
Mitchy took this in with an attention that spoke of his already recognising how the less tempered darkness favoured talk. “And is that all that passed between you?”
“Well, practically; except of course that I made him understand, I think, how it happened that I haven’t kept my own counsel.”
“Oh but you HAVE—didn’t he at least feel?—or perhaps even have done better, when you’ve two such excellent persons to keep it FOR you. Can’t he easily believe how we feel with you?”
Vanderbank appeared for a minute to leave this appeal unheeded; he continued to stare into the garden while he smoked and swung the long leg he had thrown over the arm of the chair. When he at last spoke, however, it was with some emphasis—perhaps even with some vulgarity. “Oh rot!”
Mitchy hovered without an arrest. “You mean he CAN’T feel?”
“I mean it isn’t true. I’ve no illusions about you. I know how you’re both affected, though I of course perfectly trust you.”
Mitchy had a short silence. “Trust us not to speak?”
“Not to speak to Nanda herself—though of course too if you spoke to others,” Vanderbank went on, “they’d immediately rush and tell her.”
“I’ve spoken to no one,” said Mitchy. “I’m sure of it. And neither has Mrs. Brook.”
“I’m glad you’re sure of that also,” Mitchy returned, “for it’s only doing her justice.”
“Oh I’m quite confident of it,” said Vanderbank. “And without asking her?”
“Perfectly.”
“And you’re equally sure, without asking, thatIhaven’t betrayed you?” After which, while, as if to let the question lie there in its folly, Vanderbank said nothing, his friend pursued: “I came, I must tell you, terribly near it to-day.”
“Why must you tell me? Your coming ‘near’ doesn’t concern me, and I take it you don’t suppose I’m watching or sounding you. Mrs. Brook will have come terribly near,” Vanderbank continued as if to make the matter free; “but she won’t have done it either. She’ll have been distinctly tempted—!”
“But she won’t have fallen?” Mitchy broke in. “Exactly—there we are.Iwas distinctly tempted and I didn’t fall. I think your certainty about Mrs. Brook,” he added, “shows you do know her. She’s incapable of anything deliberately nasty.”
“Oh of anything nasty in any way,” Vanderbank said musingly and kindly.
“Yes; one knows on the whole what she WON’T do.” After which, for a period, Mitchy roamed and reflected. “But in spite of the assurance given you by Mr. Longdon—or perhaps indeed just because of your having taken it—I think I ought to mention to you my belief that Nanda does know of his offer to you. I mean by having guessed it.”
“Oh!” said Vanderbank.
“There’s in fact more still,” his companion pursued—“that I feel I should like to mention to you.”
“Oh!” Vanderbank at first only repeated. But after a moment he said: “My dear fellow, I’m much obliged.”
“The thing I speak of is something I should at any rate have said, and I should have looked out for some chance if we had not had this one.” Mitchy spoke as if his friend’s last words were not of consequence, and he continued as Vanderbank got up and, moving rather aimlessly, came and stood with his back to the chimney. “My only hesitation would have been caused by its entailing our going down into things in a way that, face to face—given the private nature of the things—I dare say most men don’t particularly enjoy. But if you don’t mind—!”
“Oh I don’t mind. In fact, as I tell you, I recognise an obligation to you.” Vanderbank, with his shoulders against the high mantel, uttered this without a direct look; he smoked and smoked, then considered the tip of his cigar. “You feel convinced she knows?” he threw out.
“Well, it’s my impression.”
“Ah any impression of yours—of that sort—is sure to be right. If you think I ought to have it from you I’m really grateful. Is that—a—what you wanted to say to me?” Vanderbank after a slight pause demanded.
Mitchy, watching him more than he watched Mitchy, shook a mildly decisive head. “No.”
Vanderbank, his eyes on his smoke-puffs, seemed to wonder. “What you wanted is—something else?”
“Something else.”
“Oh!” said Vanderbank for the third time.
The ejaculation had been vague, but the movement that followed it was definite; the young man, turning away, found himself again near the chair he had quitted, and resumed possession of it as a sign of being at his friend’s service. This friend, however, not only hung fire but finally went back to take a shot from a quarter they might have been supposed to have left. “It strikes me as odd his imagining—awfully acute as he is—that she has NOT guessed. One wouldn’t have thought he could live with her here in such an intimacy—seeing her every day and pretty much all day—and make such a mistake.”
Vanderbank, his great length all of a lounge again, turned it over. “And yet I do thoroughly feel the mistake’s not yours.”
Mitchy had a new serenity of affirmation. “Oh it’s not mine.”
“Perhaps then”—it occurred to his friend—“he doesn’t really believe it.”
“And only says so to make you feel more easy?”
“So that one may—in fairness to one’s self—keep one’s head, as it were, and decide quite on one’s own grounds.”
“Then you HAVE still to decide?”
Vanderbank took time to answer. “I’ve still to decide.” Mitchy became again on this, in the sociable dusk, a slow-circling vaguely-agitated element, and his companion continued: “Is your idea very generously and handsomely to help that by letting me know—?”
“That I do definitely renounce”—Mitchy took him up—“any pretension and any hope? Well, I’m ready with a proof of it. I’ve passed my word that I’ll apply elsewhere.”
Vanderbank turned more round to him. “Apply to the Duchess for her niece?”
“It’s practically settled.”
“But since when?”
Mitchy barely faltered. “Since this afternoon.”
“Ah then not with the Duchess herself.”
“With Nanda—whose plan from the first, you won’t have forgotten, the thing has so charmingly been.”
Vanderbank could show that his not having in the least forgotten was yet not a bar to his being now mystified. “But, my dear man, what can Nanda ‘settle’?”
“My fate,” Mitchy said, pausing well before him.
Vanderbank sat now a minute with raised eyes, catching the indistinctness of the other’s strange expression. “You’re both beyond me!” he exclaimed at last. “I don’t see what you in particular gain.”
“I didn’t either till she made it all out to me. One sees then, in such a matter, for one’s self. And as everything’s gain that isn’t loss, there was nothing I COULD lose. It gets me,” Mitchy further explained, “out of the way.”
“Out of the way of what?”
This, Mitchy frankly showed, was more difficult to say, but he in time brought it out. “Well, of appearing to suggest to you that my existence, in a prolonged state of singleness, may ever represent for her any real alternative.”
“But alternative to what?”
“Why to being YOUR wife, damn you!” Mitchy, on these words turned away again, and his companion, in the presence of his renewed dim gyrations, sat for a minute dumb. Before Van had spoken indeed he was back again. “Excuse my violence, but of course you really see.”
“I’m not pretending anything,” Vanderbank said—“but a man MUST understand. What I catch hold of is that you offer me—in the fact that you’re thus at any rate disposed of—a proof that I, by the same token, shan’t, if I hesitate to ‘go in,’ have a pretext for saying to myself that I MAY deprive her—!”
“Yes, precisely,” Mitchy now urbanely assented: “of something—in the shape of a man with MY amount of money—that she may live to regret and to languish for. My amount of money, don’t you see?” he very simply added, “is nothing to her.”
“And you want me to be sure that—so far as I may ever have had a scruple—she has had her chance and got rid of it.”
“Completely,” Mitchy smiled.
“Because”—Vanderbank with the aid of his cigar thoughtfully pieced it out—“that may possibly bring me to the point.”
“Possibly!” Mitchy laughed.
He had stood a moment longer, almost as if to see the possibility develop before his eyes, and had even started at the next sound of his friend’s voice. What Vanderbank in fact brought out, however, only made him turn his back. “Do you like so very much little Aggie?”
“Well,” said Mitchy, “Nanda does. And I like Nanda.”
“You’re too amazing,” Vanderbank mused. His musing had presently the effect of making him rise; meditation indeed beset him after he was on his feet. “I can’t help its coming over me then that on such an extraordinary system you must also rather like ME.”
“What will you have, my dear Van?” Mitchy frankly asked. “It’s the sort of thing you must be most used to. For at the present moment—look!—aren’t we all at you at once?”
It was as if his dear Van had managed to appear to wonder. “‘All’?”
“Nanda, Mrs. Brook, Mr. Longdon—!”
“And you. I see.”
“Names of distinction. And all the others,” Mitchy pursued, “that I don’t count.”
“Oh you’re the best.”
“I?”
“You’re the best,” Vanderbank simply repeated. “It’s at all events most extraordinary,” he declared. “But I make you out on the whole better than I do Mr. Longdon.”
“Ah aren’t we very much the same—simple lovers of life? That is of that finer essence of it which appeals to the consciousness—”
“The consciousness?”—his companion took up his hesitation.
“Well, enlarged and improved.”
The words had made on Mitchy’s lips an image by which his friend appeared for a moment held. “One doesn’t really know quite what to say or to do.”
“Oh you must take it all quietly. You’re of a special class; one of those who, as we said the other day—don’t you remember?—are a source of the sacred terror. People made in such a way must take the consequences; just as people must take them,” Mitchy went on, “who are made asIam. So cheer up!”
Mitchy, uttering this incitement, had moved to the empty chair by the window, in which he presently was sunk; and it might have been in emulation of his previous strolling and straying that Vanderbank himself now began to revolve. The meditation he next threw out, however, showed a certain resistance to Mitchy’s advice. “I’m glad at any rate I don’t deprive her of a fortune.”
“You don’t deprive her of mine of course,” Mitchy answered from the chair; “but isn’t her enjoyment of Mr. Longdon’s at least a good deal staked after all on your action?”
Vanderbank stopped short. “It’s his idea to settle it ALL?”
Mitchy gave out his glare. “I thought you didn’t ‘care a hang.’ I haven’t been here so long,” he went on as his companion at first retorted nothing, “without making up my mind for myself about his means. He IS distinctly bloated.”
It sent Vanderbank off again. “Oh well, she’ll no more get all in the one event than she’ll get nothing in the other. She’ll only get a sort of provision. But she’ll get that whatever happens.”
“Oh if you’re sure—!” Mitchy simply commented.
“I’m not sure, confound it!” Then—for his voice had been irritated—Van spoke more quietly. “Only I see her here—though on his wish of course—handling things quite as if they were her own and paying him a visit without, apparently, any calculable end. What’s that on HIS part but a pledge?”
Oh Mitchy could show off-hand that he knew what it was. “It’s a pledge, quite as much, to you. He shows you the whole thing. He likes you not a whit less than he likes her.”
“Oh thunder!” Van impatiently sighed.
“It’s as ‘rum’ as you please, but there it is,” said the inexorable Mitchy.
“Then does he think I’ll do it for THIS?”
“For ‘this’?”
“For the place, the whole thing, as you call it, that he shows me.”
Mitchy had a short silence that might have represented a change of colour. “It isn’t good enough?” But he instantly took himself up. “Of course he wants—as I do—to treat you with tact!”
“Oh it’s all right,” Vanderbank immediately said. “Your ‘tact’—yours and his—is marvellous, and Nanda’s greatest of all.”
Mitchy’s momentary renewal of stillness was addressed, he somehow managed not obscurely to convey, to the last clause of his friend’s speech. “If you’re not sure,” he presently resumed, “why can’t you frankly ask him?”
Vanderbank again, as the phrase is, “mooned” about a little. “Because I don’t know that it would do.”
“What do you mean by ‘do’?”
“Well, that it would be exactly—what do you call it?—‘square.’ Or even quite delicate or decent. To take from him, in the way of an assurance so handsomely offered, so much, and then to ask for more: I don’t feel I can do it. Besides, I’ve my little conviction. To the question itself he might easily reply that it’s none of my business.”
“I see,” Mitchy dropped. “Such pressure might suggest to him moreover that you’re hesitating more than you perhaps really are.”
“Oh as to THAT” said Vanderbank, “I think he practically knows how much.”
“And how little?” He met this, however, with no more form than if it had been a poor joke, so that Mitchy also smoked for a moment in silence. “It’s your coming down here, you mean, for these three or four days, that will have fixed it?”
The question this time was one to which the speaker might have expected an answer, but Vanderbank’s only immediate answer was to walk and walk. “I want so awfully to be kind to her,” he at last said.
“I should think so!” Then with irrelevance Mitchy harked back. “ShallIfind out?”
But Vanderbank, with another thought, had lost the thread. “Find out what?”
“Why if she does get anything—!”
“If I’m not kind ENOUGH?”—Van had caught up again. “Dear no; I’d rather you shouldn’t speak unless first spoken to.”
“Well, HE may speak—since he knows we know.”
“It isn’t likely, for he can’t make out why I told you.”
“You didn’t tell ME, you know,” said Mitchy. “You told Mrs. Brook.”
“Well, SHE told you, and her talking about it is the unpleasant idea. He can’t get her down anyhow.”
“Poor Mrs. Brook!” Mitchy meditated.
“Poor Mrs. Brook!” his companion echoed.
“But I thought you said,” he went on, “that he doesn’t mind.”
“YOUR knowing? Well, I dare say he doesn’t. But he doesn’t want a lot of gossip and chatter.”
“Oh!” said Mitchy with meekness.
“I may absolutely take it from you then,” Vanderbank presently resumed, “that Nanda has her idea?”
“Oh she didn’t tell me so. But it’s none the less my belief.”
“Well,” Vanderbank at last threw off, “I feel it for myself. If only because she always knows everything,” he pursued without looking at Mitchy. “She always knows everything, everything.”
“Everything, everything.” Mitchy got up.
“She told me so herself yesterday,” said Van.
“And she told ME so to-day.”
Vanderbank’s hesitation might have shown he was struck with this. “Well, I don’t think it’s information that either of us required. But of course she—can’t help it,” he added. “Everything, literally everything, in London, in the world she lives in, is in the air she breathes—so that the longer SHE’S in it the more she’ll know.”
“The more she’ll know, certainly,” Mitchy acknowledged. “But she isn’t in it, you see, down here.”
“No. Only she appears to have come down with such accumulations. And she won’t be here for ever,” Vanderbank hastened to mention. “Certainly not if you marry her.”
“But isn’t that at the same time,” Vanderbank asked, “just the difficulty?”
Mitchy looked vague. “The difficulty?”
“Why as a married woman she’ll be steeped in it again.”
“Surely”—oh Mitchy could be candid! “But the difference will be that for a married woman it won’t matter. It only matters for girls,” he plausibly continued—“and then only for those on whom no one takes pity.”
“The trouble is,” said Vanderbank—but quite as if uttering only a general truth—“that it’s just a thing that may sometimes operate as a bar to pity. Isn’t it for the non-marrying girls that it doesn’t particularly matter? For the others it’s such an odd preparation.”
“Oh I don’t mind it!” Mitchy declared.
Vanderbank visibly demurred. “Ah but your choice—!”
“Is such a different sort of thing?” Mitchy, for the half-hour, in the ambiguous dusk, had never looked more droll. “The young lady I named isn’t my CHOICE.”
“Well then, that’s only a sign the more that you do these things more easily.”
“Oh ‘easily’!” Mitchy murmured.
“We oughtn’t at any rate to keep it up,” said Vanderbank, who had looked at his watch. “Twelve twenty-five—good-night. Shall I blow out the candles?”
“Do, please. I’ll close the window”—and Mitchy went to it. “I’ll follow you—good-night.” The candles after a minute were out and his friend had gone, but Mitchy, left in darkness face to face with the vague quiet garden, still stood there.
I
The footman, opening the door, mumbled his name without sincerity, and Vanderbank, passing in, found in fact—for he had caught the symptom—the chairs and tables, the lighted lamps and the flowers alone in possession. He looked at his watch, which exactly marked eight, then turned to speak again to the servant, who had, however, without another sound and as if blushing for the house, already closed him in. There was nothing indeed but Mrs. Grendon’s want of promptness that failed of a welcome: her drawing-room, on the January night, showed its elegance through a suffusion of pink electricity which melted, at the end of the vista, into the faintly golden glow of a retreat still more sacred. Vanderbank walked after a moment into the second room, which also proved empty and which had its little globes of white fire—discreetly limited in number—coated with lemon-coloured silk. The walls, covered with delicate French mouldings, were so fair that they seemed vaguely silvered; the low French chimney had a French fire. There was a lemon-coloured stuff on the sofa and chairs, a wonderful polish on the floor that was largely exposed, and a copy of a French novel in blue paper on one of the spindle-legged tables. Vanderbank looked about him an instant as if generally struck, then gave himself to something that had particularly caught his eye. This was simply his own name written rather large on the cover of the French book and endowed, after he had taken the volume up, with the power to hold his attention the more closely the longer he looked at it. He uttered, for a private satisfaction, before letting the matter pass, a low confused sound; after which, flinging the book down with some emphasis in another place, he moved to the chimney-piece, where his eyes for a little intently fixed the small ashy wood-fire. When he raised them again it was, on the observation that the beautiful clock on the mantel was wrong, to consult once more his watch and then give a glance, in the chimney-glass, at the state of his moustache, the ends of which he twisted for a moment with due care. While so engaged he became aware of something else and, quickly facing about, recognised in the doorway of the room the other figure the glass had just reflected.
“Oh YOU?” he said with a quick handshake. “Mrs. Grendon’s down?” But he had already passed with Nanda, on their greeting, back into the first room, which contained only themselves, and she had mentioned that she believed Tishy to have said 8.15, which meant of course anything people liked.
“Oh then there’ll be nobody till nine. I didn’t, I suppose, sufficiently study my note; which didn’t mention to me, by the way,” Vanderbank added, “that you were to be here.”
“Ah but why SHOULD it?” Nanda spoke again, however, before he could reply. “I dare say that when she wrote to you she didn’t know.”
“Know you’d come bang up to meet me?” Vanderbank laughed. “Jolly at any rate, thanks to my mistake, to have in this way a quiet moment with you. You came on ahead of your mother?”
“Oh no—I’m staying here.”
“Oh!” said Vanderbank.
“Mr. Longdon came up with me—I came here, Friday last, straight.”
“You parted at the door?” he asked with marked gaiety.
She thought a moment—she was more serious. “Yes—but only for a day or two. He’s coming tonight.”
“Good. How delightful!”
“He’ll be glad to see you,” Nanda said, looking at the flowers.
“Awfully kind of him when I’ve been such a brute.”
“How—a brute?”
“Well, I mean not writing—nor going back.”
“Oh I see,” Nanda simply returned.
It was a simplicity that, clearly enough, made her friend a little awkward. “Has he—a—minded? Hut he can’t have complained!” he quickly added.
“Oh he never complains.”
“No, no—it isn’t in him. But it’s just that,” said Vanderbank, “that makes one feel so base. I’ve been ferociously busy.”
“He knows that—he likes it,” Nanda returned. “He delights in your work. And I’ve done what I can for him.”
“Ah,” said her companion, “you’ve evidently brought him round. I mean to this lady.”
“To Tishy? Oh of course I can’t leave her—with nobody.”
“No”—Vanderbank became jocose again—“that’s a London necessity. You can’t leave anybody with nobody—exposed to everybody.”
Mild as it was, however, Nanda missed the pleasantry. “Mr. Grendon’s not here.”
“Where is he then?”
“Yachting—but she doesn’t know.”
“Then she and you are just doing this together?”
“Well,” said Nanda, “she’s dreadfully frightened.”
“Oh she mustn’t allow herself,” he returned, “to be too much carried away by it. But we’re to have your mother?”
“Yes, and papa. It’s really for Mitchy and Aggie,” the girl went on—“before they go abroad.”
“Ah then I see what you’ve come up for! Tishy and I aren’t in it. It’s all for Mitchy.”
“If you mean there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for him you’re quite right. He has always been of a kindness to me—!”
“That culminated in marrying your friend?” Vanderbank asked. “It was charming certainly, and I don’t mean to diminish the merit of it. But Aggie herself, I gather, is of a charm now—!”
“Isn’t she?”—Nanda was eager. “Hasn’t she come out?”
“With a bound—into the arena. But when a young person’s out with Mitchy—!”
“Oh you mustn’t say anything against that. I’ve been out with him myself.”
“Ah but my dear child—!” Van frankly argued.
It was not, however, a thing to notice. “I knew it would be just so. It always is when they’ve been like that.”
“Do you mean as she apparently WAS? But doesn’t it make one wonder a little IF she was?”
“Oh she was—I know she was. And we’re also to have Harold,” Nanda continued—“another of Mitchy’s beneficiaries. It WOULD be a banquet, wouldn’t it? if we were to have them all.”
Vanderbank hesitated, and the look he fixed on the door might have suggested a certain open attention to the arrival of their hostess or the announcement of other guests. “If you haven’t got them all, the beneficiaries, you’ve got, in having me, I should suppose, about the biggest.”
“Ah what has he done for you?” Nanda asked.
Again her friend hung fire. “Do you remember something you said to me down there in August?”
She looked vague but quite unembarrassed. “I remember but too well that I chattered.”
“You declared to me that you knew everything.”
“Oh yes—and I said so to Mitchy too.”
“Well, my dear child, you don’t.”
“Because I don’t know—?”
“Yes, what makes ME the victim of his insatiable benevolence.”
“Ah well, if you’ve no doubt of it yourself that’s all that’s required. I’m quite GLAD to hear of something I don’t know,” Nanda pursued. “And we’re to have Harold too,” she repeated.
“As a beneficiary? Then we SHALL fill up! Harold will give us a stamp.”
“Won’t he? I hear of nothing but his success. Mother wrote me that people are frantic for him; and,” said the girl after an instant, “do you know what Cousin Jane wrote me?”
“What WOULD she now? I’m trying to think.”
Nanda relieved him of this effort. “Why that mother has transferred to him all the scruples she felt—‘even to excess’—in MY time, about what we might pick up among you all that wouldn’t be good for us.”
“That’s a neat one for ME!” Vanderbank declared. “And I like your talk about your antediluvian ‘time.’”
“Oh it’s all over.”
“What exactly is it,” Vanderbank presently demanded, “that you describe in that manner?”
“Well, my little hour. And the danger of picking up.”
“There’s none of it here?”
Nanda appeared frankly to judge. “No—because, really, Tishy, don’t you see? is natural. We just talk.”
Vanderbank showed his interest. “Whereas at your mother’s—?”
“Well, you were all afraid.”
Vanderbank laughed straight out. “Do you mind my telling her that?”
“Oh she knows it. I’ve heard her say herself you were.”
“AhIwas,” he concurred. “You know we’ve spoken of that before.”
“I’m speaking now of all of you,” said Nanda. “But it was she who was most so, for she tried—I know she did, she told me so—to control you. And it was when, you were most controlled—!”
Van’s amusement took it up. “That we were most detrimental?”
“Yes, because of course what’s so awfully unutterable is just what we most notice. Tishy knows that,” Nanda wonderfully observed.
As the reflexion of her tone might have been caught by an observer in Vanderbank’s face it was in all probability caught by his interlocutress, who superficially, however, need have recognised there—what was all she showed—but the right manner of waiting for dinner. “The better way then is to dash right in? That’s what our friend here does?”
“Oh you know what she does!” the girl replied as with a sudden drop of interest in the question. She turned at the moment to the opening of the door.
It was Tishy who at last appeared, and her guest had his greeting ready. “We’re talking of the delicate matters as to which you think it’s better to dash right in; but I’m bound to say your inviting a hungry man to dinner doesn’t appear to be one of them.”
The sign of Tishy Grendon—as it had been often called in a society in which variety of reference had brought to high perfection, for usual safety, the sense of signs—was a retarded facial glimmer that, in respect to any subject, closed up the rear of the procession. It had been said of her indeed that when processions were at all rapid she was usually to be found, on a false impression of her whereabouts, mixed up with the next; so that now, for instance, by the time she had reached the point of saying to Vanderbank “Are you REALLY hungry?” Nanda had begun to appeal to him for some praise of their hostess’s appearance. This was of course with soft looks up and down at her clothes. “Isn’t she too nice? Did you ever see anything so lovely?”
“I’m so faint with inanition,” Van replied to Mrs. Grendon, “that—like the traveller in the desert, isn’t it?—I only make out, as an oasis or a mirage, a sweet green rustling blur. I don’t trust you.”
“I don’t trust YOU,” Nanda said on her friend’s behalf. “She isn’t ‘green’—men are amazing: they don’t know the dearest old blue that ever was seen.”
“IS it your ‘OLD blue’?” Vanderbank, monocular, very earnestly asked. “I can imagine it was ‘dear,’ but I should have thought—!”
“It was yellow”—Nanda helped him out—“if I hadn’t kindly told you.” Tishy’s figure showed the confidence of objects consecrated by publicity; bodily speaking a beautiful human plant, it might have taken the last November gale to account for the completeness with which, in some quarters, she had shed her leaves. Her companions could only emphasise by the direction of their eyes the nature of the responsibility with which a spectator would have seen them saddled—a choice, as to consciousness, between the effect of her being and the effect of her not being dressed. “Oh I’m hideous—of course I know it,” said Tishy. “I’m only just clean. Here’s Nanda now, who’s beautiful,” she vaguely continued, “and Nanda—”
“Oh but, darling, Nanda’s clean too!” the young lady in question interrupted; on which her fellow guest could only laugh with her as in relief from the antithesis of which her presence of mind had averted the completion, little indeed as in Mrs. Grendon’s talk that element of style was usually involved.
“There’s nothing in such a matter,” Vanderbank observed as if it were the least he could decently say, “like challenging enquiry; and here’s Harold, precisely,” he went on in the next breath, “as clear and crisp and undefiled as a fresh five-pound note.”
“A fresh one?”—Harold had passed in a flash from his hostess. “A man who like me hasn’t seen one for six months could perfectly do, I assure you, with one that has lost its what-do-you-call it.” He kissed Nanda with a friendly peck, then, more completely aware, had a straighter apprehension for Tishy. “My dear child, YOU seem to have lost something, though I’ll say for you that one doesn’t miss it.”
Mrs. Grendon looked from him to Nanda. “Does he mean anything very nasty? I can only understand you when Nanda explains,” she returned to Harold. “In fact there’s scarcely anything I understand except when Nanda explains. It’s too dreadful her being away so much now with strange people, whom I’m sure she can’t begin to do for what she does for me; it makes me miss her all round. And the only thing I’ve come across that she CAN’T explain,” Tishy bunched straight at her friend, “is what on earth she’s doing there.”
“Why she’s working Mr. Longdon, like a good fine girl,” Harold said; “like a good true daughter and even, though she doesn’t love me nearly so much as I love HER, I will say, like a good true sister. I’m bound to tell you, my dear Tishy,” he went on, “that I think it awfully happy, with the trend of manners, for any really nice young thing to be a bit lost to sight. London, upon my honour, is quite too awful for girls, and any big house in the country is as much worse—with the promiscuities and opportunities and all that—as you know for yourselves.Iknow some places,” Harold declared, “where, if I had any girls, I’d see ‘em shot before I’d take ‘em.”
“Oh you know too much, my dear boy!” Vanderbank remarked with commiseration.
“Ah my brave old Van,” the youth returned, “don’t speak as if YOU had illusions. I know,” he pursued to the ladies, “just where some of Van’s must have perished, and some of the places I’ve in mind are just where he has left his tracks. A man must be wedded to sweet superstitions not nowadays to HAVE to open his eyes. Nanda love,” he benevolently concluded, “stay where you are. So at least I shan’t blush for you. That you’ve the good fortune to have reached your time of life with so little injury to your innocence makes you a case by yourself, of which we must recognise the claims. If Tishy can’t make you gasp, that’s nothing against you nor against HER—Tishy comes of one of the few innocent English families that are left. Yes, you may all cry ‘Oho!’—but I defy you to name me say five, or at most seven, in which some awful thing or other hasn’t happened. Of course ours is one, and Tishy’s is one, and Van’s is one, and Mr. Longdon’s is one, and that makes you, bang off, four. So there you are!” Harold gaily wound up.
“I see now why he’s the rage!” Vanderbank observed to Nanda.
But Mrs. Grendon expressed to their young friend a lingering wonder. “Do you mean you go in for the adoption—?”
“Oh Tishy!” Nanda mildly murmured.
Harold, however, had his own tact. “The dear man’s taking her quite over? Not altogether unreservedly. I’m with the governor: I think we ought to GET something. ‘Oh yes, dear man, but what do you GIVE us for her?’—that’s whatIshould say to him. I mean, don’t you know, that I don’t think she’s making quite the bargain she might. If he were to want ME I don’t say he mightn’t have me, but I should have it on my conscience to make it in one way or another a good thing for my parents. You ARE nice, old woman”—he turned to his sister—“and one can still feel for the flower of your youth something of the wonderful ‘reverence’ that we were all brought up on. For God’s sake therefore—all the more—don’t really close with him till you’ve had another word or two with me. I’ll be hanged”—he appealed to the company again—“if he shall have her for nothing!”
“See rather,” Vanderbank said to Mrs. Grendon, “how little it’s like your really losing her that she should be able this evening fairly to bring the dear man to you. At this rate we don’t lose her—we simply get him as well.”
“Ah but is it quite the dear man’s COMPANY we want?”—and Harold looked anxious and acute. “If that’s the best arrangement Nanda can make—!”
“If he hears us talking in this way, which strikes me as very horrible,” Nanda interposed very simply and gravely, “I don’t think we’re likely to get anything.”
“Oh Harold’s talk,” Vanderbank protested, “offers, I think, an extraordinary interest; only I’m bound to say it crushes me to the earth. I’ve to make at least, as I listen to him, a big effort to bear up. It doesn’t seem long ago,” he pursued to his young friend, “that I used to feel I was in it; but the way you bring home to me, dreadful youth, that I’m already NOT—!”
Harold looked earnest to understand. “The hungry generations tread you down—is that it?”
Vanderbank gave a pleasant tragic headshake. “We speak a different language.”
“Ah but I think I perfectly understand yours!”
“That’s just my anguish—and your advantage. It’s awfully curious,” Vanderbank went on to Nanda, “but I feel as if I must figure to him, you know, very much as Mr. Longdon figures to me. Mr. Longdon doesn’t somehow get into me. Yet I do, I think, into him. But we don’t matter!”
“‘We’?”—Nanda, with her eyes on him, echoed it.
“Mr. Longdon and I. It can’t be helped, I suppose,” he went on, for Tishy, with sociable sadness, “but it IS short innings.”
Mrs. Grendon, who was clearly credulous, looked positively frightened. “Ah but, my dear, thank you! I haven’t begun to LIVE.”
“Well,Ihave—that’s just where it is,” said Harold. “Thank you all the more, old Van, for the tip.”
There was an announcement just now at the door, and Tishy turned to meet the Duchess, with Harold, almost as if he had been master of the house, figuring but a step behind her. “Don’t mind HER,” Vanderbank immediately said to the companion with whom he was left, “but tell me, while I still have hold of you, who wrote my name on the French novel that I noticed a few minutes since in the other room?”
Nanda at first only wondered. “If it’s there—didn’t YOU?”
He just hesitated. “If it were here you’d see if it’s my hand.”
Nanda faltered, and for somewhat longer. “How should I see? What do I know of your hand?”
He looked at her hard. “You HAVE seen it.”
“Oh—so little!” she replied with a faint smile.
“Do you mean I’ve not written to you for so long? Surely I did in—when was it?”
“Yes, when? But why SHOULD you?” she asked in quite a different tone.
He was not prepared on this with the right statement, and what he did after a moment bring out had for the occasion a little the sound of the wrong. “The beauty of YOU is that you’re too good; which for me is but another way of saying you’re too clever. You make no demands. You let things go. You don’t allow in particular for the human weakness that enjoys an occasional glimpse of the weakness of others.”
She had deeply attended to him. “You mean perhaps one doesn’t show enough what one wants?”
“I think that must be it. You’re so fiendishly proud.”
She appeared again to wonder. “Not too much so, at any rate, only to want from YOU—”
“Well, what?”
“Why, what’s pleasant for yourself,” she simply said.
“Oh dear, that’s poor bliss!” he returned. “How does it come then,” he next said, “that with this barrenness of our intercourse I know so well YOUR hand?”
A series of announcements had meanwhile been made, with guests arriving to match them, and Nanda’s eyes at this moment engaged themselves with Mr. Longdon and her mother, who entered the room together. When she looked back to her companion she had had time to drop a consciousness of his question. “If I’m proud, to you, I’m not good,” she said, “and if I’m good—always to you—I’m not proud. I know at all events perfectly how immensely you’re occupied, what a quantity of work you get through and how every minute counts for you. Don’t make it a crime to me that I’m reasonable.”
“No, that would show, wouldn’t it? that there isn’t much else. But how it all comes back—!”
“Well, to what?” she asked.
“To the old story. You know how I’m occupied. You know how I work. You know how I manage my time.”
“Oh I see,” said Nanda. “It IS my knowing, after all, everything.”
“Everything. The book I just mentioned is one that, months ago—-I remember now—I lent your mother.”
“Oh a thing in a blue cover? I remember then too.” Nanda’s face cleared up. “I had forgotten it was lying about here, but I must have brought it—in fact I remember I did—for Tishy. And I wrote your name on it so that we might know—”
“That I hadn’t lent it to either of you? It didn’t occur to you to write your own?” Vanderbank went on.
“Well, but if it isn’t mine? It ISN’T mine, I’m sure.”
“Therefore also if it can’t be Tishy’s—”
“The thing’s simple enough—it’s mother’s.”
“‘Simple’?” Vanderbank laughed. “I like you! And may I ask if you’ve read the remarkable work?”
“Oh yes.” Then she wonderfully said: “For Tishy.”
“To see if it would do?”
“I’ve often done that,” the girl returned.
“And she takes your word?”
“Generally. I think I remember she did that time.”
“And read the confounded thing?”
“Oh no!” said Nanda.
He looked at her a moment longer. “You’re too particular!” he rather oddly sounded, turning away with it to meet Mr. Longdon.
II
When after dinner the company was restored to the upper rooms the Duchess was on her feet as soon as the door opened for the entrance of the gentlemen. Then it might have been seen that she had a purpose, for as soon as the elements had again, with a due amount of the usual shuffling and mismatching, been mixed, her case proved the first to have been settled. She had got Mr. Longdon beside her on a sofa that was just right for two. “I’ve seized you without a scruple,” she frankly said, “for there are things I want to say to you as well as very particularly to ask. More than anything else of course I want again to thank you.”
No collapse of Mr. Longdon’s was ever incompatible with his sitting well forward. “‘Again’?”
“Do you look so blank,” she demanded, “because you’ve really forgotten the gratitude I expressed to you when you were so good as to bring Nanda up for Aggie’s marriage?—or because you don’t think it a matter I should trouble myself to return to? How can I help it,” she went on without waiting for his answer, “if I see your hand in everything that has happened since the so interesting talk I had with you last summer at Mertle? There have been times when I’ve really thought of writing to you; I’ve even had a bold bad idea of proposing myself to you for a Sunday. Then the crisis, my momentary alarm, has struck me as blowing over, and I’ve felt I could wait for some luck like this, which would sooner or later come.” Her companion, however, appeared to leave the luck so on her hands that she could only snatch up, to cover its nudity, the next handsomest assumption. “I see you cleverly guess that what I’ve been worried about is the effect on Mrs. Brook of the loss of her dear Mitchy. If you’ve not at all events had your own impression of this effect, isn’t that only because these last months you’ve seen so little of her? I’VE seen,” said the Duchess, “enough and to spare.” She waited as if for her vision, on this, to be flashed back at her, but the only result of her speech was that her friend looked hard at somebody else. It was just this symptom indeed that perhaps sufficed her, for in a minute she was again afloat. “Things have turned out so much as I desire them that I should really feel wicked not to have a humble heart. There’s a quarter indeed,” she added with a noble unction, “to which I don’t fear to say for myself that no day and no night pass without my showing it. However, you English, I know, don’t like one to speak of one’s religion. I’m just as simply thankful for mine—I mean with as little sense of indecency or agony about it—as I am for my health or my carriage. My point is at any rate that I say in no cruel spirit of triumph, yet do none the less very distinctly say, that the person Mr. Mitchett’s marriage has inevitably pleased least may be now rather to be feared.” These words had the sound of a climax, and she had brought them out as if, with her duty done, to leave them; but something that took place, for her eye, in the face Mr. Longdon had half-averted gave her after an instant what he might have called her second wind. “Oh I know you think she always HAS been! But you’ve exaggerated—as to that; and I don’t say that even at present it’s anything we shan’t get the better of. Only we must keep our heads. We must remember that from her own point of view she has her grievance, and we must at least look as if we trusted her. That, you know, is what you’ve never quite done.”
He gave out a murmur of discomfort which produced in him a change of position, and the sequel to the change was that he presently accepted from his cushioned angle of the sofa the definite support it could offer. If his eyes moreover had not met his companion’s they had been brought by the hand he repeatedly and somewhat distressfully passed over them closer to the question of which of the alien objects presented to his choice it would cost him least to profess to handle. What he had already paid, a spectator would easily have gathered from the long, the suppressed wriggle that had ended in his falling back, was some sacrifice of his habit of not privately depreciating those to whom he was publicly civil. It was plain, however, that when he presently spoke his thought had taken a stretch. “I’m sure I’ve fully intended to be everything that’s proper. But I don’t think Mr. Vanderbank cares for her.”
It kindled in the Duchess an immediate light. “Vous avez bien de l’esprit. You put one at one’s ease. I’ve been vaguely groping while you’re already there. It’s really only for Nanda he cares?”
“Yes—really.”
The Duchess debated. “And yet exactly how much?”
“I haven’t asked him.”
She had another, a briefer pause. “Don’t you think it about time you SHOULD?” Once more she waited, then seemed to feel her opportunity wouldn’t. “We’ve worked a bit together, but you don’t take me into your confidence. I dare say you don’t believe I’m quite straight. Don’t you really see how I MUST be?” She had a pleading note which made him at last more consentingly face her. “Don’t you see,” she went on with the advantage of it, “that, having got all I want for myself, I haven’t a motive in the world for spoiling the fun of another? I don’t want in the least, I assure you, to spoil even Mrs. Brook’s; for how will she get a bit less out of him—I mean than she does now—if what you desire SHOULD take place? Honestly, my dear man, that’s quite whatIdesire, and I only want, over and above, to help you. What I feel for Nanda, believe me, is pure pity. I won’t say I’m frantically grateful to her, because in the long run—one way or another—she’ll have found her account. It nevertheless worries me to see her; and all the more because of this very certitude, which you’ve so kindly just settled for me, that our young man hasn’t really with her mother—”
Whatever the certitude Mr. Longdon had kindly settled, it was in another interest that he at this moment broke in. “Is he YOUR young man too?”
She was not too much amused to cast about her.
“Aren’t such marked ornaments of life a little the property of all who admire and enjoy them?”
“You ‘enjoy’ him?” Mr. Longdon asked in the same straightforward way.
“Immensely.”
His silence for a little seemed the sign of a plan. “What is it he hasn’t done with Mrs. Brook?”
“Well, the thing that WOULD be the complication. He hasn’t gone beyond a certain point. You may ask how one knows such matters, but I’m afraid I’ve not quite a receipt for it. A woman knows, but she can’t tell. They haven’t done, as it’s called, anything wrong.”
Mr. Longdon frowned. “It would be extremely horrid if they had.”
“Ah but, for you and me who know life, it isn’t THAT that—if other things had made for it—would have prevented! As it happens, however, we’ve got off easily. She doesn’t speak to him—!”
She had forms he could only take up. “‘Speak’ to him—?”
“Why as much as she would have liked to be able to believe.”
“Then where’s the danger of which you appear to wish to warn me?”
“Just in her feeling in the case as most women would feel. You see she did what she could for her daughter. She did, I’m bound to say, as that sort of thing goes among you people, a good deal. She treasured up, she nursed along Mitchy, whom she would also, though of course not so much, have liked herself. Nanda could have kept him on with a word, becoming thereby so much the less accessible for YOUR plan. That would have thoroughly obliged her mother, but your little English girls, in these altered times—oh I know how you feel them!—don’t stand on such trifles; and—even if you think it odd of me—I can’t defend myself, though I’ve so directly profited, against a certain compassion also for Mrs. Brook’s upset. As a good-natured woman I feel in short for both of them. I deplore all round what’s after all a rather sad relation. Only, as I tell you, Nanda’s the one, I naturally say to myself, for me now most to think of; if I don’t assume too much, that is, that you don’t suffer by my freedom.”
Mr. Longdon put by with a mere drop of his eyes the question of his suffering: there was so clearly for him an issue more relevant. “What do you know of my ‘plan’?”
“Why, my dear man, haven’t I told you that ever since Mertle I’ve made out your hand? What on earth for other people can your action look like but an adoption?”
“Of—a—HIM?”
“You’re delightful. Of—a—HER! If it does come to the same thing for you, so much the better. That at any rate is what we’re all taking it for, and Mrs. Brook herself en tete. She sees—through your generosity—Nanda’s life more or less, at the worst, arranged for, and that’s just what gives her a good conscience.”
If Mr. Longdon breathed rather hard it seemed to show at least that he followed. “What does she want of a good conscience?”
From under her high tiara an instant she almost looked down at him. “Ah you do hate her!”
He coloured, but held his ground. “Don’t you tell me yourself she’s to be feared?”
“Yes, and watched. But—if possible—with amusement.”
“Amusement?” Mr. Longdon faintly gasped.
“Look at her now,” his friend went on with an indication that was indeed easy to embrace. Separated from them by the width of the room, Mrs. Brook was, though placed in profile, fully presented; the satisfaction with which she had lately sunk upon a light gilt chair marked itself as superficial and was moreover visibly not confirmed by the fact that Vanderbank’s high-perched head, arrested before her in a general survey of opportunity, kept her eyes too far above the level of talk. Their companions were dispersed, some in the other room, and for the occupants of the Duchess’s sofa they made, as a couple in communion, a picture, framed and detached, vaguely reduplicated in the high polish of the French floor. “She IS tremendously pretty.” The Duchess appeared to drop this as a plea for indulgence and to be impelled in fact by the interlocutor’s silence to carry it further. “I’ve never at all thought, you know, that Nanda touches her.”
Mr. Longdon demurred. “Do you mean for beauty?”
His friend, for his simplicity, discriminated. “Ah they’ve neither of them ‘beauty.’ That’s not a word to make free with. But the mother has grace.”
“And the daughter hasn’t
“Not a line. You answer me of course, when I say THAT, you answer me with your adored Lady Julia, and will want to know what then becomes of the lucky resemblance. I quite grant you that Lady Julia must have had the thing we speak of. But that dear sweet blessed thing is very much the same lost secret as the dear sweet blessed OTHER thing that went away with it—the decent leisure that, for the most part, we’ve also seen the last of. It’s the thing at any rate that poor Nanda and all her kind have most effectually got rid of. Oh if you’d trust me a little more you’d see that I’m quite at one with you on all the changes for the worse. I bear up, but I’m old enough to have known. All the same Mrs. Brook has something—say what you like—when she bends that little brown head. Dieu sait comme elle se coiffe, but what she gets out of it! Only look.”
Mr. Longdon conveyed in an indescribable manner that he had retired to a great distance; yet even from this position he must have launched a glance that arrived at a middle way. “They both know you’re watching them.”
“And don’t they know YOU are? Poor Mr. Van has a consciousness!”
“So should I if two terrible women—”
“Were admiring you both at once?” The Duchess folded the big feathered fan that had partly protected their vision. “Well, SHE, poor dear, can’t help it. She wants him herself.”
At the drop of the Duchess’s fan he restored his nippers. “And he doesn’t—not a bit—want HER!”
“There it is. She has put down her money, as it were, without a return. She has given Mitchy up and got nothing instead.”
There was delicacy, yet there was distinctness, in Mr. Longdon’s reserve. “Do you call ME nothing?”
The Duchess, at this, fairly swelled with her happy stare. “Then it IS an adoption?” She forbore to press, however; she only went on: “It isn’t a question, my dear man, of whatIcall it. YOU don’t make love to her.”
“Dear me,” said Mr. Longdon, “what would she have had?”
“That could be more charming, you mean, than your famous ‘loyalty’? Oh, caro mio, she wants it straighter! But I shock you,” his companion quickly added.
The manner in which he firmly rose was scarce a denial; yet he stood for a moment in place. “What after all can she do?”
“She can KEEP Mr. Van.”
Mr. Longdon wondered. “Where?”
“I mean till it’s too late. She can work on him.”
“But how?”
Covertly again the Duchess had followed the effect of her friend’s perceived movement on Mrs. Brook, who also got up. She gave a rap with her fan on his leg. “Sit down—you’ll see.”
III
He mechanically obeyed her although it happened to lend him the air of taking Mrs. Brook’s approach for a signal to resume his seat. She came over to them, Vanderbank followed, and it was without again moving, with a vague upward gape in fact from his place, that Mr. Longdon received as she stood before him a challenge of a sort to flash a point into what the Duchess had just said. “Why do you hate me so?”
Vanderbank, who, beside Mrs. Brook, looked at him with attention, might have suspected him of turning a trifle pale; though even Vanderbank, with reasons of his own for an observation of the sharpest, could scarce have read into the matter the particular dim vision that would have accounted for it—the flicker of fear of what Mrs. Brook, whether as daughter or as mother, was at last so strangely and differently to show herself.
“I should warn you, sir,” the young man threw off, “how little we consider that—in Buckingham Crescent certainly—a fair question. It isn’t playing the game—it’s hitting below the belt. We hate and we love—the latter especially; but to tell each other why is to break that little tacit rule of finding out for ourselves which is the delight of our lives and the source of our triumphs. You can say, you know, if you like, but you’re not obliged.”
Mr. Longdon transferred to him something of the same colder apprehension, looking at him manifestly harder than ever before and finding in his eyes also no doubt a consciousness more charged. He presently got up, but, without answering Vanderbank, fixed again Mrs. Brook, to whom he echoed without expression: “Hate you?”
The next moment, while he remained in presence with Vanderbank, Mrs. Brook was pointing out her meaning to him from the cushioned corner he had quitted. “Why, when you come back to town you come straight, as it were, here.”
“Ah what’s that,” the Duchess asked in his interest, “but to follow Nanda as closely as possible, or at any rate to keep well with her?”
Mrs. Brook, however, had no ear for this plea. “And when I, coming here too and thinking only of my chance to ‘meet’ you, do my very sweetest to catch your eye, you’re entirely given up—!”
“To trying of course,” the Duchess broke in afresh, “to keep well with ME!”
Mrs. Brook now had a smile for her. “Ah that takes precautions then that I shall perhaps fail of if I too much interrupt your conversation.”
“Isn’t she nice to me,” the Duchess asked of Mr. Longdon, “when I was in the very act of praising her to the skies?”
Their interlocutor’s reply was not too rapid to anticipate Mrs. Brook herself. “My dear Jane, that only proves his having reached some extravagance in the other sense that you had in mere decency to match. The truth is probably in the ‘mean’—isn’t that what they call it?—between you. Don’t YOU now take him away,” she went on to Vanderbank, who had glanced about for some better accommodation.