He immediately pushed forward the nearest chair, which happened to be by the Duchess’s side of the sofa. “Will you sit here, sir?”
“If you’ll stay to protect me.”
“That was really what I brought him over to you for,” Mrs. Brook said while Mr. Longdon took his place and Vanderbank looked out for another seat. “But I didn’t know,” she observed with her sweet free curiosity, “that he called you ‘sir.’” She often made discoveries that were fairly childlike. “He has done it twice.”
“Isn’t that only your inevitable English surprise,” the Duchess demanded, “at the civility quite the commonest in other societies?—so that one has to come here to find it regarded, in the way of ceremony, as the very end of the world!”
“Oh,” Mr. Longdon remarked, “it’s a word I rather like myself even to employ to others.”
“I always ask here,” the Duchess continued to him, “what word they’ve got instead. And do you know what they tell me?”
Mrs. Brook wondered, then again, before he was ready, charmingly suggested: “Our pretty manner?” Quickly too she appealed to Mr. Longdon. “Is THAT what you miss from me?”
He wondered, however, more than Mrs. Brook. “Your ‘pretty manner’?”
“Well, these grand old forms that the Duchess is such a mistress of.” Mrs. Brook had with this one of her eagerest visions. “Did mamma say ‘sir’ to you? OughtI? Do you really get it, in private, out of Nanda? SHE has such depths of discretion,” she explained to the Duchess and to Vanderbank, who had come back with his chair, “that it’s just the kind of racy anecdote she never in the world gives me.”
Mr. Longdon looked across at Van, placed now, after a moment’s talk with Tishy in sight of them all, by Mrs. Brook’s arm of the sofa. “You haven’t protected—you’ve only exposed me.”
“Oh there’s no joy without danger”—Mrs. Brook took it up with spirit. “Perhaps one should even say there’s no danger without joy.”
Vanderbank’s eyes had followed Mrs. Grendon after his brief passage with her, terminated by some need of her listless presence on the other side of the room. “What do you say then, on that theory, to the extraordinary gloom of our hostess? Her safety, by such a rule, must be deep.”
The Duchess was this time the first to know what they said. “The expression of Tishy’s face comes precisely from our comparing it so unfavourably with that of her poor sister Carrie, who, though she isn’t here to-night with the Cashmores—amazing enough even as coming WITHOUT that!—has so often shown us that an ame en peine, constantly tottering, but, as Nanda guarantees us, usually recovering, may look after all as beatific as a Dutch doll.”
Mrs. Brook’s eyes had, on Tishy’s passing away, taken the same course as Vanderbank’s, whom she had visibly not neglected moreover while the pair stood there. “I give you Carrie, as you know, and I throw Mr. Cashmore in; but I’m lost in admiration to-night, as I always have been, of the way Tishy makes her ugliness serve. I should call it, if the word weren’t so for ladies’-maids, the most ‘elegant’ thing I know.”
“My dear child,” the Duchess objected, “what you describe as making her ugliness serve is what I should describe as concealing none of her beauty. There’s nothing the matter surely with ‘elegant’ as applied to Tishy save that as commonly used it refers rather to a charm that’s artificial than to a state of pure nature. There should be for elegance a basis of clothing. Nanda rather stints her.”
Mrs. Brook, perhaps more than usually thoughtful, just discriminated. “There IS, I think, one little place. I’ll speak to her.”
“To Tishy?” Vanderbank asked.
“Oh THAT would do no good. To Nanda. All the same,” she continued, “it’s an awfully superficial thing of you not to see that her dreariness—on which moreover I’ve set you right before—is a mere facial accident and doesn’t correspond or, as they say, ‘rhyme’ to anything within her that might make it a little interesting. What I like it for is just that it’s so funny in itself. Her low spirits are nothing more than her features. Her gloom, as you call it, is merely her broken nose.”
“HAS she a broken nose?” Mr. Longdon demanded with an accent that for some reason touched in the others the spring of laughter.
“Has Nanda never mentioned it?” Mrs. Brook profited by this gaiety to ask.
“That’s the discretion you just spoke of,” said the Duchess. “Only I should have expected from the cause you refer to rather the comic effect.”
“Mrs. Grendon’s broken nose, sir,” Vanderbank explained to Mr. Longdon, “is only the kinder way taken by these ladies to speak of Mrs. Grendon’s broken heart. You must know all about that.”
“Oh yes—ALL.” Mr. Longdon spoke very simply, with the consequence this time, on the part of his companions, of a silence of some minutes, which he himself had at last to break. “Mr. Grendon doesn’t like her.” The addition of these words apparently made the difference—as if they constituted a fresh link with the irresistible comedy of things. That he was unexpectedly diverting was, however, no check to Mr. Longdon’s delivering his full thought. “Very horrid of two sisters to be both, in their marriages, so wretched.”
“Ah but Tishy, I maintain,” Mrs. Brook returned, “ISN’T wretched at all. If I were satisfied that she’s really so I’d never let Nanda come to her.”
“That’s the most extraordinary doctrine, love,” the Duchess interposed. “When you’re satisfied a woman’s ‘really’ poor you never give her a crust?”
“Do you call Nanda a crust, Duchess?” Vanderbank amusedly asked.
“She’s all at any rate, apparently, just now, that poor Tishy has to live on.”
“You’re severe then,” the young man said, “on our dinner of to-night.”
“Oh Jane,” Mrs. Brook declared, “is never severe: she’s only uncontrollably witty. It’s only Tishy moreover who gives out that her husband doesn’t like her. HE, poor man, doesn’t say anything of the sort.”
“Yes, but, after all, you know”—Vanderbank just put it to her—“where the deuce, all the while, IS he?”
“Heaven forbid,” the Duchess remarked, “that we should too rashly ascertain.”
“There it is—exactly,” Mr. Longdon subjoined.
He had once more his success of hilarity, though not indeed to the injury of the Duchess’s next word. “It’s Nanda, you know, who speaks, and loud enough, for Harry Grendon’s dislikes.”
“That’s easy for her,” Mrs. Brook declared, “when she herself isn’t one of them.”
“She isn’t surely one of anybody’s,” Mr. Longdon gravely observed.
Mrs. Brook gazed across at him. “You ARE too dear! But I’ve none the less a crow to pick with you.”
Mr. Longdon returned her look, but returned it somehow to Van. “You frighten me, you know, out of my wits.”
“Ido?” said Vanderbank.
Mr. Longdon just hesitated. “Yes.”
“It must be the sacred terror,” Mrs. Brook suggested to Van, “that Mitchy so often speaks of. I’M not trying with you,” she went on to Mr. Longdon, “for anything of that kind, but only for the short half-hour in private that I think you won’t for the world grant me. Nothing will induce you to find yourself alone with me.”
“Why what on earth,” Vanderbank asked, “do you suspect him of supposing you want to do?”
“Oh it isn’t THAT,” Mrs. Brook sadly said.
“It isn’t what?” laughed the Duchess.
“That he fears I may want in any way to—what do you call it?—make up to him.” She spoke as if she only wished it had been. “He has a deeper thought.”
“Well then what in goodness is it?” the Duchess pressed.
Mr. Longdon had said nothing more, but Mrs. Brook preferred none the less to treat the question as between themselves. She WAS, as the others said, wonderful. “You can’t help thinking me”—she spoke to him straight—“rather tortuous.” The pause she thus momentarily produced was so intense as to give a sharpness that was almost vulgar to the little “Oh!” by which it was presently broken and the source of which neither of her three companions could afterwards in the least have named. Neither would have endeavoured to fix an infelicity of which each doubtless had been but too capable. “It’s only as a mother,” she added, “that I want my chance.”
But the Duchess was at this again in the breach. “Take it, for mercy’s sake then, my dear, over Harold, who’s an example to Nanda herself in the way that, behind the piano there, he’s keeping it up with Lady Fanny.”
If this had been a herring that, in the interest of peace, the Duchess had wished to draw across the scent, it could scarce have been more effective. Mrs. Brook, whose position had made just the difference that she lost the view of the other side of the piano, took a slight but immediate stretch. “IS Harold with Lady Fanny?”
“You ask it, my dear child,” said the Duchess, “as if it were too grand to be believed. It’s the note of eagerness,” she went on for Mr. Longdon’s benefit—“it’s almost the note of hope: one of those that ces messieurs, that we all in fact delight in and find so matchless. She desires for Harold the highest advantages.”
“Well then,” declared Vanderbank, who had achieved a glimpse, “he’s clearly having them. It brings home to one his success.”
“His success is true,” Mrs. Brook insisted. “How he does it I don’t know.”
“Oh DON’T you?” trumpeted the Duchess.
“He’s amazing,” Mrs. Brook pursued. “I watch—I hold my breath. But I’m bound to say also I rather admire. He somehow amuses them.”
“She’s as pleased as Punch,” said the Duchess.
“Those great calm women—they like slighter creatures.”
“The great calm whales,” the Duchess laughed, “swallow the little fishes.”
“Oh my dear,” Mrs. Brook returned, “Harold can be tasted, if you like—”
“IfIlike?” the Duchess parenthetically jeered. “Thank you, love!”
“But he can’t, I think, be eaten. It all works out,” Mrs. Brook expounded, “to the highest end. If Lady Fanny’s amused she’ll be quiet.”
“Bless me,” cried the Duchess, “of all the immoral speeches—! I put it to you, Longdon. Does she mean”—she appealed to their friend—“that if she commits murder she won’t commit anything else?”
“Oh it won’t be murder,” said Mrs. Brook. “I mean that if Harold, in one way and another, keeps her along, she won’t get off.”
“Off where?” Mr. Longdon risked.
Vanderbank immediately informed him. “To one of the smaller Italian towns. Don’t you know?”
“Oh yes. Like—who is it? I forget.”
“Anna Karenine? You know about Anna?”
“Nanda,” said the Duchess, “has told him. But I thought,” she went on to Mrs. Brook, “that Lady Fanny, by this time, MUST have gone.”
“Petherton then,” Mrs. Brook returned, “doesn’t keep you au courant?”
The Duchess blandly wondered. “I seem to remember he had positively said so. And that she had come back.”
“Because this looks so like a fresh start? No. WE know. You assume besides,” Mrs. Brook asked, “that Mr. Cashmore would have received her again?”
The Duchess fixed a little that gentleman and his actual companion. “What will you have? He mightn’t have noticed.”
“Oh you’re out of step, Duchess,” Vanderbank said. “We used all to march abreast, but we’re falling to pieces. It’s all, saving your presence, Mitchy’s marriage.”
“Ah,” Mrs. Brook concurred, “how thoroughly I feel that! Oh I knew. The spell’s broken; the harp has lost a string. We’re not the same thing. HE’S not the same thing.”
“Frankly, my dear,” the Duchess answered, “I don’t think that you personally are either.”
“Oh as for that—which is what matters least—we shall perhaps see.” With which Mrs. Brook turned again to Mr. Longdon. “I haven’t explained to you what I meant just now. We want Nanda.”
Mr. Longdon stared. “At home again?”
“In her little old nook. You must give her back.”
“Do you mean altogether?”
“Ah that will be for you in a manner to arrange. But you’ve had her practically these five months, and with no desire to be unreasonable we yet have our natural feelings.”
This interchange, to which circumstances somehow gave a high effect of suddenness and strangeness, was listened to by the others in a quick silence that was like the sense of a blast of cold air, though with the difference between the spectators that Vanderbank attached his eyes hard to Mrs. Brook and that the Duchess looked as straight at Mr. Longdon, to whom clearly she wished to convey that if he had wondered a short time before how Mrs. Brook would do it he must now be quite at his ease. He indulged in fact, after this lady’s last words, in a pause that might have signified some of the fulness of a new light. He only said very quietly: “I thought you liked it.”
At this his neighbour broke in. “The care you take of the child? They DO!” The Duchess, as she spoke, became aware of the nearer presence of Edward Brookenham, who within a minute had come in from the other room; and her decision of character leaped forth in her quick signal to him. “Edward will tell you.” He was already before their semicircle. “DO you, dear,” she appealed, “want Nanda back from Mr. Longdon?”
Edward plainly could be trusted to feel in his quiet way that the oracle must be a match for the priestess. “‘Want’ her, Jane? We wouldn’t TAKE her.” And as if knowing quite what he was about he looked at his wife only after he had spoken.
IV
His reply had complete success, to which there could scarce have afterwards been a positive denial that some sound of amusement even from Mr. Longdon himself had in its degree contributed. Certain it was that Mrs. Brook found, as she exclaimed that her husband was always so awfully civil, just the right note of resigned understanding; whereupon he for a minute presented to them blankly enough his fine dead face. “‘Civil’ is just what I was afraid I wasn’t. I mean, you know,” he continued to Mr. Longdon, “that you really mustn’t look to us to let you off—!”
“From a week or a day”—Mr. Longdon took him up—“of the time to which you consider I’ve pledged myself? My dear sir, please don’t imagine it’s for ME the Duchess appeals.”
“It’s from your wife, you delicious dull man,” that lady elucidated. “If you wished to be stiff with our friend here you’ve really been so with HER; which comes, no doubt, from the absence between you of proper preconcerted action. You spoke without your cue.”
“Oh!” said Edward Brookenham.
“That’s it, Jane”—Mrs. Brook continued to take it beautifully. “We dressed to-day in a hurry and hadn’t time for our usual rehearsal. Edward, when we dine out, generally brings three pocket-handkerchiefs and six jokes. I leave the management of the handkerchiefs to his own taste, but we mostly try together in advance to arrange a career for the other things. It’s some charming light thing of my own that’s supposed to give him the sign.”
“Only sometimes he confounds”—Vanderbank helped her out—“your light and your heavy!” He had got up to make room for his host of so many occasions and, having forced him into the empty chair, now moved vaguely off to the quarter of the room occupied by Nanda and Mr. Cashmore.
“That’s very well,” the Duchess resumed, “but it doesn’t at all clear you, cara mia, of the misdemeanour of setting up as a felt domestic need something of which Edward proves deeply unconscious. He has put his finger on Nanda’s true interest. He doesn’t care a bit how it would LOOK for you to want her.”
“Don’t you mean rather, Jane, how it looks for us NOT to want her?” Mrs. Brook amended with a detachment now complete. “Of course, dear old friend,” she continued to Mr. Longdon, “she quite puts me with my back to the wall when she helps you to see—what you otherwise mightn’t guess—that Edward and I work it out between us to show off as tender parents and yet to get from you everything you’ll give. I do the sentimental and he the practical; so that we, after one fashion and another, deck ourselves in the glory of our sacrifice without forfeiting the ‘keep’ of our daughter. This must appeal to you as another useful illustration of what London manners have come to; unless indeed,” Mrs. Brook prattled on, “it only strikes you still more—and to a degree that blinds you to its other possible bearings—as the last proof that I’m too tortuous for you to know what I’d be at!”
Mr. Longdon faced her, across his interval, with his original terror represented now only by such a lingering flush as might have formed a natural tribute to a brilliant scene. “I haven’t the glimmering of an idea of what you’d be at. But please understand,” he added, “that I don’t at all refuse you the private half-hour you referred to a while since.”
“Are you really willing to put the child up for the rest of the year?” Edward placidly demanded, speaking as if quite unaware that anything else had taken place.
His wife fixed her eyes on him. “The ingenuity of your companions, love, plays in the air like the lightning, but flashes round your head only, by good fortune, to leave it unscathed. Still, you have after all your own strange wit, and I’m not sure that any of ours ever compares with it. Only, confronted also with ours, how can poor Mr. Longdon really choose which of the two he’ll meet?”
Poor Mr. Longdon now looked hard at Edward. “Oh Mr. Brookenham’s, I feel, any day. It’s even with YOU, I confess,” he said to him, “that I’d rather have that private half-hour.”
“Done!” Mrs. Brook declared. “I’ll send him to you. But we HAVE, you know, as Van says, gone to pieces,” she went on, twisting her pretty head and tossing it back over her shoulder to an auditor of whose approach to her from behind, though it was impossible she should have seen him, she had visibly within a minute become aware. “It’s your marriage, Mitchy, that has darkened our old bright air, changed us more than we even yet know, and most grossly and horribly, my dear man, changed YOU. You steal up in a way that gives one the creeps, whereas in the good time that’s gone you always burst in with music and song. Go round where I can see you: I mayn’t love you now, but at least, I suppose, I may look at you. Direct your energies,” she pursued while Mitchy obeyed her, “as much as possible, please, against our uncanny chill. Pile on the fire and close up the ranks; this WAS our best hour, you know—and all the more that Tishy, I see, is getting rid of her superfluities. Here comes back old Van,” she wound up, “vanquished, I judge, in the attempt to divert Nanda from her prey. Won’t Nanda sit with poor US?” she asked of Vanderbank, who now, meeting Mitchy in range of the others, remained standing with him and as at her commands.
“I didn’t of course ask her,” the young man replied.
“Then what did you do?”
“I only took a little walk.”
Mrs. Brook, on this, was woeful at Mitchy. “See then what we’ve come to. When did we ever ‘walk’ in YOUR time save as a distinct part of the effect of our good things? Please return to Nanda,” she said to Vanderbank, “and tell her I particularly wish her to come in for this delightful evening’s end.”
“She’s joining us of herself now,” the Duchess noted, “and so’s Mr. Cashmore and so’s Tishy—VOYEZ!—who has kept on—(bless her little bare back!)—no one she oughtn’t to keep. As nobody else will now arrive it would be quite cosey if she locked the door.”
“But what on earth, my dear Jane,” Mrs. Brook plaintively wondered, “are you proposing we should do?”
Mrs. Brook, in her apprehension, had looked expressively at their friends, but the eye of the Duchess wandered no further than Harold and Lady Fanny. “It would perhaps serve to keep that pair a little longer from escaping together.”
Mrs. Brook took a pause no greater. “But wouldn’t it be, as regards another pair, locking the stable-door after—what do you call it? Don’t Petherton and Aggie appear already to have escaped together? Mitchy, man, where in the world’s your wife?”
“I quite grant you,” said the Duchess gaily, “that my niece is wherever Petherton is. This I’m sure of, for THERE’S a friendship, if you please, that has not been interrupted. Petherton’s not gone, is he?” she asked in her turn of Mitchy.
But again before he could speak it was taken up. “Mitchy’s silent, Mitchy’s altered, Mitchy’s queer!” Mrs. Brook proclaimed, while the new recruits to the circle, Tishy and Nanda and Mr. Cashmore, Lady Fanny and Harold too after a minute and on perceiving the movement of the others, ended by enlarging it, with mutual accommodation and aid, to a pleasant talkative ring in which the subject of their companion’s demonstration, on a low ottoman and glaring in his odd way in almost all directions at once, formed the conspicuous attractive centre. Tishy was nearest Mr. Longdon, and Nanda, still flanked by Mr. Cashmore, between that gentleman and his wife, who had Harold on her other side. Edward Brookenham was neighboured by his son and by Vanderbank, who might easily have felt himself, in spite of their separation and given, as it happened, their places in the group, rather publicly confronted with Mr. Longdon. “Is his wife in the other room?” Mrs. Brook now put to Tishy.
Tishy, after a stare about, recovered the acuter consciousness to account for this guest. “Oh yes—she’s playing with him.”
“But with whom, dear?”
“Why, with Petherton. I thought you knew.”
“Knew they’re playing—-?” Mrs. Brook was almost Socratic.
“The Missus is regularly wound up,” her husband meanwhile, without resonance, observed to Vanderbank.
“Brilliant indeed!” Vanderbank replied.
“But she’s rather naughty, you know,” Edward after a pause continued.
“Oh fiendish!” his interlocutor said with a short smothered laugh that might have represented for a spectator a sudden start at such a flash of analysis from such a quarter.
When Vanderbank’s attention at any rate was free again their hostess, assisted to the transition, was describing the play, as she had called it, of the absentees. “She has hidden a book and he’s trying to find it.”
“Hide and seek? Why, isn’t it innocent, Mitch!” Mrs. Brook exclaimed.
Mitchy, speaking for the first time, faced her with extravagant gloom. “Do you really think so?”
“That’s HER innocence!” the Duchess laughed to him.
“And don’t you suppose he has found it YET?” Mrs. Brook pursued earnestly to Tishy. “Isn’t it something we might ALL play at if—?” On which however, abruptly checking herself, she changed her note. “Nanda love, please go and invite them to join us.”
Mitchy, at this, on his ottoman, wheeled straight round to the girl, who looked at him before speaking. “I’ll go if Mitchy tells me.”
“But if he does fear,” said her mother, “that there may be something in it—?”
Mitchy jerked back to Mrs. Brook. “Well, you see, I don’t want to give way to my fear. Suppose there SHOULD be something! Let me not know.”
She dealt with him tenderly. “I see. You couldn’t—so soon—bear it.”
“Ah but, savez-vous,” the Duchess interposed with some majesty, “you’re horrid!”
“Let them alone,” Mitchy continued. “We don’t want at all events a general romp.”
“Oh I thought just that,” said Mrs. Brook, “was what the Duchess wished the door locked for! Perhaps moreover”—she returned to Tishy—“he hasn’t yet found the book.”
“He can’t,” Tishy said with simplicity.
“But why in the world—?”
“You see she’s sitting on it”—Tishy felt, it was plain, the responsibility of explanation. “So that unless he pulls her off—”
“He can’t compass his desperate end? Ah I hope he won’t pull her off!” Mrs. Brook wonderfully murmured. It was said in a manner that stirred the circle, and unanimous laughter seemed already to have crowned her invocation, lately uttered, to the social spirit. “But what in the world,” she pursued, “is the book selected for such a position? I hope it’s not a very big one.”
“Oh aren’t the books that are sat upon,” Mr. Cashmore freely speculated, “as a matter of course the bad ones?”
“Not a bit as a matter of course,” Harold as freely replied to him. “They sit, all round, nowadays—I mean in the papers and places—on some awfully good stuff. Why I myself read books that I couldn’t—upon my honour I wouldn’t risk it!—read out to you here.”
“What a pity,” his father dropped with the special shade of dryness that was all Edward’s own, “what a pity you haven’t got one of your favourites to try on us!”
Harold looked about as if it might have been after all a happy thought. “Well, Nanda’s the only girl.”
“And one’s sister doesn’t count,” said the Duchess.
“It’s just because the thing’s bad,” Tishy resumed for Mrs. Brook’s more particular benefit, “that Lord Petherton’s trying to wrest it.”
Mrs. Brook’s pale interest deepened. “Then it’s a real hand-to-hand struggle?”
“He says she shan’t read it—she says she will.”
“Ah that’s because—isn’t it, Jane?” Mrs. Brook appealed—“he so long overlooked and advised her in those matters. Doesn’t he feel by this time—so awfully clever as he is—the extraordinary way she has come out?”
“‘By this time’?” Harold echoed. “Dearest mummy, you’re too sweet. It’s only about ten weeks—isn’t it, Mitch? You don’t mind my saying that, I hope,” he solicitously added.
Mitchy had his back to him and, bending it a little, sat with head dropped and knees pressing his hands together. “I don’t mind any one’s saying anything.”
“Lord, are you already past that?” Harold sociably laughed.
“He used to vibrate to everything. My dear man, what IS the matter?” Mrs. Brook demanded. “Does it all move too fast for you?”
“Mercy on us, what ARE you talking about? That’s whatIwant to know!” Mr. Cashmore vivaciously declared.
“Well, she HAS gone at a pace—if Mitchy doesn’t mind,” Harold interposed in the tone of tact and taste. “But then don’t they always—I mean when they’re like Aggie and they once get loose—go at a pace? That’s whatIwant to know. I don’t suppose mother did, nor Tishy, nor the Duchess,” he communicated to the rest; “but mother and Tishy and the Duchess, it strikes me, must either have been of the school that knew, don’t you know? a deuce of a deal before, or of the type that takes it all more quietly after.”
“I think a woman can only speak for herself. I took it all quietly enough both before and after,” said Mrs. Brook. Then she addressed to Mr. Cashmore with a small formal nod one of her lovely wan smiles. “What I’m talking about, s’il vous plait, is marriage.”
“I wonder if you know,” the Duchess broke out on this, “how silly you all sound! When did it ever, in any society that could call itself decently ‘good,’ NOT make a difference that an innocent young creature, a flower tended and guarded, should find from one day to the other her whole consciousness changed? People pull long faces and look wonderful looks and punch each other, in your English fashion, in the sides, and say to each other in corners that my poor darling has ‘come out.’ Je crois bien, she has come out! I married her—I don’t mind saying it now—exactly that she SHOULD come out, and I should be mightily ashamed of every one concerned if she hadn’t. I didn’t marry her, I give you to believe, that she should stay ‘in,’ and if any of you think to frighten Mitchy with it I imagine you’ll do so as little as you frighten ME. If it has taken her a very short time—as Harold so vividly puts it—to which of you did I ever pretend, I should like to know, that it would take her a very long one? I dare say there are girls it would have taken longer, just as there are certainly others who wouldn’t have required so much as an hour. It surely isn’t news to you that if some young persons among us all are very stupid and others very wise, MY dear child was never either, but only perfectly bred and deliciously clever. Ah THAT—rather! If she’s so clever that you don’t know what to do with her it’s scarcely HER fault. But add to it that Mitchy’s very kind, and you have the whole thing. What more do you want?”
Mrs. Brook, who looked immensely struck, replied with the promptest sympathy, yet as if there might have been an alternative. “I don’t think”—and her eyes appealed to the others—“that we want ANY more, do we? than the whole thing.”
“Gracious, I should hope not!” her husband remarked as privately as before to Vanderbank. “Jane—for a mixed company—does go into it.”
Vanderbank, for a minute and with a special short arrest, took in the circle. “Should you call us ‘mixed’? There’s only ONE girl.”
Edward Brookenham glanced at his daughter. “Yes, but I wish there were more.”
“DO you?” And Vanderbank’s laugh at this odd view covered, for a little, the rest of the talk. But when he again began to follow no victory had yet been snatched.
It was Mrs. Brook naturally who rattled the standard. “When you say, dearest, that we don’t know what to ‘do’ with Aggie’s cleverness, do you quite allow for the way we bow down before it and worship it? I don’t quite see what else we—in here—can do with it, even though we HAVE gathered that, just over there, Petherton’s finding for it a different application. We can only each in our way do our best. Don’t therefore succumb, Jane, to the delusive harm of a grievance. There would be nothing in it. You haven’t got one. The beauty of the life that so many of us have so long led together”—and she showed that it was for Mr. Longdon she more particularly brought this out—“is precisely that nobody has ever had one. Nobody has dreamed of it—it would have been such a rough false note, a note of violence out of all keeping. Did YOU ever hear of one, Van? Did you, my poor Mitchy? But you see for yourselves,” she wound up with a sigh and before either could answer, “how inferior we’ve become when we have even in our defence to assert such things.”
Mitchy, who for a while past had sat gazing at the floor, now raised his good natural goggles and stretched his closed mouth to its widest. “Oh I think we’re pretty good still!” he then replied.
Mrs. Brook indeed appeared, after a pause and addressing herself again to Tishy, to give a reluctant illustration of it, coming back as from an excursion of the shortest to the question momentarily dropped. “I’m bound to say—all the more you know—that I don’t quite see what Aggie mayn’t now read.” Suddenly, however, her look at their informant took on an anxiety. “Is the book you speak of something VERY awful?”
Mrs. Grendon, with so much these past minutes to have made her so, was at last visibly more present. “That’s what Lord Petherton says of it. From what he knows of the author.”
“So that he wants to keep her—?”
“Well, from trying it first. I think he wants to see if it’s good for her.”
“That’s one of the most charming soins, I think,” the Duchess said, “that a gentleman may render a young woman to whom he desires to be useful. I won’t say that Petherton always knows how good a book may be, but I’d trust him any day to say how bad.”
Mr. Longdon, who had sat throughout silent and still, quitted his seat at this and evidently in so doing gave Mrs. Brook as much occasion as she required. She also got up and her movement brought to her view at the door of the further room something that drew from her a quick exclamation. “He can tell us now then—for here they come!” Lord Petherton, arriving with animation and followed so swiftly by his young companion that she presented herself as pursuing him, shook triumphantly over his head a small volume in blue paper. There was a general movement at the sight of them, and by the time they had rejoined their friends the company, pushing back seats and causing a variety of mute expression smoothly to circulate, was pretty well on its feet. “See—he HAS pulled her off!” said Mrs. Brook. “Little Aggie, to whom plenty of pearls were singularly becoming, met it as pleasant sympathy. Yes, and it was a REAL pull. But of course,” she continued with the prettiest humour and as if Mrs. Brook would quite understand, “from the moment one has a person’s nails, and almost his teeth, in one’s flesh—!”
Mrs. Brook’s sympathy passed, however, with no great ease from Aggie’s pearls to her other charms; fixing the former indeed so markedly that Harold had a quick word about it for Lady Fanny. “When poor mummy thinks, you know, that Nanda might have had them—!”
Lady Fanny’s attention, for that matter, had resisted them as little. “Well, I dare say that if I had wantedImight!”
“Lord—COULD you have stood him?” the young man returned. “But I believe women can stand anything!” he profoundly concluded. His mother meanwhile, recovering herself, had begun to ejaculate on the prints in Aggie’s arms, and he was then diverted from the sense of what he “personally,” as he would have said, couldn’t have stood, by a glance at Lord Petherton’s trophy, for which he made a prompt grab. “The bone of contention?” Lord Petherton had let it go and Harold remained arrested by the cover. “Why blest if it hasn’t Van’s name!”
“Van’s?”—his mother was near enough to effect her own snatch, after which she swiftly faced the proprietor of the volume. “Dear man, it’s the last thing you lent me! But I don’t think,” she added, turning to Tishy, “that I ever passed such a production on to YOU.”
“It was just seeing Mr. Van’s hand,” Aggie conscientiously explained, “that made me think one was free—!”
“But it isn’t Mr. Van’s hand!”—Mrs. Brook quite smiled at the error. She thrust the book straight at Mr. Longdon. “IS that Mr. Van’s hand?”
Holding the disputed object, which he had put on his nippers to glance at, he presently, without speaking, looked over these aids straight at Nanda, who looked as straight back at him. “It was I who wrote Mr. Van’s name.” The girl’s eyes were on Mr. Longdon, but her words as for the company. “I brought the book here from Buckingham Crescent and left it by accident in the other room.”
“By accident, my dear,” her mother replied, “I do quite hope. But what on earth did you bring it for? It’s too hideous.”
Nanda seemed to wonder. “Is it?” she murmured.
“Then you haven’t read it?”
She just hesitated. “One hardly knows now, I think, what is and what isn’t.”
“She brought it only for ME to read,” Tishy gravely interposed.
Mrs. Brook looked strange. “Nanda RECOMMENDED it?”
“Oh no—the contrary.” Tishy, as if scared by so much publicity, floundered a little. “She only told me—”
“The awful subject?” Mrs. Brook wailed.
There was so deepening an echo of the drollery of this last passage that it was a minute before Vanderbank could be heard saying: “The responsibility’s wholly mine for setting the beastly thing in motion. Still,” he added good-humouredly and as to minimise if not the cause at least the consequence, “I think I agree with Nanda that it’s no worse than anything else.”
Mrs. Brook had recovered the volume from Mr. Longdon’s relaxed hand and now, without another glance at it, held it behind her with an unusual air of firmness. “Oh how can you say that, my dear man, of anything so revolting?”
The discussion kept them for the instant well face to face. “Then did YOU read it?”
She debated, jerking the book into the nearest empty chair, where Mr. Cashmore quickly pounced on it. “Wasn’t it for that you brought it me?” she demanded. Yet before he could answer she again challenged her child. “Have you read this work, Nanda?”
“Yes mamma.”
“Oh I say!” cried Mr. Cashmore, hilarious and turning the leaves.
Mr. Longdon had by this time ceremoniously approached Tishy. “Good-night.”
I
“I think you had better wait,” Mrs. Brook said, “till I see if he has gone;” and on the arrival the next moment of the servants with the tea she was able to put her question. “Is Mr. Cashmore still with Miss Brookenham?”
“No, ma’am,” the footman replied. “I let Mr. Cashmore out five minutes ago.”
Vanderbank showed for the next short time by his behaviour what he felt at not yet being free to act on this; moving pointlessly about the room while the servants arranged the tea-table and taking no trouble to make, for appearance, any other talk. Mrs. Brook, on her side, took so little that the silence—which their temporary companions had all the effect of keeping up by conscious dawdling—became precisely one of those precious lights for the circle belowstairs which people fondly fancy they have not kindled when they have not spoken. But Vanderbank spoke again as soon as the door was closed. “Does he run in and out that way without even speaking to YOU?”
Mrs. Brook turned away from the fire that, late in May, was the only charm of the crude cold afternoon. “One would like to draw the curtains, wouldn’t one? and gossip in the glow of the hearth.”
“Oh ‘gossip’!” Vanderbank wearily said as he came to her pretty table.
In the act of serving him she checked herself. “You wouldn’t rather have it with HER?”
He balanced a moment. “Does she have a tea of her own?”
“Do you mean to say you don’t know?”—Mrs. Brook asked it with surprise. “Such ignorance of what I do for her does tell, I think, the tale of how you’ve lately treated us.”
“In not coming for so long?”
“For more weeks, for more months than I can count. Scarcely since—when was it?—the end of January, that night of Tishy’s dinner.”
“Yes, that awful night.”
“Awful, you call it?”
“Awful.”
“Well, the time without you,” Mrs. Brook returned, “has been so bad that I’m afraid I’ve lost the impression of anything before.” Then she offered the tea to his choice. “WILL you have it upstairs?”
He received the cup. “Yes, and here too.” After which he said nothing again till, first pouring in milk to cool it, he had drunk his tea down. “That’s not literally true, you know. I HAVE been in.”
“Yes, but always with other people—you managed it somehow; the wrong ones. It hasn’t counted.”
“Ah in one way and another I think everything counts. And you forget I’ve dined.”
“Oh—for once!”
“The once you asked me. So don’t spoil the beauty of your own behaviour by mistimed reflexions. You’ve been, as usual, superior.”
“Ah but there has been no beauty in it. There has been nothing,” Mrs. Brook went on, “but bare bleak recognition, the curse of my hideous intelligence. We’ve fallen to pieces, and at least I’m not such a fool as not to have felt it in time. From the moment one did feel it why should one insist on vain forms? If YOU felt it, and were so ready to drop them, my part was what it has always been—to accept the inevitable. We shall never grow together again. The smash was too great.”
Vanderbank for a little said nothing; then at last: “You ought to know how great!”
Whatever had happened her lovely look here survived it. “I?”
“The smash,” he replied, “was indeed as complete, I think, as your intention. Each of the ‘pieces’ testifies to your success. Five minutes did it.”
She appeared to wonder where he was going. “But surely not MY minutes. Where have you discovered that I made Mitchy’s marriage?”
“Mitchy’s marriage has nothing to do with it.”
“I see.” She had the old interest at least still at their service. “You think we might have survived that.” A new thought of it seemed to glimmer. “I’m bound to say Mitchy’s marriage promises elements.”
“You did it that night at Mrs. Grendon’s.” He spoke as if he had not heard her. “It was a wonderful performance. You pulled us down—just closing with each of the great columns in its turn—as Samson pulled down the temple. I was at the time more or less bruised and buried and didn’t in the agitation and confusion fully understand what had happened. But I understand now.”
“Are you very sure?” Mrs. Brook earnestly asked.
“Well, I’m stupid compared with you, but you see I’ve taken my time. I’ve puzzled it out. I’ve lain awake on it: all the more that I’ve had to do it all myself—with the Mitchys in Italy and Greece. I’ve missed his aid.”
“You’ll have it now,” Mrs. Brook kindly said. “They’re coming back.”
“And when do they arrive?”
“Any day, I believe.”
“Has he written you?”
“No,” said Mrs. Brook—“there it is. That’s just the way we’ve fallen to pieces. But you’ll of course have heard something.”
“Never a word.”
“Ah then it’s complete.”
Vanderbank thought a moment. “Not quite, is it?—I mean it won’t be altogether unless he hasn’t written to Nanda.”
“Then HAS he?”—she was keen again.
“Oh I’m assuming. Don’t YOU know?”
“How should I?”
This too he turned over. “Just as a consequence of your having, at Tishy’s, so abruptly and wonderfully tackled the question that a few days later, as I afterwards gathered, was to be crowned with a measure of success not yet exhausted. Why, in other words—if it was to know so little about her and to get no nearer to her—did you bring about Nanda’s return?”
There was a clear reason, her face said, if she could only remember it. “Why did I—?” Then as catching a light: “Fancy your asking me—at this time of day!”
“Ah you HAVE noticed that I haven’t asked before? However,” Van promptly added, “I know well enough what you notice. Nanda hasn’t mentioned to you whether or no she has heard?”
“Absolutely not. But you don’t suppose, I take it, that it was to pry into her affairs I called her in.”
Vanderbank, on this, lighted for the first time with a laugh. “‘Called her in’? How I like your expressions!”
“I do then, in spite of all,” she eagerly asked, “remind you a little of the bon temps? Ah,” she sighed, “I don’t say anything good now. But of course I see Jane—though not so often either. It’s from Jane I’ve heard of what she calls her ‘young things.’ It seems so odd to think of Mitchy as a young thing. He’s as old as all time, and his wife, who the other day was about six, is now practically about forty. And I also saw Petherton,” Mrs. Brook added, “on his return.”
“His return from where?”
“Why he was with them at Corfu, Malta, Cyprus—I don’t know where; yachting, spending Mitchy’s money, ‘larking,’ he called it—I don’t know what. He was with them for weeks.”
“Till Jane, you mean, called him in?”
“I think it must have been that.”
“Well, that’s better,” said Van, “than if Mitchy had had to call him out.”
“Oh Mitchy—!” Mrs. Brook comprehensively sounded.
Her visitor quite assented. “Isn’t he amazing?”
“Unique.”
He had a short pause. “But what’s she up to?”
It was apparently for Mrs. Brook a question of such variety of application that she brought out experimentally: “Jane?”
“Dear no. I think we’ve fathomed ‘Jane,’ haven’t we?”
“Well,” mused Mrs. Brook, “I’m by no means sure I have. Just of late I’ve had a new sense!”
“Yes, of what now?” Van amusedly put it as she held the note.
“Oh of depths below depths. But poor Jane—of course after all she’s human. She’s beside herself with one thing and another, but she can’t in any consistency show it. She took her stand so on having with Petherton’s aid formed Aggie for a femme charmante—”
“That it’s too late to cry out that Petherton’s aid can now be dispensed with? Do you mean then that he IS such a brute that after all Mitchy has done for him—?” Vanderbank, at the rising image, pulled up in easy disgust.
“I think him quite capable of considering with a magnificent insolence of selfishness that what Mitchy has MOST done will have been to make Aggie accessible in a way that—for decency and delicacy of course, things on which Petherton highly prides himself—she could naturally not be as a girl. Her marriage has simplified it.”
Vanderbank took it all in. “‘Accessible’ is good!”
“Then—which was what I intended just now—Aggie has already become so—?”
Mrs. Brook, however, could as yet in fairness only wonder. “That’s just what I’m dying to see.”
Her companion smiled at it. “‘Even in our ashes live their wonted fires’! But what do you make, in such a box, of poor Mitchy himself? His marriage can scarcely to such an extent have simplified HIM.”
It was something, none the less, that Mrs. Brook had to weigh. “I don’t know. I give it up. The thing was of a strangeness!”
Her friend also paused, and it was as if for a little, on either side of a gate on which they might have had their elbows, they remained looking at each other over it and over what was unsaid between them. “It WAS ‘rum’!” he at last merely dropped.
It was scarce for Mrs. Brook, all the same—she seemed to feel after a moment—to surround the matter with an excess of silence.
“He did what a man does—especially in that business—when he doesn’t do what he wants.”
“Do you mean what somebody else wanted?”
“Well, what he himself DIDN’T. And if he’s unhappy,” she went on, “he’ll know whom to pitch into.”
“Ah,” said Vanderbank, “even if he is he won’t be the man to what you might call ‘vent’ it on her. He’ll seek compensations elsewhere and won’t mind any ridicule—!”
“Whom are you speaking of as ‘her’?” Mrs. Brook asked as on feeling that something in her face had made him stop. “I wasn’t referring,” she explained, “to his wife.”
“Oh!” said Vanderbank.
“Aggie doesn’t matter,” she went on.
“Oh!” he repeated. “You meant the Duchess?” he then threw off.
“Don’t be silly!” she rejoined. “He MAY not become unhappy—God grant NOT!” she developed. “But if he does he’ll take it out of Nanda.”
Van appeared to challenge this. “‘Take it out’ of her?”
“Well, want to know, as some American asked me the other day of somebody, what she’s ‘going to do’ about it.”
Vanderbank, who had remained on his feet, stood still at this for a longer time than at anything yet. “But what CAN she ‘do’—?”
“That’s again just what I’m curious to see.” Mrs. Brook then spoke with a glance at the clock. “But if you don’t go up to her—!”
“My notion of seeing her alone may be defeated by her coming down on learning that I’m here?” He had taken out his watch. “I’ll go in a moment. But, as a light on that danger, would YOU, in the circumstances, come down?”
Mrs. Brook, however, could for light only look darkness. “Oh you don’t love ME!”
Vanderbank, still with his watch, stared then as an alternative at the fire. “You haven’t yet told me you know, if Mr. Cashmore now comes EVERY day.”
“My dear man, how can I say? You’ve just your occasion to find out.”
“From HER, you mean?”
Mrs. Brook hesitated. “Unless you prefer the footman. Must I again remind you that, with her own sitting-room and one of the men, in addition to her maid, wholly at her orders, her independence is ideal?”
Vanderbank, who appeared to have been timing himself, put up his watch. “I’m bound to say then that with separations so established I understand less than ever your unforgettable explosion.”
“Ah you come back to that?” she wearily asked. “And you find it, with all you’ve to think about, unforgettable?”
“Oh but there was a wild light in your eye—!”
“Well,” Mrs. Brook said, “you see it now quite gone out.” She had spoken more sadly than sharply, but her impatience had the next moment a flicker. “I called Nanda in because I wanted to.”
“Precisely; but what I don’t make out, you see, is what you’ve since gained by it.”
“You mean she only hates me the more?”
Van’s impatience, in the movement with which he turned from her, had a flare still sharper. “You know I’m incapable of meaning anything of the sort.”
She waited a minute while his back was presented. “I sometimes think in effect that you’re incapable of anything straightforward.”
Vanderbank’s movement had not been to the door, but he almost reached it after giving her, on this, a hard look. He then stopped short, however, to stare an instant still more fixedly into the hat he held in his hand; the consequence of which in turn was that he the next minute stood again before her chair. “Don’t you call it straightforward of me just not to have come for so long?”
She had again to take time to say. “Is that an allusion to what—by the loss of your beautiful presence—I’ve failed to ‘gain’? I dare say at any rate”—she gave him no time to reply—“that you feel you’re quite as straightforward as I and that we’re neither of us creatures of mere rash impulse. There was a time in fact, wasn’t there? when we rather enjoyed each other’s dim depths. If I wanted to fawn on you,” she went on, “I might say that, with such a comrade in obliquity to wind and double about with, I’d risk losing myself in the mine. But why retort or recriminate? Let us not, for God’s sake, be vulgar—we haven’t yet, bad as it is, come to THAT. I CAN be, no doubt—I some day MUST be: I feel it looming at me out of the awful future as an inevitable fate. But let it be for when I’m old and horrible; not an hour before. I do want to live a little even yet. So you ought to let me off easily—even as I let you.”
“Oh I know,” said Vanderbank handsomely, “that there are things you don’t put to me! You show a tact!”
“There it is. And I like much better,” Mrs. Brook went on, “our speaking of it as delicacy than as duplicity. If you understand, it’s so much saved.”
“What I always understand more than anything else,” he returned, “is the general truth that you’re prodigious.”
It was perhaps a little as relapse from tension that she had nothing against that. “As for instance when it WOULD be so easy—!”
“Yes, to take up what lies there, you yet so splendidly abstain.”
“You literally press upon me my opportunity? It’s YOU who are splendid!” she rather strangely laughed.
“Don’t you at least want to say,” he went on with a slight flush, “what you MOST obviously and naturally might?”
Appealed to on the question of underlying desire, Mrs. Brook went through the decent form of appearing to try to give it the benefit of any doubt. “Don’t I want, you mean, to find out before you go up what YOU want? Shall you be too disappointed,” she asked, “if I say that, since I shall probably learn, as we used to be told as children, ‘all in good time,’ I can wait till the light comes out of itself?”
Vanderbank still lingered. “You ARE deep!”
“You’ve only to be deeper.”
“That’s easy to say. I’m afraid at any rate you won’t think I am,” he pursued after a pause, “if I ask you what in the world—since Harold does keep Lady Fanny so quiet—Cashmore still requires Nanda’s direction for.”
“Ah find out!” said Mrs. Brook.
“Isn’t Mrs. Donner quite shelved?”
“Find out,” she repeated.
Vanderbank had reached the door and had his hand on the latch, but there was still something else. “You scarce suppose, I imagine, that she has come to like him ‘for himself?”
“Find out!” And Mrs. Brook, who was now on her feet, turned away. He watched her a moment more, then checked himself and left her.
II
She remained alone ten minutes, at the end of which her reflexions would have been seen to be deep—were interrupted by the entrance of her husband. The interruption was indeed not so great as if the couple had not met, as they almost invariably met, in silence: she took at all events, to begin with, no more account of his presence than to hand him a cup of tea accompanied with nothing but cream and sugar. Her having no word for him, however, committed her no more to implying that he had come in only for his refreshment than it would have committed her to say: “Here it is, Edward dear—just as you like it; so take it and sit down and be quiet.” No spectator worth his salt could have seen them more than a little together without feeling how everything that, under his eyes or not, she either did or omitted, rested on a profound acquaintance with his ways. They formed, Edward’s ways, a chapter by themselves, of which Mrs. Brook was completely mistress and in respect to which the only drawback was that a part of her credit was by the nature of the case predestined to remain obscure. So many of them were so queer that no one but she COULD know them, and know thereby into what crannies her reckoning had to penetrate. It was one of them for instance that if he was often most silent when most primed with matter, so when he had nothing to say he was always silent too—a peculiarity misleading, until mastered, for a lady who could have allowed in the latter case for almost any variety of remark. “What do you think,” he said at last, “of his turning up to-day?”
“Of old Van’s?”
“Oh has HE turned up?”
“Half an hour ago, and asking almost in his first breath for Nanda. I sent him up to her and he’s with her now.” If Edward had his ways she had also some of her own; one of which, in talk with him, if talk it could be called, was never to produce anything till the need was marked. She had thus a card or two always in reserve, for it was her theory that she never knew what might happen. It nevertheless did occur that he sometimes went, as she would have called it, one better.
“He’s not with her now. I’ve just been with her.”
“Then he didn’t go up?” Mrs. Brook was immensely interested. “He left me, you know, to do so.”
“Know—how should I know? I left her five minutes ago.”
“Then he went out without seeing her.” Mrs. Brook took it in. “He changed his mind out there on the stairs.”
“Well,” said Edward, “it won’t be the first mind that has been changed there. It’s about the only thing a man can change.”
“Do you refer particularly to MY stairs?” she asked with her whimsical woe. But meanwhile she had taken it in. “Then whom were you speaking of?”
“Mr. Longdon’s coming to tea with her. She has had a note.”
“But when did he come to town?”
“Last night, I believe. The note, an hour or two ago, announced him—brought by hand and hoping she’d be at home.”
Mrs. Brook thought again. “I’m glad she is. He’s too sweet. By hand!—it must have been so he sent them to mamma. He wouldn’t for the world wire.”
“Oh Nanda has often wired to HIM,” her father returned.
“Then she ought to be ashamed of herself. But how,” said Mrs. Brook, “do you know?”
“Oh I know when we’re in a thing like this.”
“Yet you complain of her want of intimacy with you! It turns out that you’re as thick as thieves.”
Edward looked at this charge as he looked at all old friends, without a sign—to call a sign—of recognition. “I don’t know of whose want of intimacy with me I’ve ever complained. There isn’t much more of it, that I can see, that any of them could put on. What do you suppose I’d have them do? If I on my side don’t get very far I may have alluded to THAT.”
“Oh but you do,” Mrs. Brook declared. “You think you don’t, but you get very far indeed. You’re always, as I said just now, bringing out something that you’ve got somewhere.”
“Yes, and seeing you flare up at it. What I bring out is only what they tell me.”
This limitation offered, however, for Mrs. Brook no difficulty. “Ah but it seems to me that with the things people nowadays tell one—! What more do you want?”
“Well”—and Edward from his chair regarded the fire a while—“the difference must be in what they tell YOU.”
“Things that are better?”
“Yes—worse. I dare say,” he went on, “what I give them—”
“Isn’t as bad as what I do? Oh we must each do our best. But when I hear from you,” Mrs. Brook pursued, “that Nanda had ever permitted herself anything so dreadful as to wire to him, it comes over me afresh thatIwould have been the perfect one to deal with him if his detestation of me hadn’t prevented.” She was by this time also—but on her feet—before the fire, into which, like her husband, she gazed. “Iwould never have wired. I’d have gone in for little delicacies and odd things she has never thought of.”
“Oh she doesn’t go in for what you do,” Edward assented.
“She’s as bleak as a chimney-top when the fire’s out, and if it hadn’t been after all for mamma—!” And she lost herself again in the reasons of things.
Her husband’s silence seemed to mark for an instant a deference to her allusion, but there was a limit even to this combination. “You make your mother, I think, keep it up pretty well. But if she HADN’T as you say, done so—?”
“Why we shouldn’t have been anywhere.”
“Well, where are we now? That’s whatIwant to know.”
Following her own train she had at first no heed for his question. “Without his hatred he would have liked me.” But she came back with a sigh to the actual. “No matter. We must deal with what we’ve got.”
“What HAVE we got?” Edward continued.
Again with no ear for his question his wife turned away, only however, after taking a few vague steps, to approach him with new decision. “If Mr. Longdon’s due will you do me a favour? Will you go back to Nanda—before he arrives—and let her know, though not of course as from ME, that Van has been here half an hour, has had it put well before him that she’s up there and at liberty, and has left the house without seeing her?”
Edward Brookenham made no motion. “You don’t like better to do it yourself?”