The Awkward Age

She had opened at one of the tables, unperceivingly, a big volume of which she turned the leaves. “Don’t ‘adore’ a girl, Mr. Mitchy—just help her. That’s more to the purpose.”

“Help you?” he cried. “You bring tears to my eyes!”

“Can’t a girl have friends?” she went on. “I never heard of anything so idiotic.” Giving him, however, no chance to take her up on this, she made a quick transition. “Mother didn’t come because she wants me now, as she says, more to share her own life.”

Mitchy looked at it. “But is this the way for her to share yours?”

“Ah that’s another matter—about which you must talk to HER. She wants me no longer to keep seeing only with her eyes. She’s throwing me into the world.”

Mitchy had listened with the liveliest interest, but he presently broke into a laugh. “What a good thing then that I’m there to catch you!”

Without—it might have been seen—having gathered the smallest impression of what they enclosed, she carefully drew together again the covers of her folio. There was deliberation in her movements. “I shall always be glad when you’re there. But where do you suppose they’ve gone?” Her eyes were on what was visible of the other room, from which there arrived no sound of voices.

“They’re off there,” said Mitchy, “but just looking unutterable things about you. The impression’s too deep. Let them look, and tell me meanwhile if Mrs. Donner gave you my message.”

“Oh yes, she told me some humbug.”

“The humbug then was in the tone my perfectly sincere speech took from herself. She gives things, I recognise, rather that sound. It’s her weakness,” he continued, “and perhaps even one may say her danger. All the more reason you should help her, as I believe you’re supposed to be doing, aren’t you? I hope you feel you are,” he earnestly added.

He had spoken this time gravely enough, and with magnificent gravity Nanda replied. “I HAVE helped her. Tishy’s sure I have. That’s what Tishy wants me for. She says that to be with some nice girl’s really the best thing for her.”

Poor Mitchy’s face hereupon would have been interesting, would have been distinctly touching to other eyes; but Nanda’s were not heedful of it. “Oh,” he returned after an instant and without profane mirth, “that seems to me the best thing for any one.”

Vanderbank, however, might have caught his expression, for Vanderbank now reappeared, smiling on the pair as if struck by their intimacy. “How you ARE keeping it up!” Then to Nanda persuasively: “Do you mind going to him in there? I want him so really to see you. It’s quite, you know, what he came for.”

Nanda seemed to wonder. “What will he do to me? Anything dreadful?”

“He’ll tell you what I meant just now.”

“Oh,” said Nanda, “if he’s a person who can tell me sometimes what you mean—!” With which she went quickly off.

“And can’t I hear?” Mitchy asked of his host while they looked after her.

“Yes, but only from me.” Vanderbank had pushed him to a seat again and was casting about for cigarettes. “Be quiet and smoke, and I’ll tell you.”

Mitchy, on the sofa, received with meditation a light. “Will she understand? She has everything in the world but one,” he added. “But that’s half.”

Vanderbank, before him, lighted for himself. “What is it?”

“A sense of humour.”

“Oh yes, she’s serious.”

Mitchy smoked a little. “She’s tragic.”

His friend, at the fire, watched a moment the empty portion of the other room, then walked across to give the door a light push that all but closed it. “It’s rather odd,” he remarked as he came back—“that’s quite what I just said to him. But he won’t treat her to comedy.”

III

“Is it the shock of the resemblance to her grandmother?” Vanderbank had asked of Mr. Longdon on rejoining him in his retreat. This victim of memory, with his back turned, was gazing out of the window, and when in answer he showed his face there were tears in his eyes. His answer in fact was just these tears, the significance of which Vanderbank immediately recognised. “It’s still greater then than you gathered from her photograph?”

“It’s the most extraordinary thing in the world. I’m too absurd to be so upset”—Mr. Longdon smiled through his tears—“but if you had known Lady Julia you’d understand. It’s SHE again, as I first knew her, to the life; and not only in feature, in stature, in colour, in movement, but in every bodily mark and sign, in every look of the eyes above all—oh to a degree!—in the sound, in the charm of the voice.” He spoke low and confidentially, but with an intensity that now relieved him—he was as restless as with a discovery. He moved about as with a sacred awe—he might a few steps away have been in the very presence. “She’s ALL Lady Julia. There isn’t a touch of her mother. It’s unique—an absolute revival. I see nothing of her father, I see nothing of any one else. Isn’t it thought wonderful by every one?” he went on. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“To have prepared you a little?”—Vanderbank felt almost guilty. “I see—I should have liked to make more of it; though,” he added all lucidly, “I might so, by putting you on your guard, have caused myself to lose what, if you’ll allow me to say it, strikes me as one of the most touching tributes I’ve ever seen rendered to a woman. In fact, however, how could I know? I never saw Lady Julia, and you had in advance all the evidence I could have: the portrait—pretty bad, in the taste of the time, I admit—and the three or four photographs you must have noticed with it at Mrs. Brook’s. These things must have compared themselves for you with my photograph in there of the granddaughter. The similarity of course we had all observed, but it has taken your wonderful memory and your happy vision to put into it all the detail.”

Mr. Longdon thought a moment, giving a dab with his pocket-handkerchief. “Very true—you’re quite right. It’s far beyond any identity in the pictures. But why did you tell me,” he added more sharply, “that she isn’t beautiful?”

“You’ve deprived me,” Vanderbank laughed, “of the power of expressing civilly any surprise at your finding her so. But I said to you, please remember, nothing that qualified a jot my sense of the special stamp of her face. I’ve always positively found in it a recall of the type of the period you must be thinking of. It isn’t a bit modern. It’s a face of Sir Thomas Lawrence—”

“It’s a face of Gainsborough!” Mr. Longdon returned with spirit. “Lady Julia herself harked back.”

Vanderbank, clearly, was equally touched and amused. “Let us say at once that it’s a face of Raphael.”

His old friend’s hand was instantly on his arm. “That’s exactly what I often said to myself of Lady Julia’s.”

“The forehead’s a little too high,” said Vanderbank.

“But it’s just that excess that, with the exquisite eyes and the particular disposition round it of the fair hair, makes the individual grace, makes the beauty of the resemblance.”

Released by Lady Julia’s lover, the young man in turn grasped him as an encouragement to confidence. “It’s a face that should have the long side-ringlets of 1830. It should have the rest of the personal arrangement, the pelisse, the shape of bonnet, the sprigged muslin dress and the cross-laced sandals. It should have arrived in a pea-green ‘tilbury’ and be a reader of Mrs. Radcliffe. And all this to complete the Raphael!”

Mr. Longdon, who, his discovery proclaimed, had begun, as might have been said, to live with it, looked hard a moment at his companion. “How you’ve observed her!”

Vanderbank met it without confusion. “Whom haven’t I observed? Do you like her?” he then rather oddly and abruptly asked.

The old man broke away again. “How can I tell—with such disparities?”

“The manner must be different,” Vanderbank suggested. “And the things she says.”

His visitor was before him again. “I don’t know what to make of them. They don’t go with the rest of her. Lady Julia,” said Mr. Longdon, “was rather shy.”

On this too his host could meet him. “She must have been. And Nanda—yes, certainly—doesn’t give that impression.”

“On the contrary. But Lady Julia was gay!” he added with an eagerness that made Vanderbank smile.

“I can also see that. Nanda doesn’t joke. And yet,” Vanderbank continued with his exemplary candour, “we mustn’t speak of her, must we? as if she were bold and grim.”

Mr. Longdon fixed him. “Do you think she’s sad?”

They had preserved their lowered tone and might, with their heads together, have been conferring as the party “out” in some game with the couple in the other room. “Yes. Sad.” But Vanderbank broke off. “I’ll send her to you.” Thus it was he had come back to her.

Nanda, on joining the elder man, went straight to the point. “He says it’s so beautiful—what you feel on seeing me: if that IS what he meant.” Mr. Longdon kept silent again at first, only smiling at her, but less strangely now, and then appeared to look about him for some place where she could sit near him. There was a sofa in this room too, on which, observing it, she quickly sank down, so that they were presently together, placed a little sideways and face to face. She had shown perhaps that she supposed him to have wished to take her hand, but he forbore to touch her, though letting her feel all the kindness of his eyes and their long backward vision. These things she evidently felt soon enough; she went on before he had spoken. “I know how well you knew my grandmother. Mother has told me—and I’m so glad. She told me to say to you that she wants YOU to tell me.” Just a shade, at this, might have appeared to drop over his face, but who was there to know if the girl observed it? It didn’t prevent at any rate her completing her statement. “That’s why she wished me to-day to come alone. She said she wished you to have me all to yourself.”

No, decidedly, she wasn’t shy: that mute reflexion was in the air an instant. “That, no doubt, is the best way. I thank her very much. I called, after having had the honour of dining—I called, I think, three times,” he went on with a sudden displacement of the question; “but I had the misfortune each time to miss her.”

She kept looking at him with her crude young clearness. “I didn’t know about that. Mother thinks she’s more at home than almost any one. She does it on purpose: she knows what it is,” Nanda pursued with her perfect gravity, “for people to be disappointed of finding her.”

“Oh I shall find her yet,” said Mr. Longdon. “And then I hope I shall also find YOU.”