The Awkward Age

Mrs. Brook meanwhile had thought it out. “Then he has something to be careful of; it would take something really handsome to inspire in a man like him that sort of interest. With his small expenses all these years his savings must be immense. And how could he have proposed to mamma unless he had originally had money?”

If Vanderbank a little helplessly wondered he also laughed. “You must remember your mother refused him.”

“Ah but not because there wasn’t enough.”

“No—I imagine the force of the blow for him was just in the other reason.”

“Well, it would have been in that one just as much if that one had been the other.” Mrs. Brook was sagacious, though a trifle obscure, and she pursued the next moment: “Mamma was so sincere. The fortune was nothing to her. That shows it was immense.”

“It couldn’t have been as great as your logic,” Vanderbank smiled; “but of course if it has been growing ever since—!”

“I can see it grow while he sits there,” Mrs. Brook declared. But her logic had in fact its own law, and her next transition was an equal jump. “It was too lovely, the frankness of your admission a minute ago that I affect him uncannily. Ah don’t spoil it by explanations!” she beautifully pleaded: “he’s not the first and he won’t be the last with whom I shall not have been what they call a combination. The only thing that matters is that I mustn’t, if possible, make the case worse. So you must guide me. What IS one to do?”

Vanderbank, now amused again, looked at her kindly. “Be yourself, my dear woman. Obey your fine instincts.”

“How can you be,” she sweetly asked, “so hideously hypocritical? You know as well as you sit there that my fine instincts are the thing in the world you’re most in terror of. ‘Be myself?’” she echoed. “What you’d LIKE to say is: ‘Be somebody else—that’s your only chance.’ Well, I’ll try—I’ll try.”

He laughed again, shaking his head. “Don’t—don’t.”

“You mean it’s too hopeless? There’s no way of effacing the bad impression or of starting a good one?” On this, with a drop of his mirth, he met her eyes, and for an instant, through the superficial levity of their talk, they might have appeared to sound each other. It lasted till Mrs. Brook went on: “I should really like not to lose him.”

Vanderbank seemed to understand and at last said: “I think you won’t lose him.”

“Do you mean you’ll help me, Van, you WILL?” Her voice had at moments the most touching tones of any in England, and humble, helpless, affectionate, she spoke with a familiarity of friendship. “It’s for the sense of the link with mamma,” she explained. “He’s simply full of her.”

“Oh I know. He’s prodigious.”

“He has told you more—he comes back to it?” Mrs. Brook eagerly asked.

“Well,” the young man replied a trifle evasively, “we’ve had a great deal of talk, and he’s the jolliest old boy possible, and in short I like him.”

“I see,” said Mrs. Brook blandly, “and he likes you in return as much as he despises me. That makes it all right—makes me somehow so happy for you. There’s something in him—what is it?—that suggests the oncle d’Amerique, the eccentric benefactor, the fairy godmother. He’s a little of an old woman—but all the better for it.” She hung fire but an instant before she pursued: “What can we make him do for you?”

Vanderbank at this was very blank. “Do for me?”

“How can any one love you,” she asked, “without wanting to show it in some way? You know all the ways, dear Van,” she breathed, “in which I want to show it.”

He might have known them, something suddenly fixed in his face appeared to say, but they were not what was, on this speech of hers, most immediately present to him. “That for instance is the tone not to take with him.”

“There you are!” she sighed with discouragement. “Well, only TELL me.” Then as he said nothing: “I must be more like mamma?”

His expression confessed to his feeling an awkwardness. “You’re perhaps not quite enough like her.”

“Oh I know that if he deplores me as I am now she would have done so quite as much; in fact probably, as seeing it nearer, a good deal more. She’d have despised me even more than he. But if it’s a question,” Mrs. Brook went on, “of not saying what mamma wouldn’t, how can I know, don’t you see, what she WOULD have said?” Mrs. Brook became as wonderful as if she saw in her friend’s face some admiring reflexion of the fine freedom of mind that—in such a connexion quite as much as in any other—she could always show. “Of course I revere mamma just as much as he does, and there was everything in her to revere. But she was none the less in every way a charming woman too, and I don’t know, after all, do I? what even she—in their peculiar relation—may not have said to him.”

Vanderbank’s laugh came back. “Very good—very good. I return to my first idea. Try with him whatever comes into your head. You’re a woman of genius after all, and genius mostly justifies itself. To make you right,” he went on pleasantly and inexorably, “might perhaps be to make you wrong. Since you HAVE so great a charm trust it not at all or all in all. That, I dare say, is all you can do. Therefore—yes—be yourself.”

These remarks were followed on either side by the repetition of a somewhat intenser mutual gaze, though indeed the speaker’s eyes had more the air of meeting his friend’s than of seeking them. “I can’t be YOU certainly, Van,” Mrs. Brook sadly brought forth.

“I know what you mean by that,” he rejoined in a moment. “You mean I’m hypocritical.”

“Hypocritical?”

“I’m diplomatic and calculating—I don’t show him how bad I am; whereas with you he knows the worst.”

Of this observation Mrs. Brook, whose eyes attached themselves again to Mr. Longdon, took at first no further notice than might have been indicated by the way it set her musing.

“‘Calculating’?”—she at last took him up. “On what is there to calculate?”

“Why,” said Vanderbank, “if, as you just hinted, he’s a blessing in disguise—! I perfectly admit,” he resumed, “that I’m capable of sacrifices to keep on good terms with him.”

“You’re not afraid he’ll bore you?”

“Oh yes—distinctly.”

“But he’ll be worth it? Then,” Mrs. Brook said as he appeared to assent, “he’ll be worth a great deal.” She continued to watch Mr. Longdon, who, without his glasses, stared straight at the floor while Mr. Cashmore talked to him. She pursued, however, dispassionately enough: “He must be of a narrowness—!”

“Oh beautiful!”

She was silent again. “I shall broaden him. YOU won’t.”

“Heaven forbid!” Vanderbank heartily concurred. “But none the less, as I’ve said, I’ll help you.”

Her attention was still fixed. “It will be him you’ll help. If you’re to make sacrifices to keep on good terms with him the first sacrifice will be of me.” Then on his leaving this remark so long unanswered that she had finally looked at him again: “I’m perfectly prepared for it.”

It was as if, jocosely enough, he had had time to make up his mind how to meet her. “What will you have—when he loved my mother?”

Nothing could have been droller than the gloom of her surprise. “Yours too?”

“I didn’t tell you the other day—out of delicacy.”

Mrs. Brookenham darkly thought. “HE didn’t tell me either.”

“The same consideration deterred him. But if I didn’t speak of it,” Vanderbank continued, “when I arranged with you, after meeting him here at dinner, that you should come to tea with him at my rooms—if I didn’t mention it then it wasn’t because I hadn’t learnt it early.”

Mrs. Brook more deeply sounded this affair, but she spoke with the exaggerated mildness that was the form mostly taken by her gaiety. “It was because of course it makes him out such a wretch! What becomes in that case of his loyalty?”

“To YOUR mother’s memory? Oh it’s all right—he has it quite straight. She came later. Mine, after my father’s death, had refused him. But you see he might have been my stepfather.”

Mrs. Brookenham took it in, but she had suddenly a brighter light. “He might have been my OWN father! Besides,” she went on, “if his line is to love the mothers why on earth doesn’t he love ME? I’m in all conscience enough of one.”

“Ah but isn’t there in your case the fact of a daughter?” Vanderbank asked with a slight embarrassment.

Mrs. Brookenham stared. “What good does that do me?”

“Why, didn’t she tell you?”

“Nanda? She told me he doesn’t like her any better than he likes me.”