The Awkward Age

His fellow visitor barely hesitated. “It would be his own if he were free—and it would be Lord Petherton’s FOR him. I mean by his being free Nanda’s becoming definitely lost to him. Then it would be impossible for Mrs. Brook to continue to persuade him, as she does now, that by a waiting game he’ll come to his chance. His chance will cease to exist, and he wants so, poor darling, to marry. You’ve really now seen my niece,” she went on. “That’s another reason why I hold you can help me.”

“Yes—I’ve seen her.”

“Well, there she is.” It was as if in the pause that followed this they sat looking at little absent Aggie with a wonder that was almost equal. “The good God has given her to me,” the Duchess said at last.

“It seems to me then that she herself is, in her remarkable loveliness, really your help.”

“She’ll be doubly so if you give me proofs that you believe in her.” And the Duchess, appearing to consider that with this she had made herself clear and her interlocutor plastic, rose in confident majesty. “I leave it to you.”

Mr. Longdon did the same, but with more consideration now. “Is it your expectation that I shall speak to Mr. Mitchett?”

“Don’t flatter yourself he won’t speak to YOU!”

Mr. Longdon made it out. “As supposing me, you mean, an interested party?”

She clapped her gloved hands for joy. “It’s a delight to hear you practically admit that you ARE one! Mr. Mitchett will take anything from you—above all perfect candour. It isn’t every day one meets YOUR kind, and he’s a connoisseur. I leave it to you—I leave it to you.”

She spoke as if it were something she had thrust bodily into his hands and wished to hurry away from. He put his hands behind him—straightening himself a little, half-kindled, still half-confused. “You’re all extraordinary people!”

She gave a toss of her head that showed her as not so dazzled. “You’re the best of us, caro mio—you and Aggie: for Aggie’s as good as you. Mitchy’s good too, however—Mitchy’s beautiful. You see it’s not only his money. He’s a gentleman. So are you. There aren’t so many. But we must move fast,” she added more sharply.

“What do you mean by fast?”

“What should I mean but what I say? If Nanda doesn’t get a husband early in the business—”

“Well?” said Mr. Longdon, as she appeared to pause with the weight of her idea.

“Why she won’t get one late—she won’t get one at all. One, I mean, of the kind she’ll take. She’ll have been in it over-long for THEIR taste.”

She had moved, looking off and about her—little Aggie always on her mind—to the flight of steps, where she again hung fire; and had really ended by producing in him the manner of keeping up with her to challenge her. “Been in what?”

She went down a few steps while he stood with his face full of perceptions strained and scattered. “Why in the air they themselves have infected for her!”

V

Late that night, in the smoking room, when the smokers—talkers and listeners alike—were about to disperse, Mr. Longdon asked Vanderbank to stay, and then it was that the young man, to whom all the evening he had not addressed a word, could make out why, a little unnaturally, he had prolonged his vigil. “I’ve something particular to say to you and I’ve been waiting. I hope you don’t mind. It’s rather important.” Vanderbank expressed on the spot the liveliest desire to oblige him and, quickly lighting another cigarette, mounted again to the deep divan with which a part of the place was furnished. The smoking-room at Mertle was not unworthy of the general nobleness, and the fastidious spectator had clearly been reckoned on in the great leather-covered lounge that, raised by a step or two above the floor, applied its back to two quarters of the wall and enjoyed most immediately a view of the billiard-table. Mr. Longdon continued for a minute to roam with the air of dissimulated absence that, during the previous hour and among the other men, his companion’s eye had not lost; he pushed a ball or two about, examined the form of an ash-stand, swung his glasses almost with violence and declined either to smoke or to sit down. Vanderbank, perched aloft on the bench and awaiting developments, had a little the look of some prepossessing criminal who, in court, should have changed places with the judge. He was unlike many a man of marked good looks in that the effect of evening dress was not, with a perversity often observed in such cases, to over-emphasise his fineness. His type was rather chastened than heightened, and he sat there moreover with a primary discretion quite in the note of the deference that from the first, with his friend of the elder fashion, he had taken as imposed. He had a strong sense for shades of respect and was now careful to loll scarcely more than with an official superior. “If you ask me,” Mr. Longdon presently continued, “why at this hour of the night—after a day at best too heterogeneous—I don’t keep over till to-morrow whatever I may have to say, I can only tell you that I appeal to you now because I’ve something on my mind that I shall sleep the better for being rid of.”

There was space to circulate in front of the haut-pas, where he had still paced and still swung his glasses; but with these words he had paused, leaning against the billiard-table, to meet the interested urbanity of the answer they produced. “Are you very sure that having got rid of it you WILL sleep? Is it a pure confidence,” Vanderbank said, “that you do me the honour to make me? Is it something terrific that requires a reply, so that I shall have to take account on my side of the rest I may deprive you of?”

“Don’t take account of anything—I’m myself a man who always takes too much. It isn’t a matter about which I press you for an immediate answer. You can give me no answer probably without a good deal of thought. I’VE thought a good deal—otherwise I wouldn’t speak. I only want to put something before you and leave it there.”

“I never see you,” said Vanderbank, “that you don’t put something before me.”

“That sounds,” his friend returned, “as if I rather overloaded—what’s the sort of thing you fellows nowadays say?—your intellectual board. If there’s a congestion of dishes sweep everything without scruple away. I’ve never put before you anything like this.”

He spoke with a weight that in the great space, where it resounded a little, made an impression—an impression marked by the momentary pause that fell between them. He partly broke the silence first by beginning to walk again, and then Vanderbank broke it as through the apprehension of their becoming perhaps too solemn. “Well, you immensely interest me and you really couldn’t have chosen a better time. A secret—for we shall make it that of course, shan’t we?—at this witching hour, in this great old house, is all my visit here will have required to make the whole thing a rare remembrance. So I assure you the more you put before me the better.”

Mr. Longdon took up another ash-tray, but with the air of doing so as a direct consequence of Vanderbank’s tone. After he had laid it down he put on his glasses; then fixing his companion he brought out: “Have you no idea at all—?”

“Of what you have in your head? Dear Mr. Longdon, how SHOULD I have?”

“Well, I’m wondering if I shouldn’t perhaps have a little in your place. There’s nothing that in the circumstances occurs to you as likely I should want to say?”

Vanderbank gave a laugh that might have struck an auditor as a trifle uneasy. “When you speak of ‘the circumstances’ you do a thing that—unless you mean the simple thrilling ones of this particular moment—always of course opens the door of the lurid for a man of any imagination. To such a man you’ve only to give a nudge for his conscience to jump. That’s at any rate the case with mine. It’s never quite on its feet—so it’s now already on its back.” He stopped a little—his smile was even strained. “Is what you want to put before me something awful I’ve done?”

“Excuse me if I press this point.” Mr. Longdon spoke kindly, but if his friend’s anxiety grew his own thereby diminished. “Can you think of nothing at all?”

“Do you mean that I’ve done?”

“No, but that—whether you’ve done it or not—I may have become aware of.”

There could have been no better proof than Vanderbank’s expression, on this, of his having mastered the secret of humouring without appearing to patronise. “I think you ought to give me a little more of a clue.”

Mr. Longdon took off his glasses. “Well—the clue’s Nanda Brookenham.”

“Oh I see.” His friend had responded quickly, but for a minute said nothing more, and the great marble clock that gave the place the air of a club ticked louder in the stillness. Mr. Longdon waited with a benevolent want of mercy, yet with a look in his face that spoke of what depended for him—though indeed very far within—on the upshot of his patience. The hush between them, for that matter, became a conscious public measure of the young man’s honesty. He evidently at last felt it as such, and there would have been for an observer of his handsome controlled face a study of some sharp things. “I judge that you ask me for such an utterance,” he finally said, “as very few persons at any time have the right to expect of a man. Think of the people—and very decent ones—to whom on so many a question one must only reply that it’s none of their business.”

“I see you know what I mean,” said Mr. Longdon.

“Then you know also the distinguished exception I make of you. There isn’t another man with whom I’d talk of it.”

“And even to me you don’t! But I’m none the less obliged to you,” Mr. Longdon added.

“It isn’t only the gravity,” his companion went on; “it’s the ridicule that inevitably attaches—!”

The manner in which Mr. Longdon indicated the empty room was in itself an interruption. “Don’t I sufficiently spare you?”

“Thank you, thank you,” said Vanderbank.

“Besides, it’s not for nothing.”

“Of course not!” the young man returned, though with a look of noting the next moment a certain awkwardness in his concurrence. “But don’t spare me now.”

“I don’t mean to.” Mr. Longdon had his back to the table again, on which he rested with each hand on the rim. “I don’t mean to,” he repeated.

His victim gave a laugh that betrayed at least the drop of a tension. “Yet I don’t quite see what you can do to me.”

“It’s just what for some time past I’ve been trying to think.”

“And at last you’ve discovered?”

“Well—it has finally glimmered out a little in this extraordinary place.”

Vanderbank frankly wondered. “In consequence of anything particular that has happened?”

Mr. Longdon had a pause. “For an old idiot who notices as much as I something particular’s always happening. If you’re a man of imagination—”

“Oh,” Vanderbank broke in, “I know how much more in that case you’re one! It only makes me regret,” he continued, “that I’ve not attended more since yesterday to what you’ve been about.”