The Awkward Age

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.”