The Awkward Age

“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.”