The Awkward Age

“Oh I know,” said Vanderbank handsomely, “that there are things you don’t put to me! You show a tact!”

“There it is. And I like much better,” Mrs. Brook went on, “our speaking of it as delicacy than as duplicity. If you understand, it’s so much saved.”

“What I always understand more than anything else,” he returned, “is the general truth that you’re prodigious.”

It was perhaps a little as relapse from tension that she had nothing against that. “As for instance when it WOULD be so easy—!”

“Yes, to take up what lies there, you yet so splendidly abstain.”

“You literally press upon me my opportunity? It’s YOU who are splendid!” she rather strangely laughed.

“Don’t you at least want to say,” he went on with a slight flush, “what you MOST obviously and naturally might?”

Appealed to on the question of underlying desire, Mrs. Brook went through the decent form of appearing to try to give it the benefit of any doubt. “Don’t I want, you mean, to find out before you go up what YOU want? Shall you be too disappointed,” she asked, “if I say that, since I shall probably learn, as we used to be told as children, ‘all in good time,’ I can wait till the light comes out of itself?”

Vanderbank still lingered. “You ARE deep!”

“You’ve only to be deeper.”

“That’s easy to say. I’m afraid at any rate you won’t think I am,” he pursued after a pause, “if I ask you what in the world—since Harold does keep Lady Fanny so quiet—Cashmore still requires Nanda’s direction for.”

“Ah find out!” said Mrs. Brook.

“Isn’t Mrs. Donner quite shelved?”

“Find out,” she repeated.

Vanderbank had reached the door and had his hand on the latch, but there was still something else. “You scarce suppose, I imagine, that she has come to like him ‘for himself?”

“Find out!” And Mrs. Brook, who was now on her feet, turned away. He watched her a moment more, then checked himself and left her.

II

She remained alone ten minutes, at the end of which her reflexions would have been seen to be deep—were interrupted by the entrance of her husband. The interruption was indeed not so great as if the couple had not met, as they almost invariably met, in silence: she took at all events, to begin with, no more account of his presence than to hand him a cup of tea accompanied with nothing but cream and sugar. Her having no word for him, however, committed her no more to implying that he had come in only for his refreshment than it would have committed her to say: “Here it is, Edward dear—just as you like it; so take it and sit down and be quiet.” No spectator worth his salt could have seen them more than a little together without feeling how everything that, under his eyes or not, she either did or omitted, rested on a profound acquaintance with his ways. They formed, Edward’s ways, a chapter by themselves, of which Mrs. Brook was completely mistress and in respect to which the only drawback was that a part of her credit was by the nature of the case predestined to remain obscure. So many of them were so queer that no one but she COULD know them, and know thereby into what crannies her reckoning had to penetrate. It was one of them for instance that if he was often most silent when most primed with matter, so when he had nothing to say he was always silent too—a peculiarity misleading, until mastered, for a lady who could have allowed in the latter case for almost any variety of remark. “What do you think,” he said at last, “of his turning up to-day?”

“Of old Van’s?”

“Oh has HE turned up?”

“Half an hour ago, and asking almost in his first breath for Nanda. I sent him up to her and he’s with her now.” If Edward had his ways she had also some of her own; one of which, in talk with him, if talk it could be called, was never to produce anything till the need was marked. She had thus a card or two always in reserve, for it was her theory that she never knew what might happen. It nevertheless did occur that he sometimes went, as she would have called it, one better.

“He’s not with her now. I’ve just been with her.”

“Then he didn’t go up?” Mrs. Brook was immensely interested. “He left me, you know, to do so.”

“Know—how should I know? I left her five minutes ago.”

“Then he went out without seeing her.” Mrs. Brook took it in. “He changed his mind out there on the stairs.”

“Well,” said Edward, “it won’t be the first mind that has been changed there. It’s about the only thing a man can change.”

“Do you refer particularly to MY stairs?” she asked with her whimsical woe. But meanwhile she had taken it in. “Then whom were you speaking of?”

“Mr. Longdon’s coming to tea with her. She has had a note.”

“But when did he come to town?”

“Last night, I believe. The note, an hour or two ago, announced him—brought by hand and hoping she’d be at home.”

Mrs. Brook thought again. “I’m glad she is. He’s too sweet. By hand!—it must have been so he sent them to mamma. He wouldn’t for the world wire.”

“Oh Nanda has often wired to HIM,” her father returned.

“Then she ought to be ashamed of herself. But how,” said Mrs. Brook, “do you know?”

“Oh I know when we’re in a thing like this.”

“Yet you complain of her want of intimacy with you! It turns out that you’re as thick as thieves.”

Edward looked at this charge as he looked at all old friends, without a sign—to call a sign—of recognition. “I don’t know of whose want of intimacy with me I’ve ever complained. There isn’t much more of it, that I can see, that any of them could put on. What do you suppose I’d have them do? If I on my side don’t get very far I may have alluded to THAT.”

“Oh but you do,” Mrs. Brook declared. “You think you don’t, but you get very far indeed. You’re always, as I said just now, bringing out something that you’ve got somewhere.”

“Yes, and seeing you flare up at it. What I bring out is only what they tell me.”

This limitation offered, however, for Mrs. Brook no difficulty. “Ah but it seems to me that with the things people nowadays tell one—! What more do you want?”

“Well”—and Edward from his chair regarded the fire a while—“the difference must be in what they tell YOU.”

“Things that are better?”

“Yes—worse. I dare say,” he went on, “what I give them—”

“Isn’t as bad as what I do? Oh we must each do our best. But when I hear from you,” Mrs. Brook pursued, “that Nanda had ever permitted herself anything so dreadful as to wire to him, it comes over me afresh that I would have been the perfect one to deal with him if his detestation of me hadn’t prevented.” She was by this time also—but on her feet—before the fire, into which, like her husband, she gazed. “I would never have wired. I’d have gone in for little delicacies and odd things she has never thought of.”

“Oh she doesn’t go in for what you do,” Edward assented.

“She’s as bleak as a chimney-top when the fire’s out, and if it hadn’t been after all for mamma—!” And she lost herself again in the reasons of things.

Her husband’s silence seemed to mark for an instant a deference to her allusion, but there was a limit even to this combination. “You make your mother, I think, keep it up pretty well. But if she HADN’T as you say, done so—?”

“Why we shouldn’t have been anywhere.”

“Well, where are we now? That’s what I want to know.”

Following her own train she had at first no heed for his question. “Without his hatred he would have liked me.” But she came back with a sigh to the actual. “No matter. We must deal with what we’ve got.”

“What HAVE we got?” Edward continued.