The Awkward Age

Mitchy stared. “You’re stupendous, my dear!” he murmured.

Ah but she kept it up. “I had my idea about Aggie.”

“Oh don’t I know you had? And how you were positive about the sort of person—!”

“That she didn’t even suspect herself,” Nanda broke in, “to be? I’m equally positive now. It’s quite what I believed, only there’s ever so much more of it. More HAS come—and more will yet. You see, when there has been nothing before, it all has to come with a rush. So that if even I’m surprised of course she is.”

“And of course I am!” Mitchy’s interest, though even now not wholly unqualified with amusement, had visibly deepened. “You admit then,” he continued, “that you’re surprised?”

Nanda just hesitated. “At the mere scale of it. I think it’s splendid. The only person whose astonishment I don’t quite understand,” she added, “is Cousin Jane.”

“Oh Cousin Jane’s astonishment serves her right!”

“If she held so,” Nanda pursued, “that marriage should do everything—!”

“She shouldn’t be in such a funk at finding what it IS doing? Oh no, she’s the last one!” Mitchy declared. “I vow I enjoy her scare.”

“But it’s very bad, you know,” said Nanda.

“Oh too awful!”

“Well, of course,” the girl appeared assentingly to muse, “she couldn’t after all have dreamed—!” But she took herself up. “The great thing is to be helpful.”

“And in what way—?” Mitchy asked with his wonderful air of inviting competitive suggestions.

“Toward Aggie’s finding herself. Do you think,” she immediately continued, “that Lord Petherton really is?”

Mitchy frankly considered. “Helpful? Oh he does his best, I gather. Yes,” he presently added—“Petherton’s all right.”

“It’s you yourself, naturally,” his companion threw off, “who can help most.”

“Certainly, and I’m doing my best too. So that with such good assistance”—he seemed at last to have taken it all from her—“what is it, I again ask, that, as you request, I’m to ‘leave’ to you?”

Nanda required, while he still waited, some time to reply. “To keep my promise.”

“Your promise?”

“Not to abandon you.”

“Ah,” cried Mitchy, “that’s better!”

“Then good-bye,” she said.

“Good-bye.” But he came a few steps forward. “I MAYN’T kiss your hand?”

“Never.”

“Never?”

“Never.”

“Oh!” he oddly sounded as he quickly went out.

IV

The interval he had represented as likely to be useful to her was in fact, however, not a little abbreviated by a punctuality of arrival on Mr. Longdon’s part so extreme as to lead the first thing to a word almost of apology. “You can’t say,” her new visitor immediately began, “that I haven’t left you alone, these many days, as much as I promised on coming up to you that afternoon when after my return to town I found Mr. Mitchett instead of your mother awaiting me in the drawing-room.”

“Yes,” said Nanda, “you’ve really done quite as I asked you.”

“Well,” he returned, “I felt half an hour ago that, near as I was to relief, I could keep it up no longer; so that though I knew it would bring me much too soon I started at six sharp for our trysting-place.”

“And I’ve no tea, after all, to reward you!” It was but now clearly that she noticed it. “They must have removed the things without my heeding.”

Her old friend looked at her with some intensity. “Were you in the room?”

“Yes—but I didn’t see the man come in.”

“What then were you doing?”

Nanda thought; her smile was as usual the faintest discernible outward sign. “Thinking of YOU.”

“So tremendously hard?”

“Well, of other things too and of other persons. Of everything really that in our last talk I told you I felt I must have out with myself before meeting you for what I suppose you’ve now in mind.”

Mr. Longdon had kept his eyes on her, but at this he turned away; not, however, for an alternative, embracing her material situation with the embarrassed optimism of Vanderbank or the mitigated gloom of Mitchy. “Ah”—he took her up with some dryness—“you’ve been having things out with yourself?” But he went on before she answered: “I don’t want any tea, thank you. I found myself, after five, in such a fidget that I went three times in the course of the hour to my club, where I’ve the impression I each time had it. I dare say it wasn’t there, though, I did have it,” he after an instant pursued, “for I’ve somehow a confused image of a shop in Oxford Street—or was it rather in Regent?—into which I gloomily wandered to beguile the moments with a mixture that if I strike you as upset I beg you to set it all down to. Do you know in fact what I’ve been doing for the last ten minutes? Roaming hither and thither in your beautiful Crescent till I could venture to come in.”

“Then did you see Mitchy go out? But no, you wouldn’t”—Nanda corrected herself. “He has been gone longer than that.”

Her visitor had dropped on a sofa where, propped by the back, he sat rather upright, his glasses on his nose, his hands in his pockets and his elbows much turned out. “Mitchy left you more than ten minutes ago, and yet your state on his departure remains such that there could be a bustle of servants in the room without your being aware? Kindly give me a lead then as to what it is he has done to you.”

She hovered before him with her obscure smile. “You see it for yourself.”

He shook his head with decision. “I don’t see anything for myself, and I beg you to understand that it’s not what I’ve come here to-day to do. Anything I may yet see which I don’t already see will be only, I warn you, so far as you shall make it very clear. There—you’ve work cut out. And is it with Mr. Mitchett, may I ask, that you’ve been, as you mention, cutting it?”

Nanda looked about her as if weighing many things; after which her eyes came back to him. “Do you mind if I don’t sit down?”

“I don’t mind if you stand on your head—at the pass we’ve come to.”

“I shall not try your patience,” the girl good-humouredly replied, “so far as that. I only want you not to be worried if I walk about a little.”

Mr. Longdon, without a movement, kept his posture. “Oh I can’t oblige you there. I SHALL be worried. I’ve come on purpose to be worried, and the more I surrender myself to the rack the more, I seem to feel, we shall have threshed our business out. So you may dance, you may stamp, if you like, on the absolutely passive thing you’ve made of me.”

“Well, what I HAVE had from Mitchy,” she cheerfully responded, “is practically a lesson in dancing: by which I perhaps mean rather a lesson in sitting, myself, as I want you to do while I talk, as still as a mouse. They take,” she declared, “while THEY talk, an amount of exercise!”

“They?” Mr. Longdon wondered. “Was his wife with him?”

“Dear no—he and Mr. Van.”