The Awkward Age Part 17

"Of his being a great figure among us? I don't know what he may have said to you or have suppressed; but you can take it from me--as between ourselves, you know--that he's very much the best of us. Old Van in fact--if you really want a candid opinion," and Mitchy shone still brighter as he talked, "is formed for a distinctly higher sphere. I should go so far as to say that on our level he's positively wasted."

"And are you very sure you're not?" Mr. Longdon asked with a smile.

"Dear no--I'm in my element. My element's to grovel before Van. You've only to look at me, as you must already have made out, to see I'm everything dreadful that he isn't. But you've seen him for yourself--I needn't tell you!" Mitchy sighed.

Mr. Longdon, as under the coercion of so much confidence, had stood in place longer than for any previous moment, and the spell continued for a minute after Mitchy had paused. Then nervously and abruptly he turned away, his friend watching him rather aimlessly wander. "Our host has spoken of you to me in high terms," he said as he came back. "You'd have no fault to find with them."

Mitchy took it with his highest light. "I know from your taking the trouble to remember that, how much what I've said of him pleases and touches you. We're a little sort of religion then, you and I; we're an organisation of two, at any rate, and we can't help ourselves.

There--that's settled." He glanced at the clock on the chimney. "But what's the matter with him?"

"You gentlemen dress so much," said Mr. Longdon.

Mitchy met the explanation quite halfway. "_I_ try to look funny--but why should Apollo in person?"

Mr. Longdon weighed it. "Do you think him like Apollo?"

"The very image. Ask any of the women!"

"But do _I_ know--?"

"How Apollo must look?" Mitchy considered. "Why the way it works is that it's just from Van's appearance they get the tip, and that then, don't you see? they've their term of comparison. Isn't it what you call a vicious circle? I borrow a little their vice."

Mr. Longdon, who had once more been arrested, once more sidled away.

Then he spoke from the other side of the expanse of a table covered with books for which the shelves had no s.p.a.ce--covered with portfolios, with well-worn leather-cased boxes, with doc.u.ments in neat piles. The place was a miscellany, yet not a litter, the picture of an admirable order.

"If we're a fond a.s.sociation of two, you and I, let me, accepting your idea, do what, this way, under a gentleman's roof and while enjoying his hospitality, I should in ordinary circ.u.mstances think perhaps something of a breach."

"Oh strike out!" Mitchy laughed. It possibly chilled his interlocutor, who again hung fire so long that he himself at last adopted his image.

"Why doesn't he marry, you mean?"

Mr. Longdon fairly flushed with recognition. "You're very deep, but with what we perceive--why doesn't he?"

Mitchy continued visibly to have his amus.e.m.e.nt, which might have been, this time and in spite of the amalgamation he had pictured, for what "they" perceived. But he threw off after an instant an answer clearly intended to meet the case. "He thinks he hasn't the means. He has great ideas of what a fellow must offer a woman."

Mr. Longdon's eyes travelled a while over the amenities about him. "He hasn't such a view of himself alone--?"

"As to make him think he's enough as he stands? No," said Mitchy, "I don't fancy he has a very awful view of himself alone. And since we ARE burning this incense under his nose," he added, "it's also my impression that he has no private means. Women in London cost so much."

Mr. Longdon had a pause. "They come very high, I dare say."

"Oh tremendously. They want so much--they want everything. I mean the sort of women he lives with. A modest man--who's also poor--isn't in it. I give you that at any rate as his view. There are lots of them that would---and only too glad--'love him for himself'; but things are much mixed, and these not necessarily the right ones, and at all events he doesn't see it. The result of which is that he's waiting."

"Waiting to feel himself in love?"

Mitchy just hesitated. "Well, we're talking of marriage. Of course you'll say there are women with money. There ARE"--he seemed for a moment to meditate--"dreadful ones!"

The two men, on this, exchanged a long regard. "He mustn't do that."

Mitchy again hesitated. "He won't."

Mr. Longdon had also a silence, which he presently terminated by one of his jerks into motion. "He shan't!"

Once more Mitchy watched him revolve a little, but now, familiarly yet with a sharp emphasis, he himself resumed their colloquy. "See here, Mr.

Longdon. Are you seriously taking him up?"

Yet again, at the tone of this appeal, the old man perceptibly coloured.

It was as if his friend had brought to the surface an inward excitement, and he laughed for embarra.s.sment. "You see things with a freedom--"

"Yes, and it's so I express them. I see them, I know, with a raccourci; but time after all rather presses, and at any rate we understand each other. What I want now is just to say"--and Mitchy spoke with a simplicity and a gravity he had not yet used--"that if your interest in him should at any time reach the point of your wis.h.i.+ng to do something or other (no matter what, don't you see?) FOR him--!"

Mr. Longdon, as he faltered, appeared to wonder, but emitted a sound of gentleness. "Yes?"

"Why," said the stimulated Mitchy, "do, for G.o.d's sake, just let me have a finger in it."

Mr. Longdon's momentary mystification was perhaps partly but the natural effect of const.i.tutional prudence. "A finger?"

"I mean--let me help."

"Oh!" breathed the old man thoughtfully and without meeting his eyes.

Mitchy, as if with more to say, watched him an instant, then before speaking caught himself up. "Look out--here he comes."

Hearing the stir of the door by which he had entered he looked round; but it opened at first only to admit Vanderbank's servant. "Miss Brookenham!" the man announced; on which the two gentlemen in the room were--audibly, almost violently--precipitated into a union of surprise.

II

However she might have been discussed Nanda was not one to shrink, for, though she drew up an instant on failing to find in the room the person whose invitation she had obeyed, she advanced the next moment as if either of the gentlemen before her would answer as well. "How do you do, Mr. Mitchy? How do you do, Mr. Longdon?" She made no difference for them, speaking to the elder, whom she had not yet seen, as if they were already acquainted. There was moreover in the air of that personage at this juncture little to invite such a confidence: he appeared to have been startled, in the oddest manner, into stillness and, holding out no hand to meet her, only stared rather stiffly and without a smile. An observer disposed to interpret the scene might have fancied him a trifle put off by the girl's familiarity, or even, as by a singular effect of her self-possession, stricken into deeper diffidence. This self-possession, however, took on her own part no account of any awkwardness: it seemed the greater from the fact that she was almost unnaturally grave, and it overflowed in the immediate challenge: "Do you mean to say Van isn't here? I've come without mother--she said I could, to see HIM," she went on, addressing herself more particularly to Mitchy. "But she didn't say I might do anything of that sort to see YOU."

If there was something serious in Nanda and something blank in their companion, there was, superficially at least, nothing in Mr. Mitchett but his usual flush of gaiety. "Did she really send you off this way alone?" Then while the girl's face met his own with the clear confession of it: "Isn't she too splendid for anything?" he asked with immense enjoyment. "What do you suppose is her idea?" Nanda's eyes had now turned to Mr. Longdon, whom she fixed with her mild straightness; which led to Mitchy's carrying on and repeating the appeal. "Isn't Mrs. Brook charming? What do you suppose is her idea?"

It was a bound into the mystery, a bound of which his fellow visitor stood quite unconscious, only looking at Nanda still with the same coldness of wonder. All expression had for the minute been arrested in Mr. Longdon, but he at last began to show that it had merely been r.e.t.a.r.ded. Yet it was almost with solemnity that he put forth his hand.

"How do you do? How do you do? I'm so glad!"

Nanda shook hands with him as if she had done so already, though it might have been just her look of curiosity that detracted from her air of amusing herself. "Mother has wanted me awfully to see you. She told me to give you her love," she said. Then she added with odd irrelevance: "I didn't come in the carriage, nor in a cab nor an omnibus."

"You came on a bicycle?" Mitchy enquired.

"No, I walked." She still spoke without a gleam. "Mother wants me to do everything."

"Even to walk!" Mitchy laughed. "Oh yes, we must in these times keep up our walking!" The ingenious observer just now suggested might even have detected in the still higher rise of this visitor's spirits a want of mere inward ease.

She had taken no notice of the effect upon him of her mention of her mother, and she took none, visibly, of Mr. Longdon's manner or of his words. What she did while the two men, without offering her, either, a seat, practically lost themselves in their deepening vision, was to give her attention all to the place, looking at the books, pictures and other significant objects, and especially at the small table set out for tea, to which the servant who had admitted her now returned with a steaming kettle. "Isn't it charming here? Will there be any one else? Where IS Mr. Van? Shall I make tea?" There was just a faint quaver, showing a command of the situation more desired perhaps than achieved, in the very rapid sequence of these e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns. The servant meanwhile had placed the hot water above the little silver lamp and left the room.

"Do you suppose there's anything the matter? Oughtn't the man--or do you know our host's room?" Mr. Longdon, addressing Mitchy with solicitude, yet began to show in a countenance less blank a return of his sense of relations. It was as if something had happened to him and he were in haste to convert the signs of it into an appearance of care for the proprieties.

"Oh," said Mitchy, "Van's only making himself beautiful"--which account of their absent entertainer gained a point from his appearance at the moment in the doorway furthest removed from the place where the three were gathered.

Vanderbank came in with friendly haste and with something of the look indeed--refreshed, almost rosy, brightly brushed and quickly b.u.t.toned--of emerging, out of breath, from pleasant ablutions and renewals. "What a brute to have kept you waiting! I came back from work quite begrimed. How d'ye do, how d'ye do, how d'ye do? What's the matter with you, huddled there as if you were on a street-crossing? I want you to think this a refuge--but not of that kind!" he laughed. "Sit down, for heaven's sake; lie down--be happy! Of course you've made acquaintance all--except that Mitchy's so modest! Tea, tea!"--and he bustled to the table, where the next minute he appeared rather helpless.