The Awkward Age Part 32

"They're one of the couples who are invited together." But his face reflected so little success for her levity that it was in another tone she presently added: "Mitchy really oughtn't." Her friend, in silence, fixed his eyes on the ground; an att.i.tude in which there was something to make her strike rather wild. "But of course, kind as he is, he can scarcely be called particular. He has his ideas--he thinks nothing matters. He says we've all come to a pa.s.s that's the end of everything."

Mr. Longdon remained mute a while, and when he at last, raised his eyes it was without meeting Nanda's and with some dryness of manner. "The end of everything? One might easily receive that impression."

He again became mute, and there was a pause between them of some length, accepted by Nanda with an anxious stillness that it might have touched a spectator to observe. She sat there as if waiting for some further sign, only wanting not to displease her friend, yet unable to pretend to play any part and with something in her really that she couldn't take back now, something involved in her original a.s.sumption that there was to be a kind of intelligence in their relation. "I dare say," she said at last, "that I make allusions you don't like. But I keep forgetting."

He waited a moment longer, then turned to her with a look rendered a trifle strange by the way it happened to reach over his gla.s.ses. It was even austerer than before. "Keep forgetting what?"

She gave after an instant a faint feeble smile which seemed to speak of helplessness and which, when at rare moments it played in her face, was expressive from her positive lack of personal, superficial diffidence.

"Well--I don't know." It was as if appearances became at times so complicated that--so far as helping others to understand was concerned--she could only give up.

"I hope you don't think I want you to be with me as you wouldn't be--so to speak--with yourself. I hope you don't think I don't want you to be frank. If you were to try to APPEAR to me anything--!" He ended in simple sadness: that, for instance, would be so little what he should like.

"Anything different, you mean, from what I am? That's just what I've thought from the first. One's just what one IS--isn't one? I don't mean so much," she went on, "in one's character or temper--for they have, haven't they? to be what's called 'properly controlled'--as in one's mind and what one sees and feels and the sort of thing one notices."

Nanda paused an instant; then "There you are!" she simply but rather desperately brought out.

Mr. Longdon considered this with visible intensity. "What you suggest is that the things you speak of depend on other people?"

"Well, every one isn't so beautiful as you." She had met him with prompt.i.tude, yet no sooner had she spoken than she appeared again to encounter a difficulty. "But there it is--my just saying even that. Oh how I always know--as I've told you before--whenever I'm different!

I can't ask you to tell me the things Granny WOULD have said, because that's simply arranging to keep myself back from you, and so being nasty and underhand, which you naturally don't want, nor I either.

Nevertheless when I say the things she wouldn't, then I put before you too much--too much for your liking it--what I know and see and feel. If we're both partly the result of other people, HER other people were so different." The girl's sensitive boldness kept it up, but there was something in her that pleaded for patience. "And yet if she had YOU, so I've got you too. It's the flattery of that, or the sound of it, I know, that must be so unlike her. Of course it's awfully like mother; yet it isn't as if you hadn't already let me see--is it?--that you don't really think me the same." Again she stopped a minute, as to find her scarce possible way with him, and again for the time he gave no sign. She struck out once more with her strange cool limpidity. "Granny wasn't the kind of girl she COULDN't be--and so neither am I."

Mr. Longdon had fallen while she talked into something that might have been taken for a conscious temporary submission to her; he had uncrossed his fidgety legs and, thrusting them out with the feet together, sat looking very hard before him, his chin sunk on his breast and his hands, clasped as they met, rapidly twirling their thumbs. So he remained for a time that might have given his young friend the sense of having made herself right for him so far as she had been wrong. He still had all her attention, just as previously she had had his, but, while he now simply gazed and thought, she watched him with a discreet solicitude that would almost have represented him as a near relative whom she supposed unwell.

At the end he looked round, and then, obeying some impulse that had gathered in her while they sat mute, she put out to him the tender hand she might have offered to a sick child. They had been talking about frankness, but she showed a frankness in this instance that made him perceptibly colour. To that in turn, however, he responded only the more completely, taking her hand and holding it, keeping it a long minute during which their eyes met and something seemed to clear up that had been too obscure to be dispelled by words. Finally he brought out as if, though it was what he had been thinking of, her gesture had most determined him: "I wish immensely you'd get married!"

His tone betrayed so special a meaning that the words had a sound of suddenness; yet there was always in Nanda's face that odd preparedness of the young person who has unlearned surprise through the habit, in company, of studiously not compromising her innocence by blinking at things said. "How CAN I?" she asked, but appearing rather to take up the proposal than to put it by.

"Can't you, CAN'T you?" He spoke pressingly and kept her hand. She shook her head slowly, markedly; on which he continued: "You don't do justice to Mr. Mitchy." She said nothing, but her look was there and it made him resume: "Impossible?"

"Impossible." At this, letting her go, Mr. Longden got up; he pulled out his watch. "We must go back." She had risen with him and they stood face to face in the faded light while he slipped the watch away. "Well, that doesn't make me wish it any less."

"It's lovely of you to wish it, but I shall be one of the people who don't. I shall be at the end," said Nanda, "one of those who haven't."

"No, my child," he returned gravely--"you shall never be anything so sad."

"Why not--if YOU'VE been?" He looked at her a little, quietly, and then, putting out his hand, pa.s.sed her own into his arm. "Exactly because I have."

III

"Would you" the d.u.c.h.ess said to him the next day, "be for five minutes awfully kind to my poor little niece?" The words were spoken in charming entreaty as he issued from the house late on the Sunday afternoon--the second evening of his stay, which the next morning was to bring to an end--and on his meeting the speaker at one of the extremities of the wide cool terrace. There was at this point a subsidiary flight of steps by which she had just mounted from the grounds, one of her purposes being apparently to testify afresh to the anxious supervision of little Aggie she had momentarily suffered herself to be diverted from. This young lady, established in the pleasant shade on a sofa of light construction designed for the open air, offered the image of a patience of which it was a questionable kindness to break the spell. It was that beautiful hour when, toward the close of the happiest days of summer, such places as the great terrace at Mertle present to the fancy a recall of the banquet-hall deserted--deserted by the company lately gathered at tea and now dispersed, according to affinities and combinations promptly felt and perhaps quite as promptly criticised, either in quieter chambers where intimacy might deepen or in gardens and under trees where the stillness knew the click of b.a.l.l.s and the good humour of games.

There had been chairs, on the terrace, pushed about; there were ungathered teacups on the level top of the parapet; the servants in fact, in the manner of "hands" mustered by a whistle on the deck of a s.h.i.+p, had just arrived to restore things to an order soon again to be broken. There were scattered couples in sight below and an idle group on the lawn, out of the midst of which, in spite of its detachment, somebody was sharp enough sometimes to cry "Out!" The high daylight was still in the sky, but with just the foreknowledge already of the long golden glow in which the many-voiced caw of the rooks would sound at once sociable and sad. There was a great deal all about to be aware of and to look at, but little Aggie had her eyes on a book over which her pretty head was bent with a docility visible even from afar. "I've a friend--down there by the lake--to go back to," the d.u.c.h.ess went on, "and I'm on my way to my room to get a letter that I've promised to show him. I shall immediately bring it down and then in a few minutes be able to relieve you,--I don't leave her alone too much--one doesn't, you know, in a house full of people, a child of that age. Besides"--and Mr.

Longdon's interlocutress was even more confiding--"I do want you so very intensely to know her. You, par exemple, you're what I SHOULD like to give her." Mr. Longdon looked the n.o.ble lady, in acknowledgement of her appeal, straight in the face, and who can tell whether or no she acutely guessed from his expression that he recognised this particular juncture as written on the page of his doom?--whether she heard him inaudibly say "Ah here it is: I knew it would have to come!" She would at any rate have been astute enough, had this miracle occurred, quite to complete his sense for her own understanding and suffer it to make no difference in the tone in which she still confronted him. "Oh I take the bull by the horns--I know you haven't wanted to know me. If you had you'd have called on me--I've given you plenty of hints and little coughs. Now, you see, I don't cough any more--I just rush at you and grab you. You don't call on me--so I call on YOU. There isn't any indecency moreover that I won't commit for my child."

Mr. Longdon's impenetrability crashed like gla.s.s at the elbow-touch of this large handsome practised woman, who walked for him, like some brazen pagan G.o.ddess, in a cloud of queer legend. He looked off at her child, who, at a distance and not hearing them, had not moved. "I know she's a great friend of Nanda's."

"Has Nanda told you that?"

"Often--taking such an interest in her."

"I'm glad she thinks so then--though really her interests are so various. But come to my baby. I don't make HER come," she explained as she swept him along, "because I want you just to sit down by her there and keep the place, as one may say--!"

"Well, for whom?" he demanded as she stopped. It was her step that had checked itself as well as her tongue, and again, suddenly, they stood quite consciously and vividly opposed. "Can I trust you?" the d.u.c.h.ess brought out. Again then she took herself up. "But as if I weren't already doing it! It's because I do trust you so utterly that I haven't been able any longer to keep my hands off you. The person I want the place for is none other than Mitchy himself, and half my occupation now is to get it properly kept for him. Lord Petherton's immensely kind, but Lord Petherton can't do everything. I know you really like our host--!"

Mr. Longdon, at this, interrupted her with a certain coldness. "How, may I ask, do you know it?"

But with a brazen G.o.ddess to deal with--! This personage had to fix him but an instant. "Because, you dear honest man, you're here. You wouldn't be if you hated him, for you don't practically condone--!"

This time he broke in with his eyes on the child. "I feel on the contrary, I a.s.sure you, that I condone a great deal."

"Well, don't boast of your cynicism," she laughed, "till you're sure of all it covers. Let the right thing for you be," she went on, "that Nanda herself wants it."

"Nanda herself?" He continued to watch little Aggie, who had never yet turned her head. "I'm afraid I don't understand you."

She swept him on again. "I'll come to you presently and explain. I MUST get my letter for Petherton; after which I'll give up Mitchy, whom I was going to find, and since I've broken the ice--if it isn't too much to say to such a polar bear!--I'll show you le fond de ma pensee. Baby darling," she said to her niece, "keep Mr. Longdon. Show him," she benevolently suggested, "what you've been reading." Then again to her fellow guest, as arrested by this very question: "Caro signore, have YOU a possible book?"

Little Aggie had got straight up and was holding out her volume, which Mr. Longdon, all courtesy for her, glanced at. "Stories from English History. Oh!"

His e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n, though vague, was not such as to prevent the girl from venturing gently: "Have you read it?"

Mr. Longdon, receiving her pure little smile, showed he felt he had never so taken her in as at this moment, as well as also that she was a person with whom he should surely get on. "I think I must have."

Little Aggie was still more encouraged, but not to the point of keeping anything back. "It hasn't any author. It's anonymous."

The d.u.c.h.ess borrowed, for another question to Mr. Longdon, not a little of her gravity. "Is it all right?"

"I don't know"--his answer was to Aggie. "There have been some horrid things in English history."

"Oh horrid--HAVEN'T there?" Aggie, whose speech had the prettiest faintest foreignness, sweetly and eagerly quavered.

"Well, darling, Mr. Longdon will recommend to you some nice historical work--for we love history, don't we?--that leaves the horrors out. We like to know," the d.u.c.h.ess explained to the authority she invoked, "the cheerful happy RIGHT things. There are so many, after all, and this is the place to remember them. A tantot."

As she pa.s.sed into the house by the nearest of the long windows that stood open Mr. Longdon placed himself beside her little charge, whom he treated, for the next ten minutes, with an exquisite courtesy. A person who knew him well would, if present at the scene, have found occasion in it to be freshly aware that he was in his quiet way master of two distinct kinds of urbanity, the kind that added to distance and the kind that diminished it. Such an a.n.a.lyst would furthermore have noted, in respect to the aunt and the niece, of which kind each had the benefit, and might even have gone so far as to detect in him some absolute betrayal of the impression produced on him by his actual companion, some irradiation of his cert.i.tude that, from the point of view under which she had been formed, she was a remarkable, a rare success. Since to create a particular little rounded and tinted innocence had been aimed at, the fruit had been grown to the perfection of a peach on a sheltered wall, and this quality of the object resulting from a process might well make him feel himself in contact with something wholly new. Little Aggie differed from any young person he had ever met in that she had been deliberately prepared for consumption and in that furthermore the gentleness of her spirit had immensely helped the preparation. Nanda, beside her, was a Northern savage, and the reason was partly that the elements of that young lady's nature were already, were publicly, were almost indecorously active. They were practically there for good or for ill; experience was still to come and what they might work out to still a mystery; but the sum would get itself done with the figures now on the slate. On little Aggie's slate the figures were yet to be written; which sufficiently accounted for the difference of the two surfaces. Both the girls struck him as lambs with the great shambles of life in their future; but while one, with its neck in a pink ribbon, had no consciousness but that of being fed from the hand with the small sweet biscuit of un.o.bjectionable knowledge, the other struggled with instincts and forebodings, with the suspicion of its doom and the far-borne scent, in the flowery fields, of blood.

"Oh Nanda, she's my best friend after three or four others."

"After so many?" Mr. Longdon laughed. "Don't you think that's rather a back seat, as they say, for one's best?"

"A back seat?"--she wondered with a purity!

"If you don't understand," said her companion, "it serves me right, as your aunt didn't leave me with you to teach you the slang of the day."

"The 'slang'?"--she again spotlessly speculated.

"You've never even heard the expression? I should think that a great compliment to our time if it weren't that I fear it may have been only the name that has been kept from you."

The light of ignorance in the child's smile was positively golden. "The name?" she again echoed.