The Awkward Age Part 43

"Perhaps then, as a compensation, she'll even get MORE--!"

"If I don't go in? Oh!" said Vanderbank. And he changed colour.

He was by this time off, but Mrs. Brook kept Mitchy a moment. "Now--by that suggestion--he has something to show. He won't go in."

III

Her visitors had been gone half an hour, but she was still in the drawing-room when Nanda came back. The girl found her, on the sofa, in a posture that might have represented restful oblivion, but that, after a glance, our young lady appeared to interpret as mere intensity of thought. It was a condition from which at all events Mrs. Brook was quickly roused by her daughter's presence: she opened her eyes and put down her feet, so that the two were confronted as closely as persons may be when it is only one of them who looks at the other. Nanda, gazing vaguely about and not seeking a seat, slowly drew off her gloves while her mother's sad eyes considered her from top to toe. "Tea's gone,"

Mrs. Brook then said as if there were something in the loss peculiarly irretrievable. "But I suppose," she added, "he gave you all you want."

"Oh dear yes, thank you--I've had lots."

Nanda hovered there slim and charming, feathered and ribboned, dressed in thin fresh fabrics and faint colours, with something in the effect of it all to which the sweeter deeper melancholy in her mother's eyes seemed happily to testify. "Just turn round, dear." The girl immediately obeyed, and Mrs. Brook once more took everything in. "The back's best--only she didn't do what she said she would. How they do lie!" she gently quavered.

"Yes, but we lie so to THEM." Nanda had swung round again, producing evidently on her mother's part, by the admirable "hang" of her light skirts, a still deeper peace. "Do you mean the middle fold?--I knew she wouldn't. I don't want my back to be best--I don't walk backward."

"Yes," Mrs. Brook resignedly mused; "you dress for yourself."

"Oh how can you say that," the girl asked, "when I never stick in a pin but what I think of YOU!"

"Well," Mrs. Brook moralised, "one must always, I consider, think, as a sort of point de repere, of some one good person. Only it's best if it's a person one's afraid of. You do very well, but I'm not enough. What one really requires is a kind of salutary terror. I never stick in a pin without thinking of your Cousin Jane. What is it that some one quotes somewhere about some one's having said that 'Our antagonist is our helper--he prevents our being superficial'? The extent to which with my poor clothes the d.u.c.h.ess prevents ME--!" It was a measure Mrs. Brook could give only by the general soft wail of her submission to fate.

"Yes, the d.u.c.h.ess isn't a woman, is she? She's a standard."

The speech had for Nanda's companion, however, no effect of pleasantry or irony, and it was a mark of the special intercourse of these good friends that though they showed each other, in manner and tone, such sustained consideration as might almost have given it the stamp of diplomacy, there was yet in it also something of that economy of expression which is the result of a common experience. The recurrence of opportunity to observe them together would have taught a spectator that--on Mrs. Brook's side doubtless more particularly--their relation was governed by two or three remarkably established and, as might have been said, refined laws, the spirit of which was to guard against the vulgarity so often coming to the surface between parent and child. That they WERE as good friends as if Nanda had not been her daughter was a truth that no pa.s.sage between them might fail in one way or another to ill.u.s.trate. Nanda had gathered up, for that matter, early in life, a flower of maternal wisdom: "People talk about conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid." Mrs. Brook was as "nice" to Nanda as she was to Sarah Curd--which involved, as may easily be imagined, the happiest conditions for Sarah. "Well," she resumed, reverting to the d.u.c.h.ess on a final apprais.e.m.e.nt of the girl's air, "I really think I do well by you and that Jane wouldn't have anything to say to-day. You look awfully like mamma," she then threw off as if for the first time of mentioning it.

"Oh Cousin Jane doesn't care for that," Nanda returned. "What I don't look like is Aggie, for all I try."

"Ah you shouldn't try--you can do nothing with it. One must be what one is."

Mrs. Brook was almost sententious, but Nanda, with civility, let it pa.s.s. "No one in London touches her. She's quite by herself. When one sees her one feels her to be the real thing."

Mrs. Brook, without harshness, wondered. "What do you mean by the real thing?"

Even Nanda, however, had to think a moment.

"Well, the real young one. That's what Lord Petherton calls her," she mildly joked--"'the young 'un'"

Her mother's echo was not for the joke, but for something else. "I know what you mean. What's the use of being good?"

"Oh I didn't mean that," said Nanda. "Besides, isn't Aggie of a goodness--?"

"I wasn't talking of her. I was asking myself what's the use of MY being."

"Well, you can't help it any more than the d.u.c.h.ess can help--!"

"Ah but she could if she would!" Mrs. Brook broke in with a sharper ring than she had yet given. "We can't help being good perhaps, if that burden's laid on us--but there are lengths in other directions we're not absolutely obliged to go. And what I think of when I stick in the pins,"

she went on, "is that Jane seems to me really never to have had to pay."

She appeared for a minute to brood on this till she could no longer bear it; after which she jerked out: "Why she has never had to pay for ANYthing!"

Nanda had by this time seated herself, taking her place, under the interest of their talk, on her mother's sofa, where, except for the removal of her long soft gloves, which one of her hands again and again drew caressingly through the other, she remained very much as if she were some friendly yet circ.u.mspect young visitor to whom Mrs. Brook had on some occasion dropped "DO come." But there was something perhaps more expressly conciliatory in the way she had kept everything on: as if, in particular serenity and to confirm kindly Mrs. Brook's sense of what had been done for her, she had neither taken off her great feathered hat nor laid down her parasol of pale green silk, the "match" of hat and ribbons and which had an expensive precious k.n.o.b. Our spectator would possibly have found too much earnestness in her face to be sure if there was also candour. "And do you mean that YOU have had to pay--?"

"Oh yes--all the while." With this Mrs. Brook was a little short, and also as she added as if to banish a slight awkwardness: "But don't let it discourage you."

Nanda seemed an instant to weigh the advice, and the whole thing would have been striking as another touch in the picture of the odd want, on the part of each, of any sense of levity in the other. Whatever escape, face to face, mother or daughter might ever seek would never be the humorous one--a circ.u.mstance, notwithstanding, that would not in every case have failed to make their interviews droll for a third person. It would always indeed for such a person have produced an impression of tension beneath the surface. "I could have done much better at the start and have lost less time," the girl at last said, "if I hadn't had the drawback of not really remembering Granny."

"Oh well, _I_ remember her!" Mrs. Brook moaned with an accent that evidently struck her the next moment as so much out of place that she slightly deflected. She took Nanda's parasol and held it as if--a more delicate thing much than any one of hers--she simply liked to have it.

"Her clothes--at your age at least--must have been hideous. Was it at the place he took you to that he gave you tea?" she then went on.

"Yes, at the Museum. We had an orgy in the refreshment-room. But he took me afterwards to Tishy's, where we had another."

"He went IN with you?" Mrs. Brook had suddenly flashed into eagerness.

"Oh yes--I made him."

"He didn't want to?"

"On the contrary--very much. But he doesn't do everything he wants,"

said Nanda.

Mrs. Brook seemed to wonder. "You mean you've also to want it?"

"Oh no--THAT isn't enough. What I suppose I mean," Nanda continued, "is that he doesn't do anything he doesn't want. But he does quite enough,"

she added.

"And who then was at Tishy's?"

"Oh poor old Tish herself, naturally, and Carrie Donner."

"And no one else?"

The girl just waited. "Yes, Mr. Cashmore came in."

Her mother gave a groan of impatience. "Ah AGAIN?"

Nanda thought an instant. "How do you mean, 'again'? He just lives there as much as he ever did, and Tishy can't prevent him."

"I was thinking of Mr. Longdon--of THEIR meeting. When he met him here that time he liked it so little. Did he like it any more to-day?" Mrs.

Brook quavered.

"Oh no, he hated it."

"But hadn't he--if he should go in--known he WOULD?"

"Yes, perfectly. But he wanted to see."