The Awkward Age Part 57

"So should I if two terrible women--"

"Were admiring you both at once?" The d.u.c.h.ess folded the big feathered fan that had partly protected their vision. "Well, SHE, poor dear, can't help it. She wants him herself."

At the drop of the d.u.c.h.ess's fan he restored his nippers. "And he doesn't--not a bit--want HER!"

"There it is. She has put down her money, as it were, without a return.

She has given Mitchy up and got nothing instead."

There was delicacy, yet there was distinctness, in Mr. Longdon's reserve. "Do you call ME nothing?"

The d.u.c.h.ess, at this, fairly swelled with her happy stare. "Then it IS an adoption?" She forbore to press, however; she only went on: "It isn't a question, my dear man, of what _I_ call it. YOU don't make love to her."

"Dear me," said Mr. Longdon, "what would she have had?"

"That could be more charming, you mean, than your famous 'loyalty'?

Oh, caro mio, she wants it straighter! But I shock you," his companion quickly added.

The manner in which he firmly rose was scarce a denial; yet he stood for a moment in place. "What after all can she do?"

"She can KEEP Mr. Van."

Mr. Longdon wondered. "Where?"

"I mean till it's too late. She can work on him."

"But how?"

Covertly again the d.u.c.h.ess had followed the effect of her friend's perceived movement on Mrs. Brook, who also got up. She gave a rap with her fan on his leg. "Sit down--you'll see."

III

He mechanically obeyed her although it happened to lend him the air of taking Mrs. Brook's approach for a signal to resume his seat. She came over to them, Vanderbank followed, and it was without again moving, with a vague upward gape in fact from his place, that Mr. Longdon received as she stood before him a challenge of a sort to flash a point into what the d.u.c.h.ess had just said. "Why do you hate me so?"

Vanderbank, who, beside Mrs. Brook, looked at him with attention, might have suspected him of turning a trifle pale; though even Vanderbank, with reasons of his own for an observation of the sharpest, could scarce have read into the matter the particular dim vision that would have accounted for it--the flicker of fear of what Mrs. Brook, whether as daughter or as mother, was at last so strangely and differently to show herself.

"I should warn you, sir," the young man threw off, "how little we consider that--in Buckingham Crescent certainly--a fair question. It isn't playing the game--it's. .h.i.tting below the belt. We hate and we love--the latter especially; but to tell each other why is to break that little tacit rule of finding out for ourselves which is the delight of our lives and the source of our triumphs. You can say, you know, if you like, but you're not obliged."

Mr. Longdon transferred to him something of the same colder apprehension, looking at him manifestly harder than ever before and finding in his eyes also no doubt a consciousness more charged. He presently got up, but, without answering Vanderbank, fixed again Mrs.

Brook, to whom he echoed without expression: "Hate you?"

The next moment, while he remained in presence with Vanderbank, Mrs.

Brook was pointing out her meaning to him from the cus.h.i.+oned corner he had quitted. "Why, when you come back to town you come straight, as it were, here."

"Ah what's that," the d.u.c.h.ess asked in his interest, "but to follow Nanda as closely as possible, or at any rate to keep well with her?"

Mrs. Brook, however, had no ear for this plea. "And when I, coming here too and thinking only of my chance to 'meet' you, do my very sweetest to catch your eye, you're entirely given up--!"

"To trying of course," the d.u.c.h.ess broke in afresh, "to keep well with ME!"

Mrs. Brook now had a smile for her. "Ah that takes precautions then that I shall perhaps fail of if I too much interrupt your conversation."

"Isn't she nice to me," the d.u.c.h.ess asked of Mr. Longdon, "when I was in the very act of praising her to the skies?"

Their interlocutor's reply was not too rapid to antic.i.p.ate Mrs. Brook herself. "My dear Jane, that only proves his having reached some extravagance in the other sense that you had in mere decency to match. The truth is probably in the 'mean'--isn't that what they call it?--between you. Don't YOU now take him away," she went on to Vanderbank, who had glanced about for some better accommodation.

He immediately pushed forward the nearest chair, which happened to be by the d.u.c.h.ess's side of the sofa. "Will you sit here, sir?"

"If you'll stay to protect me."

"That was really what I brought him over to you for," Mrs. Brook said while Mr. Longdon took his place and Vanderbank looked out for another seat. "But I didn't know," she observed with her sweet free curiosity, "that he called you 'sir.'" She often made discoveries that were fairly childlike. "He has done it twice."

"Isn't that only your inevitable English surprise," the d.u.c.h.ess demanded, "at the civility quite the commonest in other societies?--so that one has to come here to find it regarded, in the way of ceremony, as the very end of the world!"

"Oh," Mr. Longdon remarked, "it's a word I rather like myself even to employ to others."

"I always ask here," the d.u.c.h.ess continued to him, "what word they've got instead. And do you know what they tell me?"

Mrs. Brook wondered, then again, before he was ready, charmingly suggested: "Our pretty manner?" Quickly too she appealed to Mr. Longdon.

"Is THAT what you miss from me?"

He wondered, however, more than Mrs. Brook. "Your 'pretty manner'?"

"Well, these grand old forms that the d.u.c.h.ess is such a mistress of."

Mrs. Brook had with this one of her eagerest visions. "Did mamma say 'sir' to you? Ought _I_? Do you really get it, in private, out of Nanda?

SHE has such depths of discretion," she explained to the d.u.c.h.ess and to Vanderbank, who had come back with his chair, "that it's just the kind of racy anecdote she never in the world gives me."

Mr. Longdon looked across at Van, placed now, after a moment's talk with Tishy in sight of them all, by Mrs. Brook's arm of the sofa. "You haven't protected--you've only exposed me."

"Oh there's no joy without danger"--Mrs. Brook took it up with spirit.

"Perhaps one should even say there's no danger without joy."

Vanderbank's eyes had followed Mrs. Grendon after his brief pa.s.sage with her, terminated by some need of her listless presence on the other side of the room. "What do you say then, on that theory, to the extraordinary gloom of our hostess? Her safety, by such a rule, must be deep."

The d.u.c.h.ess was this time the first to know what they said. "The expression of Tishy's face comes precisely from our comparing it so unfavourably with that of her poor sister Carrie, who, though she isn't here to-night with the Cashmores--amazing enough even as coming WITHOUT that!--has so often shown us that an ame en peine, constantly tottering, but, as Nanda guarantees us, usually recovering, may look after all as beatific as a Dutch doll."

Mrs. Brook's eyes had, on Tishy's pa.s.sing away, taken the same course as Vanderbank's, whom she had visibly not neglected moreover while the pair stood there. "I give you Carrie, as you know, and I throw Mr. Cashmore in; but I'm lost in admiration to-night, as I always have been, of the way Tishy makes her ugliness serve. I should call it, if the word weren't so for ladies'-maids, the most 'elegant' thing I know."

"My dear child," the d.u.c.h.ess objected, "what you describe as making her ugliness serve is what I should describe as concealing none of her beauty. There's nothing the matter surely with 'elegant' as applied to Tishy save that as commonly used it refers rather to a charm that's artificial than to a state of pure nature. There should be for elegance a basis of clothing. Nanda rather stints her."

Mrs. Brook, perhaps more than usually thoughtful, just discriminated.

"There IS, I think, one little place. I'll speak to her."

"To Tishy?" Vanderbank asked.

"Oh THAT would do no good. To Nanda. All the same," she continued, "it's an awfully superficial thing of you not to see that her dreariness--on which moreover I've set you right before--is a mere facial accident and doesn't correspond or, as they say, 'rhyme' to anything within her that might make it a little interesting. What I like it for is just that it's so funny in itself. Her low spirits are nothing more than her features.

Her gloom, as you call it, is merely her broken nose."