The Awkward Age Part 70

He maintained his waiting att.i.tude. "Thanks, thanks."

"You're our guardian angel!" she exclaimed.

At this he laughed out. "Wait till you see what Mr. Longdon does!"

But she took no notice. "I want you to see before I go that I've done nothing for myself. Van, after all--!" she mused.

"Well?"

"Only hates me. It isn't as with you," she said. "I've really lost him."

Mitchy for an instant, with the eyes that had shown his tears, glared away into s.p.a.ce. "He can't very positively, you know, now like ANY of us. He misses a fortune."

"There it is!" Mrs. Brook once more observed. Then she had a comparative brightness. "I'm so glad YOU don't!" He gave another laugh, but she was already facing Mr. Tatton, who had again answered the bell. "Show Mr.

Longdon up."

"I'm to tell him then it's at your request?" Mitchy asked when the butler had gone.

"That you receive him? Oh yes. He'll be the last to quarrel with that.

But there's one more thing."

It was something over which of a sudden she had one of her returns of anxiety. "I've been trying for months and months to remember to find out from you--"

"Well, what?" he enquired, as she looked odd.

"Why if Harold ever gave back to you, as he swore to me on his honour he would, that five-pound note--!"

"But which, dear lady?" The sense of other incongruities than those they had been dealing with seemed to arrive now for Mitchy's aid.

"The one that, ages ago, one day when you and Van were here, we had the joke about. You produced it, in sport, as a 'fine' for something, and put it on that table; after which, before I knew what you were about, before I could run after you, you had gone off and ridiculously left it.

Of course the next minute--and again before I could turn round--Harold had pounced on it, and I tried in vain to recover it from him. But all I could get him to do--"

"Was to promise to restore it straight to its owner?" Mitchy had listened so much less in surprise than in amus.e.m.e.nt that he had apparently after a moment re-established the scene. "Oh I recollect--he did settle with me. THAT'S all right."

She fixed him from the door of the next room. "You got every penny?"

"Every penny. But fancy your bringing it up!"

"Ah I always do, you know--SOME day."

"Yes, you're of a rigour--! But be at peace. Harold's quite square," he went on, "and I quite meant to have asked you about him."

Mrs. Brook, promptly, was all for this. "Oh it's all right."

Mitchy came nearer. "Lady f.a.n.n.y--?"

"Yes--HAS stayed for him."

"Ah," said Mitchy, "I knew you'd do it! But hush--they're coming!" On which, while she whisked away, he went back to the fire.

IV

Ten minutes of talk with Mr. Longdon by Mrs. Brookenham's hearth elapsed for him without his arriving at the right moment to take up the business so richly put before him in his previous interview. No less time indeed could have sufficed to bring him into closer relation with this affair, and nothing at first could have been more marked than the earnestness of his care not to show impatience of appeals that were, for a person of his old friend's general style, simple recognitions and decencies. There was a limit to the mere allusiveness with which, in Mr. Longdon's school of manners, a foreign tour might be treated, and Mitchy, no doubt, plentifully showed that none of his frequent returns had encountered a curiosity at once so explicit and so discreet. To belong to a circle in which most of the members might be at any moment on the other side of the globe was inevitably to fall into the habit of few questions, as well as into that of making up for their fewness by their freedom.

This interlocutor in short, while Mrs. Brook's representative privately thought over all he had in hand, went at some length and very charmingly--since it was but a tribute to common courtesy--into the Virgilian a.s.sociations of the Bay of Naples. Finally, however, he started, his eye having turned to the clock. "I'm afraid that, though our hostess doesn't appear, I mustn't forget myself. I too came back but yesterday and I've an engagement--for which I'm already late--with Miss Brookenham, who has been so good as to ask me to tea."

The divided mind, the express civility, the decent "Miss Brookenham,"

the escape from their hostess--these were all things Mitchy could quickly take in, and they gave him in a moment his light for not missing his occasion. "I see, I see--I shall make you keep Nanda waiting. But there's something I shall ask you to take from me quite as a sufficient basis for that: which is simply that after all, you know--for I think you do know, don't you?--I'm nearly as much attached to her as you are."

Mr. Longdon had looked suddenly apprehensive and even a trifle embarra.s.sed, but he spoke with due presence of mind. "Of course I understand that perfectly. If you hadn't liked her so much--"

"Well?" said Mitchy as he checked himself.

"I would never, last year, have gone to stay with you."

"Thank you!" Mitchy laughed.

"Though I like you also--and extremely," Mr. Longdon gravely pursued, "for yourself."

Mitchy made a sign of acknowledgement. "You like me better for HER than you do for anybody else BUT myself."

"You put it, I think, correctly. Of course I've not seen so much of Nanda--if between my age and hers, that is, any real contact is possible--without knowing that she now regards you as one of the very best of her friends, treating you, I find myself suspecting, with a degree of confidence--"

Mitchy gave a laugh of interruption. "That she doesn't show even to you?"

Mr. Longdon's poised gla.s.ses faced him. "Even! I don't mind, as the opportunity has come up, telling you frankly--and as from my time of life to your own--all the comfort I take in the sense that in any case of need or trouble she might look to you for whatever advice or support the crisis should demand."

"She has told you she feels I'd be there?" Mitchy after an instant asked.

"I'm not sure," his friend replied, "that I ought quite to mention anything she has 'told' me. I speak of what I've made out myself."

"Then I thank you more than I can say for your penetration. Her mother, I should let you know," Mitchy continued, "is with her just now."

Mr. Longdon took off his gla.s.ses with a jerk. "Has anything happened to her?"

"To account for the fact I refer to?" Mitchy said in amus.e.m.e.nt at his start. "She's not ill, that I know of, thank goodness, and she hasn't broken her leg. But something, none the less, has happened to her--that I think I may say. To tell you all in a word, it's the reason, such as it is, of my being here to meet you. Mrs. Brook asked me to wait. She'll see you herself some other time."

Mr. Longdon wondered. "And Nanda too?"

"Oh that must be between yourselves. Only, while I keep you here--"

"She understands my delay?"

Mitchy thought. "Mrs. Brook must have explained." Then as his companion took this in silence, "But you don't like it?" he asked.

"It only comes to me that Mrs. Brook's explanations--!"