The Awkward Age Part 18

"Nanda, you blessed child, do YOU mind making it? How jolly of you!--are you all right?" He seemed, with this, for the first time, to be aware of somebody's absence. "Your mother isn't coming? She let you come alone?

How jolly of her!" Pulling off her gloves Nanda had come immediately to his a.s.sistance; on which, quitting the table and laying hands on Mr.

Longdon's shoulder to push him toward a sofa, he continued to talk, to sound a note of which the humour was the exaggeration of his flurry.

"How jolly of you to be willing to come--most awfully kind! I hope she isn't ill? Do, Mitchy, lie down. Down, Mitchy, down!--that's the only way to keep you." He had waited for no account of Mrs. Brookenham's health, and it might have been apparent--still to our sharp spectator--that he found nothing wonderful in her daughter's unsupported arrival.

"I can make tea beautifully," she said from behind her table. "Mother showed me how this morning."

"This morning?"--and Mitchy, who, before the fire and still erect, had declined to be laid low, greeted the simple remark with uproarious mirth. "Dear young lady, you're the most delicious family!"

"She showed me at breakfast about the little things to do. She thought I might have to make it here and told me to offer," the girl went on.

"I haven't yet done it this way at home--I usually have my tea upstairs.

They bring it up in a cup, all made and very weak, with a piece of bread-and-b.u.t.ter in the saucer. That's because I'm so young. Tishy never lets me touch hers either; so we had to make up for lost time. That's what mother said"--she followed up her story, and her young distinctness had clearly something to do with a certain pale concentration in Mr.

Longdon's face. "Mother isn't ill, but she told me already yesterday she wouldn't come. She said it's really all for ME. I'm sure I hope it is!"--with which there flickered in her eyes, dimly but perhaps all the more prettily, the first intimation they had given of the light of laughter. "She told me you'd understand, Mr. Van--from something you've said to her. It's for my seeing Mr. Longdon without--she thinks--her spoiling it."

"Oh my dear child, 'spoiling it'!" Vanderbank protested as he took a cup of tea from her to carry to their friend. "When did your mother ever spoil anything? I told her Mr. Longdon wanted to see you, but I didn't say anything of his not yearning also for the rest of the family."

A sound of protest rather formless escaped from the gentleman named, but Nanda continued to carry out her duty. "She told me to ask why he hadn't been again to see her. Mr. Mitchy, sugar?--isn't that the way to say it?

Three lumps? You're like me, only that I more often take five." Mitchy had dashed forward for his tea; she gave it to him; then she added with her eyes on Mr. Longdon's, which she had had no difficulty in catching: "She told me to ask you all sorts of things."

This acquaintance had got up to take his cup from Vanderbank, whose hand, however, dealt with him on the question of his sitting down again.

Mr. Longdon, resisting, kept erect with a low gasp that his host only was near enough to catch. This suddenly appeared to confirm an impression gathered by Vanderbank in their contact, a strange sense that his visitor was so agitated as to be trembling in every limb. It brought to his own lips a kind of e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n--"I SAY!" But even as he spoke Mr. Longdon's face, still white, but with a smile that was not all pain, seemed to supplicate him not to notice; and he was not a man to require more than this to achieve a divination as deep as it was rapid. "Why we've all been scattered for Easter, haven't we?" he asked of Nanda.

"Mr. Longdon has been at home, your mother and father have been paying visits, I myself have been out of London, Mitchy has been to Paris, and you--oh yes, I know where you've been."

"Ah we all know that--there has been such a row made about it!" Mitchy said.

"Yes, I've heard of the feeling there is," Nanda replied.

"It's supposed to be awful, my knowing Tishy--quite too awful."

Mr. Longdon, with Vanderbank's covert aid, had begun to appear to have pulled himself together, dropping back on his sofa and attending in a manner to his tea. It might have been with the notion of showing himself at ease that he turned, on this, a benevolent smile to the girl. "But what, my dear, is the objection--?"

She looked gravely from him to Vanderbank and to Mitchy, and then back again from one of these to the other. "Do you think I ought to say?"

They both laughed and they both just appeared uncertain, but Vanderbank spoke first. "I don't imagine, Nanda, that you really know."

"No--as a family, you're perfection!" Mitchy broke out. Before the fire again, with his cup, he addressed his hilarity to Mr. Longdon. "I told you a tremendous lot, didn't I? But I didn't tell you about that."

His elder maintained, yet with a certain vagueness, the att.i.tude of amiable enquiry. "About the--a--family?"

"Well," Mitchy smiled, "about its ramifications. This young lady has a tremendous friendship--and in short it's all very complicated."

"My dear Nanda," said Vanderbank, "it's all very simple. Don't believe a word of anything of the sort."

He had spoken as with the intention of a large vague optimism; but there was plainly something in the girl that would always make for lucidity.

"Do you mean about Carrie Donner? I DON'T believe it, and at any rate I don't think it's any one's business. I shouldn't have a very high opinion of a person who would give up a friend." She stopped short with the sense apparent that she was saying more than she meant, though, strangely, as if it had been an effect of her type and of her voice, there was neither pertness nor pa.s.sion in the profession she had just made. Curiously wanting as she seemed both in timidity and in levity, she was to a certainty not self-conscious--she was extraordinarily simple. Mr. Longdon looked at her now with an evident surrender to his extreme interest, and it might well have perplexed him to see her at once so downright as from experience and yet of so fresh and sweet a tenderness of youth.

"That's right, that's right, my dear young lady: never, never give up a friend for anything any one says!" It was Mitchy who rang out with this lively wisdom, the action of which on Mr. Longdon--unless indeed it was the action of something else--was to make that personage, in a manner that held the others watching him in slight suspense, suddenly spring to his feet again, put down his teacup carefully on a table near and then without a word, as if no one had been present, quietly wander away and disappear through the door left open on Vanderbank's entrance. It opened into a second, a smaller sitting-room, into which the eyes of his companions followed him.

"What's the matter?" Nanda asked. "Has he been taken ill?"

"He IS 'rum,' my dear Van," Mitchy said; "but you're right--of a charm, a distinction! In short just the sort of thing we want."

"The sort of thing we 'want'--I dare say!" Vanderbank laughed. "But it's not the sort of thing that's to be had for the asking--it's a sort we shall be mighty lucky if we can get!"

Mitchy turned with amus.e.m.e.nt to Nanda. "Van has invented him and, with the natural greed of the inventor, won't let us have him cheap. Well,"

he went on, "I'll 'stand' my share."

"The difficulty is that he's so much too good for us," Vanderbank explained.

"Ungrateful wretch," his friend cried, "that's just what I've been telling him that YOU are! Let the return you make not be to deprive me--!"

"Mr. Van's not at all too good for ME, if you mean that," Nanda broke in. She had finished her tea-making and leaned back in her chair with her hands folded on the edge of the tray.

Vanderbank only smiled at her in silence, but Mitchy took it up.

"There's n.o.body too good for you, of course; only you're not quite, don't you know? IN our set. You're in Mrs. Grendon's. I know what you're going to say--that she hasn't got any set, that she's just a loose little white flower dropped on the indifferent bosom of the world. But you're the small sprig of tender green that, added to her, makes her immediately 'compose.'"

Nanda looked at him with her cold kindness. "What nonsense you do talk!"

"Your tone's sweet to me," he returned, "as showing that you don't think ME, either, too good for you. No one, remember, will take that for your excuse when the world some day sees me annihilated by your having put an end to our so harmless relations."

The girl appeared to lose herself a moment in the--abysmal humanity over which his fairly fascinating ugliness played like the whirl of an eddy.

"Martyr!" she gently exclaimed. But there was no smile with it. She turned to Vanderbank, who, during the previous minute, had moved toward the neighbouring room, then faltering, taking counsel of discretion, had come back on a scruple. "What IS the matter?"

"What do you want to get out of him, you wretch?" Mitchy went on as their host for an instant said nothing.

Vanderbank, whose handsome face had a fine thought in it, looked a trifle absently from one of them to the other; but it was to Nanda he spoke. "Do you like him, Nanda?"

She showed surprise at the question. "How can I know so soon?"

"HE knows already."

Mitchy, with his eyes on her, became radiant to interpret. "He knows that he's pierced to the heart!"

"The matter with him, as you call it," Vanderbank brought out, "is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen." He looked at her as with a hope she'd understand. "Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!"

"Precisely," Mitchy continued; "the victim done for by one glance of the G.o.ddess!"

Nanda, motionless in her chair, fixed her other friend with clear curiosity. "'Beautiful'? Why beautiful?"

Vanderbank, about to speak, checked himself.

"I won't spoil it. Have it from HIM!"--and, returning to their friend, he this time went out.

Mitchy and Nanda looked at each other. "But isn't it rather awful?"

Mitchy demanded.

She got up without answering; she slowly came away from the table. "I think I do know if I like him."

"Well you may," Mitchy exclaimed, "after his putting before you probably, on the whole, the greatest of your triumphs."