The Awkward Age Part 27

He had appealed to his companions impartially, but Mr. Longdon, whose attention was now all for his hostess, appeared unconscious. "If you're all watching is it your idea that I should watch WITH you?"

The enquiry, on his lips, was a waft of cold air, the sense of which clearly led Mrs. Brook to put her invitation on the right ground. "Not of course on the chance of anything's happening to the dear child--to whom nothing obviously CAN happen but that her aunt will marry her off in the shortest possible time and in the best possible conditions. No, the interest is much more in the way the d.u.c.h.ess herself steers."

"Ah, she's in a boat," Mr. Cashmore fully concurred, "that will take a good bit of that."

It is not for Mr. Longdon's historian to overlook that if he was, not unnaturally, mystified he was yet also visibly interested. "What boat is she in?"

He had addressed his curiosity, with politeness, to Mr. Cashmore, but they were all arrested by the wonderful way in which Mrs. Brook managed to smile at once very dimly, very darkly, and yet make it take them all in. "I think YOU must tell him, Van."

"Heaven forbid!"--and Van again retreated.

"I'LL tell him like a shot--if you really give me leave," said Mr.

Cashmore, for whom any scruple referred itself manifestly not to the subject of the information but to the presence of a lady.

"I DON'T give you leave and I beg you'll hold your tongue," Mrs.

Brookenham returned. "You handle such matters with a minuteness--! In short," she broke off to Mr. Longdon, "he would tell you a good deal more than you'll care to know. She IS in a boat--but she's an experienced mariner. Basta, as she would say. Do you know Mitchy?" Mrs.

Brook suddenly asked.

"Oh yes, he knows Mitchy"--Vanderbank had approached again.

"Then make HIM tell him"--she put it before the young man as a charming turn for them all. "Mitchy CAN be refined when he tries."

"Oh dear--when Mitchy 'tries'!" Vanderbank laughed. "I think I should rather, for the job, offer him to Mr. Longdon abandoned to his native wild impulse."

"I LIKE Mr. Mitchett," the old man said, endeavouring to look his hostess straight in the eye and speaking as if somewhat to defy her to convict him, even from the point of view of Beccles, of a mistake.

Mrs. Brookenham took it with a wonderful bright emotion. "My dear friend, vous me rendez la vie! If you can stand Mitchy you can stand any of us!"

"Upon my honour I should think so!" Mr. Cashmore was eager to remark.

"What on earth do you mean," he demanded of Mrs. Brook, "by saying that I'm more 'minute' than he?"

She turned her beauty an instant on this critic. "I don't say you're more minute--I say he's more brilliant. Besides, as I've told you before, you're not one of us." With which, as a check to further discussion, she went straight on to Mr. Longdon: "The point about Aggie's conservative education is the wonderful sincerity with which the d.u.c.h.ess feels that one's girl may so perfectly and consistently be hedged in without one's really ever (for it comes to that) depriving one's own self--"

"Well, of what?" Mr. Longdon boldly demanded while his hostess appeared thoughtfully to falter.

She addressed herself mutely to Vanderbank, in whom the movement produced a laugh. "I defy you," he exclaimed, "to say!"

"Well, you don't defy ME!" Mr. Cashmore cried as Mrs. Brook failed to take up the challenge. "If you know Mitchy," he went on to Mr. Longdon, "you must know Petherton."

The elder man remained vague and not imperceptibly cold. "Petherton?"

"My brother-in-law--whom, G.o.d knows why, Mitchy runs."

"Runs?" Mr. Longdon again echoed.

Mrs. Brook appealed afresh to Vanderbank. "I think we ought to spare him. I may not remind you of mamma," she continued to their companion, "but I hope you don't mind my saying how much you remind me.

Explanations, after all, spoil things, and if you CAN make anything of us and will sometimes come back you'll find everything in its native freshness. You'll see, you'll feel for yourself."

Mr. Longdon stood before her and raised to Vanderbank, when she had ceased, the eyes he had attached to the carpet while she talked. "And must I go now?" Explanations, she had said, spoiled things, but he might have been a stranger at an Eastern court--comically helpless without his interpreter.

"If Mrs. Brook desires to 'spare' you," Vanderbank kindly replied, "the best way to make sure of it would perhaps indeed be to remove you. But hadn't we a hope of Nanda?"

"It might be of use for us to wait for her?"--it was still to his young friend that Mr. Longdon put it.

"Ah when she's once on the loose--!" Mrs. Brookenham sighed.

"Unless la voila," she said as a hand was heard at the door-latch. It was only, however, a footman who entered with a little tray that, on his approaching his mistress, offered to sight the brown envelope of a telegram. She immediately took leave to open this missive, after the quick perusal of which she had another vision of them all. "It IS she--the modern daughter. 'Tishy keeps me dinner and opera; clothes all right; return uncertain, but if before morning have latch-key.' She won't come home till morning!" said Mrs. Brook.

"But think of the comfort of the latch-key!" Vanderbank laughed. "You might go to the opera," he said to Mr. Longdon.

"Hanged if _I_ don't!" Mr. Cashmore exclaimed.

Mr. Longdon appeared to have caught from Nanda's message an obscure agitation; he met his young friend's suggestion at all events with a visible intensity. "Will you go with me?"

Vanderbank had just debated, recalling engagements; which gave Mrs.

Brook time to intervene. "Can't you live without him?" she asked of her elder friend.

Vanderbank had looked at her an instant. "I think I can get there late,"

he then replied to Mr. Longdon.

"I think _I_ can get there early," Mr. Cashmore declared. "Mrs. Grendon must have a box; in fact I know which, and THEY don't," he jocosely continued to his hostess.

Mrs. Brook meanwhile had given Mr. Longdon her hand. "Well, in any case the child SHALL soon come to you. And oh alone," she insisted: "you needn't make phrases--I know too well what I'm about."

"One hopes really you do," pursued the unquenched Mr. Cashmore.

"If that's what one gets by having known your mother--!"

"It wouldn't have helped YOU" Mrs. Brook retorted. "And won't you have to say it's ALL you were to get?" she pityingly murmured to her other visitor.

He turned to Vanderbank with a strange gasp, and that comforter said "Come!"

BOOK FIFTH. THE d.u.c.h.eSS

The lower windows of the great white house, which stood high and square, opened to a wide flagged terrace, the parapet of which, an old bal.u.s.trade of stone, was broken in the middle of its course by a flight of stone steps that descended to a wonderful garden. The terrace had the afternoon shade and fairly hung over the prospect that dropped away and circled it--the prospect, beyond the series of gardens, of scattered splendid trees and green glades, an horizon mainly of woods. Nanda Brookenham, one day at the end of July, coming out to find the place unoccupied as yet by other visitors, stood there a while with an air of happy possession. She moved from end to end of the terrace, pausing, gazing about her, taking in with a face that showed the pleasure of a brief independence the combination of delightful things--of old rooms with old decorations that gleamed and gloomed through the high windows, of old gardens that squared themselves in the wide angles of old walls, of wood-walks rustling in the afternoon breeze and stretching away to further reaches of solitude and summer. The scene had an expectant stillness that she was too charmed to desire to break; she watched it, listened to it, followed with her eyes the white b.u.t.terflies among the flowers below her, then gave a start as the cry of a peac.o.c.k came to her from an unseen alley. It set her after a minute into less difficult motion; she pa.s.sed slowly down the steps, wandering further, looking back at the big bright house but pleased again to see no one else appear. If the sun was still high enough she had a pink parasol. She went through the gardens one by one, skirting the high walls that were so like "collections" and thinking how, later on, the nectarines and plums would flush there. She exchanged a friendly greeting with a man at work, pa.s.sed through an open door and, turning this way and that, finally found herself in the park, at some distance from the house. It was a point she had had to take another rise to reach, a place marked by an old green bench for a larger sweep of the view, which, in the distance where the woods stopped, showed in the most English way in the world the colour-spot of an old red village and the tower of an old grey church. She had sunk down upon the bench almost with a sense of adventure, yet not too fluttered to wonder if it wouldn't have been happy to bring a book; the charm of which precisely would have been in feeling everything about her too beautiful to let her read.

The sense of adventure grew in her, presently becoming aware of a stir in the thicket below, followed by the coming into sight, on a path that, mounting, pa.s.sed near her seat, of a wanderer whom, had his particular, his exceptional ident.i.ty not quickly appeared, it might have disappointed her a trifle to have to recognise as a friend. He saw her immediately, stopped, laughed, waved his hat, then bounded up the slope and, brushing his forehead with his handkerchief, confessing as to a red face, was rejoicingly there before her. Her own e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n on first seeing him--"Why, Mr. Van!"--had had an ambiguous sharpness that was rather for herself than for her visitor. She made room for him on the bench, where in a moment he was cooling off and they were both explaining. The great thing was that he had walked from the station to stretch his legs, coming far round, for the lovely hour and the pleasure of it, by a way he had learnt on some previous occasion of being at Mertle.

"You've already stayed here then?" Nanda, who had arrived but half an hour before, spoke as if she had lost the chance to give him a new impression.

"I've stayed here--yes, but not with Mitchy; with some people or other--who the deuce can they have been?--who had the place for a few months a year or two ago."

"Don't you even remember?"

Vanderbank wondered and laughed. "It will come to me. But it's a charming sign of London relations, isn't it?--that one CAN come down to people this way and be awfully well 'done for' and all that, and then go away and lose the whole thing, quite forget to whom one has been beholden. It's a queer life."