The Awkward Age Part 33

She understood too little--he gave it up. "And who are all the other best friends whom poor Nanda comes after?"

"Well, there's my aunt, and Miss Merriman, and Gelsomina, and Dr.

Beltram."

"And who, please, is Miss Merriman?"

"She's my governess, don't you know?--but such a deliciously easy governess."

"That, I suppose, is because she has such a deliciously easy pupil. And who is Gelsomina?" Mr. Longdon enquired.

"She's my old nurse--my old maid."

"I see. Well, one must always be kind to old maids. But who's Dr.

Beltram?"

"Oh the most intimate friend of all. We tell him everything."

There was for Mr. Longdon in this, with a slight incert.i.tude, an effect of drollery. "Your little troubles?"

"Ah they're not always so little! And he takes them all away."

"Always?--on the spot?"

"Sooner or later," said little Aggie with serenity. "But why not?"

"Why not indeed?" he laughed. "It must be very plain sailing." Decidedly she was, as Nanda had said, an angel, and there was a wonder in her possession on this footing of one of the most expressive little faces that even her expressive race had ever shown him. Formed to express everything, it scarce expressed as yet even a consciousness. All the elements of play were in it, but they had nothing to play with. It was a rest moreover, after so much that he had lately been through, to be with a person for whom questions were so simple. "But he sounds all the same like the kind of doctor whom, as soon as one hears of him, one wants to send for."

The young girl had at this a small light of confusion. "Oh I don't mean he's a doctor for medicine. He's a clergyman--and my aunt says he's a saint. I don't think you've many in England," little Aggie continued to explain.

"Many saints? I'm afraid not. Your aunt's very happy to know one. We should call Dr. Beltram in England a priest."

"Oh but he's English. And he knows everything we do--and everything we think."

"'We'--your aunt, your governess and your nurse? What a varied wealth of knowledge!"

"Ah Miss Merriman and Gelsomina tell him only what they like."

"And do you and the d.u.c.h.ess tell him what you DON'T like?"

"Oh often--but we always like HIM--no matter what we tell him. And we know that just the same he always likes us."

"I see then of course," said Mr. Longdon, very gravely now, "what a friend he must be. So it's after all this," he continued in a moment, "that Nanda comes in?"

His companion had to consider, but suddenly she caught a.s.sistance. "This one, I think, comes before." Lord Petherton, arriving apparently from the garden, had drawn near un.o.bserved by Mr. Longdon and the next moment was within hail. "I see him very often," she continued--"oftener than Nanda. Oh but THEN Nanda. And then," little Aggie wound up, "Mr.

Mitchy."

"Oh I'm glad HE comes in," Mr. Longdon returned, "though rather far down in the list." Lord Petherton was now before them, there being no one else on the terrace to speak to, and, with the odd look of an excess of physical power that almost blocked the way, he seemed to give them in the flare of his big teeth the benefit of a kind of brutal geniality.

It was always to be remembered for him that he could scarce show without surprising you an adjustment to the smaller conveniences; so that when he took up a trifle it was not perforce in every case the sign of an uncanny calculation. When the elephant in the show plays the fiddle it must be mainly with the presumption of consequent apples; which was why, doubtless, this personage had half the time the air of a.s.suring you that, really civilised as his type had now become, no apples were required. Mr. Longdon viewed him with a vague apprehension and as if quite unable to meet the question of what he would have called for such a personage the social responsibility. Did this specimen of his cla.s.s pull the tradition down or did he just take it where he found it--in the very different place from that in which, on ceasing so long ago to "go out," Mr. Longdon had left it? Our friend doubtless averted himself from the possibility of a mental dilemma; if the man didn't lower the position was it the position then that let down the man? Somehow he wasn't positively up. More evidence would be needed to decide; yet it was just of more evidence that one remained rather in dread. Lord Petherton was kind to little Aggie, kind to her companion, kind to every one, after Mr. Longdon had explained that she was so good as to be giving him the list of her dear friends. "I'm only a little dismayed,"

the elder man said, "to find Mr. Mitchett at the bottom."

"Oh but it's an awfully short list, isn't it? If it consists only of me and Mitchy he's not so very low down. We don't allow her very MANY friends; we look out too well for ourselves." He addressed the child as on an easy jocose understanding. "Is the question, Aggie, whether we shall allow you Mr. Longdon? Won't that rather 'do' for us--for Mitchy and me? I say, d.u.c.h.ess," he went on as this lady reappeared, "ARE we going to allow her Mr. Longdon and do we quite realise what we're about?

We mount guard awfully, you know"--he carried the joke back to the person he had named. "We sift and we sort, we pick the candidates over, and I should like to hear any one say that in this case at least I don't keep a watch on my taste. Oh we close in!"

The d.u.c.h.ess, the object of her quest in her hand, had come back. "Well then Mr. Longdon will close WITH us--you'll consider henceforth that he's as safe as yourself. Here's the letter I wanted you to read--with which you'll please take a turn, in strict charge of the child, and then restore her to us. If you don't come I shall know you've found Mitchy and shall be at peace. Go, little heart," she continued to the child, "but leave me your book to look over again. I don't know that I'm quite sure!" She sent them off together, but had a grave protest as her friend put out his hand for the volume. "No, Petherton--not for books; for her reading I can't say I do trust you. But for everything else--quite!" she declared to Mr. Longdon with a look of conscientious courage as their companion withdrew. "I do believe," she pursued in the same spirit, "in a certain amount of intelligent confidence. Really nice men are steadied by the sense of your having had it. But I wouldn't," she added gaily, "trust him all round!"

IV

Many things at Mertle were strange for her interlocutor, but nothing perhaps as yet had been so strange as the sight of this arrangement for little Aggie's protection; an arrangement made in the interest of her remaining as a young person of her age and her monde--so her aunt would have put it--should remain. The strangest part of the impression too was that the provision might really have its happy side and his lordship understand definitely better than any one else his n.o.ble friend's whole theory of perils and precautions. The child herself, the spectator of the incident was sure enough, understood nothing; but the understandings that surrounded her, filling all the air, made it a heavier compound to breathe than any Mr. Longdon had yet tasted. This heaviness had grown for him through the long sweet summer day, and there was something in his at last finding himself ensconced with the d.u.c.h.ess that made it supremely oppressive. The contact was one that, none the less, he would not have availed himself of a decent pretext to avoid. With so many fine mysteries playing about him there was relief, at the point he had reached, rather than alarm, in the thought of knowing the worst; which it pressed upon him somehow that the d.u.c.h.ess must not only altogether know but must in any relation quite naturally communicate. It fluttered him rather that a person who had an understanding with Lord Petherton should so single him out as to wish for one also with himself; such a person must either have great variety of mind or have a wonderful idea of HIS variety. It was true indeed that Mr. Mitchett must have the most extraordinary understanding, and yet with Mr. Mitchett he now found himself quite pleasantly at his ease. Their host, however, was a person sui generis, whom he had accepted, once for all, the inconsequence of liking in conformity with the need he occasionally felt to put it on record that he was not narrow-minded. Perhaps at bottom he most liked Mitchy because Mitchy most liked Nanda; there hung about him still moreover the faded fragrance of the superst.i.tion that hospitality not declined is one of the things that "oblige." It obliged the thoughts, for Mr. Longdon, as well as the manners, and in the especial form in which he was now committed to it would have made him, had he really thought any ill, ask himself what the deuce then he was doing in the man's house. All of which didn't prevent some of Mitchy's queer condonations--if condonations in fact they were--from not wholly, by themselves, soothing his vague unrest, an unrest which never had been so great as at the moment he heard the d.u.c.h.ess abruptly say to him: "Do you know my idea about Nanda? It's my particular desire you should--the reason, really, why I've thus laid violent hands on you. Nanda, my dear man, should marry at the very first moment."

This was more interesting than he had expected, and the effect produced by his interlocutress, as well as doubtless not lost on her, was shown in his suppressed start. "There has been no reason why I should attribute to you any judgement of the matter; but I've had one myself, and I don't see why I shouldn't say frankly that it's very much the one you express. It would be a very good thing."

"A very good thing, but none of my business?"--the d.u.c.h.ess's vivacity was not unamiable.

It was on this circ.u.mstance that her companion for an instant perhaps meditated. "It's probably not in my interest to say that. I should give you too easy a retort. It would strike any one as quite as much your business as mine."

"Well, it ought to be somebody's, you know. One would suppose it to be her mother's--her father's; but in this country the parents are even more emanc.i.p.ated than the children. Suppose, really, since it appears to be n.o.body's affair, that you and I do make it ours. We needn't either of us," she continued, "be concerned for the other's reasons, though I'm perfectly ready, I a.s.sure you, to put my cards on the table. You've your feelings--we know they're beautiful. I, on my side, have mine--for which I don't pretend anything but that they're strong. They can dispense with being beautiful when they're so perfectly settled. Besides, I may mention, they're rather nice than otherwise. Edward and I have a cousinage, though for all he does to keep it up--! If he leaves his children to play in the street I take it seriously enough to make an occasional dash for them before they're run over. And I want for Nanda simply the man she herself wants--it isn't as if I wanted for her a dwarf or a hunchback or a coureur or a drunkard. Vanderbank's a man whom any woman, don't you think? might be--whom more than one woman IS--glad of for herself: beau comme le jour, awfully conceited and awfully patronising, but clever and successful and yet liked, and without, so far as I know, any of the terrific appendages which in this country so often diminish the value of even the pleasantest people. He hasn't five horrible unmarried sisters for his wife to have always on a visit. The way your women don't marry is the ruin here of society, and I've been a.s.sured in good quarters--though I don't know so much about that--the ruin also of conversation and of literature. Isn't it precisely just a little to keep Nanda herself from becoming that kind of appendage--say to poor Harold, say, one of these days, to her younger brother and sister--that friends like you and me feel the importance of bestirring ourselves in time? Of course she's supposedly young, but she's really any age you like: your London world so fearfully batters and bruises them." She had gone fast and far, but it had given Mr. Longdon time to feel himself well afloat. There were so many things in it all to take up that he laid his hand--of which, he was not unconscious, the feebleness exposed him--on the nearest. "Why I'm sure her mother--after twenty years of it--is fresh enough."

"Fresh? You find Mrs. Brook fresh?" The d.u.c.h.ess had a manner that, in its all-knowingness, rather humiliated than encouraged; but he was all the more resolute for being conscious of his own reserves. "It seems to me it's fresh to look about thirty."

"That indeed would be perfect. But she doesn't--she looks about three.

She simply looks a baby."

"Oh d.u.c.h.ess, you're really too particular!" he retorted, feeling that, as the trodden worm will turn, anxiety itself may sometimes tend to wit.

She met him in her own way. "I know what I mean. My niece is a person _I_ call fresh. It's warranted, as they say in the shops. Besides," she went on, "if a married woman has been knocked about that's only a part of her condition. Elle l'a lien voulu, and if you're married you're married; it's the smoke--or call it the soot!--of the fire. You know, yourself," she roundly pursued, "that Nanda's situation appals you."

"Oh 'appals'!" he restrictively murmured.

It even tried a little his companion's patience. "There you are, you English--you'll never face your own music. It's amazing what you'd rather do with a thing--anything not to shoot at or to make money with--than look at its meaning. If I wished to save the girl as YOU wish it I should know exactly from what. But why differ about reasons," she asked, "when we're at one about the fact? I don't mention the greatest of Vanderbank's merits," she added--"his having so delicious a friend.

By whom, let me hasten to a.s.sure you," she laughed, "I don't in the least mean Mrs. Brook! She IS delicious if you like, but believe me when I tell you, caro mio--if you need to be told--that for effective action on him you're worth twenty of her."

What was most visible in Mr. Longdon was that, however it came to him, he had rarely before, all at once, had so much given him to think about. Again the only way to manage was to take what came uppermost.

"By effective action you mean action on the matter of his proposing for Nanda?"

The d.u.c.h.ess's a.s.sent was n.o.ble. "You can make him propose--you can make, I mean, a sure thing of it. You can doter the bride." Then as with the impulse to meet benevolently and more than halfway her companion's imperfect apprehension: "You can settle on her something that will make her a parti." His apprehension was perhaps imperfect, but it could still lead somehow to his flushing all over, and this demonstration the d.u.c.h.ess as quickly took into account. "Poor Edward, you know, won't give her a penny."

Decidedly she went fast, but Mr. Longdon in a moment had caught up.

"Mr. Vanderbank--your idea is--would require on the part of his wife something of that sort?"

"Pray who wouldn't--in the world we all move in--require it quite as much? Mr. Vanderbank, I'm a.s.sured, has no means of his own at all, and if he doesn't believe in impecunious marriages it's not I who shall be shocked at him. For myself I simply despise them. He has nothing but a poor official salary. If it's enough for one it would be little for two, and would be still less for half a dozen. They're just the people to have, that blessed pair, a fine old English family."

Mr. Longdon was now fairly abreast of it. "What it comes to then, the idea you're so good as to put before me, is to bribe him to take her."

The d.u.c.h.ess remained bland, but she fixed him. "You say that as if you were scandalised, but if you try Mr. Van with it I don't think he'll be. And you won't persuade me," she went on finely, "that you haven't yourself thought of it." She kept her eyes on him, and the effect of them, soon enough visible in his face, was such as presently to make her exult at her felicity. "You're of a limpidity, dear man--you've only to be said 'bo!' to and you confess. Consciously or unconsciously--the former, really, I'm inclined to think--you've wanted him for her." She paused an instant to enjoy her triumph, after which she continued: "And you've wanted her for him. I make you out, you'll say--for I see you coming--one of those horrible benevolent busy-bodies who are the worst of the cla.s.s, but you've only to think a little--if I may go so far--to see that no 'making' at all is required. You've only one link with the Brooks, but that link is golden. How can we, all of us, by this time, not have grasped and admired the beauty of your feeling for Lady Julia?

There it is--I make you wince: to speak of it is to profane it. Let us by all means not speak of it then, but let us act on it." He had at last turned his face from her, and it now took in, from the vantage of his high position, only the loveliness of the place and the hour, which included a glimpse of Lord Petherton and little Aggie, who, down in the garden, slowly strolled in familiar union. Each had a hand in the other's, swinging easily as they went; their talk was evidently of flowers and fruits and birds; it was quite like father and daughter.

One could see half a mile off in short that THEY weren't flirting. Our friend's bewilderment came in odd cold gusts: these were unreasoned and capricious; one of them, at all events, during his companion's pause, must have roared in his ears. Was it not therefore through some continuance of the sound that he heard her go on speaking? "Of course you know the poor child's own condition."