The Awkward Age Part 45

"Well," said Mrs. Brook as she took this in, "I think it's awfully clever of you to get only the good of him and have none of the worry."

Nanda wondered. "The worry?"

"You leave that all to ME," her mother went on, but quite forgivingly.

"I hope at any rate that the good, for you, will be real."

"Real?" the girl, remaining vague, again echoed.

Mrs. Brook showed for this not perhaps an irritation, but a flicker of austerity. "You must remember we've a great many things to think about.

There are things we must take for granted in each other--we must all help in our way to pull the coach. That's what I mean by worry, and if you don't have any so much the better for you. For me it's in the day's work. Your father and I have most to think about always at this time, as you perfectly know--when we have to turn things round and manage somehow or other to get out of town, have to provide and pinch, to meet all the necessities, with money, money, money at every turn running away like water. The children this year seem to fit into nothing, into nowhere, and Harold's more dreadful than he has ever been, doing nothing at all for himself and requiring everything to be done for him. He talks about his American girl, with millions, who's so awfully taken with him, but I can't find out anything about her: the only one, just now, that people seem to have heard of is the one b.o.o.by Manger's engaged to. The Mangers literally snap up everything," Mrs. Brook quite wailingly now continued: "the Jew man, so gigantically rich--who is he? Baron Schack or Schmack--who has just taken c.u.mberland House and who has the awful stammer--or what is it? no roof to his mouth--is to give that horrid little Algie, to do his conversation for him, four hundred a year, which Harold pretended to me that, of all the rush of young men--dozens!--HE was most in the running for. Your father's settled gloom is terrible, and I bear all the brunt of it; we get literally nothing this year for the Hovel, yet have to spend on it heaven knows what; and everybody, for the next three months, in Scotland and everywhere, has asked us for the wrong time and n.o.body for the right: so that I a.s.sure you I don't know where to turn--which doesn't however in the least prevent every one coming to me with their own selfish troubles." It was as if Mrs. Brook had found the cup of her secret sorrows suddenly jostled by some touch of which the perversity, though not completely noted at the moment, proved, as she a little let herself go, sufficient to make it flow over; but she drew, the next thing, from her daughter's stillness a reflexion of the vanity of such heat and speedily recovered herself as if in order with more dignity to point the moral. "I can carry my burden and shall do so to the end; but we must each remember that we shall fall to pieces if we don't manage to keep hold of some little idea of responsibility. I positively can't arrange without knowing when it is you go to him."

"To Mr. Longdon? Oh whenever I like," Nanda replied very gently and simply.

"And when shall you be so good as to like?"

"Well, he goes himself on Sat.u.r.day, and if I want I can go a few days later."

"And what day can you go if I want?" Mrs. Brook spoke as with a small sharpness--just softened indeed in time--produced by the sight of a freedom in her daughter's life that suddenly loomed larger than any freedom of her own. It was still a part of the unsteadiness of the vessel of her anxieties; but she never after all remained publicly long subject to the influence she often comprehensively designated to others as well as to herself as "nastiness." "What I mean is that you might go the same day, mightn't you?"

"With him--in the train? I should think so if you wish it."

"But would HE wish it? I mean would he hate it?"

"I don't think so at all, but I can easily ask him."

Mrs. Brook's head inclined to the chimney and her eyes to the window.

"Easily?"

Nanda looked for a moment mystified by her mother's insistence. "I can at any rate perfectly try it."

"Remembering even that mamma would never have pushed so?"

Nanda's face seemed to concede even that condition. "Well," she at all events serenely replied, "I really think we're good friends enough for anything."

It might have been, for the light it quickly produced, exactly what her mother had been working to make her say. "What do you call that then, I should like to know, but his adopting you?"

"Ah I don't know that it matters much what it's called."

"So long as it brings with it, you mean," Mrs. Brook asked, "all the advantages?"

"Well yes," said Nanda, who had now begun dimly to smile--"call them advantages."

Mrs. Brook had a pause. "One would be quite ready to do that if one only knew a little more exactly what they're to consist of."

"Oh the great advantage, I feel, is doing something for HIM."

Nanda's companion, at this, hesitated afresh. "But doesn't that, my dear, put the extravagance of your surrender to him on rather an odd footing? Charity, love, begins at home, and if it's a question of merely GIVING, you've objects enough for your bounty without going so far."

The girl, as her stare showed, was held a moment by her surprise, which presently broke out. "Why, I thought you wanted me so to be nice to him!"

"Well, I hope you won't think me very vulgar," said Mrs. Brook, "if I tell you that I want you still more to have some idea of what you'll get by it. I've no wish," she added, "to keep on boring you with Mitchy--"

"Don't, don't!" Nanda pleaded.

Her mother stopped as short as if there had been something in her tone to set the limit the more utterly for being unstudied. Yet poor Mrs.

Brook couldn't leave it there. "Then what do you get instead?"

"Instead of Mitchy? Oh," said Nanda, "I shall never marry."

Mrs. Brook at this turned away, moving over to the window with quickened weariness. Nanda, on her side, as if their talk had ended, went across to the sofa to take up her parasol before leaving the room, an impulse rather favoured than arrested by the arrival of her brother Harold, who came in at the moment both his relatives had turned a back to the door and who gave his sister, as she faced him, a greeting that made their mother look round. "Hallo, Nan--you ARE lovely! Ain't she lovely, mother?"

"No!" Mrs. Brook answered, not, however, otherwise noticing him. Her domestic despair centred at this instant all in her daughter. "Well then, we shall consider--your father and I--that he must take the consequence."

Nanda had now her hand on the door, while Harold had dropped on the sofa. "'He'?" she just sounded.

"I mean Mr. Longdon."

"And what do you mean by the consequence?"

"Well, it will do for the beginning of it that you'll please go down WITH him."

"On Sat.u.r.day then? Thanks, mamma," the girl returned.

She was instantly gone, on which Mrs. Brook had more attention for her son. This, after an instant, as she approached the sofa and raised her eyes from the little table beside it, came straight out. "Where in the world is that five-pound note?"

Harold looked vacantly about him. "What five-pound note?"

BOOK SEVENTH. MITCHY

Mr. Longdon's garden took in three acres and, full of charming features, had for its greatest wonder the extent and colour of its old brick wall, in which the pink and purple surface was the fruit of the mild ages and the protective function, for a visitor strolling, sitting, talking, reading, that of a nurse of reverie. The air of the place, in the August time, thrilled all the while with the bliss of birds, the hum of little lives unseen and the flicker of white b.u.t.terflies. It was on the large flat enclosed lawn that Nanda spoke to Vanderbank of the three weeks she would have completed there on the morrow--weeks that had been--she made no secret of it--the happiest she had yet spent anywhere. The greyish day was soft and still and the sky faintly marbled, while the more newly arrived of the visitors from London, who had come late on the Friday afternoon, lounged away the morning in an att.i.tude every relaxed line of which referred to the holiday he had, as it were--at first merely looking about and victualling--sat down in front of as a captain before a city. There were sitting-places, just there, out of the full light, cushioned benches in the thick wide spread of old mulberry-boughs. A large book of facts lay in the young man's lap, and Nanda had come out to him, half an hour before luncheon, somewhat as Beatrice came out to Bened.i.c.k: not to call him immediately indeed to the meal, but mentioning promptly that she had come at a bidding. Mr. Longdon had rebuked her, it appeared, for her want of attention to their guest, showing her in this way, to her pleasure, how far he had gone toward taking her, as he called it, into the house.

"You've been thinking of yourself," Vanderbank asked, "as a mere clerk at a salary, and you now find that you're a partner and have a share in the concern?"

"It seems to be something like that. But doesn't a partner put in something? What have I put in?"

"Well--ME, for one thing. Isn't it your being here that has brought me down?"

"Do you mean you wouldn't have come for him alone? Then don't you make anything of his attraction? You ought to," said Nanda, "when he likes you so."

Vanderbank, longing for a river, was in white flannels, and he took her question with a happy laugh, a handsome face of good humour that completed the effect of his long, cool fairness. "Do you mind my just sitting still, do you mind letting me smoke and staying with me a while?

Perhaps after a little we'll walk about--shan't we? But face to face with this dear old house, in this jolly old nook, one's too contented to move, lest raising a finger even should break the spell. What WILL be perfect will be your just sitting down--DO sit down--and scolding me a little. That, my dear Nanda, will deepen the peace." Some minutes later, while, near him but in another chair, she fingered the impossible book, as she p.r.o.nounced it, that she had taken from him, he came back to what she had last said. "Has he talked to you much about his 'liking' me?"

Nanda waited a minute, turning over the book. "No."

"Then how are you just now so struck with it?"