The Awkward Age Part 59

"Nanda," said the d.u.c.h.ess, "has told him. But I thought," she went on to Mrs. Brook, "that Lady f.a.n.n.y, by this time, MUST have gone."

"Petherton then," Mrs. Brook returned, "doesn't keep you au courant?"

The d.u.c.h.ess blandly wondered. "I seem to remember he had positively said so. And that she had come back."

"Because this looks so like a fresh start? No. WE know. You a.s.sume besides," Mrs. Brook asked, "that Mr. Cashmore would have received her again?"

The d.u.c.h.ess fixed a little that gentleman and his actual companion.

"What will you have? He mightn't have noticed."

"Oh you're out of step, d.u.c.h.ess," Vanderbank said. "We used all to march abreast, but we're falling to pieces. It's all, saving your presence, Mitchy's marriage."

"Ah," Mrs. Brook concurred, "how thoroughly I feel that! Oh I knew. The spell's broken; the harp has lost a string. We're not the same thing.

HE'S not the same thing."

"Frankly, my dear," the d.u.c.h.ess answered, "I don't think that you personally are either."

"Oh as for that--which is what matters least--we shall perhaps see."

With which Mrs. Brook turned again to Mr. Longdon. "I haven't explained to you what I meant just now. We want Nanda."

Mr. Longdon stared. "At home again?"

"In her little old nook. You must give her back."

"Do you mean altogether?"

"Ah that will be for you in a manner to arrange. But you've had her practically these five months, and with no desire to be unreasonable we yet have our natural feelings."

This interchange, to which circ.u.mstances somehow gave a high effect of suddenness and strangeness, was listened to by the others in a quick silence that was like the sense of a blast of cold air, though with the difference between the spectators that Vanderbank attached his eyes hard to Mrs. Brook and that the d.u.c.h.ess looked as straight at Mr. Longdon, to whom clearly she wished to convey that if he had wondered a short time before how Mrs. Brook would do it he must now be quite at his ease. He indulged in fact, after this lady's last words, in a pause that might have signified some of the fulness of a new light. He only said very quietly: "I thought you liked it."

At this his neighbour broke in. "The care you take of the child? They DO!" The d.u.c.h.ess, as she spoke, became aware of the nearer presence of Edward Brookenham, who within a minute had come in from the other room; and her decision of character leaped forth in her quick signal to him.

"Edward will tell you." He was already before their semicircle. "DO you, dear," she appealed, "want Nanda back from Mr. Longdon?"

Edward plainly could be trusted to feel in his quiet way that the oracle must be a match for the priestess. "'Want' her, Jane? We wouldn't TAKE her." And as if knowing quite what he was about he looked at his wife only after he had spoken.

IV

His reply had complete success, to which there could scarce have afterwards been a positive denial that some sound of amus.e.m.e.nt even from Mr. Longdon himself had in its degree contributed. Certain it was that Mrs. Brook found, as she exclaimed that her husband was always so awfully civil, just the right note of resigned understanding; whereupon he for a minute presented to them blankly enough his fine dead face.

"'Civil' is just what I was afraid I wasn't. I mean, you know," he continued to Mr. Longdon, "that you really mustn't look to us to let you off--!"

"From a week or a day"--Mr. Longdon took him up--"of the time to which you consider I've pledged myself? My dear sir, please don't imagine it's for ME the d.u.c.h.ess appeals."

"It's from your wife, you delicious dull man," that lady elucidated. "If you wished to be stiff with our friend here you've really been so with HER; which comes, no doubt, from the absence between you of proper preconcerted action. You spoke without your cue."

"Oh!" said Edward Brookenham.

"That's it, Jane"--Mrs. Brook continued to take it beautifully. "We dressed to-day in a hurry and hadn't time for our usual rehearsal.

Edward, when we dine out, generally brings three pocket-handkerchiefs and six jokes. I leave the management of the handkerchiefs to his own taste, but we mostly try together in advance to arrange a career for the other things. It's some charming light thing of my own that's supposed to give him the sign."

"Only sometimes he confounds"--Vanderbank helped her out--"your light and your heavy!" He had got up to make room for his host of so many occasions and, having forced him into the empty chair, now moved vaguely off to the quarter of the room occupied by Nanda and Mr. Cashmore.

"That's very well," the d.u.c.h.ess resumed, "but it doesn't at all clear you, cara mia, of the misdemeanour of setting up as a felt domestic need something of which Edward proves deeply unconscious. He has put his finger on Nanda's true interest. He doesn't care a bit how it would LOOK for you to want her."

"Don't you mean rather, Jane, how it looks for us NOT to want her?"

Mrs. Brook amended with a detachment now complete. "Of course, dear old friend," she continued to Mr. Longdon, "she quite puts me with my back to the wall when she helps you to see--what you otherwise mightn't guess--that Edward and I work it out between us to show off as tender parents and yet to get from you everything you'll give. I do the sentimental and he the practical; so that we, after one fashion and another, deck ourselves in the glory of our sacrifice without forfeiting the 'keep' of our daughter. This must appeal to you as another useful ill.u.s.tration of what London manners have come to; unless indeed," Mrs.

Brook prattled on, "it only strikes you still more--and to a degree that blinds you to its other possible bearings--as the last proof that I'm too tortuous for you to know what I'd be at!"

Mr. Longdon faced her, across his interval, with his original terror represented now only by such a lingering flush as might have formed a natural tribute to a brilliant scene. "I haven't the glimmering of an idea of what you'd be at. But please understand," he added, "that I don't at all refuse you the private half-hour you referred to a while since."

"Are you really willing to put the child up for the rest of the year?"

Edward placidly demanded, speaking as if quite unaware that anything else had taken place.

His wife fixed her eyes on him. "The ingenuity of your companions, love, plays in the air like the lightning, but flashes round your head only, by good fortune, to leave it unscathed. Still, you have after all your own strange wit, and I'm not sure that any of ours ever compares with it. Only, confronted also with ours, how can poor Mr. Longdon really choose which of the two he'll meet?"

Poor Mr. Longdon now looked hard at Edward. "Oh Mr. Brookenham's, I feel, any day. It's even with YOU, I confess," he said to him, "that I'd rather have that private half-hour."

"Done!" Mrs. Brook declared. "I'll send him to you. But we HAVE, you know, as Van says, gone to pieces," she went on, twisting her pretty head and tossing it back over her shoulder to an auditor of whose approach to her from behind, though it was impossible she should have seen him, she had visibly within a minute become aware. "It's your marriage, Mitchy, that has darkened our old bright air, changed us more than we even yet know, and most grossly and horribly, my dear man, changed YOU. You steal up in a way that gives one the creeps, whereas in the good time that's gone you always burst in with music and song.

Go round where I can see you: I mayn't love you now, but at least, I suppose, I may look at you. Direct your energies," she pursued while Mitchy obeyed her, "as much as possible, please, against our uncanny chill. Pile on the fire and close up the ranks; this WAS our best hour, you know--and all the more that Tishy, I see, is getting rid of her superfluities. Here comes back old Van," she wound up, "vanquished, I judge, in the attempt to divert Nanda from her prey. Won't Nanda sit with poor US?" she asked of Vanderbank, who now, meeting Mitchy in range of the others, remained standing with him and as at her commands.

"I didn't of course ask her," the young man replied.

"Then what did you do?"

"I only took a little walk."

Mrs. Brook, on this, was woeful at Mitchy. "See then what we've come to. When did we ever 'walk' in YOUR time save as a distinct part of the effect of our good things? Please return to Nanda," she said to Vanderbank, "and tell her I particularly wish her to come in for this delightful evening's end."

"She's joining us of herself now," the d.u.c.h.ess noted, "and so's Mr.

Cashmore and so's Tishy--VOYEZ!--who has kept on--(bless her little bare back!)--no one she oughtn't to keep. As n.o.body else will now arrive it would be quite cosey if she locked the door."

"But what on earth, my dear Jane," Mrs. Brook plaintively wondered, "are you proposing we should do?"

Mrs. Brook, in her apprehension, had looked expressively at their friends, but the eye of the d.u.c.h.ess wandered no further than Harold and Lady f.a.n.n.y. "It would perhaps serve to keep that pair a little longer from escaping together."

Mrs. Brook took a pause no greater. "But wouldn't it be, as regards another pair, locking the stable-door after--what do you call it? Don't Petherton and Aggie appear already to have escaped together? Mitchy, man, where in the world's your wife?"

"I quite grant you," said the d.u.c.h.ess gaily, "that my niece is wherever Petherton is. This I'm sure of, for THERE'S a friendship, if you please, that has not been interrupted. Petherton's not gone, is he?" she asked in her turn of Mitchy.

But again before he could speak it was taken up. "Mitchy's silent, Mitchy's altered, Mitchy's queer!" Mrs. Brook proclaimed, while the new recruits to the circle, Tishy and Nanda and Mr. Cashmore, Lady f.a.n.n.y and Harold too after a minute and on perceiving the movement of the others, ended by enlarging it, with mutual accommodation and aid, to a pleasant talkative ring in which the subject of their companion's demonstration, on a low ottoman and glaring in his odd way in almost all directions at once, formed the conspicuous attractive centre. Tishy was nearest Mr. Longdon, and Nanda, still flanked by Mr. Cashmore, between that gentleman and his wife, who had Harold on her other side. Edward Brookenham was neighboured by his son and by Vanderbank, who might easily have felt himself, in spite of their separation and given, as it happened, their places in the group, rather publicly confronted with Mr.

Longdon. "Is his wife in the other room?" Mrs. Brook now put to Tishy.

Tishy, after a stare about, recovered the acuter consciousness to account for this guest. "Oh yes--she's playing with him."

"But with whom, dear?"

"Why, with Petherton. I thought you knew."