The Awkward Age Part 60

"Knew they're playing---?" Mrs. Brook was almost Socratic.

"The Missus is regularly wound up," her husband meanwhile, without resonance, observed to Vanderbank.

"Brilliant indeed!" Vanderbank replied.

"But she's rather naughty, you know," Edward after a pause continued.

"Oh fiendish!" his interlocutor said with a short smothered laugh that might have represented for a spectator a sudden start at such a flash of a.n.a.lysis from such a quarter.

When Vanderbank's attention at any rate was free again their hostess, a.s.sisted to the transition, was describing the play, as she had called it, of the absentees. "She has hidden a book and he's trying to find it."

"Hide and seek? Why, isn't it innocent, Mitch!" Mrs. Brook exclaimed.

Mitchy, speaking for the first time, faced her with extravagant gloom.

"Do you really think so?"

"That's HER innocence!" the d.u.c.h.ess laughed to him.

"And don't you suppose he has found it YET?" Mrs. Brook pursued earnestly to Tishy. "Isn't it something we might ALL play at if--?" On which however, abruptly checking herself, she changed her note. "Nanda love, please go and invite them to join us."

Mitchy, at this, on his ottoman, wheeled straight round to the girl, who looked at him before speaking. "I'll go if Mitchy tells me."

"But if he does fear," said her mother, "that there may be something in it--?"

Mitchy jerked back to Mrs. Brook. "Well, you see, I don't want to give way to my fear. Suppose there SHOULD be something! Let me not know."

She dealt with him tenderly. "I see. You couldn't--so soon--bear it."

"Ah but, savez-vous," the d.u.c.h.ess interposed with some majesty, "you're horrid!"

"Let them alone," Mitchy continued. "We don't want at all events a general romp."

"Oh I thought just that," said Mrs. Brook, "was what the d.u.c.h.ess wished the door locked for! Perhaps moreover"--she returned to Tishy--"he hasn't yet found the book."

"He can't," Tishy said with simplicity.

"But why in the world--?"

"You see she's sitting on it"--Tishy felt, it was plain, the responsibility of explanation. "So that unless he pulls her off--"

"He can't compa.s.s his desperate end? Ah I hope he won't pull her off!"

Mrs. Brook wonderfully murmured. It was said in a manner that stirred the circle, and unanimous laughter seemed already to have crowned her invocation, lately uttered, to the social spirit. "But what in the world," she pursued, "is the book selected for such a position? I hope it's not a very big one."

"Oh aren't the books that are sat upon," Mr. Cashmore freely speculated, "as a matter of course the bad ones?"

"Not a bit as a matter of course," Harold as freely replied to him.

"They sit, all round, nowadays--I mean in the papers and places--on some awfully good stuff. Why I myself read books that I couldn't--upon my honour I wouldn't risk it!--read out to you here."

"What a pity," his father dropped with the special shade of dryness that was all Edward's own, "what a pity you haven't got one of your favourites to try on us!"

Harold looked about as if it might have been after all a happy thought.

"Well, Nanda's the only girl."

"And one's sister doesn't count," said the d.u.c.h.ess.

"It's just because the thing's bad," Tishy resumed for Mrs. Brook's more particular benefit, "that Lord Petherton's trying to wrest it."

Mrs. Brook's pale interest deepened. "Then it's a real hand-to-hand struggle?"

"He says she shan't read it--she says she will."

"Ah that's because--isn't it, Jane?" Mrs. Brook appealed--"he so long overlooked and advised her in those matters. Doesn't he feel by this time--so awfully clever as he is--the extraordinary way she has come out?"

"'By this time'?" Harold echoed. "Dearest mummy, you're too sweet. It's only about ten weeks--isn't it, Mitch? You don't mind my saying that, I hope," he solicitously added.

Mitchy had his back to him and, bending it a little, sat with head dropped and knees pressing his hands together. "I don't mind any one's saying anything."

"Lord, are you already past that?" Harold sociably laughed.

"He used to vibrate to everything. My dear man, what IS the matter?"

Mrs. Brook demanded. "Does it all move too fast for you?"

"Mercy on us, what ARE you talking about? That's what _I_ want to know!"

Mr. Cashmore vivaciously declared.

"Well, she HAS gone at a pace--if Mitchy doesn't mind," Harold interposed in the tone of tact and taste. "But then don't they always--I mean when they're like Aggie and they once get loose--go at a pace?

That's what _I_ want to know. I don't suppose mother did, nor Tishy, nor the d.u.c.h.ess," he communicated to the rest; "but mother and Tishy and the d.u.c.h.ess, it strikes me, must either have been of the school that knew, don't you know? a deuce of a deal before, or of the type that takes it all more quietly after."

"I think a woman can only speak for herself. I took it all quietly enough both before and after," said Mrs. Brook. Then she addressed to Mr. Cashmore with a small formal nod one of her lovely wan smiles. "What I'm talking about, s'il vous plait, is marriage."

"I wonder if you know," the d.u.c.h.ess broke out on this, "how silly you all sound! When did it ever, in any society that could call itself decently 'good,' NOT make a difference that an innocent young creature, a flower tended and guarded, should find from one day to the other her whole consciousness changed? People pull long faces and look wonderful looks and punch each other, in your English fashion, in the sides, and say to each other in corners that my poor darling has 'come out.' Je crois bien, she has come out! I married her--I don't mind saying it now--exactly that she SHOULD come out, and I should be mightily ashamed of every one concerned if she hadn't. I didn't marry her, I give you to believe, that she should stay 'in,' and if any of you think to frighten Mitchy with it I imagine you'll do so as little as you frighten ME. If it has taken her a very short time--as Harold so vividly puts it--to which of you did I ever pretend, I should like to know, that it would take her a very long one? I dare say there are girls it would have taken longer, just as there are certainly others who wouldn't have required so much as an hour. It surely isn't news to you that if some young persons among us all are very stupid and others very wise, MY dear child was never either, but only perfectly bred and deliciously clever. Ah THAT--rather! If she's so clever that you don't know what to do with her it's scarcely HER fault. But add to it that Mitchy's very kind, and you have the whole thing. What more do you want?"

Mrs. Brook, who looked immensely struck, replied with the promptest sympathy, yet as if there might have been an alternative. "I don't think"--and her eyes appealed to the others--"that we want ANY more, do we? than the whole thing."

"Gracious, I should hope not!" her husband remarked as privately as before to Vanderbank. "Jane--for a mixed company--does go into it."

Vanderbank, for a minute and with a special short arrest, took in the circle. "Should you call us 'mixed'? There's only ONE girl."

Edward Brookenham glanced at his daughter. "Yes, but I wish there were more."

"DO you?" And Vanderbank's laugh at this odd view covered, for a little, the rest of the talk. But when he again began to follow no victory had yet been s.n.a.t.c.hed.

It was Mrs. Brook naturally who rattled the standard. "When you say, dearest, that we don't know what to 'do' with Aggie's cleverness, do you quite allow for the way we bow down before it and worship it? I don't quite see what else we--in here--can do with it, even though we HAVE gathered that, just over there, Petherton's finding for it a different application. We can only each in our way do our best. Don't therefore succ.u.mb, Jane, to the delusive harm of a grievance. There would be nothing in it. You haven't got one. The beauty of the life that so many of us have so long led together"--and she showed that it was for Mr.

Longdon she more particularly brought this out--"is precisely that n.o.body has ever had one. n.o.body has dreamed of it--it would have been such a rough false note, a note of violence out of all keeping. Did YOU ever hear of one, Van? Did you, my poor Mitchy? But you see for yourselves," she wound up with a sigh and before either could answer, "how inferior we've become when we have even in our defence to a.s.sert such things."

Mitchy, who for a while past had sat gazing at the floor, now raised his good natural goggles and stretched his closed mouth to its widest. "Oh I think we're pretty good still!" he then replied.

Mrs. Brook indeed appeared, after a pause and addressing herself again to Tishy, to give a reluctant ill.u.s.tration of it, coming back as from an excursion of the shortest to the question momentarily dropped. "I'm bound to say--all the more you know--that I don't quite see what Aggie mayn't now read." Suddenly, however, her look at their informant took on an anxiety. "Is the book you speak of something VERY awful?"