The Awkward Age Part 81

"Well, but HE does you justice--he knows. So it shows, so it shows--!"

But in this direction too, unable to say what it showed, she had again broken down and again could only hold herself and let her companion sit there. "Ah Nanda, Nanda!" he deeply murmured; and the depth of the pity was, vainly and blindly, as the depth of a reproach.

"It's I--it's I, therefore," she said as if she must then so look at it with him; "it's I who am the horrible impossible and who have covered everything else with my own impossibility. For some different person you COULD have done what you speak of, and for some different person you can do it still."

He stared at her with his barren sorrow. "A person different from him?"

"A person different from ME!"

"And what interest have I in any such person?"

"But your interest in me--you see well enough where THAT lands us."

Mr. Longdon now got to his feet and somewhat stiffly remained; after which, for all answer, "You say you WILL come then?" he asked. Then as--seemingly with her last thought--she kept silent: "You understand clearly, I take it, that this time it's never again to leave me--or to BE left."

"I understand," she presently replied. "Never again. That," she continued, "is why I asked you for these days."

"Well then, since you've taken them--"

"Ah but have YOU?" said Nanda. They were close to each other now, and with a tenderness of warning that was helped by their almost equal stature she laid her hand on his shoulder. "What I did more than anything else write to him for," she had now regained her clearness enough to explain, "was that--with whatever idea you had--you should see for yourself how he could come and go."

"And what good was that to do me? HADN'T I seen for myself?"

"Well--you've seen once more. Here he was. I didn't care what he thought. Here I brought him. And his reasons remain."

She kept her eyes on her companion's face, but his own now and afterwards seemed to wander far. "What do I care for his reasons so long as they're not mine?"

She thought an instant, still holding him gently and as if for successful argument. "But perhaps you don't altogether understand them."

"And why the devil, altogether, SHOULD I?"

"Ah because you distinctly want to," said Nanda ever so kindly. "You've admitted as much when we've talked--"

"Oh but when HAVE we talked?" he sharply interrupted.

This time he had challenged her so straight that it was her own look that strayed. "When?"

"When."

She hesitated. "When HAVEN'T we?"

"Well, YOU may have: if that's what you call talking--never saying a word. But I haven't. I've only to do at any rate, in the way of reasons, with my own."

"And yours too then remain? Because, you know," the girl pursued, "I AM like that."

"Like what?"

"Like what he thinks." Then so gravely that it was almost a supplication, "Don't tell me," she added, "that you don't KNOW what he thinks. You do know."

Their eyes, on that strange ground, could meet at last, and the effect of it was presently for Mr. Longdon. "I do know."

"Well?"

"Well!" He raised his hands and took her face, which he drew so close to his own that, as she gently let him, he could kiss her with solemnity on the forehead. "Come!" he then very firmly said--quite indeed as if it were a question of their moving on the spot.

It literally made her smile, which, with a certain compunction, she immediately corrected by doing for him in the pressure of her lips to his cheek what he had just done for herself. "To-day?" she more seriously asked.

He looked at his watch. "To-morrow."

She paused, but clearly for a.s.sent. "That's what I mean by your taking me as I am. It IS, you know, for a girl--extraordinary."

"Oh I know what it is!" he exclaimed with an odd fatigue in his tenderness.

But she continued, with the shadow of her scruple, to explain. "We're many of us, we're most of us--as you long ago saw and showed you felt--extraordinary now. We can't help it. It isn't really our fault.

There's so much else that's extraordinary that if we're in it all so much we must naturally be." It was all obviously clearer to her than ever yet, and her sense of it found renewed expression; so that she might have been, as she wound up, a very much older person than her friend. "Everything's different from what it used to be."

"Yes, everything," he returned with an air of final indoctrination.

"That's what he ought to have recognised."

"As YOU have?" Nanda was once more--and completely now--enthroned in high justice. "Oh he's more old-fashioned than you."

"Much more," said Mr. Longdon with a queer face.

"He tried," the girl went on--"he did his best. But he couldn't. And he's so right--for himself."

Her visitor, before meeting this, gathered in his hat and stick, which for a minute occupied his attention. "He ought to have married--!"

"Little Aggie? Yes," said Nanda.

They had gained the door, where Mr. Longdon again met her eyes. "And then Mitchy--!"

But she checked him with a quick gesture. "No--not even then!"

So again before he went they were for a minute confronted. "Are you anxious about Mitchy?"

She faltered, but at last brought it out. "Yes. Do you see? There I am."

"I see. There we are. Well," said Mr. Longdon--"to-morrow."