The Awkward Age (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1899)/Book 8/Chapter 28
XXVIII
When, after dinner, the company was restored to the upper rooms, the Duchess was on her feet as soon as the door opened for the entrance of the gentlemen. Then it might have been seen that she had a purpose, for after the elements had again, with a due amount of the usual shuffling and mismatching, been mixed, her case proved the first to have been settled. She had got Mr. Longdon beside her on a sofa that was just right for two. "I've seized you without a scruple," she frankly said, "for there are things I want to say to you as well as, very particularly, to ask. More than anything else, course, I want again to thank you."
No collapse of Mr. Longdon's was ever incompatible with his sitting well forward. "'Again'?"
"Do you look so blank," she demanded, "because you've really forgotten the gratitude I expressed to you when you were so good as to bring Nanda up for Aggie's marriage?—or because you don't think it a matter I should trouble myself to return to? How can I help it," she went on without waiting for his answer, "if I see your hand in everything that has happened since the so interesting talk I had with you last summer at Mertle? There have been times when I've really thought of writing to you; I've even had a bold bad idea of proposing myself to you for a Sunday. Then the crisis, my momentary alarm, has struck me as blowing over, and I've felt I could wait for some luck like this, which would sooner or later come." Her companion, however, appeared to leave the luck so on her hands that she could only snatch up, to cover its nudity, the next handsomest assumption. "I see you cleverly guess that what I've been worried about is the effect on Mrs. Brook of the loss of her dear Mitchy. If you've not, at all events, had your own impression of this effect, isn't that only because, these last months, you've seen so little of her? I've seen," said the Duchess, "enough and to spare." She waited as if for her vision, on this, to be flashed back at her, but the only result of her speech was that her friend looked hard at somebody else. It was just this symptom indeed that perhaps sufficed her, for in a minute she was again afloat. "Things have turned out so much as I desire them that I should really feel wicked not to have a humble heart. There's a quarter indeed," she added with a noble unction, "to which I don't fear to say for myself that no day and no night pass without my showing it. However, you English, I know, don't like one to speak of one's religion. I'm just as simply thankful for mine—I mean with as little sense of indecency or agony about it—as I am for my health or my carriage. My point is, at any rate, that I say in no cruel spirit of triumph, yet do, none the less, very distinctly say, that Mr. Mitchett's disgusted patroness may be now to be feared." These words had the sound of a climax, and she had brought them out as if, with her duty done, to leave them; but something that took place, for her eye, in the face Mr. Longdon had half averted gave her after an instant what he might have called her second wind. "Oh, I know you think she always has been. But you've exaggerated—as to that; and I don't say that even at present it's anything we sha'n't get the better of. Only we must keep our heads. We must remember that from her own point of view she has her grievance, and we must at least look as if we trusted her. That, you know, is what you've never quite done."
Mr. Longdon gave out a murmur of discomfort which produced in him a change of position, and the sequel to the change was that he presently accepted from his cushioned angle of the sofa the definite support it could offer. If his eyes, moreover, had not met his companion's, they had been brought, by the hand he repeatedly and somewhat distressfully passed over them, closer to the question of which of the alien objects presented to his choice it would cost him least to profess to handle. What he had already paid, a spectator would easily have gathered from the long, suppressed wriggle that had ended in his falling back, was some sacrifice of his habit of not privately depreciating those to whom he was publicly civil. It was plain, however, that when he presently spoke his thought had taken a stretch. "I'm sure I've fully intended to be everything that's proper. But I don't think Mr. Vanderbank cares for her."
It kindled in the Duchess an immediate light. "Vous avez bien de l'esprit. You put one at one's ease. I've been vaguely groping, while you're already there. It's really only for Nanda he cares."
"Yes—really."
The Duchess hesitated. "And yet exactly how much?"
"I haven't asked him."
She had another, but a briefer pause. "Don't you think it about time you should?" Once more she waited, then seemed to feel that her opportunity wouldn't. "We've worked a bit together, but you don't take me into your confidence. I dare say you don't believe I'm quite straight. Don't you really see how I must be?" She had a pleading note which made him at last fix her. "Don't you see," she went on with the advantage of it, "that, having got all I want for myself, I haven't a motive in the world for spoiling the fun of another? I don't want in the least, I assure you, to spoil even Mrs. Brook's; for how will she get a bit less out of him—I mean than she does now—if what you desire should take place? Honestly, my dear man, that's quite what I desire, and I only want, over and above, to help you. What I feel for Nanda, believe me, is pure pity. I won't say I'm frantically grateful to her, because, in the long-run—one way or another—she'll have found her account. It nevertheless worries me to see her, and all the more because of this very certitude, which you've so kindly just settled for me, that our young man hasn't really, with her mother—"
Whatever the certitude Mr. Longdon had kindly settled, it was in another interest that he at this moment broke in. "Is he your young man too?"
She was not too much amused to cast about her. "Aren't such marked ornaments of life a little the property of all who admire and enjoy them?"
"You 'enjoy' him?" Mr. Longdon asked in the same straightforward way.
"Immensely."
His silence, for a little, seemed the sign of a plan. "What is it he hasn't done with Mrs. Brook?"
"Well, the thing that would be the complication. He hasn't gone beyond a certain point. You may ask how one knows such matters, but I'm afraid I've not quite a receipt for it. A woman knows, but she can't tell. They haven't done, as it's called, anything wrong."
Mr. Longdon frowned. "It would be extremely horrid if they had."
"Ah, but, for you and me who know life, it isn't that that—if other things had made for it—would have prevented! As it happens, however, we've got off easily. She doesn't speak to him—"
She had forms he could only take up. "'Speak' to him—?"
"Why, as much as she would have liked to be able to believe."
"Then where's the danger of which you appear to wish to warn me?"
"Just in her feeling, in the case, as most women would feel. You see she did what she could for her daughter. She did, I'm bound to say, as that sort of thing goes among you people, a good deal. She treasured up, she nursed along Mitchy, whom she would also, though of course not so much, have liked for herself. Nanda, with a word, could have kept him on, becoming thereby, for your plan, so much the less accessible. That would have thoroughly obliged her mother, but your little English girls, in these altered times—oh, I know how you feel them!—don't stand on such trifles; and—even if you think it odd of me—I can't defend myself, though I've so directly profited, against a certain compassion also for Mrs. Brook's upset. As a good-natured woman I feel, in short, for both of them; I deplore, all round, what's after all rather a sad relation. Only, as I tell you, Nanda's the one, I naturally say to myself, for me now most to think of: if I don't assume too much, that is, that you don't suffer by my freedom."
Mr. Longdon put by with a mere drop of his eyes the question of his suffering: there was so clearly, for him, an issue more relevant. "What do you know of my 'plan'?"
"Why, my dear man, haven't I told you that ever since Mertle, I've made out your hand? What on earth, for other people, can your action look like but an adoption?"
"Of—a—him?"
"You're delightful. Of—a—her! If it does come to the same thing for you, so much the better. That, at any rate, is what we're all taking it for, and Mrs. Brook herself en tête. She sees—through your generosity—Nanda's life, more or less, at the worst, arranged for, and that's just what gives her a good conscience."
If Mr. Longdon breathed rather hard it seemed to show at least that he followed. "What does she want of a good conscience?"
From under her high tiara, an instant, she almost looked down at him. "Ah, you do hate her!"
He colored, but held his ground. "Don't you tell me yourself she's to be feared?"
"Yes, and watched. But—if possible—with amusement."
"Amusement?" Mr. Longdon faintly gasped.
"Look at her now," his friend went on with an indication that was indeed easy to embrace. Separated from them by the width of the room, Mrs. Brook was, though placed in profile, fully presented; the satisfaction with which she had lately sunk upon a light gilt chair marked itself as superficial and was moreover visibly not confirmed by the fact that Vanderbank's high-perched head, arrested before her in a general survey of opportunity, gave her eyes, in conversation, too prayerful a flight. Their companions were dispersed, some in the other room, and for the occupants of the Duchess's sofa they made, as a couple in communion, a picture, framed and detached, vaguely reduplicated in the high polish of the French floor. "She is tremendously pretty." The Duchess appeared to drop this as a plea for indulgence and to be impelled in fact by her interlocutor's silence to carry it further. "I've never at all thought, you know, that Nanda touches her."
Mr. Longdon demurred. "Do you mean for beauty?"
His friend, for his simplicity, discriminated. "Ah, they've neither of them 'beauty.' That's not a word to make free with. But the mother has grace."
"And the daughter hasn't?"
"Not a line. You answer me of course, when I say that, with your adored Lady Julia, and will want to know what then becomes of the lucky resemblance. I quite grant you that Lady Julia must have had the thing we speak of. But that dear, sweet, blessed thing is very much the same lost secret as the dear sweet blessed other thing that went away with it—the decent leisure that, for the most part, we've also seen the last of. It's the thing, at any rate, that poor Nanda and all her kind have most effectually got rid of. Oh, if you'd trust me a little more you'd see that I'm quite at one with you on all the changes for the worse. I bear up, but I'm old enough to have known. All the same, Mrs. Brook has something—say what you like—when she bends that little brown head. Dieu sait comme elle se coiffe, but what she gets out of it—! Only look."
Mr. Longdon conveyed in an indescribable manner that he had retired to a great distance; yet even this position he must have launched a glance that showed him a middle way. "They both know you're watching them."
"And don't they know you are? Poor Mr. Van has a consciousness!"
"So should I if two terrible women—"
"Were admiring you both at once?" The Duchess folded the big feathered fan that had partly protected their range. "Well, she, poor dear, can't help it. She wants him herself."
At the drop of the Duchess's fan he restored his nippers. "And he doesn't—not a bit—want her!"
"There it is. She has put down her money, as it were, without a return. She has given Mitchy up and got nothing instead."
There was delicacy, yet there was distinctness, in Mr. Longdon's reserve. "Do you call me nothing?"
The Duchess, at this, fairly swelled with her happy stare. "Then it is an adoption?" She forbore to press, however; she only went on: "It isn't a question, my dear man, of what I call it. You don't make love to her."
"Dear me," said Mr. Longdon, "what would she have had?"
"That could be more charming, you mean, than your famous 'loyalty'? Oh, caro mio, she wants it straighter! But I shock you," his companion quickly added.
The manner in which he firmly rose was scarce a denial; yet he stood for a moment in place. "What, after all, can she do?"
"She can keep Mr. Van."
Mr. Longdon wondered. "Where?"
"I mean till it's too late. She can work on him."
"But how?"
Covertly again the Duchess had followed the effect of her friend's perceived movement on Mrs. Brook, who also got up. She gave a rap with her fan on his leg. "Sit down—you'll see."