The Awkward Age (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1899)/Book 9/Chapter 34
XXXIV
Ten minutes of talk with Mr. Longdon by Mrs. Brookenham's hearth elapsed for him without his arriving at the right moment to take up the business so richly put before him in his previous interview. No less time indeed could have sufficed to bring him into closer relation with this affair, and nothing, at first, could have been more marked than the earnestness of his care not to show impatience of inquiries that were, for a person of his old friend's general style, simple recognitions and decencies. There was a limit to the mere allusiveness with which, in Mr. Longdon's school of manners, a foreign tour might be treated, and Mitchy, no doubt, plentifully showed that none of his frequent returns had encountered a curiosity at once so explicit and so discreet. To belong to a circle in which most of the members might be at any moment on the other side of the globe was inevitably to fall into the habit of few questions, as well as into that of making up for their fewness by their freedom. This interlocutor, in short, while Mrs. Brook's representative privately thought over all he had in hand, went at some length and very charmingly—since it was but a tribute to common courtesy—into the Virgilian associations of the Bay of Naples. Finally, however, he started, his eye on the clock. "I'm afraid that, though our hostess doesn't appear, I mustn't forget myself. I too came back but yesterday and I've an engagement—for which I'm already late—with Miss Brookenham, who has been so good as to ask me to tea."
The divided mind, the express civility, the decent "Miss Brookenham," the escape from their hostess—these were all things Mitchy could quickly take in, and they gave him in a moment his light for not missing his occasion. "I see, I see—I shall make you keep Nanda waiting. But there's something I shall ask you to take from me as quite a sufficient basis for that: which is simply that after all, you know—for I think you do know—don't you?—I'm nearly as much attached to her as you are."
Mr. Longdon had looked suddenly apprehensive and even a trifle embarrassed, but he spoke with due presence of mind. "Of course I understand that perfectly. If you hadn't liked her so much—"
"Well?" said Mitchy, as he checked himself.
"I would never, last year, have gone to stay with you."
"Thank you!" Mitchy laughed.
"Though I like you also—and extremely," Mr. Longdon gravely pursued, "for yourself."
Mitchy made a sign of acknowledgment. "You like me better for her than you do for anybody else but myself."
"You put it, I think, correctly. Of course I've not seen so much of Nanda—if between my age and hers, that is, any real contact is possible—without knowing that she now regards you as one of the very best of her friends, treating you, I almost fancy, with a degree of confidence—"
Mitchy gave a laugh of interruption. "That she doesn't show even to you?"
Mr, Longdon's poised glasses faced him. "Even! I don't mind," the old man went on, "as the opportunity has come up, telling you frankly—and as from my time of life to your own—all the comfort I take in the sense that in any case of need or trouble she might look to you for whatever advice or support the affair might demand."
"She has told you she feels I'd be there?" Mitchy after an instant asked.
"I'm not sure," his friend replied, "that I ought quite to mention anything she has 'told' me. I speak of what I've made out for myself."
"Then I thank you more than I can say for your penetration. Her mother, I should let you know," Mitchy continued, "is with her just now."
Mr. Longdon took off his glasses with a jerk. "Has anything happened to her?"
"To account for the fact I refer to?" Mitchy said in amusement at his start. "She's not ill, that I know of, thank goodness, and she has not broken her leg. But something, none the less, has happened to her—that, I think, I may say. To tell you all, in a word, it's the reason, such as it is, of my being here to meet you. Mrs. Brook asked me to wait. She'll see you herself some other time."
Mr. Longdon wondered. "And Nanda too?"
"Oh, that must be between yourselves. Only, while I keep you here—"
"She understands my delay?"
Mitchy thought. "Mrs. Brook must have explained." Then as his companion took this in silence, "But you don't like it?" he inquired.
"It only comes to me that Mrs. Brook's explanations—!"
"Are often odd? Oh yes. But Nanda, you know, allows for that oddity. And Mrs. Brook, by the same token," Mitchy developed, "knows herself—no one better—what may frequently be thought of it. That's precisely the reason of her desire that you should have, on this occasion, explanations from a source that she's so good as to pronounce, for the immediate purpose, superior. As for Nanda," he wound up, "to be aware that we're here together won't strike her as so bad a sign."
"No," Mr. Longdon attentively assented; "she'll hardly fear we're plotting her ruin. But what has happened to her?" he more sharply demanded.
"Well," said Mitchy, "it's you, I think, who will have to give it a name. I know you know what I've known."
Mr. Longdon, with his nippers again placed, hesitated. "Yes, I know."
"And you've accepted it."
"How could I help it? To reckon with such cleverness—"
"Was beyond you? Ah, it wasn't my cleverness," Mitchy said. "There's a greater than mine. There's a greater even than Van's. That's the whole point," he went on while his friend looked at him hard. "You don't even like it just a little?"
Mr. Longdon wondered. "The existence of such a element—?"
"No; the existence, simply, of my knowledge of your idea."
"I suppose I'm bound to keep in mind in fairness the existence of my own knowledge of yours."
But Mitchy gave that the go-by. "Oh, I've so many 'ideas'! I'm always getting hold of some new one and, for the most part, trying it—generally to let it go as a failure. Yes, I had one six months ago. I tried that. I'm trying it still."
"Then I hope," said Mr. Longdon, with a gaiety slightly strained, "that, contrary to your usual rule, it's a success."
It was a gaiety, for that matter, that Mitchy's could match. "It does promise well! But I've another idea even now, and it's just what I'm again trying."
"On me?" Mr. Longdon still somewhat extravagantly smiled.
Mitchy thought. "Well, on two or three persons, of whom you are the first for me to tackle. But what I must begin with is having from you that you recognize she trusts us."
"Nanda?"
Mitchy's idea, after an instant, had visibly gone further. "Both of them—the two women, up there, at present so strangely together. Mrs. Brook must too, immensely. But for that you won't care."
Mr. Longdon had relapsed into an anxiety more natural than his expression of a moment before. "It's about time! But if Nanda didn't trust us," he went on, "her case would indeed be a sorry one. She has nobody else."
"Yes." Mitchy's concurrence was grave. "Only you and me."
"Only you and me."
The eyes of the two men met over it in a pause terminated at last by Mitchy's saying: "We must make it all up to her."
"Is that your idea?"
"Ah," said Mitchy gently, "don't laugh at it."
His friend's gray gloom again covered him. "But what can—?" Then as Mitchy showed a face that seemed to wince with a silent "What could?" the old man completed his objection. "Think of the magnitude of the loss."
"Oh, I don't for a moment suggest," Mitchy hastened to reply, "that it isn't immense."
"She does care for him, you know," said Mr. Longdon.
Mitchy, at this, gave a long, wide glare. "'Know—'?" he ever so delicately murmured.
His irony had quite touched. "But of course you know! You know everything—Nanda and you."
There was a tone in it that moved a spring, and Mitchy laughed out. "I like your putting me with her! But we're all together. With Nanda," he next added, "it is deep."
His companion took it from him. "Deep."
"And yet somehow it isn't abject."
The old man wondered. "'Abject'?"
"I mean it isn't pitiful. In its way," Mitchy developed, "it's happy."
This too, though rather ruefully, Mr. Longdon could take from him. "Yes—in its way."
"Any passion so great, so complete," Mitchy went on, "is—satisfied or unsatisfied—a life." Mr. Longdon looked so interested that his fellow-visitor, evidently touched by what was now an appeal and a dependence, grew still more bland, or at least more assured, for affirmation. "She's not too sorry for herself."
"Ah, she's so proud!"
"Yes, but that's a help."
"Oh—not for us!"
It arrested Mitchy, but his ingenuity could only rebound. "In one way: that of reducing us to feel that the desire to 'make up' to her is—well, mainly for our relief. If she 'trusts' us, as I said just now, it isn't for that she does so." As his friend appeared to wait then to hear, it was presently with positive joy that he showed he could meet the last difficulty. "What she trusts us to do"—oh, Mitchy had worked it out!—"is to let him off."
"Let him off?" It still left Mr. Longdon dim.
"Easily. That's all."
"But what would letting him off hard be? It seems to me he's—on any terms—already beyond us. He is off."
Mr. Longdon had given it a sound that suddenly made Mitchy appear to collapse under a sharper sense of the matter. "He is off," he moodily echoed.
His companion, again a little bewildered, watched him; then with impatience: "Do, please, tell me what has happened."
He quickly pulled himself round. "Well, he was, after a long absence, here a while since, as if expressly to see her. But after spending half an hour, he went away without it."
Mr. Longdon's watch continued. "He spent the half-hour with her mother instead?"
"Oh, 'instead'—it was hardly that. He at all events dropped his idea."
"And what had it been, his idea?"
"You speak as if he had as many as I!" Mitchy replied. "In a manner indeed he has," he contiued as if for himself. "But they're of a different kind," he said to Mr. Longdon.
"What had it been, his idea?" the old man, however, simply repeated.
Mitchy's confession, at this, seemed to explain his previous evasion. "We shall never know."
Mr. Longdon hesitated, "He won't tell you?"
"Me?" Mitchy had a pause. "Less than any one."
Many things they had not spoken had already passed between them, and something, evidently, to the sense of each, passed during the moment that followed this. "While you were abroad," Mr. Longdon presently asked, "did you hear from him?"
"Never. And I wrote nothing."
"Like me," said Mr. Longdon. "I've neither written nor heard."
"Ah, but with you it will be different." Mr. Longdon, as if with the outbreak of an agitation hitherto controlled, had turned abruptly away and, with the usual swing of his glass, begun almost wildly to wander. "You will hear."
"I shall be curious."
"Oh, but what Nanda wants, you know, is that you shouldn't be too much so."
Mr. Longdon thoughtfully rambled. "Too much—?"
"To let him off, as we were saying, easily."
The elder man, for a while, said nothing more, but he at last came back. "She'd like me actually to give him something?"
"I dare say!"
"Money?"
Mitchy smiled. "A handsome present." They were face to face again, with more mute interchange. "She doesn't want him to have lost—!" Mr. Longdon, however, on this, once more broke off while Mitchy's eyes followed him. "Doesn't it give a sort of measure of what she may feel—?"
He had paused, working it out again, with the effect of his friend's returning afresh to be fed with his light. "Doesn't what give it?"
"Why, the fact that we still like him."
Mr. Longdon stared. "Do you still like him?"
"If I didn't how should I mind—?" But on the utterance of it Mitchy fairly pulled up.
His companion, after another look, laid a mild hand on his shoulder. "What is it you mind?"
"From him? Oh, nothing!" He could trust himself again. "There are people like that—great cases of privilege."
"He is one!" Mr. Longdon mused.
"There it is. They go through life, somehow, guaranteed. They can't help pleasing."
"Ah," Mr. Longdon murmured, "if it hadn't been for that—!"
"They hold, they keep every one," Mitchy went on. "It's the sacred terror."
The companions, for a little, seemed to stand together in this element; after which the elder turned once more away and appeared to continue to walk in it. "Poor Nanda!" then, in a far-off sigh, came across from him to Mitchy. Mitchy, on this, turned vaguely around to the fire, into which he remained gazing till he heard again
Mr. Longdon's voice. "I knew it, of course, after all. It was what I came up for. That night, before you went, at Mrs. Grendon's—"
"Yes?"—Mitchy was with him again.
"Well, it made me see the future. It was then already too late."
Mitchy assented with emphasis. "Too late. She was spoiled for him."
If Mr. Longdon had to take it, he. took it at least quietly, only saying after a time: "And her mother isn't?"
"Oh yes. Quite."
"And does she know it?"
"Yes, but doesn't mind. She resembles you and me. She 'still likes' him."
"But what good will that do her?"
Mitchy sketched a shrug. "What good does it do us?"
Mr. Longdon thought. "We can at least respect ourselves."
"Can we?" Mitchy smiled.
"And he can respect us," his friend, as if not hearing him, went on.
Mitchy seemed almost to demur. "He must think we're queer."
"Well, Mrs. Brook's worse than 'queer.' He can't respect her."
"Oh, that will be perhaps," Mitchy laughed, "what she'll get just most out of!" It was the first time, however, of Mr. Longdon's showing that, even after a minute, he had not understood him; so that, as quickly as possible, he passed to another point. "If you do anything, may I be in it?"
"But what can I do? If it's over it's over."
"For him, yes. But not for her or for you or for me."
"Oh, I'm not for long!" the old man wearily said, turning the next moment to the door, at which one of the footmen had appeared.
"Mrs. Brookenham's compliments, please sir," this messenger articulated, "and Miss Brookenham is now alone."
"Thanks—I'll come up."
The servant withdrew, and the eyes of the two visitors again met for a minute, after which Mitchy looked about for his hat. "Good-by. I'll go."
Mr. Longdon watched him while, having found his hat, he looked about for his stick. "You want to be in everything?"
Mitchy, without answering, smoothed his hat down; then he replied: "You say you're not for long, but you won't abandon her."
"Oh, I mean I sha'n't last forever."
"Well, since you so expressed it yourself, that's what I mean too. I assure you I sha'n't desert her. And if I can help you—"
"Help me?" Mr. Longdon interrupted, looking at him hard.
It made him a little awkward. "Help you to help her, you know—!"
"You're very wonderful," Mr. Longdon presently returned. "A year and a half ago you wanted to help me to help Mr. Vanderbank."
"Well," said Mitchy, "you can't quite say I haven't."
"But your ideas of help are of a splendor!"
"Oh, I've told you about my ideas." Mitchy was almost apologetic. Mr. Longdon hesitated. "I suppose I'm not indiscreet then in recognizing your marriage as one of them. And that, with a responsibility so great already assumed you appear fairly eager for another—"
"Makes me out a kind of monster of benevolence?" Mitchy looked at it with a flushed face. "The two responsibilities are very much one and the same. My marriage has brought me, as it were, only nearer to Nanda. My wife and she, don't you see? are particular friends."
Mr. Longdon, on his side, turned a trifle pale; he looked rather hard at the floor. "I see—I see." Then he raised his eyes. "But—to an old fellow like me—it's all so strange."
"It is strange." Mitchy spoke very kindly. "But it's all right."
Mr. Longdon gave a head-shake that was both sad and sharp. "It's all wrong. But you're all right!" he added in a different tone as he walked hastily away.