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The Awkward Age
BOOK NINTH. VANDERBANK
I
“I think you had better wait,” Mrs. Brook said, “till I see if he has gone;” and on the arrival the next moment of the servants with the tea she was able to put her question. “Is Mr. Cashmore still with Miss Brookenham?”
“No, ma’am,” the footman replied. “I let Mr. Cashmore out five minutes ago.”
Vanderbank showed for the next short time by his behaviour what he felt at not yet being free to act on this; moving pointlessly about the room while the servants arranged the tea-table and taking no trouble to make, for appearance, any other talk. Mrs. Brook, on her side, took so little that the silence—which their temporary companions had all the effect of keeping up by conscious dawdling—became precisely one of those precious lights for the circle belowstairs which people fondly fancy they have not kindled when they have not spoken. But Vanderbank spoke again as soon as the door was closed. “Does he run in and out that way without even speaking to YOU?”
Mrs. Brook turned away from the fire that, late in May, was the only charm of the crude cold afternoon. “One would like to draw the curtains, wouldn’t one? and gossip in the glow of the hearth.”
“Oh ‘gossip’!” Vanderbank wearily said as he came to her pretty table.
In the act of serving him she checked herself. “You wouldn’t rather have it with HER?”
He balanced a moment. “Does she have a tea of her own?”
“Do you mean to say you don’t know?”—Mrs. Brook asked it with surprise. “Such ignorance of what I do for her does tell, I think, the tale of how you’ve lately treated us.”
“In not coming for so long?”
“For more weeks, for more months than I can count. Scarcely since—when was it?—the end of January, that night of Tishy’s dinner.”
“Yes, that awful night.”
“Awful, you call it?”
“Awful.”
“Well, the time without you,” Mrs. Brook returned, “has been so bad that I’m afraid I’ve lost the impression of anything before.” Then she offered the tea to his choice. “WILL you have it upstairs?”
He received the cup. “Yes, and here too.” After which he said nothing again till, first pouring in milk to cool it, he had drunk his tea down. “That’s not literally true, you know. I HAVE been in.”
“Yes, but always with other people—you managed it somehow; the wrong ones. It hasn’t counted.”
“Ah in one way and another I think everything counts. And you forget I’ve dined.”
“Oh—for once!”
“The once you asked me. So don’t spoil the beauty of your own behaviour by mistimed reflexions. You’ve been, as usual, superior.”
“Ah but there has been no beauty in it. There has been nothing,” Mrs. Brook went on, “but bare bleak recognition, the curse of my hideous intelligence. We’ve fallen to pieces, and at least I’m not such a fool as not to have felt it in time. From the moment one did feel it why should one insist on vain forms? If YOU felt it, and were so ready to drop them, my part was what it has always been—to accept the inevitable. We shall never grow together again. The smash was too great.”
Vanderbank for a little said nothing; then at last: “You ought to know how great!”
Whatever had happened her lovely look here survived it. “I?”
“The smash,” he replied, “was indeed as complete, I think, as your intention. Each of the ‘pieces’ testifies to your success. Five minutes did it.”
She appeared to wonder where he was going. “But surely not MY minutes. Where have you discovered that I made Mitchy’s marriage?”
“Mitchy’s marriage has nothing to do with it.”
“I see.” She had the old interest at least still at their service. “You think we might have survived that.” A new thought of it seemed to glimmer. “I’m bound to say Mitchy’s marriage promises elements.”
“You did it that night at Mrs. Grendon’s.” He spoke as if he had not heard her. “It was a wonderful performance. You pulled us down—just closing with each of the great columns in its turn—as Samson pulled down the temple. I was at the time more or less bruised and buried and didn’t in the agitation and confusion fully understand what had happened. But I understand now.”
“Are you very sure?” Mrs. Brook earnestly asked.
“Well, I’m stupid compared with you, but you see I’ve taken my time. I’ve puzzled it out. I’ve lain awake on it: all the more that I’ve had to do it all myself—with the Mitchys in Italy and Greece. I’ve missed his aid.”
“You’ll have it now,” Mrs. Brook kindly said. “They’re coming back.”
“And when do they arrive?”
“Any day, I believe.”
“Has he written you?”
“No,” said Mrs. Brook—“there it is. That’s just the way we’ve fallen to pieces. But you’ll of course have heard something.”
“Never a word.”
“Ah then it’s complete.”
Vanderbank thought a moment. “Not quite, is it?—I mean it won’t be altogether unless he hasn’t written to Nanda.”
“Then HAS he?”—she was keen again.
“Oh I’m assuming. Don’t YOU know?”
“How should I?”
This too he turned over. “Just as a consequence of your having, at Tishy’s, so abruptly and wonderfully tackled the question that a few days later, as I afterwards gathered, was to be crowned with a measure of success not yet exhausted. Why, in other words—if it was to know so little about her and to get no nearer to her—did you bring about Nanda’s return?”
There was a clear reason, her face said, if she could only remember it. “Why did I—?” Then as catching a light: “Fancy your asking me—at this time of day!”
“Ah you HAVE noticed that I haven’t asked before? However,” Van promptly added, “I know well enough what you notice. Nanda hasn’t mentioned to you whether or no she has heard?”
“Absolutely not. But you don’t suppose, I take it, that it was to pry into her affairs I called her in.”
Vanderbank, on this, lighted for the first time with a laugh. “‘Called her in’? How I like your expressions!”
“I do then, in spite of all,” she eagerly asked, “remind you a little of the bon temps? Ah,” she sighed, “I don’t say anything good now. But of course I see Jane—though not so often either. It’s from Jane I’ve heard of what she calls her ‘young things.’ It seems so odd to think of Mitchy as a young thing. He’s as old as all time, and his wife, who the other day was about six, is now practically about forty. And I also saw Petherton,” Mrs. Brook added, “on his return.”
“His return from where?”
“Why he was with them at Corfu, Malta, Cyprus—I don’t know where; yachting, spending Mitchy’s money, ‘larking,’ he called it—I don’t know what. He was with them for weeks.”
“Till Jane, you mean, called him in?”
“I think it must have been that.”
“Well, that’s better,” said Van, “than if Mitchy had had to call him out.”
“Oh Mitchy—!” Mrs. Brook comprehensively sounded.
Her visitor quite assented. “Isn’t he amazing?”
“Unique.”
He had a short pause. “But what’s she up to?”
It was apparently for Mrs. Brook a question of such variety of application that she brought out experimentally: “Jane?”
“Dear no. I think we’ve fathomed ‘Jane,’ haven’t we?”
“Well,” mused Mrs. Brook, “I’m by no means sure I have. Just of late I’ve had a new sense!”
“Yes, of what now?” Van amusedly put it as she held the note.
“Oh of depths below depths. But poor Jane—of course after all she’s human. She’s beside herself with one thing and another, but she can’t in any consistency show it. She took her stand so on having with Petherton’s aid formed Aggie for a femme charmante—”
“That it’s too late to cry out that Petherton’s aid can now be dispensed with? Do you mean then that he IS such a brute that after all Mitchy has done for him—?” Vanderbank, at the rising image, pulled up in easy disgust.
“I think him quite capable of considering with a magnificent insolence of selfishness that what Mitchy has MOST done will have been to make Aggie accessible in a way that—for decency and delicacy of course, things on which Petherton highly prides himself—she could naturally not be as a girl. Her marriage has simplified it.”
Vanderbank took it all in. “‘Accessible’ is good!”
“Then—which was what I intended just now—Aggie has already become so—?”
Mrs. Brook, however, could as yet in fairness only wonder. “That’s just what I’m dying to see.”
Her companion smiled at it. “‘Even in our ashes live their wonted fires’! But what do you make, in such a box, of poor Mitchy himself? His marriage can scarcely to such an extent have simplified HIM.”
It was something, none the less, that Mrs. Brook had to weigh. “I don’t know. I give it up. The thing was of a strangeness!”
Her friend also paused, and it was as if for a little, on either side of a gate on which they might have had their elbows, they remained looking at each other over it and over what was unsaid between them. “It WAS ‘rum’!” he at last merely dropped.
It was scarce for Mrs. Brook, all the same—she seemed to feel after a moment—to surround the matter with an excess of silence.
“He did what a man does—especially in that business—when he doesn’t do what he wants.”
“Do you mean what somebody else wanted?”
“Well, what he himself DIDN’T. And if he’s unhappy,” she went on, “he’ll know whom to pitch into.”
“Ah,” said Vanderbank, “even if he is he won’t be the man to what you might call ‘vent’ it on her. He’ll seek compensations elsewhere and won’t mind any ridicule—!”
“Whom are you speaking of as ‘her’?” Mrs. Brook asked as on feeling that something in her face had made him stop. “I wasn’t referring,” she explained, “to his wife.”
“Oh!” said Vanderbank.
“Aggie doesn’t matter,” she went on.
“Oh!” he repeated. “You meant the Duchess?” he then threw off.
“Don’t be silly!” she rejoined. “He MAY not become unhappy—God grant NOT!” she developed. “But if he does he’ll take it out of Nanda.”
Van appeared to challenge this. “‘Take it out’ of her?”
“Well, want to know, as some American asked me the other day of somebody, what she’s ‘going to do’ about it.”
Vanderbank, who had remained on his feet, stood still at this for a longer time than at anything yet. “But what CAN she ‘do’—?”
“That’s again just what I’m curious to see.” Mrs. Brook then spoke with a glance at the clock. “But if you don’t go up to her—!”
“My notion of seeing her alone may be defeated by her coming down on learning that I’m here?” He had taken out his watch. “I’ll go in a moment. But, as a light on that danger, would YOU, in the circumstances, come down?”
Mrs. Brook, however, could for light only look darkness. “Oh you don’t love ME!”
Vanderbank, still with his watch, stared then as an alternative at the fire. “You haven’t yet told me you know, if Mr. Cashmore now comes EVERY day.”
“My dear man, how can I say? You’ve just your occasion to find out.”
“From HER, you mean?”
Mrs. Brook hesitated. “Unless you prefer the footman. Must I again remind you that, with her own sitting-room and one of the men, in addition to her maid, wholly at her orders, her independence is ideal?”
Vanderbank, who appeared to have been timing himself, put up his watch. “I’m bound to say then that with separations so established I understand less than ever your unforgettable explosion.”
“Ah you come back to that?” she wearily asked. “And you find it, with all you’ve to think about, unforgettable?”
“Oh but there was a wild light in your eye—!”
“Well,” Mrs. Brook said, “you see it now quite gone out.” She had spoken more sadly than sharply, but her impatience had the next moment a flicker. “I called Nanda in because I wanted to.”
“Precisely; but what I don’t make out, you see, is what you’ve since gained by it.”
“You mean she only hates me the more?”
Van’s impatience, in the movement with which he turned from her, had a flare still sharper. “You know I’m incapable of meaning anything of the sort.”
She waited a minute while his back was presented. “I sometimes think in effect that you’re incapable of anything straightforward.”
Vanderbank’s movement had not been to the door, but he almost reached it after giving her, on this, a hard look. He then stopped short, however, to stare an instant still more fixedly into the hat he held in his hand; the consequence of which in turn was that he the next minute stood again before her chair. “Don’t you call it straightforward of me just not to have come for so long?”
She had again to take time to say. “Is that an allusion to what—by the loss of your beautiful presence—I’ve failed to ‘gain’? I dare say at any rate”—she gave him no time to reply—“that you feel you’re quite as straightforward as I and that we’re neither of us creatures of mere rash impulse. There was a time in fact, wasn’t there? when we rather enjoyed each other’s dim depths. If I wanted to fawn on you,” she went on, “I might say that, with such a comrade in obliquity to wind and double about with, I’d risk losing myself in the mine. But why retort or recriminate? Let us not, for God’s sake, be vulgar—we haven’t yet, bad as it is, come to THAT. I CAN be, no doubt—I some day MUST be: I feel it looming at me out of the awful future as an inevitable fate. But let it be for when I’m old and horrible; not an hour before. I do want to live a little even yet. So you ought to let me off easily—even as I let you.”
“Oh I know,” said Vanderbank handsomely, “that there are things you don’t put to me! You show a tact!”
“There it is. And I like much better,” Mrs. Brook went on, “our speaking of it as delicacy than as duplicity. If you understand, it’s so much saved.”
“What I always understand more than anything else,” he returned, “is the general truth that you’re prodigious.”
It was perhaps a little as relapse from tension that she had nothing against that. “As for instance when it WOULD be so easy—!”
“Yes, to take up what lies there, you yet so splendidly abstain.”
“You literally press upon me my opportunity? It’s YOU who are splendid!” she rather strangely laughed.
“Don’t you at least want to say,” he went on with a slight flush, “what you MOST obviously and naturally might?”
Appealed to on the question of underlying desire, Mrs. Brook went through the decent form of appearing to try to give it the benefit of any doubt. “Don’t I want, you mean, to find out before you go up what YOU want? Shall you be too disappointed,” she asked, “if I say that, since I shall probably learn, as we used to be told as children, ‘all in good time,’ I can wait till the light comes out of itself?”
Vanderbank still lingered. “You ARE deep!”
“You’ve only to be deeper.”
“That’s easy to say. I’m afraid at any rate you won’t think I am,” he pursued after a pause, “if I ask you what in the world—since Harold does keep Lady Fanny so quiet—Cashmore still requires Nanda’s direction for.”
“Ah find out!” said Mrs. Brook.
“Isn’t Mrs. Donner quite shelved?”
“Find out,” she repeated.
Vanderbank had reached the door and had his hand on the latch, but there was still something else. “You scarce suppose, I imagine, that she has come to like him ‘for himself?”
“Find out!” And Mrs. Brook, who was now on her feet, turned away. He watched her a moment more, then checked himself and left her.
II
She remained alone ten minutes, at the end of which her reflexions would have been seen to be deep—were interrupted by the entrance of her husband. The interruption was indeed not so great as if the couple had not met, as they almost invariably met, in silence: she took at all events, to begin with, no more account of his presence than to hand him a cup of tea accompanied with nothing but cream and sugar. Her having no word for him, however, committed her no more to implying that he had come in only for his refreshment than it would have committed her to say: “Here it is, Edward dear—just as you like it; so take it and sit down and be quiet.” No spectator worth his salt could have seen them more than a little together without feeling how everything that, under his eyes or not, she either did or omitted, rested on a profound acquaintance with his ways. They formed, Edward’s ways, a chapter by themselves, of which Mrs. Brook was completely mistress and in respect to which the only drawback was that a part of her credit was by the nature of the case predestined to remain obscure. So many of them were so queer that no one but she COULD know them, and know thereby into what crannies her reckoning had to penetrate. It was one of them for instance that if he was often most silent when most primed with matter, so when he had nothing to say he was always silent too—a peculiarity misleading, until mastered, for a lady who could have allowed in the latter case for almost any variety of remark. “What do you think,” he said at last, “of his turning up to-day?”
“Of old Van’s?”
“Oh has HE turned up?”
“Half an hour ago, and asking almost in his first breath for Nanda. I sent him up to her and he’s with her now.” If Edward had his ways she had also some of her own; one of which, in talk with him, if talk it could be called, was never to produce anything till the need was marked. She had thus a card or two always in reserve, for it was her theory that she never knew what might happen. It nevertheless did occur that he sometimes went, as she would have called it, one better.
“He’s not with her now. I’ve just been with her.”
“Then he didn’t go up?” Mrs. Brook was immensely interested. “He left me, you know, to do so.”
“Know—how should I know? I left her five minutes ago.”
“Then he went out without seeing her.” Mrs. Brook took it in. “He changed his mind out there on the stairs.”
“Well,” said Edward, “it won’t be the first mind that has been changed there. It’s about the only thing a man can change.”
“Do you refer particularly to MY stairs?” she asked with her whimsical woe. But meanwhile she had taken it in. “Then whom were you speaking of?”
“Mr. Longdon’s coming to tea with her. She has had a note.”
“But when did he come to town?”
“Last night, I believe. The note, an hour or two ago, announced him—brought by hand and hoping she’d be at home.”
Mrs. Brook thought again. “I’m glad she is. He’s too sweet. By hand!—it must have been so he sent them to mamma. He wouldn’t for the world wire.”
“Oh Nanda has often wired to HIM,” her father returned.
“Then she ought to be ashamed of herself. But how,” said Mrs. Brook, “do you know?”
“Oh I know when we’re in a thing like this.”
“Yet you complain of her want of intimacy with you! It turns out that you’re as thick as thieves.”
Edward looked at this charge as he looked at all old friends, without a sign—to call a sign—of recognition. “I don’t know of whose want of intimacy with me I’ve ever complained. There isn’t much more of it, that I can see, that any of them could put on. What do you suppose I’d have them do? If I on my side don’t get very far I may have alluded to THAT.”
“Oh but you do,” Mrs. Brook declared. “You think you don’t, but you get very far indeed. You’re always, as I said just now, bringing out something that you’ve got somewhere.”
“Yes, and seeing you flare up at it. What I bring out is only what they tell me.”
This limitation offered, however, for Mrs. Brook no difficulty. “Ah but it seems to me that with the things people nowadays tell one—! What more do you want?”
“Well”—and Edward from his chair regarded the fire a while—“the difference must be in what they tell YOU.”
“Things that are better?”
“Yes—worse. I dare say,” he went on, “what I give them—”
“Isn’t as bad as what I do? Oh we must each do our best. But when I hear from you,” Mrs. Brook pursued, “that Nanda had ever permitted herself anything so dreadful as to wire to him, it comes over me afresh that I would have been the perfect one to deal with him if his detestation of me hadn’t prevented.” She was by this time also—but on her feet—before the fire, into which, like her husband, she gazed. “I would never have wired. I’d have gone in for little delicacies and odd things she has never thought of.”
“Oh she doesn’t go in for what you do,” Edward assented.
“She’s as bleak as a chimney-top when the fire’s out, and if it hadn’t been after all for mamma—!” And she lost herself again in the reasons of things.
Her husband’s silence seemed to mark for an instant a deference to her allusion, but there was a limit even to this combination. “You make your mother, I think, keep it up pretty well. But if she HADN’T as you say, done so—?”
“Why we shouldn’t have been anywhere.”
“Well, where are we now? That’s what I want to know.”
Following her own train she had at first no heed for his question. “Without his hatred he would have liked me.” But she came back with a sigh to the actual. “No matter. We must deal with what we’ve got.”
“What HAVE we got?” Edward continued.
Again with no ear for his question his wife turned away, only however, after taking a few vague steps, to approach him with new decision. “If Mr. Longdon’s due will you do me a favour? Will you go back to Nanda—before he arrives—and let her know, though not of course as from ME, that Van has been here half an hour, has had it put well before him that she’s up there and at liberty, and has left the house without seeing her?”
Edward Brookenham made no motion. “You don’t like better to do it yourself?”
“If I liked better,” said Mrs. Brook, “I’d have already done it. The way to make it not come from me is surely not for me to give it to her. Besides, I want to be here to receive him first.”
“Then can’t she know it afterwards?”
“After Mr. Longdon has gone? The whole point is that she should know it in time to let HIM know it.”
Edward still communed with the fire. “And what’s the point of THAT?” Her impatience, which visibly increased, carried her away again, and by the time she reached the window he had launched another question. “Are you in such a hurry she should know that Van doesn’t want her?”
“What do you call a hurry when I’ve waited nearly a year? Nanda may know or not as she likes—may know whenever: if she doesn’t know pretty well by this time she’s too stupid for it to matter. My only pressure’s for Mr. Longdon. She’ll have it there for him when he arrives.”
“You mean she’ll make haste to tell him?”
Mrs. Brook raised her eyes a moment to some upper immensity. “She’ll mention it.”
Her husband on the other hand, his legs outstretched, looked straight at the toes of his boots. “Are you very sure?” Then as he remained without an answer: “Why should she if he hasn’t told HER?”
“Of the way I so long ago let you know that he had put the matter to Van? It’s not out between them in words, no doubt; but I fancy that for things to pass they’ve not to dot their i’s quite so much, my dear, as we two. Without a syllable said to her she’s yet aware in every fibre of her little being of what has taken place.”
Edward gave a still longer space to taking this in. “Poor little thing!”
“Does she strike you as so poor,” Mrs. Brook asked, “with so awfully much done for her?”
“Done by whom?”
It was as if she had not heard the question that she spoke again. “She has got what every woman, young or old, wants.”
“Really?”
Edward’s tone was of wonder, but she simply went on: “She has got a man of her own.”
“Well, but if he’s the wrong one?”
“Do you call Mr. Longdon so very wrong? I wish,” she declared with a strange sigh, “that I had had a Mr. Longdon!”
“I wish very much you had. I wouldn’t have taken it like Van.”
“Oh it took Van,” Mrs. Brook replied, “to put THEM where they are.”
“But where ARE they? That’s exactly it. In these three months, for instance,” Edward demanded, “how has their connexion profited?”
Mrs. Brook turned it over. “Profited which?”
“Well, one cares most for one’s child.”
“Then she has become for him what we’ve most hoped her to be—an object of compassion still more marked.”
“Is that what you’ve hoped her to be?” Mrs. Brook was obviously so lucid for herself that her renewed expression of impatience had plenty of point. “How can you ask after seeing what I did—”
“That night at Mrs. Grendon’s? Well, it’s the first time I HAVE asked it.”
Mrs. Brook had a silence more pregnant. “It’s for being with US that he pities her.”
Edward thought. “With me too?”
“Not so much—but still you help.”
“I thought you thought I didn’t—that night.”
“At Tishy’s? Oh you didn’t matter,” said Mrs. Brook. “Everything, every one helps. Harold distinctly”—she seemed to figure it all out—“and even the poor children, I dare say, a little. Oh but every one”—she warmed to the vision—“it’s perfect. Jane immensely, par example. Almost all the others who come to the house. Cashmore, Carrie, Tishy, Fanny—bless their hearts all!—each in their degree.”
Edward Brookenham had under the influence of this demonstration gradually risen from his seat, and as his wife approached that part of her process which might be expected to furnish the proof he placed himself before her with his back to the fire. “And Mitchy, I suppose?”
But he was out. “No. Mitchy’s different.”
He wondered. “Different?”
“Not a help. Quite a drawback.” Then as his face told how these WERE involutions, “You needn’t understand, but you can believe me,” she added. “The one who does most is of course Van himself.” It was a statement by which his failure to apprehend was not diminished, and she completed her operation. “By not liking her.”
Edward’s gloom, on this, was not quite blankness, yet it was dense. “Do you like his not liking her?”
“Dear no. No better than HE does.”
“And he doesn’t—?”
“Oh he hates it.”
“Of course I haven’t asked him,” Edward appeared to say more to himself than to his wife.
“And of course I haven’t,” she returned—not at all in this case, plainly, for herself. “But I know it. He’d like her if he could, but he can’t. That,” Mrs. Brook wound up, “is what makes it sure.”
There was at last in Edward’s gravity a positive pathos. “Sure he won’t propose?”
“Sure Mr. Longdon won’t now throw her over.”
“Of course if it IS sure—”
“Well?”
“Why, it is. But of course if it isn’t—”
“Well?”
“Why, she won’t have anything. Anything but US,” he continued to reflect. “Unless, you know, you’re working it on a certainty—!”
“That’s just what I AM working it on. I did nothing till I knew I was safe.”
“‘Safe’?” he ambiguously echoed while on this their eyes met longer.
“Safe. I knew he’d stick.”
“But how did you know Van wouldn’t?”
“No matter ‘how’—but better still. He hasn’t stuck.” She said it very simply, but she turned away from him.
His eyes for a little followed her. “We don’t KNOW, after all, the old boy’s means.”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘we’ don’t. Nanda does.”
“But where’s the support if she doesn’t tell us?”
Mrs. Brook, who had faced about, again turned from him. “I hope you don’t forget,” she remarked with superiority, “that we don’t ask her.”
“YOU don’t?” Edward gloomed.
“Never. But I trust her.”
“Yes,” he mused afresh, “one must trust one’s child. Does Van?” he then enquired.
“Does he trust her?”
“Does he know anything of the general figure?”
She hesitated. “Everything. It’s high.”
“He has told you so?”
Mrs. Brook, supremely impatient now, seemed to demur even to the question. “We ask HIM even less.”
“Then how do we know?”
She was weary of explaining. “Because that’s just why he hates it.”
There was no end however, apparently, to what Edward could take. “But hates what?”
“Why, not liking her.”
Edward kept his back to the fire and his dead eyes on the cornice and the ceiling. “I shouldn’t think it would be so difficult.”
“Well, you see it isn’t. Mr. Longdon can manage it.”
“I don’t see what the devil’s the matter with her,” he coldly continued.
“Ah that may not prevent—! It’s fortunately the source at any rate of half Mr. Longdon’s interest.”
“But what the hell IS it?” he drearily demanded.
She faltered a little, but she brought it out. “It’s ME.”
“And what’s the matter with ‘you’?”
She made, at this, a movement that drew his eyes to her own, and for a moment she dimly smiled at him. “That’s the nicest thing you ever said to me. But ever, EVER, you know.”
“Is it?” She had her hand on his sleeve, and he looked almost awkward.
“Quite the very nicest. Consider that fact well and even if you only said it by accident don’t be funny—as you know you sometimes CAN be—and take it back. It’s all right. It’s charming, isn’t it? when our troubles bring us more together. Now go up to her.”
Edward kept a queer face, into which this succession of remarks introduced no light, but he finally moved, and it was only when he had almost reached the door that he stopped again. “Of course you know he has sent her no end of books.”
“Mr. Longdon—of late? Oh yes, a deluge, so that her room looks like a bookseller’s back shop; and all, in the loveliest bindings, the most standard English works. I not only know it, naturally, but I know—what you don’t—why.”
“‘Why’?” Edward echoed. “Why but that—unless he should send her money—it’s about the only kindness he can show her at a distance?”
Mrs. Brook hesitated; then with a little suppressed sigh: “That’s it!”
But it still held him. “And perhaps he does send her money.”
“No. Not now.”
Edward lingered. “Then is he taking it out—?”
“In books only?” It was wonderful—with its effect on him now visible—how she possessed her subject. “Yes, that’s his delicacy—for the present.”
“And you’re not afraid for the future—?”
“Of his considering that the books will have worked it off? No. They’re thrown in.”
Just perceptibly cheered he reached the door, where, however, he had another pause. “You don’t think I had better see Van?”
She stared. “What for?”
“Why, to ask what the devil he means.”
“If you should do anything so hideously vulgar,” she instantly replied, “I’d leave your house the next hour. Do you expect,” she asked, “to be able to force your child down his throat?”
He was clearly not prepared with an account of his expectations, but he had a general memory that imposed itself. “Then why in the world did he make up to us?”
“He didn’t. We made up to HIM.”
“But why in the world—?”
“Well,” said Mrs. Brook, really to finish, “we were in love with him.”
“Oh!” Edward jerked. He had by this time opened the door, and the sound was partly the effect of the disclosure of a servant preceding a visitor. His greeting of the visitor before edging past and away was, however, of the briefest; it might have implied that they had met but yesterday. “How d’ye do, Mitchy?—At home? Oh rather!”
