Chapter V

Late that night, in the smoking room, when the smokers--talkers and listeners alike--were about to disperse, Mr. Longdon asked Vanderbank to stay, and then it was that the young man, to whom all the evening he had not addressed a word, could make out why, a little unnaturally, he had prolonged his vigil. “I’ve something particular to say to you and I’ve been waiting. I hope you don’t mind. It’s rather important.” Vanderbank expressed on the spot the liveliest desire to oblige him and, quickly lighting another cigarette, mounted again to the deep divan with which a part of the place was furnished. The smoking-room at Mertle was not unworthy of the general nobleness, and the fastidious spectator had clearly been reckoned on in the great leather-covered lounge that, raised by a step or two above the floor, applied its back to two quarters of the wall and enjoyed most immediately a view of the billiard-table. Mr. Longdon continued for a minute to roam with the air of dissimulated absence that, during the previous hour and among the other men, his companion’s eye had not lost; he pushed a ball or two about, examined the form of an ash-stand, swung his glasses almost with violence and declined either to smoke or to sit down. Vanderbank, perched aloft on the bench and awaiting developments, had a little the look of some prepossessing criminal who, in court, should have changed places with the judge. He was unlike many a man of marked good looks in that the effect of evening dress was not, with a perversity often observed in such cases, to over-emphasise his fineness. His type was rather chastened than heightened, and he sat there moreover with a primary discretion quite in the note of the deference that from the first, with his friend of the elder fashion, he had taken as imposed. He had a strong sense for shades of respect and was now careful to loll scarcely more than with an official superior. “If you ask me,” Mr. Longdon presently continued, “why at this hour of the night--after a day at best too heterogeneous--I don’t keep over till to-morrow whatever I may have to say, I can only tell you that I appeal to you now because I’ve something on my mind that I shall sleep the better for being rid of.”

There was space to circulate in front of the haut-pas, where he had still paced and still swung his glasses; but with these words he had paused, leaning against the billiard-table, to meet the interested urbanity of the answer they produced. “Are you very sure that having got rid of it you WILL sleep? Is it a pure confidence,” Vanderbank said, “that you do me the honour to make me? Is it something terrific that requires a reply, so that I shall have to take account on my side of the rest I may deprive you of?”

“Don’t take account of anything--I’m myself a man who always takes too much. It isn’t a matter about which I press you for an immediate answer. You can give me no answer probably without a good deal of thought. I’VE thought a good deal--otherwise I wouldn’t speak. I only want to put something before you and leave it there.”

“I never see you,” said Vanderbank, “that you don’t put something before me.”

“That sounds,” his friend returned, “as if I rather overloaded--what’s the sort of thing you fellows nowadays say?--your intellectual board. If there’s a congestion of dishes sweep everything without scruple away. I’ve never put before you anything like this.”

He spoke with a weight that in the great space, where it resounded a little, made an impression--an impression marked by the momentary pause that fell between them. He partly broke the silence first by beginning to walk again, and then Vanderbank broke it as through the apprehension of their becoming perhaps too solemn. “Well, you immensely interest me and you really couldn’t have chosen a better time. A secret--for we shall make it that of course, shan’t we?--at this witching hour, in this great old house, is all my visit here will have required to make the whole thing a rare remembrance. So I assure you the more you put before me the better.”

Mr. Longdon took up another ash-tray, but with the air of doing so as a direct consequence of Vanderbank’s tone. After he had laid it down he put on his glasses; then fixing his companion he brought out: “Have you no idea at all--?”

“Of what you have in your head? Dear Mr. Longdon, how SHOULD I have?”

“Well, I’m wondering if I shouldn’t perhaps have a little in your place. There’s nothing that in the circumstances occurs to you as likely I should want to say?”

Vanderbank gave a laugh that might have struck an auditor as a trifle uneasy. “When you speak of ‘the circumstances’ you do a thing that--unless you mean the simple thrilling ones of this particular moment--always of course opens the door of the lurid for a man of any imagination. To such a man you’ve only to give a nudge for his conscience to jump. That’s at any rate the case with mine. It’s never quite on its feet--so it’s now already on its back.” He stopped a little--his smile was even strained. “Is what you want to put before me something awful I’ve done?”

“Excuse me if I press this point.” Mr. Longdon spoke kindly, but if his friend’s anxiety grew his own thereby diminished. “Can you think of nothing at all?”

“Do you mean that I’ve done?”

“No, but that--whether you’ve done it or not--I may have become aware of.”

There could have been no better proof than Vanderbank’s expression, on this, of his having mastered the secret of humouring without appearing to patronise. “I think you ought to give me a little more of a clue.”

Mr. Longdon took off his glasses. “Well--the clue’s Nanda Brookenham.”

“Oh I see.” His friend had responded quickly, but for a minute said nothing more, and the great marble clock that gave the place the air of a club ticked louder in the stillness. Mr. Longdon waited with a benevolent want of mercy, yet with a look in his face that spoke of what depended for him--though indeed very far within--on the upshot of his patience. The hush between them, for that matter, became a conscious public measure of the young man’s honesty. He evidently at last felt it as such, and there would have been for an observer of his handsome controlled face a study of some sharp things. “I judge that you ask me for such an utterance,” he finally said, “as very few persons at any time have the right to expect of a man. Think of the people--and very decent ones--to whom on so many a question one must only reply that it’s none of their business.”

“I see you know what I mean,” said Mr. Longdon.

“Then you know also the distinguished exception I make of you. There isn’t another man with whom I’d talk of it.”

“And even to me you don’t! But I’m none the less obliged to you,” Mr. Longdon added.

“It isn’t only the gravity,” his companion went on; “it’s the ridicule that inevitably attaches--!”

The manner in which Mr. Longdon indicated the empty room was in itself an interruption. “Don’t I sufficiently spare you?”

“Thank you, thank you,” said Vanderbank.

“Besides, it’s not for nothing.”

“Of course not!” the young man returned, though with a look of noting the next moment a certain awkwardness in his concurrence. “But don’t spare me now.”

“I don’t mean to.” Mr. Longdon had his back to the table again, on which he rested with each hand on the rim. “I don’t mean to,” he repeated.

His victim gave a laugh that betrayed at least the drop of a tension. “Yet I don’t quite see what you can do to me.”

“It’s just what for some time past I’ve been trying to think.”

“And at last you’ve discovered?”

“Well--it has finally glimmered out a little in this extraordinary place.”

Vanderbank frankly wondered. “In consequence of anything particular that has happened?”

Mr. Longdon had a pause. “For an old idiot who notices as much as I something particular’s always happening. If you’re a man of imagination--”

“Oh,” Vanderbank broke in, “I know how much more in that case you’re one! It only makes me regret,” he continued, “that I’ve not attended more since yesterday to what you’ve been about.”

“I’ve been about nothing but what among you people I’m always about. I’ve been seeing, feeling, thinking. That makes no show, of course I’m aware, for any one but myself, and it’s wholly my own affair. Except indeed,” he added, “so far as I’ve taken into my head to make, on it all, this special appeal. There are things that have come home to me.”

“Oh I see, I see,” Vanderbank showed the friendliest alertness. “I’m to take it from you then, with all the avidity of my vanity, that I strike you as the person best able to understand what they are.”

Mr. Longdon appeared to wonder an instant if his intelligence now had not almost too much of a glitter: he kept the same position, his back against the table, and while Vanderbank, on the settee, pressed upright against the wall, they recognised in silence that they were trying each other. “You’re much the best of them. I’ve my ideas about you. You’ve great gifts.”

“Well then, we’re worthy of each other. When Greek meets Greek--!” and the young man laughed while, a little with the air of bracing himself, he folded his arms. “Here we are.”

His companion looked at him a moment longer, then, turning away, went slowly round the table. On the further side of it he stopped again and, after a minute, with a nervous movement, set a ball or two in motion. “It’s beautiful--but it’s terrible!” he finally murmured. He hadn’t his eyes on Vanderbank, who for a minute said nothing, and he presently went on: “To see it and not to want to try to help--well, I can’t do that.” Vanderbank, still neither speaking nor moving, remained as if he might interrupt something of high importance, and his friend, passing along the opposite edge of the table, continued to produce in the stillness, without the cue, the small click of the ivory. “How long--if you don’t mind my asking--have you known it?”

Even for this at first Vanderbank had no answer--none but to rise from his place, come down to the floor and, standing there, look at Mr. Longdon across the table. He was serious now, but without being solemn. “How can one tell? One can never be sure. A man may fancy, may wonder; but about a girl, a person so much younger than himself and so much more helpless, he feels a--what shall I call it?”

“A delicacy?” Mr. Longdon suggested. “It may be that; the name doesn’t matter; at all events he’s embarrassed. He wants not to be an ass on the one side and yet not some other kind of brute on the other.”

Mr. Longdon listened with consideration--with a beautiful little air indeed of being, in his all but finally benighted state, earnestly open to information on such points from a magnificent young man. “He doesn’t want, you mean, to be a coxcomb?--and he doesn’t want to be cruel?”

Vanderbank, visibly preoccupied, produced a faint kind smile. “Oh you KNOW!”

“I? I should know less than any one.” Mr. Longdon had turned away from the table on this, and the eyes of his companion, who after an instant had caught his meaning, watched him move along the room and approach another part of the divan. The consequence of the passage was that Vanderbank’s only rejoinder was presently to say: “I can’t tell you how long I’ve imagined--have asked myself. She’s so charming, so interesting, and I feel as if I had known her always. I’ve thought of one thing and another to do--and then, on purpose, haven’t thought at all. That has mostly seemed to me best.”

“Then I gather,” said Mr. Longdon, “that your interest in her--?”

“Hasn’t the same character as her interest in ME?” Vanderbank had taken him up responsively, but after speaking looked about for a match and lighted a new cigarette. “I’m sure you understand,” he broke out, “what an extreme effort it is to me to talk of such things!”

“Yes, yes. But it’s just effort only? It gives you no pleasure? I mean the fact of her condition,” Mr. Longdon explained.

Vanderbank had really to think a little. “However much it might give me I should probably not be a fellow to gush. I’m a self-conscious stick of a Briton.”

“But even a stick of a Briton--!” Mr. Longdon faltered and hovered. “I’ve gushed in short to YOU.”

“About Lady Julia?” the young man frankly asked. “Is gushing what you call what you’ve done?”

“Say then we’re sticks of Britons. You’re not in any degree at all in love?”

There fell between them, before Vanderbank replied, another pause, of which he took advantage to move once more round the table. Mr. Longdon meanwhile had mounted to the high bench and sat there as if the judge were now in his proper place. At last his companion spoke. “What you’re coming to is of course that you’ve conceived a desire.”

“That’s it--strange as it may seem. But believe me, it has not been precipitate. I’ve watched you both.”

“Oh I knew you were watching HER,” said Vanderbank.

“To such a tune that I’ve made up my mind. I want her so to marry--!” But on the odd little quaver of longing with which he brought it out the elder man fairly hung.

“Well?” said Vanderbank.

“Well, so that on the day she does she’ll come into the interest of a considerable sum of money--already very decently invested--that I’ve determined to settle on her.”

Vanderbank’s instant admiration flushed across the room. “How awfully jolly of you--how beautiful!”

“Oh there’s a way to show practically your appreciation of it.”

But Vanderbank, for enthusiasm, scarcely heard him. “I can’t tell you how admirable I think you.” Then eagerly, “Does Nanda know it?” he demanded.

Mr. Longdon, after a wait, spoke with comparative dryness. “My idea has been that for the present you alone shall.”

Vanderbank took it in. “No other man?”

His companion looked still graver. “I need scarcely say that I depend on you to keep the fact to yourself.”

“Absolutely then and utterly. But that won’t prevent what I think of it. Nothing for a long time has given me such joy.”

Shining and sincere, he had held for a minute Mr. Longdon’s eyes. “Then you do care for her?”

“Immensely. Never, I think, so much as now. That sounds of a grossness, doesn’t it?” the young man laughed. “But your announcement really lights up the mind.”

His friend for a moment almost glowed with his pleasure. “The sum I’ve fixed upon would be, I may mention, substantial, and I should of course be prepared with a clear statement--a very definite pledge--of my intentions.”

“So much the better! Only”--Vanderbank suddenly pulled himself up--“to get it she MUST marry?”

“It’s not in my interest to allow you to suppose she needn’t, and it’s only because of my intensely wanting her marriage that I’ve spoken to you.”

“And on the ground also with it”--Vanderbank so far concurred--“of your quite taking for granted my only having to put myself forward?”

If his friend seemed to cast about it proved but to be for the fullest expression. Nothing in fact could have been more charged than the quiet way in which he presently said: “My dear boy, I back you.”

Vanderbank clearly was touched by it. “How extraordinarily kind you are to me!” Mr. Longdon’s silence appeared to reply that he was willing to let it go for that, and the young man next went on: “What it comes to then--as you put it--is that it’s a way for me to add something handsome to my income.”

Mr. Longdon sat for a little with his eyes attached to the green field of the billiard-table, vivid in the spreading suspended lamplight. “I think I ought to tell you the figure I have in mind.”

Another person present might have felt rather taxed either to determine the degree of provocation represented by Vanderbank’s considerate smile, or to say if there was an appreciable interval before he rang out: “I think, you know, you oughtn’t to do anything of the sort. Let that alone, please. The great thing is the interest--the great thing is the wish you express. It represents a view of me, an attitude toward me--!” He pulled up, dropping his arms and turning away before the complete image.

“There’s nothing in those things that need overwhelm you. It would be odd if you hadn’t yourself, about your value and your future a feeling quite as lively as any feeling of mine. There IS mine at all events. I can’t help it. Accept it. Then of the other feeling--how SHE moves me--I won’t speak.”

“You sufficiently show it!”

Mr. Longdon continued to watch the bright circle on the table, lost in which a moment he let his friend’s answer pass. “I won’t begin to you on Nanda.”

“Don’t,” said Vanderbank. But in the pause that ensued each, in one way or another, might have been thinking of her for himself.

It was broken by Mr. Longdon’s presently going on: “Of course what it superficially has the air of is my offering to pay you for taking a certain step. It’s open to you to be grand and proud--to wrap yourself in your majesty and ask if I suppose you bribeable. I haven’t spoken without having thought of that.”

“Yes,” said Vanderbank all responsively, “but it isn’t as if you proposed to me, is it, anything dreadful? If one cares for a girl one’s deucedly glad she has money. The more of anything good she has the better. I may assure you,” he added with the brightness of his friendly intelligence and quite as if to show his companion the way to be least concerned--“I may assure you that once I were disposed to act on your suggestion I’d make short work of any vulgar interpretation of my motive. I should simply try to be as fine as yourself.” He smoked, he moved about, then came up in another place. “I dare say you know that dear old Mitchy, under whose blessed roof we’re plotting this midnight treason, would marry her like a shot and without a penny.”

“I think I know everything--I think I’ve thought of everything. Mr. Mitchett,” Mr. Longdon added, “is impossible.”

Vanderbank appeared for an instant to wonder. “Wholly then through HER attitude?”

“Altogether.”

Again he hesitated. “You’ve asked her?”

“I’ve asked her.”

Once more Vanderbank faltered. “And that’s how you know?”

“About YOUR chance? That’s how I know.”

The young man, consuming his cigarette with concentration, took again several turns. “And your idea IS to give one time?”

Mr. Longdon had for a minute to turn his idea over. “How much time do you want?”

Vanderbank gave a headshake that was both restrictive and indulgent. “I must live into it a little. Your offer has been before me only these few minutes, and it’s too soon for me to commit myself to anything whatever. Except,” he added gallantly, “to my gratitude.”

Mr. Longdon, at this, on the divan, got up, as Vanderbank had previously done, under the spring of emotion; only, unlike Vanderbank, he still stood there, his hands in his pockets and his face, a little paler, directed straight. There was disappointment in him even before he spoke. “You’ve no strong enough impulse--?”

His friend met him with admirable candour. “Wouldn’t it seem that if I had I would by this time have taken the jump?”

“Without waiting, you mean, for anybody’s money?” Mr. Longdon cultivated for a little a doubt. “Of course she has struck one as--till now--tremendously young.”

Vanderbank looked about once more for matches and occupied a time with relighting. “Till now--yes. But it’s not,” he pursued, “only because she’s so young that--for each of us, and for dear old Mitchy too--she’s so interesting.” Mr. Longdon had restlessly stepped down, and Vanderbank’s eyes followed him till he stopped again. “I make out that in spite of what you said to begin with you’re conscious of a certain pressure.”

“In the matter of time? Oh yes, I do want it DONE. That,” Nanda’s patron simply explained, “is why I myself put on the screw.” He spoke with the ring of impatience. “I want her got out.”

“‘Out’?”

“Out of her mother’s house.”

Vanderbank laughed though--more immediately--he had coloured. “Why, her mother’s house is just where I see her!”

“Precisely; and if it only weren’t we might get on faster.”

Vanderbank, for all his kindness, looked still more amused. “But if it only weren’t, as you say, I seem to understand you wouldn’t have your particular vision of urgency.”

Mr. Longdon, through adjusted glasses, took him in with a look that was sad as well as sharp, then jerked the glasses off. “Oh you do understand.”

“Ah,” said Vanderbank, “I’m a mass of corruption!”

“You may perfectly be, but you shall not,” Mr. Longdon returned with decision, “get off on any such plea. If you’re good enough for me you’re good enough, as you thoroughly know, on whatever head, for any one.”

“Thank you.” But Vanderbank, for all his happy appreciation, thought again. “We ought at any rate to remember, oughtn’t we? that we should have Mrs. Brook against us.”

His companion faltered but an instant. “Ah that’s another thing I know. But it’s also exactly why. Why I want Nanda away.”

“I see, I see.”

The response had been prompt, yet Mr. Longdon seemed suddenly to show that he suspected the superficial. “Unless it’s with Mrs. Brook you’re in love.” Then on his friend’s taking the idea with a mere headshake of negation, a repudiation that might even have astonished by its own lack of surprise, “Or unless Mrs. Brook’s in love with you,” he amended.

Vanderbank had for this any decent gaiety. “Ah that of course may perfectly be!”

“But IS it? That’s the question.”

He continued light. “If she had declared her passion shouldn’t I rather compromise her--?”

“By letting me know?” Mr. Longdon reflected. “I’m sure I can’t say--it’s a sort of thing for which I haven’t a measure or a precedent. In my time women didn’t declare their passion. I’m thinking of what the meaning is of Mrs. Brookenham’s wanting you--as I’ve heard it called--herself.”

Vanderbank, still with his smile, smoked a minute. “That’s what you’ve heard it called?”

“Yes, but you must excuse me from telling you by whom.”

He was amused at his friend’s discretion. “It’s unimaginable. But it doesn’t matter. We all call everything--anything. The meaning of it, if you and I put it so, is--well, a modern shade.”

“You must deal then yourself,” said Mr. Longdon, “with your modern shades.” He spoke now as if the case simply awaited such dealing.

But at this his young friend was more grave. “YOU could do nothing?--to bring, I mean, Mrs. Brook round.”

Mr. Longdon fairly started. “Propose on your behalf for her daughter? With your authority--tomorrow. Authorise me and I instantly act.”

Vanderbank’s colour again rose--his flush was complete. “How awfully you want it!”

Mr. Longdon, after a look at him, turned away. “How awfully YOU don’t!”

The young man continued to blush. “No--you must do me justice. You’ve not made a mistake about me--I see in your proposal, I think, all you can desire I should. Only YOU see it much more simply--and yet I can’t just now explain. If it WERE so simple I should say to you in a moment ‘do speak to them for me’--I should leave the matter with delight in your hands. But I require time, let me remind you, and you haven’t yet told me how much I may take.”

This appeal had brought them again face to face, and Mr. Longdon’s first reply to it was a look at his watch. “It’s one o’clock.”

“Oh I require”--Vanderbank had recovered his pleasant humour--“more than to-night!”

Mr. Longdon went off to the smaller table that still offered to view two bedroom candles. “You must take of course the time you need. I won’t trouble you--I won’t hurry you. I’m going to bed.”

Vanderbank, overtaking him, lighted his candle for him; after which, handing it and smiling: “Shall we have conduced to your rest?”

Mr. Longdon looked at the other candle. “You’re not coming to bed?”

“To MY rest we shall not have conduced. I stay up a while longer.”

“Good.” Mr. Longdon was pleased. “You won’t forget then, as we promised, to put out the lights?”

“If you trust me for the greater you can trust me for the less. Good-night.”

Vanderbank had offered his hand. “Good-night.” But Mr. Longdon kept him a moment. “You DON’T care for my figure?”

“Not yet--not yet. PLEASE.” Vanderbank seemed really to fear it, but on Mr. Longdon’s releasing him with a little drop of disappointment they went together to the door of the room, where they had another pause.

“She’s to come down to me--alone--in September.”

Vanderbank appeared to debate and conclude. “Then may I come?”

His friend, on this footing, had to consider. “Shall you know by that time?”

“I’m afraid I can’t promise--if you must regard my coming as a pledge.”

Mr. Longdon thought on; then raising his eyes: “I don’t quite see why you won’t suffer me to tell you--!”

“The detail of your intention? I do then. You’ve said quite enough. If my visit must commit me,” Vanderbank pursued, “I’m afraid I can’t come.”

Mr. Longdon, who had passed into the corridor, gave a dry sad little laugh. “Come then--as the ladies say--‘as you are’!”

On which, rather softly closing the door, the young man remained alone in the great emptily lighted billiard-room.

BOOK SIXTH. MRS. BROOK

Presenting himself at Buckingham Crescent three days after the Sunday spent at Mertle, Vanderbank found Lady Fanny Cashmore in the act of taking leave of Mrs. Brook and found Mrs. Brook herself in the state of muffled exaltation that was the mark of all her intercourse--and most of all perhaps of her farewells--with Lady Fanny. This splendid creature gave out, as it were, so little that Vanderbank was freshly struck with all Mrs. Brook could take in, though nothing, for that matter, in Buckingham Crescent, had been more fully formulated on behalf of the famous beauty than the imperturbable grandeur of her almost total absence of articulation. Every aspect of the phenomenon had been freely discussed there and endless ingenuity lavished on the question of how exactly it was that so much of what the world would in another case have called complete stupidity could be kept by a mere wonderful face from boring one to death. It was Mrs. Brook who, in this relation as in many others, had arrived at the supreme expression of the law, had thrown off, happily enough, to whomever it might have concerned: “My dear thing, it all comes back, as everything always does, simply to personal pluck. It’s only a question, no matter when or where, of having enough. Lady Fanny has the courage of all her silence--so much therefore that it sees her completely through and is what really makes her interesting. Not to be afraid of what may happen to you when you’ve no more to say for yourself than a steamer without a light--that truly is the highest heroism, and Lady Fanny’s greatness is that she’s never afraid. She takes the risk every time she goes out--takes, as you may say, her life in her hand. She just turns that glorious mask upon you and practically says: ‘No, I won’t open my lips--to call it really open--for the forty minutes I shall stay; but I calmly defy you, all the same, to kill me for it.’ And we don’t kill her--we delight in her; though when either of us watches her in a circle of others it’s like seeing a very large blind person in the middle of Oxford Street. One fairly looks about for the police.” Vanderbank, before his fellow visitor withdrew it, had the benefit of the glorious mask and could scarce have failed to be amused at the manner in which Mrs. Brook alone showed the stress of thought. Lady Fanny, in the other scale, sat aloft and Olympian, so that though visibly much had happened between the two ladies it had all happened only to the hostess. The sense in the air in short was just of Lady Fanny herself, who came to an end like a banquet or a procession. Mrs. Brook left the room with her and, on coming back, was full of it. “She’ll go, she’ll go!”

“Go where?” Vanderbank appeared to have for the question less attention than usual.

“Well, to the place her companion will propose. Probably--like Anna Karenine--to one of the smaller Italian towns.”

“Anna Karenine? She isn’t a bit like Anna.”

“Of course she isn’t so clever,” said Mrs. Brook. “But that would spoil her. So it’s all right.”

“I’m glad it’s all right,” Vanderbank laughed. “But I dare say we shall still have her with us a while.”

“We shall do that, I trust, whatever happens. She’ll come up again--she’ll remain, I feel, one of those enormous things that fate seems somehow to have given me as the occupation of my odd moments. I don’t see,” Mrs. Brook added, “what still keeps her on the edge, which isn’t an inch wide.”

Vanderbank looked this time as if he only tried to wonder. “Isn’t it YOU?”

Mrs. Brook mused more deeply. “Sometimes I think so. But I don’t know.”

“Yes, how CAN you of course know, since she can’t tell you?”

“Oh if I depended on her telling--!” Mrs. Brook shook out with this a sofa-cushion or two and sank into the corner she had arranged. The August afternoon was hot and the London air heavy; the room moreover, though agreeably bedimmed, gave out the staleness of the season’s end. “If you hadn’t come to-day,” she went on, “you’d have missed me till I don’t know when, for we’ve let the Hovel again--wretchedly, but still we’ve let it--and I go down on Friday to see that it isn’t too filthy. Edward, who’s furious at what I’ve taken for it, had his idea that we should go there this year ourselves.”

“And now”--Vanderbank took her up--“that fond fancy has become simply the ghost of a dead thought, a ghost that, in company with a thousand predecessors, haunts the house in the twilight and pops at you out of odd corners.”

“Oh Edward’s dead thoughts are indeed a cheerful company and worthy of the perpetual mental mourning we seem to go about in. They’re worse than the relations we’re always losing without seeming to have any fewer, and I expect every day to hear that the Morning Post regrets to have to announce in that line too some new bereavement. The apparitions following the deaths of so many thoughts ARE particularly awful in the twilight, so that at this season, while the day drags and drags, I’m glad to have any one with me who may keep them at a distance.”

Vanderbank had not sat down; slowly, familiarly he turned about. “And where’s Nanda?”

“Oh SHE doesn’t help--she attracts rather the worst of the bogies. Edward and Nanda and Harold and I seated together are fairly a case for that--what do you call it?--investigating Society. Deprived of the sweet resource of the Hovel,” Mrs. Brook continued, “we shall each, from about the tenth on, forage somehow or other for ourselves. Mitchy perhaps,” she added, “will insist on taking us to Baireuth.”

“That will be the form, you mean, of his own forage?”

Mrs. Brook just hesitated. “Unless you should prefer to take it as the form of yours.”

Vanderbank appeared for a moment obligingly enough to turn this over, but with the effect of noting an objection. “Oh I’m afraid I shall have to grind straight through the month and that by the time I’m free every Ring at Baireuth will certainly have been rung. Is it your idea to take Nanda?” he asked.

She reached out for another cushion. “If it’s impossible for you to manage what I suggest why should that question interest you?”

“My dear woman”--and her visitor dropped into a chair--“do you suppose my interest depends on such poverties as what I can ‘manage’? You know well enough,” he went on in another tone, “why I care for Nanda and enquire about her.”

She was perfectly ready. “I know it, but only as a bad reason. Don’t be too sure!”

For a moment they looked at each other. “Don’t be so sure, you mean, that the elation of it may go to my head? Are you really warning me against vanity?”

“Your ‘reallys,’ my dear Van, are a little formidable, but it strikes me that before I tell you there’s something I’ve a right to ask. Are you ‘really’ what they call thinking of my daughter?”

“Your asking,” Vanderbank returned, “exactly shows the state of your knowledge of the matter. I don’t quite see moreover why you speak as if I were paying an abrupt and unnatural attention. What have I done the last three months but talk to you about her? What have you done but talk to ME about her? From the moment you first spoke to me--‘monstrously,’ I remember you called it--of the difference made in your social life by her finally established, her perpetual, her inexorable participation: from that moment what have we both done but put our heads together over the question of keeping the place tidy, as you called it--or as _I_ called it, was it?--for the young female mind?”

Mrs. Brook faced serenely enough the directness of this challenge. “Well, what are you coming to? I spoke of the change in my life of course; I happen to be so constituted that my life has something to do with my mind and my mind something to do with my talk. Good talk: you know--no one, dear Van, should know better--what part for me that plays. Therefore when one has deliberately to make one’s talk bad--!”

“‘Bad’?” Vanderbank, in his amusement, fell back in his chair. “Dear Mrs. Brook, you’re too delightful!”

“You know what I mean--stupid, flat, fourth-rate. When one has to haul in sail to that degree--and for a perfectly outside reason--there’s nothing strange in one’s taking a friend sometimes into the confidence of one’s irritation.”

“Ah,” Vanderbank protested, “you do yourself injustice. Irritation hasn’t been for you the only consequence of the affair.”

Mrs. Brook gloomily thought. “No, no--I’ve had my calmness: the calmness of deep despair. I’ve seemed to see everything go.”

“Oh how can you say that,” her visitor demanded, “when just what we’ve most been agreed upon so often is the practical impossibility of making any change? Hasn’t it seemed as if we really can’t overcome conversational habits so thoroughly formed?”

Again Mrs. Brook reflected. “As if our way of looking at things were too serious to be trifled with? I don’t know--I think it’s only you who have denied our sacrifices, our compromises and concessions. I myself have constantly felt smothered in them. But there it is,” she impatiently went on. “What I don’t admit is that you’ve given me ground to take for a proof of your ‘intentions’--to use the odious term--your association with me on behalf of the preposterous fiction, as it after all is, of Nanda’s blankness of mind.”

Vanderbank’s head, in his chair, was thrown back; his eyes ranged over the top of the room. “There never has been any mystery about my thinking her--all in her own way--the nicest girl in London. She IS.”

His companion was silent a little. “She is, by all means. Well,” she then added, “so far as I may have been alive to the fact of any one’s thinking her so, it’s not out of place I should mention to you the difference made in my appreciation of it by our delightful little stay at Mertle. My views for Nanda,” said Mrs. Brook, “have somehow gone up.”

Vanderbank was prompt to show how he could understand it. “So that you wouldn’t consider even Mitchy now?”

But his friend took no notice of the question. “The way Mr. Longdon distinguishes her is quite the sort of thing that gives a girl, as Harold says, a ‘leg up.’ It’s awfully curious and has made me think: he isn’t anything whatever, as London estimates go, in himself--so that what is it, pray, that makes him, when ‘added on’ to her, so double Nanda’s value? I somehow or other see, through his being known to back her and through the pretty story of his loyalty to mamma and all the rest of it (oh if one chose to WORK that!) ever so much more of a chance for her.”

Vanderbank’s eyes were on the ceiling. “It IS curious, isn’t it?--though I think he’s rather more ‘in himself,’ even for the London estimate, than you quite understand.” He appeared to give her time to take this up, but as she said nothing he pursued: “I dare say that if even I now WERE to enter myself it would strike you as too late.”

Her attention to this was but indirect. “It’s awfully vulgar to be talking about it, but I can’t help feeling that something possibly rather big will come of Mr. Longdon.”

“Ah we’ve touched on that before,” said Vanderbank, “and you know you did think something might come even for me.”

She continued however, as if she scarce heard him, to work out her own vision. “It’s very true that up to now--”

“Well, up to now?” he asked as she faltered.

She faltered still a little. “I do say the most hideous things. But we HAVE said worse, haven’t we? Up to now, I mean, he hasn’t given her anything. Unless indeed,” she mused, “she may have had something without telling me.”

Vanderbank went much straighter. “What sort of thing have you in mind? Are you thinking of money?”

“Yes. Isn’t it awful?”

“That you should think of it?”

“That I should talk this way.” Her friend was apparently not prepared with an assent, and she quickly enough pursued: “If he HAD given her any it would come out somehow in her expenditure. She has tremendous liberty and is very secretive, but still it would come out.”

“He wouldn’t give her any without letting you know. Nor would she, without doing so,” Vanderbank added, “take it.”

“Ah,” Mrs. Brook quietly said, “she hates me enough for anything.”

“That’s only your romantic theory.”

Once more she appeared not to hear him; she gave the discussion another turn. “Has he given YOU anything?”

Her visitor smiled. “Not so much as a cigarette. I’ve always my pockets full of them, and HE never: so he only takes mine. Oh Mrs. Brook,” he continued, “with me too--though I’ve also tremendous liberty!--it would come out.”

“I think you’d let me know,” she returned.

“Yes, I’d let you know.”

Silence, upon this, fell between them a little; which she was the first to break. “She has gone with him this afternoon--by solemn appointment--to the South Kensington Museum.”

There was something in Mrs. Brook’s dolorous drop that yet presented the news as a portent so great that he was moved again to mirth. “Ah that’s where she is? Then I confess she has scored. He has never taken ME to the South Kensington Museum.”

“You were asking what we’re going to do,” she went on. “What I meant was--about Baireuth--that the question for Nanda’s simplified. He has pressed her so to pay him a visit.”

Vanderbank’s assent was marked. “I see: so that if you do go abroad she’ll be provided for by that engagement.”

“And by lots of other invitations.”

These were such things as, for the most part, the young man could turn over. “Do you mean you’d let her go alone--?”

“To wherever she’s asked?” said Mrs. Brook. “Why not? Don’t talk like the Duchess.”

Vanderbank seemed for a moment to try not to. “Couldn’t Mr. Longdon take her? Why not?”

His friend looked really struck with it. “That WOULD be working him. But to a beautiful end!” she meditated. “The only thing would be to get him also asked.”

“Ah but there you are, don’t you see? Fancy ‘getting’ Mr. Longdon anything or anywhere whatever! Don’t you feel,” Vanderbank threw out, “how the impossibility of exerting that sort of patronage for him immediately places him?”

Mrs. Brook gave her companion one of those fitful glances of almost grateful appreciation with which their intercourse was even at its darkest hours frequently illumined. “As if he were the Primate or the French Ambassador? Yes, you’re right--one couldn’t do it; though it’s very odd and one doesn’t quite see why. It does place him. But he becomes thereby exactly the very sort of person with whom it would be most of an advantage for her to go about. What a pity,” Mrs. Brook sighed, “he doesn’t know more people!”

“Ah well, we ARE, in our way, bringing that to pass. Only we mustn’t rush it. Leave it to Nanda herself,” Vanderbank presently added; on which his companion so manifestly left it that she touched after a moment’s silence on quite a different matter. “I dare say he’d tell YOU--wouldn’t he?--if he were to give her any considerable sum.”

She had only obeyed his injunction, but he stared at the length of her jump. “He might attempt to do so, but I shouldn’t at all like it.” He was moved immediately to dismiss this branch of the subject and, apparently to help himself, take up another. “Do you mean she understands he has asked her down for a regular long stay?”

Mrs. Brook barely hesitated. “She understands, I think, that what I expect of her is to make it as long as possible.”

Vanderbank laughed out--as it was even after ten years still possible to laugh--at the childlike innocence with which her voice could invest the hardest teachings of life; then with something a trifle nervous in the whole sound and manner he sprang up from his chair. “What a blessing he is to us all!”

“Yes, but think what we must be to HIM.”

“An immense interest, no doubt.” He took a few aimless steps and, stooping over a basket of flowers, inhaled it with violence, almost buried his face. “I dare say we ARE interesting.” He had spoken rather vaguely, but Mrs. Brook knew exactly why. “We render him no end of a service. We keep him in touch with old memories.”

Vanderbank had reached one of the windows, shaded from without by a great striped sun-blind beneath which and between the flower-pots of the balcony he could see a stretch of hot relaxed street. He looked a minute at these things. “I do so like your phrases!”

She had a pause that challenged his tone. “Do you call mamma a ‘phrase’?”

He went off again, quite with extravagance, but quickly, leaving the window, pulled himself up. “I dare say we MUST put things for him--he does it, cares or is able to do it, so little himself.”

“Precisely. He just quietly acts. That’s his nature, dear thing. We must LET him act.”

Vanderbank seemed to stifle again too vivid a sense of her particular emphasis. “Yes, yes--we must let him.”

“Though it won’t prevent Nanda, I imagine,” his hostess pursued, “from finding the fun of a whole month at Beccles--or whatever she puts in--not exactly fast and furious.”

Vanderbank had the look of measuring what the girl might “put in.” “The place will be quiet, of course, but when a person’s so fond of a person--!”

“As she is of him, you mean?”

He hesitated. “Yes. Then it’s all right.”

“She IS fond of him, thank God!” said Mrs. Brook.

He was before her now with the air of a man who had suddenly determined on a great blind leap. “Do you know what he has done? He wants me so to marry her that he has proposed a definite basis.”

Mrs. Brook got straight up. “‘Proposed’? To HER?”

“No, I don’t think he has said a word to Nanda--in fact I’m sure that, very properly, he doesn’t mean to. But he spoke to me on Sunday night at Mertle--I had a big talk with him there alone, very late, in the smoking-room.” Mrs. Brook’s stare was serious, and Vanderbank now went on as if the sound of his voice helped him to meet it. “We had things out very much and his kindness was extraordinary--he’s the most beautiful old boy that ever lived. I don’t know, now that I come to think of it, if I’m within my rights in telling you--and of course I shall immediately let him know that I HAVE told you; but I feel I can’t arrive at any respectable sort of attitude in the matter without taking you into my confidence. Which is really what I came here to-day to do, though till this moment I’ve funked it.”

It was either, as her friends chose to think it, an advantage or a drawback of intercourse with Mrs. Brook that, her face being at any moment charged with the woe of the world, it was unavoidable to remain rather in the dark as to the effect there of particular strokes. Something in Vanderbank’s present study of the signs accordingly showed he had had to learn to feel his way and had more or less mastered the trick. That she had turned a little pale was really the one fresh mark. “‘Funked’ it? Why in the world--?” His own colour deepened at her accent, which was a sufficient light on his having been stupid. “Do you mean you’ve declined the arrangement?”

He only, with a smile somewhat strained, continued for a moment to look at her; clearly, however, at last feeling, and not much caring, that he got in still deeper. “You’re magnificent. You’re magnificent.”

Her lovely gaze widened out. “Comment donc? Where--why? You HAVE declined her?” she went on. After which, as he replied only with a slow head-shake that seemed to say it was not for the moment all so simple as that, she had one of the inspirations to which she was constitutionally subject. “Do you imagine I want you myself?”

“Dear Mrs. Brook, you’re so admirable,” he returned with gaiety, “that if by any chance you did, upon my honour, I don’t see how I should be able not to say ‘All right.’” But he spoke too more responsibly. “I was shy of really bringing out to you what has happened to me, for a reason that I’ve of course to look in the face. Whatever you want yourself, for Nanda you want Mitchy.”

“I see, I see.” She did full justice to his explanation. “And what did you say about a ‘basis’? The blessed man offers to settle--?”

“You’re a real prodigy,” her visitor answered, “and your imagination takes its fences in a way that, when I’m out with you, quite puts mine to shame. When he mentioned it to me I was quite surprised.”

“And I,” Mrs. Brook asked, “am not surprised a bit? Isn’t it only,” she modestly suggested, “because I’ve taken him in more than you? Didn’t you know he WOULD?” she quavered.

Vanderbank thought or at least pretended to. “Make ME the condition? How could I be sure of it?”

But the point of his question was lost for her in the growing light. “Oh then the condition’s ‘you’ only--?”

“That, at any rate, is all I have to do with. He’s ready to settle if I’m ready to do the rest.”

“To propose to her straight, you mean?” She waited, but as he said nothing she went on: “And you’re not ready. Is that it?”

“I’m taking my time.”

“Of course you know,” said Mrs. Brook, “that she’d jump at you.”

He turned away from her now, but after some steps came back. “Then you do admit it.”

She hesitated. “To YOU.”

He had a strange faint smile. “Well, as I don’t speak of it--!”

“No--only to me. What is it he settles?” Mrs. Brook demanded.

“I can’t tell you.”

“You didn’t ask?”

“On the contrary I stopped him off.”

“Oh then,” Mrs. Brook exclaimed, “that’s what I call declining.”

The words appeared for an instant to strike her companion. “Is it? Is it?” he almost musingly repeated. But he shook himself the next moment free of his wonder, was more what would have been called in Buckingham Crescent on the spot. “Isn’t there rather something in my having thus thought it my duty to warn you that I’m definitely his candidate?”

Mrs. Brook turned impatiently away. “You’ve certainly--with your talk about ‘warning’--the happiest expressions!” She put her face into the flowers as he had done just before; then as she raised it: “What kind of a monster are you trying to make me out?”

“My dear lady”--Vanderbank was prompt--“I really don’t think I say anything but what’s fair. Isn’t it just my loyalty to you in fact that has in this case positively strained my discretion?”

She shook her head in mere mild despair. “‘Loyalty’ again is exquisite. The tact of men has a charm quite its own. And you’re rather good,” she continued, “as men go.”

His laugh was now a little awkward, as if she had already succeeded in making him uncomfortable. “I always become aware with you sooner or later that they don’t go at all--in your sense: but how am I, after all, so far out if you HAVE put your money on another man?”

“You keep coming back to that?” she wearily sighed.

He thought a little. “No, then. You’ve only to tell me not to, and I’ll never speak of it again.”

“You’ll be in an odd position for speaking of it if you do really go in. You deny that you’ve declined,” said Mrs. Brook; “which means then that you’ve allowed our friend to hope.”

Vanderbank met it bravely. “Yes, I think he hopes.”

“And communicates his hope to my child?”

This arrested the young man, but only for a moment. “I’ve the most perfect faith in his wisdom with her. I trust his particular delicacy. He cares more for her,” he presently added, “even than we do.”

Mrs. Brook gazed away at the infinite of space. “‘We,’ my dear Van,” she at last returned, “is one of your own real, wonderful touches. But there’s something in what you say: I HAVE, as between ourselves--between me and him--been backing Mitchy. That is I’ve been saying to him ‘Wait, wait: don’t at any rate do anything else.’ Only it’s just from the depth of my thought for my daughter’s happiness that I’ve clung to this resource. He would so absolutely, so unreservedly do anything for her.” She had reached now, with her extraordinary self-control, the pitch of quiet bland demonstration. “I want the poor thing, que diable, to have another string to her bow and another loaf, for her desolate old age, on the shelf. When everything else is gone Mitchy will still be there. Then it will be at least her own fault--!” Mrs. Brook continued. “What can relieve me of the primary duty of taking precautions,” she wound up, “when I know as well as that I stand here and look at you--”

“Yes, what?” he asked as she just paused.

“Why that so far as they count on you they count, my dear Van, on a blank.” Holding him a minute as with the soft low voice of his fate, she sadly but firmly shook her head. “You won’t do it.”

“Oh!” he almost too loudly protested.

“You won’t do it,” she went on.

“I SAY!”--he made a joke of it.

“You won’t do it,” she repeated.

It was as if he couldn’t at last but show himself really struck; yet what he exclaimed on was what might in truth most have impressed him. “You ARE magnificent, really!”

“Mr. Mitchett!” the butler, appearing at the door, almost familiarly dropped; after which Vanderbank turned straight to the person announced.

Mr. Mitchett was there, and, anticipating Mrs. Brook in receiving him, her companion passed it straighten. “She’s magnificent!”

Mitchy was already all interest. “Rather! But what’s her last?”

It had been, though so great, so subtle, as they said in Buckingham Crescent, that Vanderbank scarce knew how to put it. “Well, she’s so thoroughly superior.”

“Oh to whom do you say it?” Mitchy cried as he greeted her.