The Awkward Age Part 21

"And what did your mother say?"

"'Imagination--dear mamma? Not a grain!'"

The old man showed a faint flush. "Your mother then has a supply that makes up for it."

The girl fixed him on this with a deeper attention. "You don't like her having said that."

His colour came stronger, though a slightly strained smile did what it could to diffuse coolness. "I don't care a single sc.r.a.p, my dear, in respect to the friend I'm speaking of, for any judgement but my own."

"Not even for her daughter's?"

"Not even for her daughter's." Mr. Longdon had not spoken loud, but he rang as clear as a bell.

Nanda, for admiration of it, broke almost for the first time into the semblance of a smile. "You feel as if my grandmother were quite YOUR property!"

"Oh quite."

"I say--that's splendid!"

"I'm glad you like it," he answered kindly.

The very kindness pulled her up. "Pardon my speaking so, but I'm sure you know what I mean. You mustn't think," she eagerly continued, "that mother won't also want to hear you."

"On the subject of Lady Julia?" He gently, but very effectively, shook his head. "Your mother shall never hear me."

Nanda appeared to wonder at it an instant, and it made her completely grave again. "It will be all for ME?"

"Whatever there may be of it, my dear."

"Oh I shall get it all out of you," she returned without hesitation.

Her mixture of free familiarity and of the vividness of evocation of something, whatever it was, sharply opposed--the little worry of this contradiction, not altogether unpleasant, continued to fill his consciousness more discernibly than anything else. It was really reflected in his quick brown eyes that she alternately drew him on and warned him off, but also that what they were beginning more and more to make out was an emotion of her own trembling there beneath her tension.

His glimpse of it widened--his glimpse of it fairly triumphed when suddenly, after this last declaration, she threw off with quite the same accent but quite another effect: "I'm glad to be like any one the thought of whom makes you so good! You ARE good," she continued; "I see already how I shall feel it." She stared at him with tears, the sight of which brought his own straight back; so that thus for a moment they sat there together.

"My dear child!" he at last simply murmured. But he laid his hand on her now, and her own immediately met it.

"You'll get used to me," she said with the same gentleness that the response of her touch had tried to express; "and I shall be so careful with you that--well, you'll see!" She broke short off with a quaver and the next instant she turned--there was some one at the door. Vanderbank, still not quite at his ease, had come back to smile upon them. Detaching herself from Mr. Longdon she got straight up to meet him. "You were right, Mr. Van. It's beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!"

BOOK FOURTH. MR. CASHMORE

Harold Brookenham, whom Mr. Cashmore, ushered in and announced, had found in the act of helping himself to a cup of tea at the table apparently just prepared--Harold Brookenham arrived at the point with a dash so direct as to leave the visitor an option between but two suppositions: that of a desperate plunge, to have his shame soon over, or that of the acquired habit of such appeals, which had taught him the easiest way. There was no great sharpness in the face of Mr. Cashmore, who was somehow ma.s.sive without majesty; yet he mightn't have been proof against the suspicion that his young friend's embarra.s.sment was an easy precaution, a conscious corrective to the danger of audacity. It wouldn't have been impossible to divine that if Harold shut his eyes and jumped it was mainly for the appearance of doing so. Experience was to be taken as showing that one might get a five-pound note as one got a light for a cigarette; but one had to check the friendly impulse to ask for it in the same way. Mr. Cashmore had in fact looked surprised, yet not on the whole so surprised as the young man seemed to have expected of him. There was almost a quiet grace in the combination of prompt.i.tude and diffidence with which Harold took over the responsibility of all proprietors.h.i.+p of the crisp morsel of paper that he slipped with slow firmness into the pocket of his waistcoat, rubbing it gently in its pa.s.sage against the delicately buff-coloured duck of which that garment was composed. "So quite too awfully kind of you that I really don't know what to say"--there was a marked recall, in the manner of this speech, of the sweetness of his mother's droop and the tenderness of her wail.

It was as if he had been moved for the moment to moralise, but the eyes he raised to his benefactor had the oddest effect of marking that personage himself as a theme for the moralist.

Mr. Cashmore, who would have been very red-haired if he had not been very bald, showed a single eye-gla.s.s and a long upper lip; he was large and jaunty, with little petulant movements and intense e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns that were not in the line of his type. "You may say anything you like if you don't say you'll repay it. That's always nonsense--I hate it."

Harold remained sad, but showed himself really superior. "Then I won't say it." Pensively, a minute, he appeared to figure the words, in their absurdity, on the lips of some young man not, like himself, tactful. "I know just what you mean."

"But I think, you know, that you ought to tell your father," Mr.

Cashmore said.

"Tell him I've borrowed of you?"

Mr. Cashmore good-humouredly demurred. "It would serve me right--it's so wretched my having listened to you. Tell him, certainly," he went on after an instant. "But what I mean is that if you're in such straits you should speak to him like a man."

Harold smiled at the innocence of a friend who could suppose him not to have exhausted that resource. "I'm ALWAYS speaking to him like a man, and that's just what puts him so awfully out. He denies to my face that I AM one. One would suppose, to hear him, not only that I'm a small objectionable child, but that I'm scarcely even human. He doesn't conceive me as with human wants."

"Oh," Mr. Cashmore laughed, "you've all--you youngsters--as many wants, I know, as an advertis.e.m.e.nt page of the Times."

Harold showed an admiration. "That's awfully good. If you think you ought to speak of it," he continued, "do it rather to mamma." He noted the hour. "I'll go, if you'll excuse me, to give you the chance."

The visitor referred to his own watch. "It's your mother herself who gives the chances--the chances YOU take."

Harold looked kind and simple. "She HAS come in, I know. She'll be with you in a moment."

He was halfway to the door, but Mr. Cashmore, though so easy, had not done with him. "I suppose you mean that if it's only your mother who's told, you may depend on her to s.h.i.+eld you."

Harold turned this over as if it were a questionable sovereign, but on second thoughts he wonderfully smiled. "Do you think that after you've let me have it you can tell? You could, of course, if you hadn't." He appeared to work it out for Mr. Cashmore's benefit. "But I don't mind,"

he added, "your telling mamma."

"Don't mind, you mean really, its annoying her so awfully?"

The invitation to repent thrown off in this could only strike the young man as absurd--it was so previous to any enjoyment. Harold liked things in their proper order; but at the same time his evolutions were quick.

"I dare say I AM selfish, but what I was thinking was that the terrific wigging, don't you know?--well, I'd take it from HER. She knows about one's life--about our having to go on, by no fault of our own, as our parents start us. She knows all about wants--no one has more than mamma."

Mr. Cashmore soundlessly glared his amus.e.m.e.nt. "So she'll say it's all right?"

"Oh no; she'll let me have it hot. But she'll recognise that at such a pa.s.s more must be done for a fellow, and that may lead to something--indirectly, don't you see? for she won't TELL my father, she'll only, in her own way, work on him--that will put me on a better footing and for which therefore at bottom I shall have to thank YOU!"

The eye a.s.sisted by Mr. Cashmore's gla.s.s had with a discernible growth of something like alarm fixed during this address the subject of his beneficence. The thread of their relations somehow lost itself in the subtler twist, and he fell back on mere stature, position and property, things always convenient in the presence of crookedness. "I shall say nothing to your mother, but I think I shall be rather glad you're not a son of mine."

Harold wondered at this new element in their talk. "Do your sons never--?"

"Borrow money of their mother's visitors?" Mr. Cashmore had taken him up, eager, evidently, quite to satisfy him; but the question was caught on the wing by Mrs. Brookenham herself, who had opened the door as her friend spoke and who quickly advanced with an echo of it.

"Lady f.a.n.n.y's visitors?"--and, though her eyes rather avoided than met his own, she seemed to cover her ladys.h.i.+p's husband with a vague but practised sympathy. "What on earth are you saying to Harold about them?"

Thus it was that at the end of a few minutes Mr. Cashmore, on the sofa face to face with her, found his consciousness quite purged of its actual sense of his weakness and a new turn given to the idea of what, in one's very drawing-room, might go on behind one's back. Harold had quickly vanished--had been tacitly disposed of, and Mrs. Brook's caller had moved even in the short s.p.a.ce of time so far in another direction as to have drawn from her the little cold question: "'Presents'? You don't mean money?"

He clearly felt the importance of expressing at least by his silence and his eye-gla.s.s what he meant. "Her extravagance is beyond everything, and though there are bills enough, G.o.d knows, that do come in to me, I don't see how she pulls through unless there are others that go elsewhere."

Mrs. Brookenham had given him his tea--her own she had placed on a small table near her; and she could now respond freely to the impulse felt, on this, of settling herself to something of real interest. Except to Harold she was incapable of reproach, though there were of course shades in her resignation, and her daughter's report of her to Mr. Longdon as conscious of an absence of prejudice would have been justified for a spectator by the particular feeling that Mr. Cashmore's speech caused her to disclose. What did this feeling wonderfully appear unless strangely irrelevant? "I've no patience when I hear you talk as if you weren't horribly rich."

He looked at her an instant as if guessing she might have derived that impression from Harold. "What has that to do with it? Does a rich man enjoy any more than a poor his wife's making a fool of him?"

Her eyes opened wider: it was one of her very few ways of betraying amus.e.m.e.nt. There was little indeed to be amused at here except his choice of the particular invidious name. "You know I don't believe a word you say."

Mr. Cashmore drank his tea, then rose to carry the cup somewhere and put it down, declining with a motion any a.s.sistance. When he was on the sofa again he resumed their intimate talk. "I like tremendously to be with you, but you mustn't think I've come here to let you say to me such dreadful things as that." He was an odd compound, Mr. Cashmore, and the air of personal good health, the untarnished bloom which sometimes lent a monstrous serenity to his mention of the barely mentionable, was on occasion balanced or matched by his playful application of extravagant terms to matters of much less moment. "You know what I come to you for, Mrs. Brook: I won't come any more if you're going to be horrid and impossible."