The Awkward Age Part 25

Vanderbank's laugh came back. "Very good--very good. I return to my first idea. Try with him whatever comes into your head. You're a woman of genius after all, and genius mostly justifies itself. To make you right," he went on pleasantly and inexorably, "might perhaps be to make you wrong. Since you HAVE so great a charm trust it not at all or all in all. That, I dare say, is all you can do. Therefore--yes--be yourself."

These remarks were followed on either side by the repet.i.tion of a somewhat intenser mutual gaze, though indeed the speaker's eyes had more the air of meeting his friend's than of seeking them. "I can't be YOU certainly, Van," Mrs. Brook sadly brought forth.

"I know what you mean by that," he rejoined in a moment. "You mean I'm hypocritical."

"Hypocritical?"

"I'm diplomatic and calculating--I don't show him how bad I am; whereas with you he knows the worst."

Of this observation Mrs. Brook, whose eyes attached themselves again to Mr. Longdon, took at first no further notice than might have been indicated by the way it set her musing.

"'Calculating'?"--she at last took him up. "On what is there to calculate?"

"Why," said Vanderbank, "if, as you just hinted, he's a blessing in disguise--! I perfectly admit," he resumed, "that I'm capable of sacrifices to keep on good terms with him."

"You're not afraid he'll bore you?"

"Oh yes--distinctly."

"But he'll be worth it? Then," Mrs. Brook said as he appeared to a.s.sent, "he'll be worth a great deal." She continued to watch Mr. Longdon, who, without his gla.s.ses, stared straight at the floor while Mr. Cashmore talked to him. She pursued, however, dispa.s.sionately enough: "He must be of a narrowness--!"

"Oh beautiful!"

She was silent again. "I shall broaden him. YOU won't."

"Heaven forbid!" Vanderbank heartily concurred. "But none the less, as I've said, I'll help you."

Her attention was still fixed. "It will be him you'll help. If you're to make sacrifices to keep on good terms with him the first sacrifice will be of me." Then on his leaving this remark so long unanswered that she had finally looked at him again: "I'm perfectly prepared for it."

It was as if, jocosely enough, he had had time to make up his mind how to meet her. "What will you have--when he loved my mother?"

Nothing could have been droller than the gloom of her surprise. "Yours too?"

"I didn't tell you the other day--out of delicacy."

Mrs. Brookenham darkly thought. "HE didn't tell me either."

"The same consideration deterred him. But if I didn't speak of it,"

Vanderbank continued, "when I arranged with you, after meeting him here at dinner, that you should come to tea with him at my rooms--if I didn't mention it then it wasn't because I hadn't learnt it early."

Mrs. Brook more deeply sounded this affair, but she spoke with the exaggerated mildness that was the form mostly taken by her gaiety. "It was because of course it makes him out such a wretch! What becomes in that case of his loyalty?"

"To YOUR mother's memory? Oh it's all right--he has it quite straight.

She came later. Mine, after my father's death, had refused him. But you see he might have been my stepfather."

Mrs. Brookenham took it in, but she had suddenly a brighter light. "He might have been my OWN father! Besides," she went on, "if his line is to love the mothers why on earth doesn't he love ME? I'm in all conscience enough of one."

"Ah but isn't there in your case the fact of a daughter?" Vanderbank asked with a slight embarra.s.sment.

Mrs. Brookenham stared. "What good does that do me?"

"Why, didn't she tell you?"

"Nanda? She told me he doesn't like her any better than he likes me."

Vanderbank in his turn showed surprise. "That's really what she said?"

"She had on her return from your rooms a most unusual fit of frankness, for she generally tells me nothing."

"Well," said Vanderbank, "how did she put it?"

Mrs. Brook reflected--recovered it. "'I like him awfully, but I am not in the least HIS idea.'"

"His idea of what?"

"That's just what I asked her. Of the proper grandchild for mamma."

Vanderbank hesitated. "Well, she isn't." Then after another pause: "But she'll do."

His companion gave him a deep look. "You'll make her?"

He got up, and on seeing him move Mr. Longdon also rose, so that, facing each other across the room, they exchanged a friendly signal or two.

"I'll make her."

III

Their hostess's account of Mr. Cashmore's motive for his staying on was so far justified as that Vanderbank, while Mr. Longdon came over to Mrs.

Brook, appeared without difficulty further to engage him. The lady in question meanwhile had drawn her old friend down, and her present method of approach would have interested an observer aware of the unhappy conviction she had just privately expressed. Some trace indeed of the glimpse of it enjoyed by Mr. Cashmere's present interlocutor might have been detected in the restlessness that Vanderbank's desire to keep the other pair uninterrupted was still not able to banish from his att.i.tude.

Not, however, that Mrs. Brook took the smallest account of it as she quickly broke out: "How can we thank you enough, my dear man, for your extraordinary kindness?" The reference was vivid, yet Mr. Longdon looked so blank about it that she had immediately to explain. "I mean to dear Van, who has told us of your giving him the great happiness--unless he's too dreadfully mistaken--of letting him really know you. He's such a tremendous friend of ours that nothing so delightful can befall him without its affecting us in the same way." She had proceeded with confidence, but suddenly she pulled up. "Don't tell me he IS mistaken--I shouldn't be able to bear it." She challenged the pale old man with a loveliness that was for the moment absolutely juvenile. "Aren't you letting him--really?"

Mr. Longdon's smile was queer. "I can't prevent him. I'm not a great house--to give orders to go over me. The kindness is Mr. Vanderbank's own, and I've taken up, I'm afraid, a great deal of his precious time."

"You have indeed." Mrs. Brook was undiscouraged. "He has been talking with me just now of nothing else. You may say," she went on, "that it's I who have kept him at it. So I have, for his pleasure's a joy to us. If you can't prevent what he feels, you know, you can't prevent either what WE feel."

Mr. Longdon's face reflected for a minute something he could scarcely have supposed her acute enough to make out, the struggle between his real mistrust of her, founded on the unconscious violence offered by her nature to his every memory of her mother, and his sense on the other hand of the high propriety of his liking her; to which latter force his interest in Vanderbank was a contribution, inasmuch as he was obliged to recognise on the part of the pair an alliance it would have been difficult to explain at Beccles. "Perhaps I don't quite see the value of what your husband and you and I are in a position to do for him."

"Do you mean because he's himself so clever?"

"Well," said Mr. Longdon, "I dare say that's at the bottom of my feeling so proud to be taken up by him. I think of the young men of MY time and see that he takes in more. But that's what you all do," he rather helplessly sighed. "You're very, very wonderful!"

She met him with an almost extravagant eagerness that the meeting should be just where he wished. "I don't take in everything, but I take in all I can. That's a great affair in London to-day, and I often feel as if I were a circus-woman, in pink tights and no particular skirts, riding half a dozen horses at once. We're all in the troupe now, I suppose,"

she smiled, "and we must travel with the show. But when you say we're different," she added, "think, after all, of mamma."

Mr. Longdon stared. "It's from her you ARE different."

"Ah but she had an awfully fine mind. We're not cleverer than she."