The Awkward Age Part 35

"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 circ.u.mstances 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 circ.u.mstances' 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 gla.s.ses. "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, pa.s.sing 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 embarra.s.sed. He wants not to be an a.s.s 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 c.o.xcomb?--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 pa.s.sage 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 gus.h.i.+ng 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.