The Awkward Age Part 49

It produced for a little a hush between them, at the end of which her companion said with extraordinary gentleness and tenderness: "Dear old Nanda!" Her own silence appeared consciously to continue, and the suggestion of it might have been that for intelligent ears there was nothing to add to the declaration she had just made and which Mitchy sat there taking in as with a new light. What he drew from it indeed he presently went on to show. "You're too awfully interesting. Of course--you know a lot. How shouldn't you--and why?"

"'Why'? Oh that's another affair! But you don't imagine what I know; I'm sure it's much more than you've a notion of. That's the kind of thing now one IS--just except the little marvel of Aggie. What on earth," the girl pursued, "do you take us for?"

"Oh it's all right!" breathed Mitchy, divinely pacific.

"I'm sure I don't know whether it is; I shouldn't wonder if it were in fact all wrong. But what at least is certainly right is for one not to pretend anything else. There I am for you at any rate. Now the beauty of Aggie is that she knows nothing--but absolutely, utterly: not the least little t.i.ttle of anything."

It was barely visible that Mitchy hesitated, and he spoke quite gravely.

"Have you tried her?"

"Oh yes. And Tishy has." His gravity had been less than Nanda's.

"Nothing, nothing." The memory of some scene or some pa.s.sage might have come back to her with a charm. "Ah say what you will--it IS the way we ought to be!"

Mitchy, after a minute of much intensity, had stopped watching her; changing his posture and with his elbows on his knees he dropped for a while his face into his hands. Then he jerked himself to his feet.

"There's something I wish awfully I could say to you. But I can't."

Nanda, after a slow headshake, covered him with one of the dimmest of her smiles. "You needn't say it. I know perfectly which it is." She held him an instant, after which she went on: "It's simply that you wish me fully to understand that you're one who, in perfect sincerity, doesn't mind one straw how awful--!"

"Yes, how awful?" He had kindled, as he paused, with his new eagerness.

"Well, one's knowledge may be. It doesn't shock in you a single hereditary prejudice."

"Oh 'hereditary'--!" Mitchy ecstatically murmured.

"You even rather like me the better for it; so that one of the reasons why you couldn't have told me--though not of course, I know, the only one--is that you would have been literally almost ashamed. Because, you know," she went on, "it IS strange."

"My lack of hereditary--?"

"Yes, discomfort in presence of the fact I speak of. There's a kind of sense you don't possess."

His appreciation again fairly goggled at her. "Oh you do know everything!"

"You're so good that nothing shocks you," she lucidly persisted.

"There's a kind of delicacy you haven't got."

He was more and more struck. "I've only that--as it were--of the skin and the fingers?" he appealed.

"Oh and that of the mind. And that of the soul. And some other kinds certainly. But not THE kind."

"Yes"--he wondered--"I suppose that's the only way one can name it." It appeared to rise there before him. "THE kind!"

"The kind that would make me painful to you. Or rather not me perhaps,"

she added as if to create between them the fullest possible light; "but my situation, my exposure--all the results of them I show. Doesn't one become a sort of a little drain-pipe with everything flowing through?"

"Why don't you call it more gracefully," Mitchy asked, freshly struck, "a little aeolian-harp set in the drawing-room window and vibrating in the breeze of conversation?"

"Oh because the harp gives out a sound, and WE--at least we try to--give out none."

"What you take, you mean, you keep?"

"Well, it sticks to us. And that's what you don't mind!"

Their eyes met long on it. "Yes--I see. I DON'T mind. I've the most extraordinary lacunae."

"Oh I don't know about others," Nanda replied; "I haven't noticed them.

But you've that one, and it's enough."

He continued to face her with his queer mixture of a.s.sent and speculation. "Enough for what, my dear? To have made me impossible for you because the only man you could, as they say, have 'respected' would be a man who WOULD have minded?" Then as under the cool soft pressure of the question she looked at last away from him: "The man with 'THE kind,'

as you call it, happens to be just the type you CAN love? But what's the use," he persisted as she answered nothing, "in loving a person with the prejudice--hereditary or other--to which you're precisely obnoxious? Do you positively LIKE to love in vain?"

It was a question, the way she turned back to him seemed to say, that deserved a responsible answer. "Yes."

But she had moved off after speaking, and Mitchy's eyes followed her to different parts of the room as, with small pretexts of present attention to it, small bestowed touches for symmetry, she slowly measured it.

"What's extraordinary then is your idea of my finding any charm in Aggie's ignorance."

She immediately put down an old snuff-box. "Why--it's the one sort of thing you don't know. You can't imagine," she said as she returned to him, "the effect it will produce on you. You must get really near it and see it all come out to feel all its beauty. You'll like it, Mitchy"--and Nanda's gravity was wonderful--"better than anything you HAVE known."

The clear sincerity of this, even had there been nothing else, imposed a consideration that Mitchy now flagrantly could give, and the deference of his suggestion of difficulty only grew more deep. "I'm to do then, with this happy condition of hers, what you say YOU'VE done--to 'try'

it?" And then as her a.s.sent, so directly challenged, failed an instant: "But won't my approach to it, however cautious, be just what will break it up and spoil it?"

Nanda thought. "Why so--if mine wasn't?"

"Oh you're not me!"

"But I'm just as bad."

"Thank you, my dear!" Mitchy rang out.

"Without," Nanda pursued, "being as good." She had on this, in a different key, her own sudden explosion. "Don't you see, Mitchy dear--for the very heart of it all--how good I BELIEVE you?"

She had spoken as with a flare of impatience at some justice he failed to do her, and this brought him after a startled instant close enough to her to take up her hand. She let him have it, and in mute solemn rea.s.surance he raised it to his lips, saying to her thus more things than he could say in any other way; which yet just after, when he had released it and a motionless pause had ensued, didn't prevent his adding three words. "Oh Nanda, Nanda!"

The tone of them made her again extraordinarily gentle. "Don't 'try'

anything then. Take everything for granted."

He had turned away from her and walked mechanically, with his air of blind emotion, to the window, where for a minute he looked out. "It has stopped raining," he said at last; "it's going to brighten."

The place had three windows, and Nanda went to the next. "Not quite yet--but I think it will."

Mitchy soon faced back into the room, where after a brief hesitation he moved, as quietly, almost as cautiously, as if on tiptoe, to the seat occupied by his companion at the beginning of their talk. Here he sank down watching the girl, who stood a while longer with her eyes on the garden. "You want me, you say, to take her out of the d.u.c.h.ess's life; but where am I myself, if we come to that, but even more IN the d.u.c.h.ess's life than Aggie is? I'm in it by my contacts, my a.s.sociations, my indifferences--all my acceptances, knowledges, amus.e.m.e.nts. I'm in it by my cynicisms--those that circ.u.mstances somehow from the first, when I began for myself to look at life and the world, committed me to and steeped me in; I'm in it by a kind of desperation that I shouldn't have felt perhaps if you had got hold of me sooner with just this touch with which you've got hold of me to-day; and I'm in it more than all--you'll yourself admit--by the very fact that her aunt desires, as you know, much more even than you do, to bring the thing about. Then we SHOULD be--the d.u.c.h.ess and I--shoulder to shoulder!"

Nanda heard him motionless to the end, taking also another minute to turn over what he had said. "What is it you like so in Lord Petherton?"

she asked as she came to him.

"My dear child, if you only could tell me! It would be, wouldn't it?--it must have been--the subject of some fairy-tale, if fairy-tales were made now, or better still of some Christmas pantomime: 'The Gnome and the Giant.'"

Nanda appeared to try--not with much success--to see it. "Do you find Lord Petherton a Gnome?"

Mitchy at first, for all reward, only glared at her. "Charming, Nanda--charming!"