The Awkward Age Part 54

"That culminated in marrying your friend?" Vanderbank asked. "It was charming certainly, and I don't mean to diminish the merit of it. But Aggie herself, I gather, is of a charm now--!"

"Isn't she?"--Nanda was eager. "Hasn't she come out?"

"With a bound--into the arena. But when a young person's out with Mitchy--!"

"Oh you mustn't say anything against that. I've been out with him myself."

"Ah but my dear child--!" Van frankly argued.

It was not, however, a thing to notice. "I knew it would be just so. It always is when they've been like that."

"Do you mean as she apparently WAS? But doesn't it make one wonder a little IF she was?"

"Oh she was--I know she was. And we're also to have Harold," Nanda continued--"another of Mitchy's beneficiaries. It WOULD be a banquet, wouldn't it? if we were to have them all."

Vanderbank hesitated, and the look he fixed on the door might have suggested a certain open attention to the arrival of their hostess or the announcement of other guests. "If you haven't got them all, the beneficiaries, you've got, in having me, I should suppose, about the biggest."

"Ah what has he done for you?" Nanda asked.

Again her friend hung fire. "Do you remember something you said to me down there in August?"

She looked vague but quite unembarra.s.sed. "I remember but too well that I chattered."

"You declared to me that you knew everything."

"Oh yes--and I said so to Mitchy too."

"Well, my dear child, you don't."

"Because I don't know--?"

"Yes, what makes ME the victim of his insatiable benevolence."

"Ah well, if you've no doubt of it yourself that's all that's required.

I'm quite GLAD to hear of something I don't know," Nanda pursued. "And we're to have Harold too," she repeated.

"As a beneficiary? Then we SHALL fill up! Harold will give us a stamp."

"Won't he? I hear of nothing but his success. Mother wrote me that people are frantic for him; and," said the girl after an instant, "do you know what Cousin Jane wrote me?"

"What WOULD she now? I'm trying to think."

Nanda relieved him of this effort. "Why that mother has transferred to him all the scruples she felt--'even to excess'--in MY time, about what we might pick up among you all that wouldn't be good for us."

"That's a neat one for ME!" Vanderbank declared. "And I like your talk about your antediluvian 'time.'"

"Oh it's all over."

"What exactly is it," Vanderbank presently demanded, "that you describe in that manner?"

"Well, my little hour. And the danger of picking up."

"There's none of it here?"

Nanda appeared frankly to judge. "No--because, really, Tishy, don't you see? is natural. We just talk."

Vanderbank showed his interest. "Whereas at your mother's--?"

"Well, you were all afraid."

Vanderbank laughed straight out. "Do you mind my telling her that?"

"Oh she knows it. I've heard her say herself you were."

"Ah _I_ was," he concurred. "You know we've spoken of that before."

"I'm speaking now of all of you," said Nanda. "But it was she who was most so, for she tried--I know she did, she told me so--to control you.

And it was when, you were most controlled--!"

Van's amus.e.m.e.nt took it up. "That we were most detrimental?"

"Yes, because of course what's so awfully unutterable is just what we most notice. Tishy knows that," Nanda wonderfully observed.

As the reflexion of her tone might have been caught by an observer in Vanderbank's face it was in all probability caught by his interlocutress, who superficially, however, need have recognised there--what was all she showed--but the right manner of waiting for dinner. "The better way then is to dash right in? That's what our friend here does?"

"Oh you know what she does!" the girl replied as with a sudden drop of interest in the question. She turned at the moment to the opening of the door.

It was Tishy who at last appeared, and her guest had his greeting ready.

"We're talking of the delicate matters as to which you think it's better to dash right in; but I'm bound to say your inviting a hungry man to dinner doesn't appear to be one of them."

The sign of Tishy Grendon--as it had been often called in a society in which variety of reference had brought to high perfection, for usual safety, the sense of signs--was a r.e.t.a.r.ded facial glimmer that, in respect to any subject, closed up the rear of the procession. It had been said of her indeed that when processions were at all rapid she was usually to be found, on a false impression of her whereabouts, mixed up with the next; so that now, for instance, by the time she had reached the point of saying to Vanderbank "Are you REALLY hungry?" Nanda had begun to appeal to him for some praise of their hostess's appearance.

This was of course with soft looks up and down at her clothes. "Isn't she too nice? Did you ever see anything so lovely?"

"I'm so faint with inanition," Van replied to Mrs. Grendon, "that--like the traveller in the desert, isn't it?--I only make out, as an oasis or a mirage, a sweet green rustling blur. I don't trust you."

"I don't trust YOU," Nanda said on her friend's behalf. "She isn't 'green'--men are amazing: they don't know the dearest old blue that ever was seen."

"IS it your 'OLD blue'?" Vanderbank, monocular, very earnestly asked. "I can imagine it was 'dear,' but I should have thought--!"

"It was yellow"--Nanda helped him out--"if I hadn't kindly told you." Tishy's figure showed the confidence of objects consecrated by publicity; bodily speaking a beautiful human plant, it might have taken the last November gale to account for the completeness with which, in some quarters, she had shed her leaves. Her companions could only emphasise by the direction of their eyes the nature of the responsibility with which a spectator would have seen them saddled--a choice, as to consciousness, between the effect of her being and the effect of her not being dressed. "Oh I'm hideous--of course I know it,"

said Tishy. "I'm only just clean. Here's Nanda now, who's beautiful,"

she vaguely continued, "and Nanda--"

"Oh but, darling, Nanda's clean too!" the young lady in question interrupted; on which her fellow guest could only laugh with her as in relief from the ant.i.thesis of which her presence of mind had averted the completion, little indeed as in Mrs. Grendon's talk that element of style was usually involved.

"There's nothing in such a matter," Vanderbank observed as if it were the least he could decently say, "like challenging enquiry; and here's Harold, precisely," he went on in the next breath, "as clear and crisp and undefiled as a fresh five-pound note."

"A fresh one?"--Harold had pa.s.sed in a flash from his hostess. "A man who like me hasn't seen one for six months could perfectly do, I a.s.sure you, with one that has lost its what-do-you-call it." He kissed Nanda with a friendly peck, then, more completely aware, had a straighter apprehension for Tishy. "My dear child, YOU seem to have lost something, though I'll say for you that one doesn't miss it."