The Awkward Age Part 80

"Why, that he has not, for so long, been to see you or written to you.

That he has seemed to neglect you."

Nanda's visitor looked so far about as to take the neighbourhood in general into the confidence of his surprise. "To neglect ME?"

"Well, others too, I believe--with whom we're not concerned. He has been so taken up. But you above all."

Mr. Longdon showed on this a coldness that somehow spoke for itself as the greatest with which he had ever in his life met an act of reparation and that was infinitely confirmed by his sustained immobility. "But of what have I complained?"

"Oh I don't think he fancies you've complained."

"And how could he have come to see me," he continued, "when for so many months past I've been so little in town?"

He was not more ready with objections, however, than his companion had by this time become with answers. "He must have been thinking of the time of your present stay. He evidently has you much on his mind--he spoke of not having seen you."

"He has quite sufficiently tried--he has left cards," Mr. Longdon returned. "What more does he want?"

Nanda looked at him with her long grave straight-ness, which had often a play of light beyond any smile. "Oh, you know, he does want more."

"Then it was open to him--"

"So he so strongly feels"--she quickly took him up--"that you must have felt. And therefore it is I speak for him."

"Don't!" said Mr. Longdon.

"But I promised him I would."

"Don't!" her friend repeated as in stifled pain.

She had kept for the time all her fine clearness turned to him; but she might on this have been taken as giving him up with a movement of obedience and a strange soft sigh. The smothered sound might even have represented to a listener at all initiated a consenting retreat before an effort greater than her reckoning--a retreat that was in so far the snap of a sharp tension. The next minute, none the less, she evidently found a fresh provocation in the sight of the pale and positively excessive rigour she had imposed, so that, though her friend was only accommodating himself to her wish she had a sudden impulse of criticism.

"You're proud about it--too proud!"

"Well, what if I am?" He looked at her with a complexity of communication that no words could have meddled with. "Pride's all right when it helps one to bear things."

"Ah," said Nanda, "but that's only when one wants to take the least from them. When one wants to take the most--!"

"Well?"--he spoke, as she faltered, with a certain small hardness of interest.

She faltered, however, indeed. "Oh I don't know how to say it." She fairly coloured with the attempt. "One must let the sense of all that I speak of--well, all come. One must rather like it. I don't know--but I suppose one must rather grovel."

Mr. Longdon, though with visible reluctance, turned it over. "That's very fine--but you're a woman."

"Yes--that must make a difference. But being a woman, in such a case, has then," Nanda went on, "its advantages."

On this point perhaps her friend might presently have been taken as relaxing. "It strikes me that even at that the advantages are mainly for others. I'm glad, G.o.d knows, that you're not also a young man."

"Then we're suited all round."

She had spoken with a prompt.i.tude that appeared again to act on him slightly as an irritant, for he met it--with more delay--by a long and derisive murmur. "Oh MY pride--!" But this she in no manner took up; so that he was left for a little to his thoughts. "That's what you were plotting when you told me the other day that you wanted time?"

"Ah I wasn't plotting--though I was, I confess, trying to work things out. That particular idea of simply asking Mr. Van by letter to present himself--that particular flight of fancy hadn't in fact then at all occurred to me."

"It never occurred, I'm bound to say, to ME," said Mr. Longdon. "I've never thought of writing to him."

"Very good. But you haven't the reasons. I wanted to attack him."

"Not about me, I hope to G.o.d!" Mr. Longdon, distinctly a little paler, rejoined.

"Don't be afraid. I think I had an instinct of how you would have taken THAT. It was about mother."

"Oh!" said her visitor.

"He has been worse to her than to you," she continued. "But he'll make it all right."

Mr. Longdon's attention retained its grimness. "If he has such a remedy for the more then, what has he for the less?"

Nanda, however, was but for an instant checked.

"Oh it's I who make it up to YOU. To mother, you see, there's no one otherwise to make it up."

This at first unmistakeably sounded to him too complicated for acceptance. But his face changed as light dawned. "That puts it then that you WILL come?"

"I'll come if you'll take me as I am--which is what I must previously explain to you: I mean more than I've ever done before. But what HE means by what you call his remedy is my making you feel better about himself."

The old man gazed at her. "'Your' doing it is too beautiful! And he could really come to you for the purpose of asking you?"

"Oh no," said the girl briskly, "he came simply for the purpose of doing what he HAD to do. After my letter how could he not come? Then he met most kindly what I said to him for mother and what he quite understood to be all my business with him; so that his appeal to me to plead with you for--well, for his credit--was only thrown in because he had so good a chance."

This speech brought Mr. Longdon abruptly to his feet, but before she could warn him again of the patience she continued to need he had already, as if what she evoked for him left him too stupefied, dropped back into submission. "The man stood there for you to render him a service?--for you to help him and praise him?"

"Ah but it wasn't to go out of my way, don't you see? He knew you were presently to be here." Her anxiety that he should understand gave her a rare strained smile. "I mustn't make--as a request from him--too much of it, and I've not a doubt that, rather than that you should think any ill of him for wis.h.i.+ng me to say a word, he would gladly be left with whatever bad appearance he may actually happen to have." She pulled up on these words as with a quick sense of their really, by their mere sound, putting her in deeper; and could only give her friend one of the looks that expressed: "If I could trust you not to a.s.sent even more than I want, I should say 'You know what I mean!'" She allowed him at all events--or tried to allow him--no time for uttered irony before going on: "He was everything you could have wished; quite as beautiful about YOU--"

"As about you?"--Mr. Longdon took her up.

She demurred. "As about mother." With which she turned away as if it handsomely settled the question.

But it only left him, as she went to the window, sitting there sombre.

"I like, you know," he brought out as his eyes followed her, "your saying you're not proud! Thank G.o.d you ARE, my dear. Yes--it's better for us."

At this, after a moment, in her place, she turned round to him. "I'm glad I'm anything--whatever you may call it and though I can't call it the same--that's good for YOU."

He said nothing more for a little, as if by such a speech something in him were simplified and softened. "It would be good for me--by which I mean it would be easier for me--if you didn't quite so immensely care for him."

"Oh!" came from Nanda with an accent of attenuation at once so precipitate and so vague that it only made her att.i.tude at first rather awkward. "Oh!" she immediately repeated, but with an increase of the same effect. After which, conscious, she made, as if to save herself, a quick addition. "Dear Mr. Longdon, isn't it rather yourself most--?"

"It would be easier for me," he went on, heedless, "if you didn't, my poor child, so wonderfully love him."

"Ah but I don't--please believe me when I a.s.sure you I DON'T!" she broke out. It burst from her, flaring up, in a queer quaver that ended in something queerer still--in her abrupt collapse, on the spot, into the nearest chair, where she choked with a torrent of tears. Her buried face could only after a moment give way to the flood, and she sobbed in a pa.s.sion as sharp and brief as the flurry of a wild thing for an instant uncaged; her old friend meantime keeping his place in the silence broken by her sound and distantly--across the room--closing his eyes to his helplessness and her shame. Thus they sat together while their trouble both conjoined and divided them. She recovered herself, however, with an effort worthy of her fall and was on her feet again as she stammeringly spoke and angrily brushed at her eyes. "What difference in the world does it make--what difference ever?" Then clearly, even with the words, her checked tears suffered her to see how it made the difference that he too had been crying; so that "I don't know why you mind!" she thereupon wailed with extravagance.

"You don't know what I would have done for him. You don't know, you don't know!" he repeated--while she looked as if she naturally couldn't--as with a renewal of his dream of beneficence and of the soreness of his personal wound.