The Awkward Age, Henry James [red white and royal blue hardcover .TXT] 📗

on her own part no account of any awkwardness: it seemed the greater from the fact that she was almost unnaturally grave, and it overflowed in the immediate challenge: “Do you mean to say Van isn’t here? I’ve come without mother—she said I could, to see HIM,” she went on, addressing herself more particularly to Mitchy. “But she didn’t say I might do anything of that sort to see YOU.”

If there was something serious in Nanda and something blank in their companion, there was, superficially at least, nothing in Mr. Mitchett but his usual flush of gaiety. “Did she really send you off this way alone?” Then while the girl’s face met his own with the clear confession of it: “Isn’t she too splendid for anything?” he asked with immense enjoyment. “What do you suppose is her idea?” Nanda’s eyes had now turned to Mr. Longdon, whom she fixed with her mild straightness; which led to Mitchy’s carrying on and repeating the appeal. “Isn’t Mrs. Brook charming? What do you suppose is her idea?”

It was a bound into the mystery, a bound of which his fellow visitor stood quite unconscious, only looking at Nanda still with the same coldness of wonder. All expression had for the minute been arrested in Mr. Longdon, but he at last began to show that it had merely been retarded. Yet it was almost with solemnity that he put forth his hand. “How do you do? How do you do? I’m so glad!”

Nanda shook hands with him as if she had done so already, though it might have been just her look of curiosity that detracted from her air of amusing herself. “Mother has wanted me awfully to see you. She told me to give you her love,” she said. Then she added with odd irrelevance: “I didn’t come in the carriage, nor in a cab nor an omnibus.”

“You came on a bicycle?” Mitchy enquired.

“No, I walked.” She still spoke without a gleam. “Mother wants me to do everything.”

“Even to walk!” Mitchy laughed. “Oh yes, we must in these times keep up our walking!” The ingenious observer just now suggested might even have detected in the still higher rise of this visitor’s spirits a want of mere inward ease.

She had taken no notice of the effect upon him of her mention of her mother, and she took none, visibly, of Mr. Longdon’s manner or of his words. What she did while the two men, without offering her, either, a seat, practically lost themselves in their deepening vision, was to give her attention all to the place, looking at the books, pictures and other significant objects, and especially at the small table set out for tea, to which the servant who had admitted her now returned with a steaming kettle. “Isn’t it charming here? Will there be any one else? Where IS Mr. Van? Shall I make tea?” There was just a faint quaver, showing a command of the situation more desired perhaps than achieved, in the very rapid sequence of these ejaculations. The servant meanwhile had placed the hot water above the little silver lamp and left the room.

“Do you suppose there’s anything the matter? Oughtn’t the man—or do you know our host’s room?” Mr. Longdon, addressing Mitchy with solicitude, yet began to show in a countenance less blank a return of his sense of relations. It was as if something had happened to him and he were in haste to convert the signs of it into an appearance of care for the proprieties.

“Oh,” said Mitchy, “Van’s only making himself beautiful”—which account of their absent entertainer gained a point from his appearance at the moment in the doorway furthest removed from the place where the three were gathered.

Vanderbank came in with friendly haste and with something of the look indeed—refreshed, almost rosy, brightly brushed and quickly buttoned— of emerging, out of breath, from pleasant ablutions and renewals. “What a brute to have kept you waiting! I came back from work quite begrimed. How d’ye do, how d’ye do, how d’ye do? What’s the matter with you, huddled there as if you were on a street-crossing? I want you to think this a refuge—but not of that kind!” he laughed. “Sit down, for heaven’s sake; lie down—be happy! Of course you’ve made acquaintance all—except that Mitchy’s so modest! Tea, tea!”—and he bustled to the table, where the next minute he appeared rather helpless. “Nanda, you blessed child, do YOU mind making it? How jolly of you!—are you all right?” He seemed, with this, for the first time, to be aware of somebody’s absence. “Your mother isn’t coming? She let you come alone? How jolly of her!” Pulling off her gloves Nanda had come immediately to his assistance; on which, quitting the table and laying hands on Mr. Longdon’s shoulder to push him toward a sofa, he continued to talk, to sound a note of which the humour was the exaggeration of his flurry. “How jolly of you to be willing to come—most awfully kind! I hope she isn’t ill? Do, Mitchy, lie down. Down, Mitchy, down!—that’s the only way to keep you.” He had waited for no account of Mrs. Brookenham’s health, and it might have been apparent—still to our sharp spectator— that he found nothing wonderful in her daughter’s unsupported arrival.

“I can make tea beautifully,” she said from behind her table. “Mother showed me how this morning.”

“This morning?”—and Mitchy, who, before the fire and still erect, had declined to be laid low, greeted the simple remark with uproarious mirth. “Dear young lady, you’re the most delicious family!”

“She showed me at breakfast about the little things to do. She thought I might have to make it here and told me to offer,” the girl went on. “I haven’t yet done it this way at home—I usually have my tea upstairs. They bring it up in a cup, all made and very weak, with a piece of bread-and-butter in the saucer. That’s because I’m so young. Tishy never lets me touch hers either; so we had to make up for lost time. That’s what mother said”—she followed up her story, and her young distinctness had clearly something to do with a certain pale concentration in Mr. Longdon’s face. “Mother isn’t ill, but she told me already yesterday she wouldn’t come. She said it’s really all for ME. I’m sure I hope it is!” —with which there flickered in her eyes, dimly but perhaps all the more prettily, the first intimation they had given of the light of laughter. “She told me you’d understand, Mr. Van—from something you’ve said to her. It’s for my seeing Mr. Longdon without—she thinks—her spoiling it.”

“Oh my dear child, ‘spoiling it’!” Vanderbank protested as he took a cup of tea from her to carry to their friend. “When did your mother ever spoil anything? I told her Mr. Longdon wanted to see you, but I didn’t say anything of his not yearning also for the rest of the family.”

A sound of protest rather formless escaped from the gentleman named, but Nanda continued to carry out her duty. “She told me to ask why he hadn’t been again to see her. Mr. Mitchy, sugar?—isn’t that the way to say it? Three lumps? You’re like me, only that I more often take five.” Mitchy had dashed forward for his tea; she gave it to him; then she added with her eyes on Mr. Longdon’s, which she had had no difficulty in catching: “She told me to ask you all sorts of things.”

This acquaintance had got up to take his cup from Vanderbank, whose hand, however, dealt with him on the question of his sitting down again. Mr. Longdon, resisting, kept erect with a low gasp that his host only was near enough to catch. This suddenly appeared to confirm an impression gathered by Vanderbank in their contact, a strange sense that his visitor was so agitated as to be trembling in every limb. It brought to his own lips a kind of ejaculation—“I SAY!” But even as he spoke Mr. Longdon’s face, still white, but with a smile that was not all pain, seemed to supplicate him not to notice; and he was not a man to require more than this to achieve a divination as deep as it was rapid. “Why we’ve all been scattered for Easter, haven’t we?” he asked of Nanda. “Mr. Longdon has been at home, your mother and father have been paying visits, I myself have been out of London, Mitchy has been to Paris, and you—oh yes, I know where you’ve been.”

“Ah we all know that—there has been such a row made about it!” Mitchy said.

“Yes, I’ve heard of the feeling there is,” Nanda replied.

“It’s supposed to be awful, my knowing Tishy—quite too awful.”

Mr. Longdon, with Vanderbank’s covert aid, had begun to appear to have pulled himself together, dropping back on his sofa and attending in a manner to his tea. It might have been with the notion of showing himself at ease that he turned, on this, a benevolent smile to the girl. “But what, my dear, is the objection—?”

She looked gravely from him to Vanderbank and to Mitchy, and then back again from one of these to the other. “Do you think I ought to say?”

They both laughed and they both just appeared uncertain, but Vanderbank spoke first. “I don’t imagine, Nanda, that you really know.”

“No—as a family, you’re perfection!” Mitchy broke out. Before the fire again, with his cup, he addressed his hilarity to Mr. Longdon. “I told you a tremendous lot, didn’t I? But I didn’t tell you about that.”

His elder maintained, yet with a certain vagueness, the attitude of amiable enquiry. “About the—a—family?”

“Well,” Mitchy smiled, “about its ramifications. This young lady has a tremendous friendship—and in short it’s all very complicated.”

“My dear Nanda,” said Vanderbank, “it’s all very simple. Don’t believe a word of anything of the sort.”

He had spoken as with the intention of a large vague optimism; but there was plainly something in the girl that would always make for lucidity. “Do you mean about Carrie Donner? I DON’T believe it, and at any rate I don’t think it’s any one’s business. I shouldn’t have a very high opinion of a person who would give up a friend.” She stopped short with the sense apparent that she was saying more than she meant, though, strangely, as if it had been an effect of her type and of her voice, there was neither pertness nor passion in the profession she had just made. Curiously wanting as she seemed both in timidity and in levity, she was to a certainty not self-conscious—she was extraordinarily simple. Mr. Longdon looked at her now with an evident surrender to his extreme interest, and it might well have perplexed him to see her at once so downright as from experience and yet of so fresh and sweet a tenderness of youth.

“That’s right, that’s right, my dear young lady: never, never give up a friend for anything any one says!” It was Mitchy who rang out with this lively wisdom, the action of which on Mr. Longdon—unless indeed it was the action of something else—was to make that personage, in a manner that held the others watching him in slight suspense, suddenly spring to his feet again, put down his teacup carefully on a table near and then without a word, as if no one had been present, quietly wander away and disappear through the door left open on Vanderbank’s entrance. It opened into a second, a smaller sitting-room, into which the eyes of his companions followed him.

“What’s the matter?” Nanda asked. “Has he been taken ill?”

“He IS ‘rum,’ my dear Van,” Mitchy said; “but you’re right—of a charm, a distinction! In short just the sort of thing we