He wonderfully glared. “Am I then already frightening you?” He shook his head rather sadly. “I’m not in the least trying yet. There’s something,” he added after an instant, “that I do want too awfully to ask you.”
“Well then—!” If she had not eagerness she had at least charity.
“Oh but you see I reflect that though you show all the courage to go to the roots and depths with ME, I’m not—I never have been—fully conscious of the nerve for doing as much with you. It’s a question,” Mitchy explained, “of how much—of a particular matter—you know.”
She continued ever so kindly to face him. “Hasn’t it come out all round now that I know everything?”
Her reply, in this form, took a minute or two to operate, but when it began to do so it fairly diffused a light. Mitchy’s face turned of a colour that might have been produced by her holding close to it some lantern wonderfully glazed. “You know, you know!” he then rang out.
“Of course I know.”
“You know, you know!” Mitchy repeated.
“Everything,” she imperturbably went on, “but what you’re talking about.”
He was silent a little, his eyes on her. “May I kiss your hand?”
“No,” she answered: “that’s what I call wild.”
He had risen with his question and after her reply he remained a moment on the spot. “See—I’ve frightened you. It proves as easy as that. But I only wanted to show you and to be sure for myself. Now that I’ve the mental certitude I shall never wish otherwise to use it.” He turned away to begin again one of his absorbed revolutions. “Mr. Longdon has asked you this time for a grand public adhesion, and what he turns up for now is to receive your ultimatum? A final irrevocable flight with him is the line he advises, so that he’ll be ready for it on the spot with the post-chaise and the pistols?”
The image appeared really to have for Nanda a certain vividness, and she looked at it a space without a hint of a smile. “We shan’t need any pistols, whatever may be decided about the post-chaise; and any flight we may undertake together will need no cover of secrecy or night. Mother, as I’ve told you—”
“Won’t fling herself across your reckless path? I remember,” said Mitchy—“you alluded to her magnificent resignation. But father?” he oddly demanded.
Nanda thought for this a moment longer. “Well, Mr. Longdon has—off in the country—a good deal of shooting.”
“So that Edward can sometimes come down with his old gun? Good then too—if it isn’t, as he takes you by the way, to shoot YOU. You’ve got it all shipshape and arranged, in other words, and have only, if the fancy does move you, to clear out. You clear out—you make all sorts of room. It IS interesting,” Mitchy exclaimed, “arriving thus with you at the depths! I look all round and see every one squared and every one but one or two suited. Why then reflexion and delay?”
“You don’t, dear Mr. Mitchy,” Nanda took her time to return, “know nearly as much as you think.”
“But isn’t my question absolutely a confession of ignorance and a renunciation of thought? I put myself from this moment forth with you,” Mitchy declared, “on the footing of knowing nothing whatever and of receiving literally from your hands all information and all life. Let my continued attitude of dependence, my dear Nanda, show it. Any hesitation you may yet feel, you imply, proceeds from a sense of duties in London not to be lightly renounced? Oh,” he thoughtfully said, “I do at least know you HAVE them.”
She watched him with the same mildness while he vaguely circled about. “You’re wild, you’re wild,” she insisted. “But it doesn’t in the least matter. I shan’t abandon you.”
He stopped short. “Ah that’s what I wanted from you in so many clear-cut golden words—though I won’t in the least of course pretend that I’ve felt I literally need it. I don’t literally need the big turquoise in my neck-tie; which incidentally means, by the way, that if you should admire it you’re quite welcome to it. Such words—that’s my point—are like such jewels: the pride, you see, of one’s heart. They’re mere vanity, but they help along. You’ve got of course always poor Tishy,” he continued.
“Will you leave it all to ME?” Nanda said as if she had not heard him.
“And then you’ve got poor Carrie,” he went on, “though HER of course you rather divide with your mother.”
“Will you leave it all to ME?” the girl repeated.
“To say nothing of poor Cashmore,” he pursued, “whom you take ALL, I believe, yourself?”
“Will you leave it all to ME?” she once more repeated.
This time he pulled up, suddenly and expressively wondering. “Are you going to do anything about it at present?—I mean with our friend?”
She appeared to have a scruple of saying, but at last she produced it. “Yes—he doesn’t mind now.”
Mitchy again laughed out. “You ARE, as a family—!” But he had already checked himself. “Mr. Longdon will at any rate, you imply, be somehow interested—”
“In MY interests? Of course—since he has gone so far. You expressed surprise at my wanting to wait and think; but how can I not wait and not think when so much depends on the question—now so definite—of how much further he WILL go?”
“I see,” said Mitchy, profoundly impressed. “And how much does that depend on?”
She had to reflect. “On how much further I, for my part, MUST!”
Mitchy’s grasp was already complete. “And he’s coming then to learn from you how far this is?”
“Yes—very much.”
Mitchy looked about for his hat. “So that of course I see my time’s about up, as you’ll want to be quite alone together.”
Nanda glanced at the clock. “Oh you’ve a margin yet.”
“But you don’t want an interval for your thinking—?”
“Now that I’ve seen you?” Nanda was already very obviously thoughtful.
“I mean if you’ve an important decision to take.”
“Well,” she returned, “seeing you HAS helped me.”
“Ah but at the same time worried you. Therefore—” And he picked up his umbrella.
Her eyes rested on its curious handle. “If you cling to your idea that I’m frightened you’ll be disappointed. It will never be given you to reassure me.”
“You mean by that that I’m primarily so solid—!”
“Yes, that till I see you yourself afraid—!”
“Well?”
“Well, I won’t admit that anything isn’t exactly what I was prepared for.”
Mitchy looked with interest into his hat. “Then what is it I’m to ‘leave’ to you?” After which, as she turned away from him with a suppressed sound and said, while he watched her, nothing else, “It’s no doubt natural for you to talk,” he went on, “but I do make you nervous. Good-bye—good-bye.”
She had stayed him, by a fresh movement, however, as he reached the door. “Aggie’s only trying to find out—!”
“Yes—what?” he asked, waiting.
“Why what sort of a person she is. How can she ever have known? It was carefully, elaborately hidden from her—kept so obscure that she could make out nothing. She isn’t now like ME.”
He wonderingly attended. “Like you?”
“Why I get the benefit of the fact that there was never a time when I didn’t know SOMETHING or other, and that I became more and more aware, as I grew older, of a hundred little chinks of daylight.”
Mitchy stared. “You’re stupendous, my dear!” he murmured.
Ah but she kept it up. “
I
had my idea about Aggie.”
“Oh don’t I know you had? And how you were positive about the sort of person—!”
“That she didn’t even suspect herself,” Nanda broke in, “to be? I’m equally positive now. It’s quite what I believed, only there’s ever so much more of it. More HAS come—and more will yet. You see, when there has been nothing before, it all has to come with a rush. So that if even I’m surprised of course she is.”
“And of course
I
am!” Mitchy’s interest, though even now not wholly unqualified with amusement, had visibly deepened. “You admit then,” he continued, “that you’re surprised?”
Nanda just hesitated. “At the mere scale of it. I think it’s splendid. The only person whose astonishment I don’t quite understand,” she added, “is Cousin Jane.”
“Oh Cousin Jane’s astonishment serves her right!”
“If she held so,” Nanda pursued, “that marriage should do everything—!”
“She shouldn’t be in such a funk at finding what it IS doing? Oh no, she’s the last one!” Mitchy declared. “I vow I enjoy her scare.”
“But it’s very bad, you know,” said Nanda.
“Oh too awful!”
“Well, of course,” the girl appeared assentingly to muse, “she couldn’t after all have dreamed—!” But she took herself up. “The great thing is to be helpful.”
“And in what way—?” Mitchy asked with his wonderful air of inviting competitive suggestions.
“Toward Aggie’s finding herself. Do you think,” she immediately continued, “that Lord Petherton really is?”
Mitchy frankly considered. “Helpful? Oh he does his best, I gather. Yes,” he presently added—“Petherton’s all right.”
“It’s you yourself, naturally,” his companion threw off, “who can help most.”
“Certainly, and I’m doing my best too. So that with such good assistance”—he seemed at last to have taken it all from her—“what is it, I again ask, that, as you request, I’m to ‘leave’ to you?”
Nanda required, while he still waited, some time to reply. “To keep my promise.”
“Your promise?”
“Not to abandon you.”
“Ah,” cried Mitchy, “that’s better!”
“Then good-bye,” she said.
“Good-bye.” But he came a few steps forward. “I MAYN’T kiss your hand?”
“Never.”
“Never?”
“Never.”
“Oh!” he oddly sounded as he quickly went out.
IV
The interval he had represented as likely to be useful to her was in fact, however, not a little abbreviated by a punctuality of arrival on Mr. Longdon’s part so extreme as to lead the first thing to a word almost of apology. “You can’t say,” her new visitor immediately began, “that I haven’t left you alone, these many days, as much as I promised on coming up to you that afternoon when after my return to town I found Mr. Mitchett instead of your mother awaiting me in the drawing-room.”
“Yes,” said Nanda, “you’ve really done quite as I asked you.”
“Well,” he returned, “I felt half an hour ago that, near as I was to relief, I could keep it up no longer; so that though I knew it would bring me much too soon I started at six sharp for our trysting-place.”
“And I’ve no tea, after all, to reward you!” It was but now clearly that she noticed it. “They must have removed the things without my heeding.”
Her old friend looked at her with some intensity. “Were you in the room?”
“Yes—but I didn’t see the man come in.”
“What then were you doing?”
Nanda thought; her smile was as usual the faintest discernible outward sign. “Thinking of YOU.”
“So tremendously hard?”
“Well, of other things too and of other persons. Of everything really that in our last talk I told you I felt I must have out with myself before meeting you for what I suppose you’ve now in mind.”
Mr. Longdon had kept his eyes on her, but at this he turned away; not, however, for an alternative, embracing her material situation with the embarrassed optimism of Vanderbank or the mitigated gloom of Mitchy. “Ah”—he took her up with some dryness—“you’ve been having things out with yourself?” But he went on before she answered: “I don’t want any tea, thank you. I found myself, after five, in such a fidget that I went three times in the course of the hour to my club, where I’ve the impression I each time had it. I dare say it wasn’t there, though, I did have it,” he after an instant pursued, “for I’ve somehow a confused image of a shop in Oxford Street—or was it rather in Regent?—into which I gloomily wandered to beguile the moments with a mixture that if I strike you as upset I beg you to set it all down to. Do you know in fact what I’ve been doing for the last ten minutes? Roaming hither and thither in your beautiful Crescent till I could venture to come in.”
“Then did you see Mitchy go out? But no, you wouldn’t”—Nanda corrected herself. “He has been gone longer than that.”
Her visitor had dropped on a sofa where, propped by the back, he sat rather upright, his glasses on his nose, his hands in his pockets and his elbows much turned out. “Mitchy left you more than ten minutes ago, and yet your state on his departure remains such that there could be a bustle of servants in the room without your being aware? Kindly give me a lead then as to what it is he has done to you.”
She hovered before him with her obscure smile. “You see it for yourself.”
He shook his head with decision. “I don’t see anything for myself, and I beg you to understand that it’s not what I’ve come here to-day to do. Anything I may yet see which I don’t already see will be only, I warn you, so far as you shall make it very clear. There—you’ve work cut out. And is it with Mr. Mitchett, may I ask, that you’ve been, as you mention, cutting it?”
Nanda looked about her as if weighing many things; after which her eyes came back to him. “Do you mind if I don’t sit down?”
“I don’t mind if you stand on your head—at the pass we’ve come to.”
“I shall not try your patience,” the girl good-humouredly replied, “so far as that. I only want you not to be worried if I walk about a little.”
Mr. Longdon, without a movement, kept his posture. “Oh I can’t oblige you there. I SHALL be worried. I’ve come on purpose to be worried, and the more I surrender myself to the rack the more, I seem to feel, we shall have threshed our business out. So you may dance, you may stamp, if you like, on the absolutely passive thing you’ve made of me.”
“Well, what I HAVE had from Mitchy,” she cheerfully responded, “is practically a lesson in dancing: by which I perhaps mean rather a lesson in sitting, myself, as I want you to do while
I
talk, as still as a mouse. They take,” she declared, “while THEY talk, an amount of exercise!”
“They?” Mr. Longdon wondered. “Was his wife with him?”
“Dear no—he and Mr. Van.”
“Was Mr. Van with him?”
“Oh no—before, alone. All over the place.”
Mr. Longdon had a pause so rich in appeal that when he at last spoke his question was itself like an answer. “Mr. Van has been to see you?”
“Yes. I wrote and asked him.”
“Oh!” said Mr. Longdon.
“But don’t get up.” She raised her hand. “Don’t.”
“Why should I?” He had never budged.
“He was most kind; stayed half an hour and, when I told him you were coming, left a good message for you.”
Mr. Longdon appeared to wait for this tribute, which was not immediately produced. “What do you call a ‘good’ message?”
“I’m to make it all right with you.”
“To make what?”
“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, God knows, that you’re not also a young man.”
“Then we’re suited all round.”
She had spoken with a promptitude 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 God!” 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 wishing 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 assent 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 God 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 attitude 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 assure 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 passion 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.
“Well, but HE does you justice—he knows. So it shows, so it shows—!”
But in this direction too, unable to say what it showed, she had again broken down and again could only hold herself and let her companion sit there. “Ah Nanda, Nanda!” he deeply murmured; and the depth of the pity was, vainly and blindly, as the depth of a reproach.
“It’s I—it’s I, therefore,” she said as if she must then so look at it with him; “it’s I who am the horrible impossible and who have covered everything else with my own impossibility. For some different person you COULD have done what you speak of, and for some different person you can do it still.”
He stared at her with his barren sorrow. “A person different from him?”
“A person different from ME!”
“And what interest have I in any such person?”
“But your interest in me—you see well enough where THAT lands us.”
Mr. Longdon now got to his feet and somewhat stiffly remained; after which, for all answer, “You say you WILL come then?” he asked. Then as—seemingly with her last thought—she kept silent: “You understand clearly, I take it, that this time it’s never again to leave me—or to BE left.”
“I understand,” she presently replied. “Never again. That,” she continued, “is why I asked you for these days.”
“Well then, since you’ve taken them—”
“Ah but have YOU?” said Nanda. They were close to each other now, and with a tenderness of warning that was helped by their almost equal stature she laid her hand on his shoulder. “What I did more than anything else write to him for,” she had now regained her clearness enough to explain, “was that—with whatever idea you had—you should see for yourself how he could come and go.”
“And what good was that to do me? HADN’T I seen for myself?”
“Well—you’ve seen once more. Here he was. I didn’t care what he thought. Here I brought him. And his reasons remain.”
She kept her eyes on her companion’s face, but his own now and afterwards seemed to wander far. “What do I care for his reasons so long as they’re not mine?”
She thought an instant, still holding him gently and as if for successful argument. “But perhaps you don’t altogether understand them