The Awkward Age (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1899)/Book 5/Chapter 20
XX
Late that night, in the smoking-room at Mertle, as the smokers—talkers and listeners alike—were about to disperse, Mr. Longdon asked Vanderbank to stay, and then it was that the young man, to whom all the evening he had not addressed a word, could make out why, a little unnaturally, he had prolonged his vigil. "I've something particular to say to you, and I've been waiting. I hope you don't mind. It's rather important." Vanderbank expressed on the spot the liveliest desire to oblige him and, quickly lighting another cigarette, mounted again to the deep divan with which a part of the place was furnished. The smoking-room at Mertle was not unworthy of the general nobleness, and the fastidious spectator had clearly been reckoned on in the great leather-covered lounge that, raised by a step or two above the floor, applied its back to two quarters of the wall and enjoyed, most immediately, a view of the billiard-table. Mr. Longdon continued for a minute to roam with the air of dissimulated absence that, during the previous hour and among the other men, his companion's eye had not lost; he pushed a ball or two about, examined the form of an ash-stand, swung his glasses almost with violence and declined either to smoke or to sit down. Vanderbank, perched aloft on the bench and awaiting developments, had a little the look of some prepossessing criminal who, in court, should have changed places with the judge. He was unlike many a man of marked good looks in that the effect of evening dress was not, with a perversity often observed in such cases, to overemphasize his fineness. His type was rather chastened than heightened, and he sat there moreover with a primary discretion quite in the note of the deference that, from the first, with this friend of the elder fashion, he had taken as imposed. He had a strong sense for shades of respect and was now careful to loll scarcely more than with an official superior. "If you ask me," Mr. Longdon presently continued, "why, at this hour of the night—after a day at best too heterogeneous—I don't keep over till to-morrow whatever I may have to say, I can only tell you that I appeal to you now because I've something on my mind that I shall sleep the better for being rid of."
There was space to circulate in front of the dais, where he had still paced and still swung his glasses; but with these words he had paused, leaning against the billiard-table, to meet the interested urbanity of the reply they produced. "Are you very sure that, having got rid of it, you will sleep? Is it a pure confidence," Vanderbank said, "that you do me the honor to make to me? Is it something terrific that requires a reply, so that I shall have to take account, on my side, of the rest I may deprive you of?"
"Don't take account of anything—I'm myself a man who always takes too much. It isn't a matter about which I press you for an immediate answer. You can give me no answer, probably, without a good deal of thought. I've thought a good deal—otherwise I wouldn't speak. I only want to put something before you and leave it there."
"I never see you," said Vanderbank, "that you don't put something before me."
"That sounds," his friend returned, "as if I rather overloaded—what's the sort of thing you fellows nowadays say?—your intellectual board. If there's a congestion of dishes, sweep everything, without scruple, away. I've never put before you anything like this."
He spoke with a weight that, in the great space, where it resounded a little, made an impression—an impression marked by the momentary pause that fell between them. He partly broke the silence, first, by beginning to walk again, and then Vanderbank broke it as through the apprehension of their becoming perhaps too solemn. "Well, you immensely interest me, and you really couldn't have chosen a better time. A secret—for we shall make it that, of course, sha'n't we?—at this witching hour, in this great old house, is all that my visit here will have required to make the whole thing a rare remembrance. So, I assure you, the more you put before me the better."
Mr. Longdon took up another ash-tray, but with the air of doing so as a direct consequence of Vanderbank's tone. After he had laid it down, he put on his glasses; then, fixing his companion, he brought out: "Have you no idea at all—?"
"Of what you have in your head? Dear Mr. Longdon, how should I have?"
"Well, I'm wondering if I shouldn't perhaps have a little in your place. There's nothing that, in the circumstances, occurs to you as likely for me to want to say?"
Vanderbank gave a laugh that might have struck an auditor as slightly uneasy. "When you speak of 'the circumstances' you do a thing that—unless you mean the simple thrilling ones of this particular moment—always, of course, opens the door of the lurid for a man of any imagination. To such a man you've only to say 'Boh!' in a certain tone for his conscience to jump. That's at any rate the case with mine. It's never quite on its feet—so it's now, already, on its back." He stopped a little—his smile was a trifle strained. "Is what you want to put before me something awful I've done?"
"Excuse me if I press this point"—Mr. Longdon spoke kindly, but if his friend's want of ease grew his own thereby diminished. "Can you think of nothing at all?"
"Do you mean that I've done?"
"No, but that—whether you've done it or not—I may have become aware of."
There could have been no better proof than Vanderbank's expression, on this, of his having mastered the secret of humoring without appearing to patronize. "I think you ought to give me a little more of a clew."
Mr. Longdon took off his glasses. "Well—the clew's Nanda Brookenham."
"Oh, I see." Vanderbank had responded quickly, but for a minute he said nothing more, and the great marble clock that gave the place the air of a club ticked louder in the stillness. Mr. Longdon waited with a benevolent want of mercy, yet with a look in his face that spoke of what depended for him—though indeed very far within—on the upshot of his patience. The hush, for that matter, between them, became a conscious, public measure of the young man's honesty. He evidently at last felt it as such, and there would have been for an observer of his handsome, controlled face a study of some sharp things. "I judge that you ask me for an utterance," he finally said, "that very few persons, at any time, have the right to expect of a man. Think of the people—and very decent ones—to whom, on many a question, one can only reply at best that it's none of their business.'"
"I see you know what I mean," said Mr. Longdon.
"Then you know also the distinguished exception I make of you. There isn't another man with whom I'd talk of it."
"And even to me you don't! But I'm none the less obliged to you," Mr. Longdon added.
"It isn't only the gravity," his friend went on; "it's the ridicule that inevitably attaches—"
The manner in which Mr. Longdon indicated the empty room was in itself an interruption. "Don't I sufficiently spare you?"
"Thank you, thank you," said Vanderbank.
"Besides, it's not for nothing."
"Of course not!" the young man returned; but with a look of noting, the next moment, a certain awkwardness in his concurrence. "But don't spare me now."
"I don't mean to." Mr. Longdon had his back to the table again, on which he rested with each hand on the rim. "I don't mean to," he repeated.
His companion gave a laugh that betrayed at least the drop of a tension. "Yet I don't quite see what you can do to me."
"It's just what, for some time past, I've been trying to think."
"And at last you've discovered?"
"Well—it has finally glimmered out a little in this extraordinary place."
Vanderbank frankly wondered. "In consequence of anything particular that has happened?"
Mr. Longdon had a pause. "For an old idiot who notices as much as I, something particular is always happening. If you're a man of imagination—"
"Oh," Vanderbank broke in, "I know how much more, in that case, you're one! It only makes me regret." he continued, "that I've not attended more, since yesterday, to what you've been about."
"I've been about nothing but what, among you people, I'm always about. I've been seeing, feeling, thinking. That makes no show, of course I'm aware, for any one but myself, and it's wholly my own affair. Except indeed," he added, "so far as I've taken into my head to make, on it all, this special appeal. There are things that have come home to me."
"Oh, see, I see"—Vanderbank showed the friendliest alertness. "I'm to take it from you then, with all the avidity of my vanity, that I strike you as the person best able to understand what they are."
Mr. Longdon appeared to wonder an instant if his intelligence now had not almost too much of a glitter; he kept the same position, his back against the table, and while Vanderbank, on the settee, pressed, upright, against the wall, they recognized in silence that they were trying each other. "You're much the best of them. I've my ideas about you. You've great gifts."
"Well then, we're worthy of each other. When Greek meets Greek—!" and the young man laughed as, a little with the air of bracing himself, he folded his arms. "Here we are."
His companion looked at him a moment longer, then, turning away, went slowly round the table. On the further side of it he stopped again and, after a minute, with a nervous movement, set a ball or two in motion. "It's beautiful—but it's terrible!" he finally murmured. He had not his eyes on Vanderbank, who for a minute said nothing, and he presently went on: "To see it, and not to want to try to help—well, I can't do that." Vanderbank still neither spoke nor moved, remained as if he might interrupt something of high importance to him, and his friend, passing along the opposite edge of the table, continued to produce in the stillness, without the cue, the small click of the ivory. "How long—if you don't mind my asking—have you known it?"
Even for this, at first, Vanderbank had no answer—none but to rise from his place, come down to the floor and, standing there, look at Mr. Longdon across the table. He was serious now, but without being solemn. "How can one tell? One can never be sure. A man may fancy, may wonder, but with a girl, a person so much younger than himself and so much more helpless, he feels a—what shall I call it?"
"A delicacy?" Mr. Longdon suggested.
"It may be that; the name doesn't matter; at all events he's embarrassed. He wants not to be an ass on the one side, and yet not some other kind of brute on the other."
Mr. Longdon listened with consideration—with a beautiful little air indeed of being, in his all but finally contracted state, earnestly open to information on such points from a magnificent young man. "He doesn't want, you mean, to be fatuous?—and he doesn't want to be cruel?"
Vanderbank, visibly preoccupied, produced a faint, kind smile. "Oh, you know!"
"I? I should know less than any one."
Mr. Longdon had turned away from the table on this, and the eyes of his companion, who after an instant had caught his meaning, watched him move along the room and approach another part of the divan. The consequence of the passage was that Vanderbank's only rejoinder was presently to say: "I can't tell you how long I've imagined—have asked myself. She's so charming—so interesting, and I feel as if I had known her always. I've thought of one thing and another to do—and then, on purpose, I haven't thought at all. That has, mostly, seemed to me best."
"Then I gather," said Mr. Longdon, "that your interest in her—"
"Hasn't the same character as her interest in me?" Vanderbank had taken him up responsively, but, after speaking, looked about for a match and lighted a new cigarette. "I'm sure you understand," he broke out, "what an extreme effort it is to me to talk of such things."
"Yes, yes. But it's just effort, only? It gives you no pleasure? I mean the fact of her passion," Mr. Longdon explained. Vanderbank had really to think a little. "However much it might give me, I should probably not be a fellow to gush. I'm a self-conscious stick of a Briton."
"But even a stick of a Briton—!" Mr. Longdon hesitated. "I've gushed, in short, to you."
"About Lady Julia?" the young man frankly asked. "Is that what you call it?"
"Say then we're sticks of Britons. You're not in any degree at all in love?"
There fell between them, before Vanderbank replied, another pause, of which he took advantage to move once more round the table. Mr. Longdon meanwhile had mounted to the high bench and sat there as if the judge were now in his proper place. At last his companion spoke. "What you're coming to is of course that you've conceived a desire."
"That's it—strange as it may seem. But, believe me, it has not been precipitate. I've watched you both."
"Oh, I knew you were watching her," said Vanderbank.
"To such a tune that I've made up my mind. I want her so to marry—" But on the odd little quaver of longing with which he brought it out the old man fairly hung.
"Well?" said Vanderbank.
"Well, so that on the day she does she'll come into the interest of a considerable sum of money—already very decently invested—that I've determined to settle upon her."
Vanderbank's instant admiration flushed across the room. "How awfully jolly of you—how beautiful!"
"Oh, there's a way to show practically your appreciation of it."
But Vanderbank, for enthusiasm, scarcely heard him. "I can't tell you how admirable I think you." Then eagerly, "Does Nanda know it?" he demanded.
Mr. Longdon, after an hesitation, spoke with comparative dryness. "My idea has been that, for the present, you alone shall."
Vanderbank also hesitated. "No other man?"
His companion looked still graver. "I need scarcely say that I depend on you to keep the fact to yourself."
"Absolutely, then, and utterly. But that won't prevent what I think of it. Nothing, for a long time, has given me such joy."
Shining and sincere, he had held for a minute Mr. Longdon's eyes. "Why, you do care for her."
"Immensely. Never, I think, so much as now. That sounds of a grossness, doesn't it?" he laughed. "But your announcement really lights up the mind."
His friend, for a moment, almost glowed with his pleasure. "The sum I've settled upon would be, I may mention, substantial, and I should of course be prepared with a clear statement—a very definite pledge—of my intentions."
"So much the better! Only"—Vanderbank suddenly pulled himself up—"to get it she must marry?"
"It's not in my interest to allow you to suppose she needn't, and it's only because of my intense wish for her marriage that I've spoken to you."
"And on the ground also, with it"—Vanderbank so far concurred—"of your quite taking for granted my only having to put myself forward?"
If his friend seemed to cast about, it proved but to be for the fullest expression. Nothing, in fact, could have been more charged than the quiet way in which he presently said: "My dear boy, I back you."
Vanderbank, clearly, was touched by it. "How extraordinarily kind you are to me!" Mr. Longdon's silence appeared to reply that he was willing to let it go for that, and the young man next went on: "What it comes to then—as you put it—is that it's a way for me to add something handsome to my income."
Mr. Longdon sat for a little with his eyes attached to the green field of the billiard-table, vivid in the spreading, suspended lamp-light. "I think I ought to tell you the figure I have in mind."
Another person present might have felt rather taxed either to determine the degree of provocation represented by Vanderbank's considerate smile, or to say if there was an appreciable interval before he rang out: "I think, you know, you oughtn't to do anything of the sort. Let that alone, please. The great thing is the interest—the great thing is the wish you express. It represents a view of me, an attitude toward me—!" He pulled up, dropping his arms and turning away, before the complete image.
"There's nothing in those things that need overwhelm you. It would be odd if you hadn't, yourself, about your value and your future, a feeling quite as lively as any feeling of mine. There is mine, at all events. I can't help it. Accept it. Then of the other feeling—how she moves me—I won't speak."
"You sufficiently show it!"
Mr. Longdon continued to watch the bright circle on the table, lost in which a moment he let his friend's answer pass. "I won't begin to you on Nanda."
"Don't,' said Vanderbank. But in the pause that ensued each, in one way or another, might have been thinking of her for himself. It was broken by Mr. Longdon's presently going on: "Of course what it superficially has the air of is my offering to pay you for taking a certain step. It's open to you to be grand and proud—to wrap yourself in your majesty and ask if I suppose you bribeable. I haven't spoken without having thought of that."
"Yes," said Vanderbank sympathetically, "but it isn't as if you proposed to me, is it? anything dreadful. If one cares for a girl one's deucedly glad she has money. The more of anything good she has the better. I may assure you," he added with the brightness of his friendly intelligence and quite as if to show his companion the way to be least concerned—"I may assure you that, once I were disposed to act on your suggestion, I would make short work of any vulgar interpretation of my motive. I should simply try to be as magnificent as yourself." He smoked, he moved about; then he came up in another place. "I dare say you know that dear old Mitchy, under whose blessed roof we're plotting this midnight treason, would marry her like a shot and without a penny."
"I think I know everything—I think I've thought of everything. Mr. Mitchett," Mr. Longdon added, "is impossible."
Vanderbank appeared for an instant to wonder. "Wholly then through her attitude?"
"Altogether."
Again he hesitated. "You've asked her?"
"I've asked her."
Once more Vanderbank faltered. "And that's how you know?"
"About your chance? That's how I know."
The young man, consuming his cigarette with concentration, took again several turns. "And your idea is to give one time?"
Mr. Longdon had, for a minute, to turn his idea over. "How much time do you want?"
Vanderbank gave a head-shake that was both restrictive and indulgent. "I must live into it a little. Your offer has been before me only these few minutes, and it's too soon for me to commit myself to anything whatever. Except," he added gallantly, "my gratitude."
Mr. Longdon, at this, on the divan, got up, as Vanderbank had previously done, under the spring of emotion; only, unlike Vanderbank, he still stood there, his hands in his pockets and his face, a little paler, directed straight. There was disappointment in him even before he spoke. "You've no strong enough impulse—?"
His friend met him with admirable candor. "Wouldn't it seem that if I had I would by this time have taken the jump?"
"Without waiting, you mean, for anybody's money?" Mr. Longdon, for a little, cultivated a doubt. "Of course she has seemed—till now—tremendously young."
Vanderbank looked about once more for matches and occupied a time with relighting. "Till now—yes. But it's not," he pursued, "only because she's so young that—for each of us, and for dear old Mitchy too—she's so interesting." Mr. Longdon had now stepped down, and Vanderbank's eyes followed him till he stopped again. "I make out that, in spite of what you said to begin with, you're conscious of a certain pressure."
"In the matter of time? Oh yes, I do want it done. That," the old man simply explained, "is why I myself put on the screw." He spoke with the ring of impatience. "I want her got out."
"'Out'?"
"Out of her mother's house."
Vanderbank laughed, though, more immediately, he had colored. "Why, her mother's house is just where I see her!"
"Precisely; and if it only were not, we might get on faster."
Vanderbank, for all his kindness, looked still more amused. "But if it only were not, as you say, I seem to see that you wouldn't have your particular vision of urgency."
Mr. Longdon, through adjusted glasses, took him in with a look that was sad as well as sharp, then jerked the glasses off. "Oh, you understand me."
"Ah," said Vanderbank, "I'm a mass of corruption!"
"You may perfectly be, but you shall not," Mr. Longdon returned with decision, "get off on any such plea. If you're good enough for me, you're good enough, as you thoroughly know, on whatever head, for any one."
"Thank you." But Vanderbank, for all his happy appreciation, thought again. "We ought, at any rate to remember, oughtn't we? that we should have Mrs. Brook against us."
His companion faltered but an instant. "Ah, that's another thing I know. But it's also exactly why. Why I want Nanda away."
"I see, I see."
The response had been prompt, yet Mr. Longdon seemed suddenly to show that he suspected the superficial. "Unless it's with Mrs. Brook you're in love." Then on his friend's taking the idea with a mere headshake of negation, a repudiation that might even have astonished by its own lack of surprise, "Or unless Mrs. Brook's in love with you," he amended.
Vanderbank had for this any decent gayety. "Ah, that of course may perfectly be!"
"But is it? That's the question."
He continued light. "If she had declared her passion shouldn't I rather compromise her—?"
"By letting me know?" Mr. Longdon reflected. "I'm sure I can't say—it's a sort of thing for which I haven't a measure or a precedent. In my time women didn't declare their passion. I'm thinking of what the meaning is of Mrs. Brookenham's wanting you—as I've heard it called—herself."
Vanderbank, still with his smile, smoked a minute. "That's what you've heard it called?"
"Yes, but you must excuse me from telling you by whom."
He was amused at his friend's discretion. "It's unimaginable. But it doesn't matter. We all call everything—anything. The meaning of it, if you and I put it so, is—well, a modern shade."
"You must deal then yourself," said Mr. Longdon, "with your modern shades." He spoke now as if the case simply awaited such dealing. But at this his young friend was more grave. "You could do nothing?—to bring, I mean, Mrs. Brook round."
Mr. Longdon fairly started. "Propose, on your behalf, for her daughter? With your authority—to-morrow. Authorize me, and I instantly act."
Vanderbank's color again rose—his flush was complete. "How awfully you want it!"
Mr. Longdon, after a look at him, turned away. "How awfully you don't!"
The young man continued to blush. "No—you must do me justice. You've not made a mistake about me—I see in your proposal all, I think, that you can desire I should. Only you see it much more simply—and yet I can't just now explain. If it were so simple I should say to you in a moment 'Do speak to them for me'—I should leave the matter with delight in your hands. But I require time, let me remind you, and you haven't yet told me how much I may take."
This appeal had brought them again face to face, and Mr. Longdon's first reply to it was a look at his watch, "It's one o'clock."
"Oh, I require"—Vanderbank had recovered his pleasant humor—"more than to-night!"
Mr. Longdon went off to the smaller table that still offered to view two bedroom candles. "You must take of course the time you need. I won't trouble you—I won't hurry you. I'm going to bed."
Vanderbank, overtaking him, lighted his candle for him; after which, handing it and smiling: "Shall we have conduced to your rest?"
Mr. Longdon looked at the other candle. "You're not coming to bed?"
"To my rest we shall not have conduced. I stay up a while longer."
"Good." Mr. Longdon was pleased. "You won't forget then, as we promised, to put out the lights?"
"If you trust me for the greater you can trust me for the less. Good-night."
Vanderbank had put out his hand. "Good-night."
But Mr. Longdon kept him a moment. "You don't care for my figure?"
"Not yet—not yet. Please." Vanderbank seemed really to fear it, but on Mr. Longdon's releasing him with a little drop of disappointment they went together to the door of the room, where they had another pause.
"She's to come down to me—alone—in September."
Vanderbank hesitated. "Then may I come?"
His friend, on this footing, had to consider. "Shall you know by that time?"
"I'm afraid I can't promise—if you must regard my coming as a pledge."
Mr. Longdon thought on; then raising his eyes: "I don't quite see why you won't suffer me to tell you—"
"The detail of your intention? I do then. You've said quite enough. If my visit positively must commit me," Vanderbank pursued, "I'm afraid I can't come."
Mr. Longdon, who had passed into the corridor, gave a dry, sad little laugh. "Come then—as the ladies say—'as you are'!"
On which, rather softly closing the door, Vanderbank remained alone in the great empty, lighted billiard-room.
END OF BOOK FIFTH