The Awkward Age (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1899)/Book 4/Chapter 14

by Henry James

XIV

Mrs. Brookenham, who had introduced him to the elder of her visitors, had also found, in serving these gentlemen with tea, a chance to edge at him with an intensity not to be resisted: "Talk to Mr. Longdon—take him off there." She had indicated the sofa at the opposite end of the room, and had set him an example by possessing herself, in the place she already occupied, of her "adored" Vanderbank. This arrangement, however, when she had made it, constituted for her, in her own corner, the ground of an instant appeal. "Will he hate me any worse for doing that?"

Vanderbank glanced at the others. "Will Cashmore, do you mean?"

"Dear no—I don't care whom he hates. But with Mr. Longdon I want to avoid mistakes."

"Then don't try quite so hard!" Vanderbank laughed. "Is that your reason for throwing him into Cashmore's arms?"

"Yes, precisely—so that I shall have these few moments to ask you for directions: you must know him, by this time, so well. I only want, Heaven help me, to be as nice to him as I possibly can."

"That's quite the best thing for you and altogether why, this afternoon, I brought him: he might have better luck in finding you—it was he who suggested it—than he has had by himself. I'm in a general way," Vanderbank added, "watching over him."

"I see—and he's watching over you." Mrs. Brook's lovely vacancy had already taken in so much. "He wants to judge of what I may be doing to you—he wants to save you from me. He quite detests me."

Vanderbank, with the interest as well as the amusement, fairly threw himself back. "There's nobody like you—you're too magnificent!"

"I am; and that I can look the truth in the face and not be angry or silly about it is, as you know, the one thing in the world for which I think a bit well of myself."

"Oh yes, I know—I know; you're too wonderful!"

Mrs. Brookenham, in a brief pause, completed her consciousness. "They're doing beautifully—he's taking Cashmore with a seriousness!"

"And with what is Cashmore taking him?"

"With the hope that, from one moment to another, Nanda may come in."

"But how on earth does that concern him?"

"Through an extraordinary fancy he has suddenly taken to her." Mrs. Brook had been swift to master the facts. "He has been meeting her at Tishy's, and she has talked to him so effectually about his behavior that she has quite made him cease to think about Carrie. He prefers her now—and of course she's much nicer."

Vanderbank's attention, it was clear, had now been fully seized. "She's much nicer. Rather! What you mean is," he asked the next moment, "that Nanda, this afternoon, has been the object of his call?"

"Yes—really; though he tried to keep it from me. She makes him feel," she went on, "so innocent and good."

Her companion, for a moment, said nothing; and then at last: "And will she come in?"

"I haven't the least idea."

"Don't you know where she is?"

"I suppose she's with Tishy, who has returned to town."

Vanderbank turned this over. "Is that your system now—to ask no questions?"

"Why should I ask any—when I want her life to be as much as possible like my own? It's simply that the hour has struck, as you know. From the moment she is down, the only thing for us is to live as friends. I think it's so vulgar," Mrs. Brook sighed, "not to have the same good manners with one's children as one has with other people. She asks me nothing."

"Nothing?" Vanderbank echoed.

"Nothing."

He paused again; after which, "It's very disgusting!" he exclained. Then as she took it up as he had taken her word of a moment before, "It's very preposterous," he continued.

Mrs. Brook appeared at a loss. "Do you mean her helping him?"

"It's not of Nanda I'm speaking—it's of him." Vanderbank spoke with a certain impatience. "His being with her in any sort of direct relation at all. His mixing her up with his not very tidy muddles."

Mrs. Brook looked intelligent and wan about it, but also perfectly good-humored. "My dear man, he is such a perfect ass!"

Vanderbank laughed in spite of himself. "And does that make it any better?"

Mrs. Brook thought, but presently had a light—she almost smiled with it. "For us." Then more wofully, "Don't you want Carrie to be saved?" she asked.

"Why should I? Not a jot. Carrie be hanged!"

"But it's for Fanny," Mrs. Brook protested. "If Carrie is rescued, it's a pretext the less for her." As the young man looked for an instant rather gloomily vague she softly quavered. "I suppose you don't positively want her to bolt?"

"To bolt?"

"Surely I've not to remind you at this time of day how Captain Dent-Douglas is always round the corner with the post-chaise, and how tight, on our side, we're all clutching her."

"But why not let her go?"

Mrs. Brook, at this, showed a sentiment more sharp. "'Go'? Then what would become of us?" She recalled his wandering fancy. "She's the delight of our life."

"Oh!" Vanderbank sceptically murmured.

"She's the ornament of our circle," his companion insisted. "She will, she won't—she won't, she will! It's the excitement, every day, of plucking the daisy over." Vanderbank's attention, as she spoke, had attached itself, across the room, to Mr. Longdon; it gave her thus an image of the way his imagination had just seemed to her to stray, and she saw a reason in it moreover for her coming up in another place. "Isn't he rather rich?" She allowed the question all its effect of abruptness.

Vanderbank looked round at her. "I haven't the least idea."

"Not after becoming so intimate? It's usually, with people, the very first thing I get my impression of." There came into her face, for another glance at their friend, no crudity of curiosity, but an expression more tenderly wistful. "He must have some mysterious box under his bed."

"Down in Suffolk?—a miser's hoard? Who knows? I dare say," Vanderbank went on. "He isn't a miser, but he strikes me as careful."

Mrs. Brook meanwhile had thought it out. "Then he has something to be careful of; it would take something really handsome to inspire in a man like him that sort of interest. With his small expenses all these years, his savings must be immense. And how could he have proposed to mamma unless he had originally had money?"

If Vanderbank hesitated he also laughed. "You must remember your mother refused him."

"Ah, but not because there was not enough."

"No—I imagine the force of the blow, for him, was just in the other reason."

"Well, it would have been in that one, just as much, if that one had been the other." Mrs. Brook was sagacious, though a trifle obscure, and she pursued the next moment: "Mamma was so sincere. The fortune was nothing to her. That shows it was immense."

"It couldn't have been as great as your logic," Vanderbank smiled; "but of course if it has been growing ever since—!"

"I can see it grow while he sits there," Mrs. Brook declared. But her logic had in fact its own law, and her next transition was an equal jump. "It was too lovely, the frankness of your admission a minute ago that I affect him uncannily. Ah, don't spoil it by explanations!" she beautifully pleaded; "he's not the first and he won't be the last with whom I shall not have been what they call a combination. The only thing that matters is that I shouldn't, if possible, make the case worse. So you must guide me. What is one to do?"

Vanderbank, now amused again, looked at her kindly. "Be yourself, my dear woman. Obey your fine instincts."

"How can you be," she sweetly asked, "so hideously hypocritical? You know as well as you sit there that my fine instincts are the thing in the world you're most in terror of. 'Be myself?" she echoed. "What you would like to say is: 'Be somebody else—that's your only chance.' Well, I'll try—I'll try."

He laughed again, shaking his head. "Don't— don't."

"You mean it's too hopeless? There's no way of effacing the bad impression or of starting a good one?" On this, with a drop of his mirth, he met her eyes, and for an instant, through the superficial levity of their talk, they might have appeared to sound each other. It lasted till Mrs. Brook went on: "I should really like not to lose him."

Vanderbank hesitated, but at last he said: "I think you won't lose him."

"Do you mean you'll help me. Van—you will?" Her voice had at moments the most touching tones of any in England, and, humble, helpless, affectionate, she spoke with a familiarity of friendship. "It's for the sense of the link with mamma," she explained. "He's simply full of her."

"Oh, I know. He's prodigious."

"He has told you more—he comes back to it?" Mrs. Brook eagerly asked.

"Well," the young man replied a trifle evasively, "we've had a great deal of talk, and he's the jolliest old boy possible, and in short I like him."

"I see," said Mrs. Brook blandly, "and he likes you, in return, as much as he despises me. That makes it all right—makes me somehow so happy for you. There's something in him—what is it?—that suggests the oncle d'Amérique, the eccentric benefactor, the fairy godmother. He's a little of an old woman—but all the better for it." She hung fire but an instant before she pursued: "What can we make him do for you?"

Vanderbank, at this, was very blank. "Do for me?"

"How can any one love you," she asked, "without wanting to show it in some way? You know all the ways, dear Van," she breathed, "in which I want to show it."

He might have known them, something suddenly fixed in his face appeared to say, but they were not what was, on this speech of hers, most immediately present to him. "That, for instance, is the tone not to take with him."

"There you are!" she sighed with discouragement. "Well, only tell me." Then as he said nothing: "I must be more like mamma?"

His smile confessed to his feeling an awkwardness. "You're perhaps not quite enough like her."

"Oh, I know that if he deplores me as I am now, she would have done so quite as much, in fact probably, as seeing it nearer, a good deal more. She would have despised me even more than he. But if it's a question," Mrs. Brook went on, "of not saying what mamma wouldn't, how can I know, don't you see? what she would have said?" Mrs. Brook became as wonderful as if she saw in her friend's face some admiring reflection of the fine freedom of mind that—in such a connection quite as much as in any other—she could always show. "Of course I revere mamma just as much as he does, and there was everything in her to revere. But she was none the less, in every way, a charming woman too, and I don't know, after all, do I? what even she—in their peculiar relation—may not have said to him."

Vanderbank's laugh came back. "Very good—very good. I return to my first idea. Try with him whatever comes into your head. You're a woman of genius, after all, and genius mostly justifies itself. To make you right," he went on pleasantly and inexorably, "might perhaps be to make you wrong. Since you have so great a charm, trust it not at all or all in all. That, I dare say, is all you can do. Therefore—yes—be yourself."

These remarks were followed on either side by the repetition of a somewhat intenser mutual gaze, though indeed the speaker's eyes had more the air of meeting his friend's than of seeking them. "I can't be you, certainly, Van." Mrs. Brook sadly brought forth.

"I know what you mean by that," he rejoined in a moment. "You mean I'm hypocritical."

"Hypocritical?"

"I'm diplomatic and calculating—I don't show him how bad I am; whereas with you he knows the worst."

Of this observation Mrs. Brook, whose eyes attached themselves again to Mr. Longdon, took at first no further notice than might have been indicated by the way it set her musing. "'Calculating'?"—she at last took him up. "On what is there to calculate?"

"Why," said Vanderbank, "if, as you just hinted, he's a blessing in disguise—! I perfectly admit," he resumed, "that I'm capable of sacrifices to keep on good terms with him."

"You're not afraid he'll bore you?"

"Oh yes—distinctly."

"But it will be worth it? Then," Mrs. Brook said, as he appeared to assent, "it will be worth a great deal." She continued to watch Mr. Longdon, who, without his glasses, stared straight at the floor while Mr. Cashmore talked to him. She pursued, however, dispassionately enough: "He must be of a narrowness—!"

"Oh, beautiful!"

She was silent again. "I shall broaden him. You won't."

"Heaven forbid!" Vanderbank heartily concurred. "But none the less, as I've said, I'll help you."

Her attention was still fixed. "It will be him you'll help. If you're to make sacrifices to keep on good terms with him, the first sacrifice will be of me." Then on his leaving this remark so long unanswered that she had finally looked at him again: "I'm perfectly prepared for it."

It was as if, jocosely enough, he had had time to make up his mind how to meet her. "What will you have—when he loved my mother?"

Nothing could have been droller than the gloom of her surprise. "Yours too?"

"I didn't tell you the other day—out of delicacy."

Mrs. Brookenham darkly thought. "He didn't tell me either."

"The same consideration deterred him. But if I didn't speak of it," Vanderbank continued, "when I arranged with you, after meeting him here at dinner, that you should come to tea with him at my rooms—if I didn't mention it then it wasn't because I hadn't learnt it early."

Mrs. Brook more deeply sounded this affair, but she spoke with the exaggerated mildness which was the form her gaiety mostly took. "It was because, of course, it makes him out such a wretch! What becomes in that case of his loyalty—?"

"To your mother's memory? Oh, it's all right—he has it quite clear. She came later—mine, after my father's death, had refused him. But, you see, he might have been my step-father."

Mrs. Brookenham took it in, but she had suddenly a brighter light. "He might have been my own father! Besides," she went on, "if his line is to love the mothers, why on earth doesn't he love me? I'm in all conscience enough of one."

"Ah, but isn't there in your case the fact of a daughter?" Vanderbank asked with a slight embarrassment.

Mrs. Brookenham stared. "What good does that do me?"

"Why, didn't she tell you?"

"Nanda? She told me he doesn't like her any better than he likes me."

Vanderbank, in his turn, showed surprise. "That's really what she said?"

"She had on her return from your rooms a most unusual fit of frankness, for she generally tells me nothing."

"Well," said Vanderbank, "how did she put it?"

Mrs. Brook reflected—recovered it. "'I like him awfully, but I'm not in the least his idea.'"

"His idea of what?"

"That's just what I asked her. Of the proper grandchild for mamma."

Vanderbank hesitated. "Well, she isn't." Then after another pause: "But she'll do."

His companion gave him a deep look. "You'll make her?"

He got up, and on seeing him move Mr. Longdon also rose, so that, facing each other across the room, they exchanged a friendly signal or two. "I'll make her."