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.”

“And why the devil, altogether, SHOULD I?”

“Ah because you distinctly want to,” said Nanda ever so kindly. “You’ve

admitted as much when we’ve talked--”

“Oh but when HAVE we talked?” he sharply interrupted.

This time he had challenged her so straight that it was her own look

that strayed. “When?”

“When.”

She hesitated. “When HAVEN’T we?”

“Well, YOU may have: if that’s what you call talking--never saying a

word. But I haven’t. I’ve only to do at any rate, in the way of reasons,

with my own.”

“And yours too then remain? Because, you know,” the girl pursued, “I AM

like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like what he thinks.” Then so gravely that it was almost a

supplication, “Don’t tell me,” she added, “that you don’t KNOW what he

thinks. You do know.”

Their eyes, on that strange ground, could meet at last, and the effect

of it was presently for Mr. Longdon. “I do know.”

“Well?”

“Well!” He raised his hands and took her face, which he drew so close to

his own that, as she gently let him, he could kiss her with solemnity

on the forehead. “Come!” he then very firmly said--quite indeed as if it

were a question of their moving on the spot.

It literally made her smile, which, with a certain compunction, she

immediately corrected by doing for him in the pressure of her lips

to his cheek what he had just done for herself. “To-day?” she more

seriously asked.

He looked at his watch. “To-morrow.”

She paused, but clearly for assent. “That’s what I mean by your taking

me as I am. It IS, you know, for a girl--extraordinary.”

“Oh I know what it is!” he exclaimed with an odd fatigue in his

tenderness.

But she continued, with the shadow of her scruple, to explain. “We’re

many of us, we’re most of us--as you long ago saw and showed you

felt--extraordinary now. We can’t help it. It isn’t really our fault.

There’s so much else that’s extraordinary that if we’re in it all so

much we must naturally be.” It was all obviously clearer to her than

ever yet, and her sense of it found renewed expression; so that she

might have been, as she wound up, a very much older person than her

friend. “Everything’s different from what it used to be.”

“Yes, everything,” he returned with an air of final indoctrination.

“That’s what he ought to have recognised.”

“As YOU have?” Nanda was once more--and completely now--enthroned in

high justice. “Oh he’s more old-fashioned than you.”

“Much more,” said Mr. Longdon with a queer face.

“He tried,” the girl went on--“he did his best. But he couldn’t. And

he’s so right--for himself.”

Her visitor, before meeting this, gathered in his hat and stick, which

for a minute occupied his attention. “He ought to have married--!”

“Little Aggie? Yes,” said Nanda.

They had gained the door, where Mr. Longdon again met her eyes. “And

then Mitchy--!”

But she checked him with a quick gesture. “No--not even then!”

So again before he went they were for a minute confronted. “Are you

anxious about Mitchy?”

She faltered, but at last brought it out. “Yes. Do you see? There I am.”

“I see. There we are. Well,” said Mr. Longdon--“to-morrow.”