The Awkward Age by Henry James (simple ebook reader txt) 📖

If you’re proud I’m not. There! It’s most extraordinary and I try to conceal it even to myself; but there’s no doubt whatever about it—I’m not proud pour deux sous. And some day, on some awful occasion, I shall show it. So—I notify you. Shall you love me still?”

“To the bitter end,” Mitchy loyally responded. “For how CAN, how need, a woman be ‘proud’ who’s so preternaturally clever? Pride’s only for use when wit breaks down—it’s the train the cyclist takes when his tire’s deflated. When that happens to YOUR tire, Mrs. Brook, you’ll let me know. And you do make me wonder just now,” he confessed, “why you’re taking such particular precautions and throwing out such a cloud of skirmishers. If you want to shoot me dead a single bullet will do.” He faltered but an instant before completing his sense. “Where you really want to come out is at the fact that Nanda loathes me and that I might as well give up asking for her.”

“Are you quite serious?” his companion after a moment resumed. “Do you really and truly like her, Mitchy?”

“I like her as much as I dare to—as much as a man can like a girl when from the very first of his seeing her and judging her he has also seen, and seen with all the reasons, that there’s no chance for him whatever. Of course, with all that, he has done his best not to let himself go. But there are moments,” Mr. Mitchett ruefully added, “when it would relieve him awfully to feel free for a good spin.”

“I think you exaggerate,” his hostess replied, “the difficulties in your way. What do you mean by all the ‘reasons’?”

“Why one of them I’ve already mentioned. I make her flesh creep.”

“My own Mitchy!” Mrs. Brookenham protestingly moaned.

“The other is that—very naturally—she’s in love.”

“With whom under the sun?”

Mrs. Brookenham had, with her startled stare, met his eyes long enough to have taken something from him before he next spoke.

“You really have never suspected? With whom conceivably but old Van?”

“Nanda’s in love with old Van?”—the degree to which she had never suspected was scarce to be expressed. “Why he’s twice her age—he has seen her in a pinafore with a dirty face and well slapped for it: he has never thought of her in the world.”

“How can a person of your acuteness, my dear woman,” Mitchy asked, “mention such trifles as having the least to do with the case? How can you possibly have such a fellow about, so beastly good-looking, so infernally well turned out in the way of ‘culture,’ and so bringing them down in short on every side, and expect in the bosom of your family the absence of history of the reigns of the good kings? If YOU were a girl wouldn’t YOU turn purple? If I were a girl shouldn’t I—unless, as is more likely, I turned green?”

Mrs. Brookenham was deeply affected. “Nanda does turn purple—?”

“The loveliest shade you ever saw. It’s too absurd that you haven’t noticed.”

It was characteristic of Mrs. Brookenham’s amiability that, with her sudden sense of the importance of this new light, she should be quite ready to abase herself. “There are so many things in one’s life. One follows false scents. One doesn’t make out everything at once. If you’re right you must help me. We must see more of her.”

“But what good will that do me?” Mitchy appealed.

“Don’t you care enough for her to want to help HER?” Then before he could speak, “Poor little darling dear!” his hostess tenderly ejaculated. “What does she think or dream? Truly she’s laying up treasure!”

“Oh he likes her,” said Mitchy. “He likes her in fact extremely.”

“Do you mean he has told you so?”

“Oh no—we never mention it! But he likes her,” Mr. Mitchett stubbornly repeated. “And he’s thoroughly straight.”

Mrs. Brookenham for a moment turned these things over; after which she came out in a manner that visibly surprised him. “It isn’t as if you wished to be nasty about him, is it?—because I know you like him yourself. You’re so wonderful to your friends”—oh she could let him see that she knew!—“and in such different and exquisite ways. There are those like HIM”—she signified her other visitor—“who get everything out of you and whom you really appear fond of, or at least to put up with, just FOR that. Then there are those who ask nothing—and whom you’re fond of in spite of it.”

Mitchy leaned back from this, fist within fist, watching her with a certain disguised emotion. He grinned almost too much for mere amusement. “That’s the class to which YOU belong.”

“It’s the best one,” she returned, “and I’m careful to remain in it. You try to get us, by bribery, into the inferior place, because, proud as you are, it bores you a little that you like us so much. But we won’t go—at least I won’t. You may make Van,” she wonderfully continued. “There’s nothing you wouldn’t do for him or give him.” Mitchy admired her from his position, slowly shaking his head with it. “He’s the man— with no fortune and just as he is, to the smallest particular—whom you would have liked to be, whom you intensely envy, and yet to whom you’re magnanimous enough for almost any sacrifice.”

Mitchy’s appreciation had fairly deepened to a flush. “Magnificent, magnificent Mrs. Brook! What ARE you in thunder up to?”

“Therefore, as I say,” she imperturbably went on, “it’s not to do him an ill turn that you make a point of what you’ve just told me.”

Mr. Mitchett for a minute gave no sign but his high colour and his queer glare. “How could it do him an ill turn?”

“Oh it WOULD be a way, don’t you see? to put before me the need of getting rid of him. For he may ‘like’ Nanda as much as you please: he’ll never, never,” Mrs. Brookenham resolutely quavered—“he’ll never come to the scratch. And to feel that as I do,” she explained, “can only be, don’t you also see? to want to save her.”

It would have appeared at last that poor Mitchy did see. “By taking it in time? By forbidding him the house?”

She seemed to stand with little nipping scissors in a garden of alternatives. “Or by shipping HER off. Will you help me to save her?” she broke out again after a moment. “It isn’t true,” she continued, “that she has any aversion to you.”

“Have you charged her with it?” Mitchy demanded with a courage that amounted to high gallantry.

It inspired on the spot his interlocutress, and her own pluck, of as fine a quality now as her diplomacy, which was saying much, fell but little below. “Yes, my dear friend—frankly.”

“Good. Then I know what she said.”

“She absolutely denied it.”

“Oh yes—they always do, because they pity me,” Mitchy smiled. “She said what they always say—that the effect I produce is, though at first upsetting, one that little by little they find it possible to get used to. The world’s full of people who are getting used to me,” Mr. Mitchett concluded.

“It’s what I shall never do, for you’re quite too great a luxury!” Mrs. Brookenham declared. “If I haven’t threshed you out really MORE with Nanda,” she continued, “it has been from a scruple of a sort you people never do a woman the justice to impute. You’re the object of views that have so much more to set them off.”

Mr. Mitchett on this jumped up; he was clearly conscious of his nerves; he fidgeted away a few steps and then, his hands in his pockets, fixed on his hostess a countenance more controlled. “What does the Duchess mean by your daughter’s being—as I understood you to quote her just now—‘damaged and depraved’?”

Mrs. Brookenham came up—she literally rose—smiling. “You fit the cap. You know how she’d like you for little Aggie!”

“What does she mean, what does she mean?” Mitchy repeated.

The door, as he spoke, was thrown open; Mrs. Brookenham glanced round. “You’ve the chance to find out from herself!” The Duchess had come back and little Aggie was in her wake.

V

That young lady, in this relation, was certainly a figure to have offered a foundation for the highest hopes. As slight and white, as delicately lovely, as a gathered garden lily, her admirable training appeared to hold her out to them all as with precautionary finger-tips. She presumed, however, so little on any introduction that, shyly and submissively, waiting for the word of direction, she stopped short in the centre of the general friendliness till Mrs. Brookenham fairly became, to meet her, also a shy little girl—put out a timid hand with wonder-struck innocent eyes that hesitated whether a kiss of greeting might be dared. “Why you dear good strange ‘ickle’ thing, you haven’t been here for ages, but it IS a joy to see you and I do hope you’ve brought your doll!”—such might have been the sense of our friend’s fond murmur while, looking at her up and down with pure pleasure, she drew the rare creature to a sofa. Little Aggie presented, up and down, an arrangement of dress exactly in the key of her age, her complexion, her emphasised virginity. She might have been prepared for her visit by a cluster of doting nuns, cloistered daughters of ancient houses and educators of similar products, whose taste, hereditarily good, had grown, out of the world and most delightfully, so queer as to leave on everything they touched a particular shade of distinction. The Duchess had brought in with the child an air of added confidence for which an observer would in a moment have seen the grounds, the association of the pair being so markedly favourable to each. Its younger member carried out the style of her aunt’s presence quite as one of the accessory figures effectively thrown into old portraits. The Duchess on the other hand seemed, with becoming blandness, to draw from her niece the dignity of a kind of office of state—hereditary governess of the children of the blood. Little Aggie had a smile as softly bright as a Southern dawn, and the friends of her relative looked at each other, according to a fashion frequent in Mrs. Brookenham’s drawing-room, in free exchange of their happy impression. Mr. Mitchett was none the less scantly diverted from his estimate of the occasion Mrs. Brookenham had just named to him.

“My dear Duchess,” he promptly asked, “do you mind explaining to me an opinion I’ve just heard of your—with marked originality—holding?”

The Duchess, her head all in the air, considered an instant her little ivory princess. “I’m always ready, Mr. Mitchett, to defend my opinions; but if it’s a question of going much into the things that are the subjects of some of them perhaps we had better, if you don’t mind, choose our time and our place.”

“No ‘time,’ gracious lady, for my impatience,” Mr. Mitchett replied, “could be better than the present—but if you’ve reasons for wanting a better place why shouldn’t we go on the spot into another room?”

Lord Petherton, at this enquiry, broke into instant mirth. “Well, of all the coolness, Mitchy!—he does go at it, doesn’t he, Mrs. Brook? What do you want to do in another room?” he demanded of his friend. “Upon my word, Duchess, under the nose of those—”

The Duchess, on the first blush, lent herself to the humour of the case. “Well, Petherton, of ‘those’?—I defy him to finish his sentence!” she smiled to the others.

“Of those,” said his lordship, “who flatter themselves that when you do happen to find them somewhere your first idea is not quite to jump at a pretext for getting off somewhere else.