“And you think poor I can make him not admit it?” She put the question as if it were really her own thought too, but they were a couple who could, even face to face and unlike the augurs behind the altar, think these things without laughing. “If he SHOULD admit it,” Mrs. Brookenham threw in, “will you give me the money?”
“The money?”
“To pay Mitchy back.”
She had now raised her eyes to her husband, but, turning away, he failed to meet them. “He’ll deny it.”
“Well, if they all deny it,” she presently remarked, “it’s a simple enough matter. I’m sure I don’t want them to come down on us! But that’s the advantage,” she almost prattled on, “of having so many such charming friends. They DON’T come down.”
This again was a remark of a sweep that there appeared to be nothing in Brookenham’s mind to match; so that, scarcely pausing in the walk he had resumed, he only said: “Who do you mean by ‘all’?”
“Why if he has had anything from Mitchy I dare say he has had something from Van.”
“Oh!” Brookenham returned as if with a still deeper drop of interest.
“They oughtn’t to do it,” she declared; “they ought to tell us, and when they don’t it serves them right.” Even this observation, however, failed to rouse in her husband a response, and, as she had quite formed the habit of doing, she philosophically answered herself. “But I don’t suppose they do it on spec.”
It was less apparent than ever what Edward supposed. “Oh Van hasn’t money to chuck about.”
“Ah I only mean a sovereign here and there.”
“Well,” Brookenham threw out after another turn, “I think Van, you know, is your affair.”
“It ALL seems to be my affair!” she lamented too woefully to have other than a comic effect. “And of course then it will be still more so if he should begin to apply to Mr. Longdon.”
“We must stop that in time.”
“Do you mean by warning Mr. Longdon and requesting him immediately to tell us? That won’t be very pleasant,” Mrs. Brookenham noted.
“Well then wait and see.”
She waited only a minute—it might have appeared she already saw. “I want him to be kind to Harold and can’t help thinking he will.”
“Yes, but I fancy that that will be his notion of it—keeping him from making debts. I dare say one needn’t trouble about him,” Brookenham added. “He can take care of himself.”
“He appears to have done so pretty well all these years,” she mused. “As I saw him in my childhood I see him now, and I see now that I saw then even how awfully in love he was with mamma. He’s too lovely about mamma,” Mrs. Brookenham pursued.
“Oh!” her husband replied.
The vivid past held her a moment. “I see now I must have known a lot as a child.”
“Oh!” her companion repeated.
“I want him to take an interest in us. Above all in the children. He ought to like us”—she followed it up. “It will be a sort of ‘poetic justice.’ He sees the reasons for himself and we mustn’t prevent it.” She turned the possibilities over, but they produced a reserve. “The thing is I don’t see how he CAN like Harold.”
“Then he won’t lend him money,” said Brookenham with all his grimness.
This contingency too she considered. “You make me feel as if I wished he would—which is too dreadful. And I don’t think he really likes ME!” she went on.
“Oh!” her husband again ejaculated. “I mean not utterly REALLY. He has to try to. But it won’t make any difference,” she next remarked. “Do you mean his trying?”
“No, I mean his not succeeding. He’ll be just the same.” She saw it steadily and saw it whole. “On account of mamma.”
Brookenham also, with his perfect propriety, put it before himself. “And will he—on account of your mother—also like ME?”
She weighed it. “No, Edward.” She covered him with her loveliest expression. “No, not really either. But it won’t make any difference.” This time she had pulled him up.
“Not if he doesn’t like Harold or like you or like me?” Edward clearly found himself able to accept only the premise.
“He’ll be perfectly loyal. It will be the advantage of mamma!” Mrs. Brookenham cried. “Mamma, Edward,” she brought out with a flash of solemnity—“mamma WAS wonderful. There have been times when I’ve always felt her still with us, but Mr. Longdon makes it somehow so real. Whether she’s with me or not, at any rate, she’s with HIM; so that when HE’S with me, don’t you see—?”
“It comes to the same thing?” her husband intelligently asked. “I see. And when was he with you last?”
“Not since the day he dined—but that was only last week. He’ll come soon—I know from Van.”
“And what does Van know?”
“Oh all sorts of things. He has taken the greatest fancy to him.”
“The old boy—to Van?”
“Van to Mr. Longdon. And the other way too. Mr. Longdon has been most kind to him.”
Brookenham still moved about. “Well, if he likes Van and doesn’t like US, what good will that do us?”
“You’d understand soon enough if you felt Van’s loyalty.”
“Oh the things you expect me to feel, my dear!” Edward Brookenham lightly moaned.
“Well, it doesn’t matter. But he IS as loyal to me as Mr. Longdon to mamma.”
The statement produced on his part an unusual vision of the comedy of things. “Every Jenny has her Jockey!” Yet perhaps—remarkably enough—there was even more imagination in his next words. “And what sort of means?”
“Mr. Longdon? Oh very good. Mamma wouldn’t have been the loser. Not that she cared. He MUST like Nanda,” Mrs. Brookenham wound up.
Her companion appeared to look at the idea and then meet it. “He’ll have to see her first.”
“Oh he shall see her!” she rang out. “It’s time for her at any rate to sit downstairs.”
“It was time, you know, I thought, a year ago.”
“Yes, I know what you thought. But it wasn’t.”
She had spoken with decision, but he seemed unwilling to concede the point. “You allowed yourself she was all ready.”
“SHE was all ready—yes. But I wasn’t. I am now,” Mrs. Brookenham, with a fine emphasis on her adverb, proclaimed as she turned to meet the opening of the door and the appearance of the butler, whose announcement—“Lord Petherton and Mr. Mitchett”—might for an observer have seemed immediately to offer support to her changed state.
IV
Lord Petherton, a man of five-and-thirty, whose robust but symmetrical proportions gave to his dark blue double-breasted coat an air of tightness that just failed of compromising his tailor, had for his main facial sign a certain pleasant brutality, the effect partly of a bold handsome parade of carnivorous teeth, partly of an expression of nose suggesting that this feature had paid a little, in the heat of youth, for some aggression at the time admired and even publicly commemorated. He would have been ugly, he substantively granted, had he not been happy; he would have been dangerous had he not been warranted. Many things doubtless performed for him this last service, but none so much as the delightful sound of his voice, the voice, as it were,