“I wish to heaven you’d leave me—I wish to heaven you’d get out of the house,” Mrs. Brookenham went on without looking up.
Harold took out his watch. “Well, mamma, now I AM ready: I wasn’t in the least before. But it will be going forth, you know, quite to seek my fortune. For do you really think—I must have from you what you do think—that it will be all right for me?”
She fixed him at last with her pretty pathos. “You mean for you to go to Brander?”
“You know,” he answered with his manner as of letting her see her own attitude, “you know you try to make me do things you wouldn’t at all do yourself. At least I hope you wouldn’t. And don’t you see that if I so far oblige you I must at least be paid for it?”
His mother leaned back in her chair, gazed for a moment at the ceiling and then closed her eyes. “You ARE frightful,” she said. “You’re appalling.”
“You’re always wanting to get me out of the house,” he continued; “I think you want to get us ALL out, for you manage to keep Nanda from showing even more than you do me. Don’t you think your children good ENOUGH, mummy dear? At any rate it’s as plain as possible that if you don’t keep us at home you must keep us in other places. One can’t live anywhere for nothing—it’s all bosh that a fellow saves by staying with people. I don’t know how it is for a lady, but a man’s practically let in—”
“Do you know you kill me, Harold?” Mrs. Brookenham woefully interposed. But it was with the same remote melancholy that she asked in the next breath: “It wasn’t an INVITATION—to Brander?”
“It’s as I told you. She said she’d write, fixing a time; but she never did write.”
“But if YOU wrote—”
“It comes to the same thing? DOES it?—that’s the question. If on my note she didn’t write—that’s what I mean. Should one simply take it that one’s wanted? I like to have these things FROM you, mother. I do, I believe, everything you say; but to feel safe and right I must just HAVE them. Any one WOULD want me, eh?”
Mrs. Brookenham had opened her eyes, but she still attached them to the cornice. “If she hadn’t wanted you she’d have written to keep you off. In a great house like that there’s always room.”
The young man watched her a moment. “How you DO like to tuck us in and then sit up yourself! What do you want to do, anyway? What ARE you up to, mummy?”
She rose at this, turning her eyes about the room as if from the extremity of martyrdom or the wistfulness of some deep thought. Yet when she spoke it was with a different expression, an expression that would have served for an observer as a marked illustration of that disconnectedness of her parts which frequently was laughable even to the degree of contributing to her social success. “You’ve spent then more than four pounds in five days. It was on Friday I gave them to you. What in the world do you suppose is going to become of me?”
Harold continued to look at her as if the question demanded some answer really helpful. “Do we live beyond our means?”
She now moved her gaze to the floor. “Will you PLEASE get away?”
“Anything to assist you. Only, if I SHOULD find I’m not wanted—?”
She met his look after an instant, and the wan loveliness and vagueness of her own had never been greater. “BE wanted, and you won’t find it. You’re odious, but you’re not a fool.”
He put his arms about her now for farewell, and she submitted as if it was absolutely indifferent to her to whose bosom she was pressed. “You do, dearest,” he laughed, “say such sweet things!” And with that he reached the door, on opening which he pulled up at a sound from below. “The Duchess! She’s coming up.”
Mrs. Brookenham looked quickly round the room, but she spoke with utter detachment. “Well, let her come.”
“As I’d let her go. I take it as a happy sign SHE won’t be at Brander.” He stood with his hand on the knob; he had another quick appeal. “But after Tuesday?”
Mrs. Brookenham had passed half round the room with the glide that looked languid but that was really a remarkable form of activity, and had given a transforming touch, on sofa and chairs, to three or four crushed cushions. It was all with the hanging head of a broken lily. “You’re to stay till the twelfth.”
“But if I AM kicked out?”
It was as a broken lily that she considered it. “Then go to the Mangers.”
“Happy thought! And shall I write?”
His mother raised a little more a window-blind. “No—I will.”
“Delicious mummy!” And Harold blew her a kiss.
“Yes, rather”—she corrected herself. “Do write—from Brander. It’s the sort of thing for the Mangers. Or even wire.”
“Both?” the young man laughed. “Oh you duck!” he cried. “And from where will YOU let them have it?”
“From Pewbury,” she replied without wincing. “I’ll write on Sunday.”
“Good. How d’ye do, Duchess?”—and Harold, before he disappeared, greeted with a rapid concentration of all the shades of familiarity a large high lady, the visitor he had announced, who rose in the doorway with the manner of a person used to arriving on thresholds very much as people arrive at stations—with the expectation of being “met.”
II
“Good-bye. He’s off,” Mrs. Brookenham, who had remained quite on her own side of the room, explained to her friend.
“Where’s he off to?” this friend enquired with a casual advance and a look not so much at her hostess as at the cushions just rearranged.
“Oh to some places. To Brander to-day.”
“How he does run about!” And the Duchess, still with a glance hither and yon, sank upon the sofa to which she had made her way unaided. Mrs. Brookenham knew perfectly the meaning of this glance: she had but three or four comparatively good pieces, whereas the Duchess, rich with the spoils of Italy, had but three or four comparatively bad. This was the relation, as between intimate friends, that the Duchess visibly preferred, and it was quite groundless, in Buckingham Crescent, ever to enter the drawing-room with an expression suspicious of disloyalty. The Duchess was a woman who so cultivated her passions that she would have regarded it as disloyal to introduce there a new piece of furniture in an underhand way—that is without a full appeal to herself, the highest authority, and the consequent bestowal of opportunity to nip the mistake in the bud. Mrs. Brookenham had repeatedly asked herself where in the world she might have found the money to be disloyal. The Duchess’s standard was of a height—! It matched for that matter her other elements, which were wontedly conspicuous as usual as she sat there suggestive of early tea. She always suggested tea before the hour, and her friend always, but with so different a wistfulness, rang for it. “Who’s to be at Brander?” she asked.
“I haven’t the least idea—he didn’t tell me. But they’ve always a lot of people.”
“Oh I know—extraordinary mixtures. Has he been there before?”
Mrs. Brookenham thought. “Oh yes—if I remember—more than once. In fact her note—which he showed me, but which only mentioned ‘some friends’—was a sort of appeal on the ground of something or other that had happened the last time.”
The Duchess dealt with it. “She writes the most extraordinary notes.”
“Well, this was