There were different ways of meeting such a tone, but Mrs. Brookenham’s choice was remarkably prompt. “I don’t think I quite understand what dreadful joke you may be making, but I dare say if you HAD let Harold borrow you’d have another manner, and I was at any rate determined to have the question out with you.”
“Let us always have everything out—that’s quite my own idea. It’s you,” said Mr. Mitchett, “who are by no means always so frank with me as I recognise—oh, I do THAT!—what it must have cost you to be over this little question of Harold. There’s one thing, Mrs. Brook, you do dodge.”
“What do I ever dodge, dear Mitchy?” Mrs. Brook quite tenderly asked.
“Why, when I ask you about your other child you’re off like a frightened fawn. When have you ever, on my doing so, said ‘my darling Mitchy, I’ll ring for her to be asked to come down so that you can see her for yourself’—when have you ever said anything like that?”
“I see,” Mrs. Brookenham mused; “you think I sacrifice her. You’re very interesting among you all, and I’ve certainly a delightful circle. The Duchess has just been letting me have it most remarkably hot, and as she’s presently coming back you’ll be able to join forces with her.”
Mitchy looked a little at a loss. “On the subject of your sacrifice—”
“Of my innocent and helpless, yet somehow at the same time, as a consequence of my cynicism, dreadfully damaged and depraved daughter.” She took in for an instant the slight bewilderment against which, as a result of her speech, even so expert an intelligence as Mr. Mitchett’s had not been proof; then with a small jerk of her head at the other side of the room made the quickest of transitions. “What IS there between her and him?”
Mitchy wondered at the other two. “Between Edward and the girl?”
“Don’t talk nonsense. Between Petherton and Jane.”
Mitchy could only stare, and the wide noonday light of his regard was at such moments really the redemption of his ugliness. “What ‘is’ there? Is there anything?”
“It’s too beautiful,” Mrs. Brookenham appreciatively sighed, “your relation with him! You won’t compromise him.”
“It would be nicer of me,” Mitchy laughed, “not to want to compromise HER!”
“Oh Jane!” Mrs. Brookenham dropped. “DOES he like her?” she continued. “You must know.”
“Ah it’s just my knowing that constitutes the beauty of my loyalty—of my delicacy.” He had his quick jumps too. “Am I never, never to see the child?”
This enquiry appeared only to confirm his friend in the view of what was touching in him. “You’re the most delicate thing I know, and it crops up with effect the oddest in the intervals of your corruption. Your talk’s half the time impossible; you respect neither age nor sex nor condition; one doesn’t know what you’ll say or do next; and one has to return your books—c’est tout dire—under cover of darkness. Yet there’s in the midst of all this and in the general abyss of you a little deepdown delicious niceness, a sweet sensibility, that one has actually one’s self, shocked as one perpetually is at you, quite to hold one’s breath and stay one’s hand for fear of ruffling or bruising. There’s no one in talk with whom,” she balmily continued, “I find myself half so often suddenly moved to pull up short. You’ve more little toes to tread on—though you pretend you haven’t: I mean morally speaking, don’t you know?—than even I have myself, and I’ve so many that I could wish most of them cut off. You never spare me a shock—no, you don’t do that: it isn’t the form your delicacy takes. But you’ll know what I mean, all the same, I think, when I tell you that there are lots I spare YOU!”
Mr. Mitchett fairly glowed with the candour of his attention. “Know what you mean, dearest lady? How can a man handicapped to death, a man of my origin, my appearance, my general weaknesses, drawbacks, immense indebtedness, all round, for the start, as it were, that I feel my friends have been so good as to allow me: how can such a man not be conscious every moment that every one about him goes on tiptoe and winks at every one else? What CAN you all mention in my presence, poor things, that isn’t personal?”
Mrs. Brookenham’s face covered him for an instant as no painted Madonna’s had ever covered the little charge at the breast beneath it. “And the finest thing of all in you is your beautiful, beautiful pride! You’re prouder than all of us put together.” She checked a motion that he had apparently meant as a protest—she went on with her muffled wisdom. “There isn’t a man but YOU whom Petherton wouldn’t have made vulgar. He isn’t vulgar himself—at least not exceptionally; but he’s just one of those people, a class one knows well, who are so fearfully, in this country, the cause of it in others. For all I know he’s the cause of it in me—the cause of it even in poor Edward. For I’m vulgar, Mitchy dear—very often; and the marvel of you is that you never are.”
“Thank you for everything. Thank you above all for ‘marvel’!” Mitchy grinned.
“Oh I know what I say!”—she didn’t in the least blush. “I’ll tell you something,” she pursued with the same gravity, “if you’ll promise to tell no one on earth. 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