by Henry James
“Unfortunate indeed,” cried the Duchess, “precisely BECAUSE they’re unmarried, and unmarried, if you don’t mind my saying so, a good deal because they’re unmarriageable. Men, after all, the nice ones—by which I mean the possible ones—are not on the lookout for little brides whose usual associates are so up to snuff. It’s not their idea that the girls they marry shall already have been pitchforked—by talk and contacts and visits and newspapers and by the way the poor creatures rush about and all the extraordinary things they do—quite into EVERYTHING. A girl’s most intelligent friend is her mother—or the relative acting as such. Perhaps you consider that Tishy takes your place!”
Mrs. Brookenham waited so long to say what she considered that before she next spoke the question appeared to have dropped. Then she only replied as if suddenly remembering her manners: “Won’t you eat something?” She indicated a particular plate. “One of the nice little round ones?” The Duchess appropriated a nice little round one and her hostess presently went on: “There’s one thing I mustn’t forget—don’t let us eat them ALL. I believe they’re what Lord Petherton really comes for.”
The Duchess finished her mouthful imperturbably before she took this up. “Does he come so often?”
Mrs. Brookenham might have been, for judicious candour, the Muse of History. “I don’t know what he calls it; but he said yesterday that he’d come today. I’ve had tea earlier for you,” she went on with her most melancholy kindness—”and he’s always late. But we mustn’t, between us, lick the platter clean.”
The Duchess entered very sufficiently into her companion’s tone. “Oh I don’t feel at all obliged to consider him, for he has not of late particularly put himself out for me. He has not been to see me since I don’t know when, and the last time he did come he brought Mr. Mitchett.”
“Here it was the other way round. It was Mr. Mitchett, the other year, who first brought Lord Petherton.”
“And who,” asked the Duchess, “had first brought Mr. Mitchett?”
Mrs. Brookenham, meeting her friend’s eyes, looked for an instant as if trying to recall. “I give it up. I muddle beginnings.”
“That doesn’t matter if you only MAKE them,” the Duchess smiled.
“No, does it?” To which Mrs. Brookenham added: “Did he bring Mr. Mitchett for Aggie?”
“If he did they’ll have been disappointed. Neither of them has seen, in my house, the tip of her nose.” The Duchess announced it with a pomp of pride.
“Ah but with your ideas that doesn’t prevent.”
“Prevent what?”
“Why what I suppose you call the pourparlers.”
“For Aggie’s hand? My dear,” said the Duchess, “I’m glad you do me the justice of feeling that I’m a person to take time by the forelock. It was not, as you seem to remember, with the sight of Mr. Mitchett that the question of Aggie’s hand began to occupy me. I should be ashamed of myself if it weren’t constantly before me and if I hadn’t my feelers out in more quarters than one. But I’ve not so much as thought of Mr. Mitchett—who, rich as he may be, is the son of a shoemaker and superlatively hideous—for a reason I don’t at all mind telling you. Don’t be outraged if I say that I’ve for a long time hoped you yourself would find the right use for him.” She paused—at present with a momentary failure of assurance, from which she rallied, however, to proceed with a burst of earnestness that was fairly noble. “Forgive me if I just tell you once for all how it strikes me, I’m stupefied at your not seeming to recognise either your interest or your duty. Oh I know you want to, but you appear to me—in your perfect good faith of course —utterly at sea. They’re one and the same thing, don’t you make out? your interest and your duty. Why isn’t it convincingly plain to you that the thing to do with Nanda is just to marry her—and to marry her soon? That’s the great thing—do it while you CAN. If you don’t want her downstairs—at which, let me say, I don’t in the least wonder—your remedy is to take the right alternative. Don’t send her to Tishy—”
“Send her to Mr. Mitchett?” Mrs. Brookenham unresentfully quavered. Her colour, during her visitor’s address had distinctly risen, but there was no irritation in her voice. “How do you know, Jane, that I don’t want her downstairs?”
The Duchess looked at her with an audacity confirmed by the absence from her face of everything but the plaintive. “There you are, with your eternal English false positions! J’aime, moi, les situations nettes—je rien comprends pas d’autres. It wouldn’t be to your honour—to that of your delicacy—that with your impossible house you SHOULD wish to plant your girl in your drawing-room. But such a way of keeping her out of it as throwing her into a worse—!”
“Well, Jane, you do say things to me!” Mrs. Brookenham blandly broke in. She had sunk back into her chair; her hands, in her lap pressed themselves together and her wan smile brought a tear into each of her eyes by the very effort to be brighter. It might have been guessed of her that she hated to seem to care, but that she had other dislikes too. “If one were to take up, you know, some of the things you say—!” And she positively sighed for the wealth of amusement at them of which her tears were the sign. Her friend could quite match her indifference. “Well, my child, TAKE them up; if you were to do that with them candidly, one by one, you would do really very much what I should like to bring you to. Do you see?” Mrs. Brookenham’s failure to repudiate the vision appeared to suffice, and her visitor cheerfully took a further jump. “As much of Tishy as she wants—AFTER. But not before.”
“After what?”
“Well—say after Mr. Mitchett. Mr. Mitchett won’t take her after Mrs. Grendon.”
“And what are your grounds for assuming that he’ll take her at all?” Then as the Duchess hung fire a moment: “Have you got it by chance from Lord Petherton?”
The eyes of the two women met for a little on this, and there might have been a consequence of it in the manner of what came. “I’ve got it from not being a fool. Men, I repeat, like the girls they marry—”
“Oh I already know your old song! The way they like the girls they DON’T marry seems to be,” Mrs. Brookenham mused, “what more immediately concerns us. You had better wait till you HAVE made Aggie’s fortune perhaps—to be so sure of the working of your system. Pardon me, darling, if I don’t take you for an example until you’ve a little more successfully become one. I know what the sort of men worth speaking of are not looking for. They ARE looking for smart safe sensible English girls.”
The Duchess glanced at the clock. “What’s Mr. Vanderbank looking for?”
Her companion appeared to oblige her by anxiously thinking. “Oh, HE, I’m afraid, poor dear—for nothing at all!”
The Duchess had taken off a glove to appease her appetite, and now, drawing it on, she smoothed it down. “I think he has his ideas.”
“The same as yours?”
“Well, more like them than like yours.”
“Ah perhaps then—for he and I,” said Mrs. Brookenham, “don’t agree, I feel, on two things in the world. So you think poor Mitchy,” she went on, “who’s the son of a shoemaker and who might be the grandson of a grasshopper, good enough for my child.”
The Duchess appreciated for a moment the superior fit of her glove. “I look facts in the face. It’s exactly what I’m doing for Aggie.” Then she grew easy to extravagance. “What are you giving her?”
But Mrs. Brookenham took without wincing whatever, as between a masterful relative and an exposed frivolity, might have been the sting of it. “That you must ask Edward. I haven’t the least idea.”
“There you are again—the virtuous English mother! I’ve got Aggie’s little fortune in an old stocking and I count it over every night. If you’ve no old stocking for Nanda there are worse fates than shoemakers and grasshoppers. Even WITH one, you know, I don’t at all say that I should sniff at poor Mitchy. We must take what we can get and I shall be the first to take it. You can’t have everything for ninepence.” And the Duchess go
t up—shining, however, with a confessed light of fantasy. “Speak to him, my dear—speak to him!”
“Do you mean offer him my child?”
She laughed at the intonation. “There you are once more—vous autres! If you’re shocked at the idea you place drolement your delicacy. I’d offer mine to the son of a chimney-sweep if the principal guarantees were there. Nanda’s charming—you don’t do her justice. I don’t say Mr. Mitchett’s either beautiful or noble, and he certainly hasn’t as much distinction as would cover the point of a pin. He doesn’t mind moreover what he says—the lengths he sometimes goes to!—but that,” added the Duchess with decision, “is no doubt much a matter of how he finds you’ll take it. And after marriage what does it signify? He has forty thousand a year, an excellent idea of how to take care of it and a good disposition.”
Mrs. Brookenham sat still; she only looked up at her friend. “Is it by Lord Petherton that you know of his excellent idea?”
The Duchess showed she was challenged, but also that she made allowances. “I go by my impression. But Lord Petherton HAS spoken for him.”
“He ought to do that,” said Mrs. Brookenham—”since he wholly lives on him.”
“Lord Petherton—on Mr. Mitchett?” The Duchess stared, but rather in amusement than in horror. “Why, hasn’t he a—property?”
“The loveliest. Mr. Mitchett’s his property. Didn’t you KNOW?” There was an artless wail in Mrs. Brookenham’s surprise.
“How should I know—still a stranger as I’m often rather happy to feel myself here and choosing my friends and picking my steps very much, I can assure you—how should I know about all your social scandals and things?”
“Oh we don’t call THAT a social scandal!” Mrs. Brookenham inimitably returned.
“Well, if you should wish to you’d have the way I tell you of to stop it. Divert the stream of Mr. Mitchett’s wealth.”
“Oh there’s plenty for every one!”—Mrs. Brookenham kept up her tone. “He’s always giving us things—bonbons and dinners and opera-boxes.”
“He has never given ME any,” the Duchess contentedly declared.
Mrs. Brookenham waited a little. “Lord Petherton has the giving of some. He has never in his life before, I imagine, made so many presents.”
“Ah then it’s a shame one has nothing!” On which before reaching the door, the Duchess changed the subject. “You say I never bring Aggie. If you like I’ll bring her back.”
Mrs. Brookenham wondered. “Do you mean today?”
“Yes, when I’ve picked her up. It will be something to do with her till Miss Merriman can take her.”
“Delighted, dearest; do bring her. And I think she should SEE Mr. Mitchett.”
“Shall I find him here too then?”
“Oh take the chance.”
The two women, on this, exchanged, tacitly and across the room—the Duchess at the door, which a servant had arrived to open for her, and Mrs. Brookenham still at her tea-table—a further stroke of intercourse, over which the latter was not on this occasion the first to lower her lids. “I think I’ve shown high scruples,” the departing guest said, “but I understand then that I’m free.”
“Free as air, dear Jane.”
“Good.” Then just as she was off, “Ah dear old Edward!” the guest exclaimed. Her kinsman, as she was fond of calling him, had reached the top of the staircase, and Mrs. Brookenham, by the fire, heard them meet on the landing—heard also the Duchess protest against his turning to see her down. Mrs. Brookenham, listening to them, hoped Edward would accept the protest and think it sufficient to leave her with the footman. Their common consciousness that she was a kind of cousin, a consciousness not devoid of satisfaction, was quite consistent with a view, early arrived at, of the absurdity of any fuss about her.
III
When Mr. Brookenham appeared his wife was prompt. “She’s coming back for Lord Petherton.”
“Oh!” he simply said.
“There’s something between them.”
“Oh!” he merely repeated. And it would have taken many such sounds on his part to represent a spirit of response discernible to any one but his mate.
“There have been things before,” she went on, “but I haven’t felt sure. Don’t you know how one has sometimes a flash?”
It couldn’t be said of Edward Brookenham, who seemed to bend for sitting down more hinges than most men, that he looked as if he knew either this or anything else. He had a pale cold face, marked and made regular, made even in a manner handsome, by a hardness of line in which, oddly, there was no significance, no accent. Clean-shaven, slightly bald, with unlighted grey eyes and a mouth that gave the impression of not working easily, he suggested a stippled drawing by an inferior master. Lean moreover and stiff, and with the air of having here and there in his person a bone or two more than his share, he had once or twice, at fancy-balls, been thought striking in a dress copied from one of Holbein’s English portraits. But when once some such meaning as that had been put into him it took a long time to put another, a longer time than even his extreme exposure or anybody’s study of the problem had yet made possible. If anything particular had finally been expected from him it might have been a summary or an explanation of the things he had always not said; but there was something in him that had long since pacified all impatience, drugged all curiosity. He had never in his life answered such a question as his wife had just put him and which she would not have put had she feared a reply. So dry and decent and even distinguished did he look, as if he had positively been created to meet a propriety and match some other piece, that lady, with her famous perceptions, would no more have appealed to him seriously on a general proposition than she would, for such a response, have rung the drawing- room bell. He was none the less held to have a great promiscuous wisdom. “What is it that’s between them?” he demanded.
“What’s between any woman and the man she’s making up to?”
“Why there may often be nothing. I didn’t know she even particularly knew him,” Brookenham added.
“It’s exactly what she would like to prevent any one’s knowing, and her coming here to be with him when she knows I know SHE knows—don’t you see?—that he’s to be here, is just one of those calculations that ARE subtle enough to put off the scent a woman who has but half a nose.” Mrs. Brookenham as she spoke appeared to attest by the pretty star- gazing way she thrust it into the air her own possession of the totality of such a feature. “I don’t know yet quite what I think, but one wakes up to such things soon enough.”
“Do you suppose it’s her idea that he’ll marry her?” Brookenham asked in his colourless way.
“My dear Edward!” his wife murmured for all answer.
“But if she can see him in other places why should she want to see him here?” Edward persisted in a voice destitute of expression.
Mrs. Brookenham now had plenty of that. “Do you mean if she can see him in his own house?”
“No cream, please,” her husband said. “Hasn’t she a house too?”
“Yes, but so pervaded all over by Aggie and Miss Merriman.”
“Oh!” Brookenham commented.
“There has always been some man—I’ve always known there has. And now it’s Petherton,” said his companion.
“But where’s the attraction?”
“In HIM? Why lots of women could tell you. Petherton has had a career.”
“But I mean in old Jane.”
“Well, I dare say lots of men could tell you. She’s no older than any one else. She has also such great elements.”
“Oh I dare say she’s all right,” Brookenham returned as if his interest in the case had dropped. You might have felt you got a little nearer to him on guessing that in so peopled a circle satiety was never far from him.
“I mean for instance she has such a grand idea of duty. She thinks we’re nowhere!”
“Nowhere?”
“With our children—with our home life. She’s
awfully down on Tishy.”
“Tishy?”—Edward appeared for a moment at a loss.
“Tishy Grendon—and her craze for Nanda.”
“Has she a craze for Nanda?”
“Surely I told you Nanda’s to be with her for Easter.”
“I believe you did,” he bethought himself, “but you didn’t say anything about a craze. And where’s Harold?” he went on.
“He’s at Brander. That is he will be by dinner. He has just gone.”
“And how does he get there?”
“Why by the South-Western. They’ll send to meet him.”
Brookenham appeared for a moment to view this statement in the dry light of experience. “They’ll only send if there are others too.”