by Henry James
Mr. Longdon’s impenetrability crashed like glass at the elbow-touch of this large handsome practised woman, who walked for him, like some brazen pagan goddess, in a cloud of queer legend. He looked off at her child, who, at a distance and not hearing them, had not moved. “I know she’s a great friend of Nanda’s.”
“Has Nanda told you that?”
“Often—taking such an interest in her.”
“I’m glad she thinks so then—though really her interests are so various. But come to my baby. I don’t make HER come,” she explained as she swept him along, “because I want you just to sit down by her there and keep the place, as one may say—!”
“Well, for whom?” he demanded as she stopped. It was her step that had checked itself as well as her tongue, and again, suddenly, they stood quite consciously and vividly opposed. “Can I trust you?” the Duchess brought out. Again then she took herself up. “But as if I weren’t already doing it! It’s because I do trust you so utterly that I haven’t been able any longer to keep my hands off you. The person I want the place for is none other than Mitchy himself, and half my occupation now is to get it properly kept for him. Lord Petherton’s immensely kind, but Lord Petherton can’t do everything. I know you really like our host—!”
Mr. Longdon, at this, interrupted her with a certain coldness. “How, may I ask, do you know it?”
But with a brazen goddess to deal with—! This personage had to fix him but an instant. “Because, you dear honest man, you’re here. You wouldn’t be if you hated him, for you don’t practically condone—!”
This time he broke in with his eyes on the child. “I feel on the contrary, I assure you, that I condone a great deal.”
“Well, don’t boast of your cynicism,” she laughed, “till you’re sure of all it covers. Let the right thing for you be,” she went on, “that Nanda herself wants it.”
“Nanda herself?” He continued to watch little Aggie, who had never yet turned her head. “I’m afraid I don’t understand you.”
She swept him on again. “I’ll come to you presently and explain. I MUST get my letter for Petherton; after which I’ll give up Mitchy, whom I was going to find, and since I’ve broken the ice—if it isn’t too much to say to such a polar bear!—I’ll show you le fond de ma pensee. Baby darling,” she said to her niece, “keep Mr. Longdon. Show him,” she benevolently suggested, “what you’ve been reading.” Then again to her fellow guest, as arrested by this very question: “Caro signore, have YOU a possible book?”
Little Aggie had got straight up and was holding out her volume, which Mr. Longdon, all courtesy for her, glanced at. “Stories from English History. Oh!”
His ejaculation, though vague, was not such as to prevent the girl from venturing gently: “Have you read it?”
Mr. Longdon, receiving her pure little smile, showed he felt he had never so taken her in as at this moment, as well as also that she was a person with whom he should surely get on. “I think I must have.”
Little Aggie was still more encouraged, but not to the point of keeping anything back. “It hasn’t any author. It’s anonymous.”
The Duchess borrowed, for another question to Mr. Longdon, not a little of her gravity. “Is it all right?”
“I don’t know”—his answer was to Aggie. “There have been some horrid things in English history.”
“Oh horrid—HAVEN’T there?” Aggie, whose speech had the prettiest faintest foreignness, sweetly and eagerly quavered.
“Well, darling, Mr. Longdon will recommend to you some nice historical work—for we love history, don’t we?—that leaves the horrors out. We like to know,” the Duchess explained to the authority she invoked, “the cheerful happy RIGHT things. There are so many, after all, and this is the place to remember them. A tantot.”
As she passed into the house by the nearest of the long windows that stood open Mr. Longdon placed himself beside her little charge, whom he treated, for the next ten minutes, with an exquisite courtesy. A person who knew him well would, if present at the scene, have found occasion in it to be freshly aware that he was in his quiet way master of two distinct kinds of urbanity, the kind that added to distance and the kind that diminished it. Such an analyst would furthermore have noted, in respect to the aunt and the niece, of which kind each had the benefit, and might even have gone so far as to detect in him some absolute betrayal of the impression produced on him by his actual companion, some irradiation of his certitude that, from the point of view under which she had been formed, she was a remarkable, a rare success. Since to create a particular little rounded and tinted innocence had been aimed at, the fruit had been grown to the perfection of a peach on a sheltered wall, and this quality of the object resulting from a process might well make him feel himself in contact with something wholly new. Little Aggie differed from any young person he had ever met in that she had been deliberately prepared for consumption and in that furthermore the gentleness of her spirit had immensely helped the preparation. Nanda, beside her, was a Northern savage, and the reason was partly that the elements of that young lady’s nature were already, were publicly, were almost indecorously active. They were practically there for good or for ill; experience was still to come and what they might work out to still a mystery; but the sum would get itself done with the figures now on the slate. On little Aggie’s slate the figures were yet to be written; which sufficiently accounted for the difference of the two surfaces. Both the girls struck him as lambs with the great shambles of life in their future; but while one, with its neck in a pink ribbon, had no consciousness but that of being fed from the hand with the small sweet biscuit of unobjectionable knowledge, the other struggled with instincts and forebodings, with the suspicion of its doom and the far-borne scent, in the flowery fields, of blood.
“Oh Nanda, she’s my best friend after three or four others.”
“After so many?” Mr. Longdon laughed. “Don’t you think that’s rather a back seat, as they say, for one’s best?”
“A back seat?”—she wondered with a purity!
“If you don’t understand,” said her companion, “it serves me right, as your aunt didn’t leave me with you to teach you the slang of the day.”
“The ‘slang’?”—she again spotlessly speculated.
“You’ve never even heard the expression? I should think that a great compliment to our time if it weren’t that I fear it may have been only the name that has been kept from you.”
The light of ignorance in the child’s smile was positively golden. “The name?” she again echoed.
She understood too little—he gave it up. “And who are all the other best friends whom poor Nanda comes after?”
“Well, there’s my aunt, and Miss Merriman, and Gelsomina, and Dr. Beltram.”
“And who, please, is Miss Merriman?”
“She’s my governess, don’t you know?—but such a deliciously easy governess.”
“That, I suppose, is because she has such a deliciously easy pupil. And who is Gelsomina?” Mr. Longdon enquired.
“She’s my old nurse—my old maid.”
“I see. Well, one must always be kind to old maids. But who’s Dr. Beltram?”
“Oh the most intimate friend of all. We tell him everything.”
There was for Mr. Longdon in this, with a slight incertitude, an effect of drollery. “Your little troubles?”
“Ah they’re not always so little! And he takes them all away.”
“Always?—on the spot?”
“Sooner or later,” said little Aggie with serenity. “But why not?”
“Why not indeed?” he laughed. “It must be very plain sailing.” Decidedly she was, as Nanda had said, an angel, and there was a wonder in her possession on this footing of one of the most expressive little faces that even her expressive race had ever shown him. Formed to express everything, it scarce expressed as yet even a consciousness. All the elements of play were in it, but they had nothing to play with. It was a rest moreov
er, after so much that he had lately been through, to be with a person for whom questions were so simple. “But he sounds all the same like the kind of doctor whom, as soon as one hears of him, one wants to send for.”
The young girl had at this a small light of confusion. “Oh I don’t mean he’s a doctor for medicine. He’s a clergyman—and my aunt says he’s a saint. I don’t think you’ve many in England,” little Aggie continued to explain.
“Many saints? I’m afraid not. Your aunt’s very happy to know one. We should call Dr. Beltram in England a priest.”
“Oh but he’s English. And he knows everything we do—and everything we think.”
“‘We’—your aunt, your governess and your nurse? What a varied wealth of knowledge!”
“Ah Miss Merriman and Gelsomina tell him only what they like.”
“And do you and the Duchess tell him what you DON’T like?”
“Oh often—but we always like HIM—no matter what we tell him. And we know that just the same he always likes us.”
“I see then of course,” said Mr. Longdon, very gravely now, “what a friend he must be. So it’s after all this,” he continued in a moment, “that Nanda comes in?”
His companion had to consider, but suddenly she caught assistance. “This one, I think, comes before.” Lord Petherton, arriving apparently from the garden, had drawn near unobserved by Mr. Longdon and the next moment was within hail. “I see him very often,” she continued—”oftener than Nanda. Oh but THEN Nanda. And then,” little Aggie wound up, “Mr. Mitchy.”
“Oh I’m glad HE comes in,” Mr. Longdon returned, “though rather far down in the list.” Lord Petherton was now before them, there being no one else on the terrace to speak to, and, with the odd look of an excess of physical power that almost blocked the way, he seemed to give them in the flare of his big teeth the benefit of a kind of brutal geniality. It was always to be remembered for him that he could scarce show without surprising you an adjustment to the smaller conveniences; so that when he took up a trifle it was not perforce in every case the sign of an uncanny calculation. When the elephant in the show plays the fiddle it must be mainly with the presumption of consequent apples; which was why, doubtless, this personage had half the time the air of assuring you that, really civilised as his type had now become, no apples were required. Mr. Longdon viewed him with a vague apprehension and as if quite unable to meet the question of what he would have called for such a personage the social responsibility. Did this specimen of his class pull the tradition down or did he just take it where he found it—in the very different place from that in which, on ceasing so long ago to “go out,” Mr. Longdon had left it? Our friend doubtless averted himself from the possibility of a mental dilemma; if the man didn’t lower the position was it the position then that let down the man? Somehow he wasn’t positively up. More evidence would be needed to decide; yet it was just of more evidence that one remained rather in dread. Lord Petherton was kind to little Aggie, kind to her companion, kind to every one, after Mr. Longdon had explained that she was so good as to be giving him the list of her dear friends. “I’m only a little dismayed,” the elder man said, “to find Mr. Mitchett at the bottom.”
“Oh but it’s an awfully short list, isn’t it? If it consists only of me and Mitchy he’s not so very low down. We don’t allow her very MANY friends; we look out too well for ourselves.” He addressed the child as on an easy jocose understanding. “Is the question, Aggie, whether we shall allow you Mr. Longdon? Won’t that rather ‘do’ for us—for Mitchy and me? I say, Duchess,” he went on as this lady reappeared, “ARE we going to allow her Mr. Longdon and do we quite realise what we’re about? We mount guard awfully, you know”—he carried the joke back to the person he had named. “We sift and we sort, we pick the candidates over, and I should like to hear any one say that in this case at least I don’t keep a watch on my taste. Oh we close in!”
The Duchess, the object of her quest in her hand, had come back. “Well then Mr. Longdon will close WITH us—you’ll consider henceforth that he’s as safe as yourself. Here’s the letter I wanted you to read—with which you’ll please take a turn, in strict charge of the child, and then restore her to us. If you don’t come I shall know you’ve found Mitchy and shall be at peace. Go, little heart,” she continued to the child, “but leave me your book to look over again. I don’t know that I’m quite sure!” She sent them off together, but had a grave protest as her friend put out his hand for the volume. “No, Petherton—not for books; for her reading I can’t say I do trust you. But for everything else—quite!” she declared to Mr. Longdon with a look of conscientious courage as their companion withdrew. “I do believe,” she pursued in the same spirit, “in a certain amount of intelligent confidence. Really nice men are steadied by the sense of your having had it. But I wouldn’t,” she added gaily, “trust him all round!”
IV
Many things at Mertle were strange for her interlocutor, but nothing perhaps as yet had been so strange as the sight of this arrangement for little Aggie’s protection; an arrangement made in the interest of her remaining as a young person of her age and her monde—so her aunt would have put it—should remain. The strangest part of the impression too was that the provision might really have its happy side and his lordship understand definitely better than any one else his noble friend’s whole theory of perils and precautions. The child herself, the spectator of the incident was sure enough, understood nothing; but the understandings that surrounded her, filling all the air, made it a heavier compound to breathe than any Mr. Longdon had yet tasted. This heaviness had grown for him through the long sweet summer day, and there was something in his at last finding himself ensconced with the Duchess that made it supremely oppressive. The contact was one that, none the less, he would not have availed himself of a decent pretext to avoid. With so many fine mysteries playing about him there was relief, at the point he had reached, rather than alarm, in the thought of knowing the worst; which it pressed upon him somehow that the Duchess must not only altogether know but must in any relation quite naturally communicate. It fluttered him rather that a person who had an understanding with Lord Petherton should so single him out as to wish for one also with himself; such a person must either have great variety of mind or have a wonderful idea of HIS variety. It was true indeed that Mr. Mitchett must have the most extraordinary understanding, and yet with Mr. Mitchett he now found himself quite pleasantly at his ease. Their host, however, was a person sui generis, whom he had accepted, once for all, the inconsequence of liking in conformity with the need he occasionally felt to put it on record that he was not narrow-minded. Perhaps at bottom he most liked Mitchy because Mitchy most liked Nanda; there hung about him still moreover the faded fragrance of the superstition that hospitality not declined is one of the things that “oblige.” It obliged the thoughts, for Mr. Longdon, as well as the manners, and in the especial form in which he was now committed to it would have made him, had he really thought any ill, ask himself what the deuce then he was doing in the man’s house. All of which didn’t prevent some of Mitchy’s queer condonations—if condonations in fact they were—from not wholly, by themselves, soothing his vague unrest, an unrest which never had been so great as at the moment he heard the Duchess abruptly say to him: “Do you know my idea about Nanda? It’s my particular desire you should—the reason, really, why I’ve thus laid violent hands on you. Nanda, my dear man, should marry at the very first moment.”