The Complete Works of Henry James

by Henry James

  He was very kind and patient. “Not perhaps quite.”

  “I’M a little of one?”

  “My dear child, as you see.”

  Yes, she saw, but was still on the wing. “And shall you have recourse—?”

  “To what?” he asked as she appeared to falter.

  “I don’t mean to anything violent. But shall you tell Nanda?”

  Mitchy wondered. “Tell her—?”

  “Well, everything. I think, you know,” Mrs. Brook musingly observed, “that it would really serve her right.”

  Mitchy’s silence, which lasted a minute, seemed to take the idea, but not perhaps quite to know what to do with it. “Ah I’m afraid I shall never really serve her right!”

  Just as he spoke the butler reappeared; at sight of whom Mrs. Brook immediately guessed. “Mr. Longdon?”

  “In Mr. Brookenham’s room, ma’am. Mr. Brookenham has gone out.”

  “And where has he gone?”

  “I think, ma’am, only for some evening papers.”

  She had an intense look for Mitchy; then she said to the man: “Ask him to wait three minutes—I’ll ring;” turning again to her visitor as soon as they were alone. “You don’t know how I’m trusting you!”

  “Trusting me?”

  “Why, if he comes up to you.”

  Mitchy thought. “Hadn’t I better go down?”

  “No—you may have Edward back. If you see him you must see him here. If I don’t myself it’s for a reason.”

  Mitchy again just sounded her. “His not, as you a while ago hinted—?”

  “Yes, caring for what I say.” She had a pause, but she brought it out. “He doesn’t believe a word—!”

  “Of what you tell him?” Mitchy was splendid. “I see. And you want something said to him.”

  “Yes, that he’ll take from YOU. Only it’s for you,” Mrs. Brook went on, “really and honestly, and as I trust you, to give it. But the comfort of you is that you’ll do so if you promise.”

  Mitchy was infinitely struck. “But I haven’t promised, eh? Of course I can’t till I know what it is.”

  “It’s to put before him—!”

  “Oh I see: the situation.”

  “What has happened here to-day. Van’s marked retreat and how, with the time that has passed, it makes us at last know where we are. You of course for yourself,” Mrs. Brook wound up, “see that.”

  “Where we are?” Mitchy took a turn and came back. “But what then did Van come for? If you speak of a retreat there must have been an advance.”

  “Oh,” said Mrs. Brook, “he simply wanted not to look too brutal. After so much absence he COULD come.”

  “Well, if he established that he isn’t brutal, where was the retreat?”

  “In his not going up to Nanda. He came—frankly—to do that, but made up his mind on second thoughts that he couldn’t risk even being civil to her.”

  Mitchy had visibly warmed to his work. “Well, and what made the difference?”

  She wondered. “What difference?”

  “Why, of the effect, as you say, of his second thoughts. Thoughts of what?”

  “Oh,” said Mrs. Brook suddenly and as if it were quite simple—”I know THAT! Suspicions.”

  “And of whom?”

  “Why, of YOU, you goose. Of your not having done—”

  “Well, what?” he persisted as she paused.

  “How shall I say it? The best thing for yourself. And of Nanda’s feeling that. Don’t you see?”

  In the effort of seeing, or perhaps indeed in the full act of it, poor Mitchy glared as never before. “Do you mean Van’s JEALOUS of me?”

  Pressed as she was, there was something in his face that momentarily hushed her. “There it is!” she achieved however at last.

  “Of ME?” Mitchy went on.

  What was in his face so suddenly and strangely—was the look of rising tears—at sight of which, as from a compunction as prompt, she showed a lovely flush. “There it is, there it is,” she repeated. “You ask me for a reason, and it’s the only one I see. Of course if you don’t care,” she added, “he needn’t come up. He can go straight to Nanda.”

  Mitchy had turned away again as with the impulse of hiding the tears that had risen and that had not wholly disappeared even by the time he faced about. “Did Nanda know he was to come?”

  “Mr. Longdon?”

  “No, no. Was she expecting Van—?”

  “My dear man,” Mrs. Brook mildly wailed, “when can she have NOT been?”

  Mitchy looked hard for an instant at the floor. “I mean does she know he has been and gone?”

  Mrs. Brook, from where she stood and through the window, looked rather at the sky. “Her father will have told her.”

  “Her father?” Mitchy frankly wondered. “Is HE in it?”

  Mrs. Brook had at this a longer pause. “You assume, I suppose, Mitchy dear,” she then quavered “that I put him up—!”

  “Put Edward up?” he broke in.

  “No—that of course. Put Van up to ideas—!”

  He caught it again. “About ME—what you call his suspicions?” He seemed to weigh the charge, but it ended, while he passed his hand hard over his eyes, in weariness and in the nearest approach to coldness he had ever shown Mrs. Brook. “It doesn’t matter. It’s every one’s fate to be in one way or another the subject of ideas. Do then,” he continued, “let Mr. Longdon come up.”

  She instantly rang the bell. “Then I’ll go to Nanda. But don’t look frightened,” she added as she came back, “as to what we may—Edward or I—do next. It’s only to tell her that he’ll be with her.”

  “Good. I’ll tell Tatton,” Mitchy replied.

  Still, however, she lingered. “Shall you ever care for me more?”

  He had almost the air, as he waited for her to go, of the master of the house, for she had made herself before him, as he stood with his back to the fire, as humble as a tolerated visitor. “Oh just as much. Where’s the difference? Aren’t our ties in fact rather multiplied?”

  “That’s the way I want to feel it. And from the moment you recognise with me—”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, that he never, you know, really WOULD—”

  He took her mercifully up. “There’s no harm done?” Mitchy thought of it.

  It made her still hover. “Nanda will be rich. Toward that you CAN help, and it’s really, I may now tell you, what it came into my head you should see our friend here FOR.”

  He maintained his waiting attitude. “Thanks, thanks.”

  “You’re our guardian angel!” she exclaimed.

  At this he laughed out. “Wait till you see what Mr. Longdon does!”

  But she took no notice. “I want you to see before I go that I’ve done nothing for myself. Van, after all—!” she mused.

  “Well?”

  “Only hates me. It isn’t as with you,” she said. “I’ve really lost him.”

  Mitchy for an instant, with the eyes that had shown his tears, glared away into space. “He can’t very positively, you know, now like ANY of us. He misses a fortune.”

  “There it is!” Mrs. Brook once more observed. Then she had a comparative brightness. “I’m so glad YOU don’t!” He gave another laugh, but she was already facing Mr. Tatton, who had again answered the bell. “Show Mr. Longdon up.”

  “I’m to tell him then it’s at your request?” Mitchy asked when the butler had gone.

  “That you receive him? Oh yes. He’ll be the last to quarrel with that. But there’s one more thing.”

  It was something over which of a sudden she had one of her returns of anxiety. “I’ve been trying for months and months to remember to find out from you—”

  “Well, what?” he enquired, as she looked odd.

  “Why if Harold ever gave back to you, as he swore to me on his honour he would, that five-pound note—!”

  “But which, dear lady?” The sense of other incongruities than those they
had been dealing with seemed to arrive now for Mitchy’s aid.

  “The one that, ages ago, one day when you and Van were here, we had the joke about. You produced it, in sport, as a ‘fine’ for something, and put it on that table; after which, before I knew what you were about, before I could run after you, you had gone off and ridiculously left it. Of course the next minute—and again before I could turn round—Harold had pounced on it, and I tried in vain to recover it from him. But all I could get him to do—”

  “Was to promise to restore it straight to its owner?” Mitchy had listened so much less in surprise than in amusement that he had apparently after a moment re-established the scene. “Oh I recollect—he did settle with me. THAT’S all right.”

  She fixed him from the door of the next room. “You got every penny?”

  “Every penny. But fancy your bringing it up!”

  “Ah I always do, you know—SOME day.”

  “Yes, you’re of a rigour—! But be at peace. Harold’s quite square,” he went on, “and I quite meant to have asked you about him.”

  Mrs. Brook, promptly, was all for this. “Oh it’s all right.”

  Mitchy came nearer. “Lady Fanny—?”

  “Yes—HAS stayed for him.”

  “Ah,” said Mitchy, “I knew you’d do it! But hush—they’re coming!” On which, while she whisked away, he went back to the fire.

  IV

  Ten minutes of talk with Mr. Longdon by Mrs. Brookenham’s hearth elapsed for him without his arriving at the right moment to take up the business so richly put before him in his previous interview. No less time indeed could have sufficed to bring him into closer relation with this affair, and nothing at first could have been more marked than the earnestness of his care not to show impatience of appeals that were, for a person of his old friend’s general style, simple recognitions and decencies. There was a limit to the mere allusiveness with which, in Mr. Longdon’s school of manners, a foreign tour might be treated, and Mitchy, no doubt, plentifully showed that none of his frequent returns had encountered a curiosity at once so explicit and so discreet. To belong to a circle in which most of the members might be at any moment on the other side of the globe was inevitably to fall into the habit of few questions, as well as into that of making up for their fewness by their freedom. This interlocutor in short, while Mrs. Brook’s representative privately thought over all he had in hand, went at some length and very charmingly—since it was but a tribute to common courtesy—into the Virgilian associations of the Bay of Naples. Finally, however, he started, his eye having turned to the clock. “I’m afraid that, though our hostess doesn’t appear, I mustn’t forget myself. I too came back but yesterday and I’ve an engagement—for which I’m already late—with Miss Brookenham, who has been so good as to ask me to tea.”

  The divided mind, the express civility, the decent “Miss Brookenham,” the escape from their hostess—these were all things Mitchy could quickly take in, and they gave him in a moment his light for not missing his occasion. “I see, I see—I shall make you keep Nanda waiting. But there’s something I shall ask you to take from me quite as a sufficient basis for that: which is simply that after all, you know—for I think you do know, don’t you?—I’m nearly as much attached to her as you are.”

  Mr. Longdon had looked suddenly apprehensive and even a trifle embarrassed, but he spoke with due presence of mind. “Of course I understand that perfectly. If you hadn’t liked her so much—”

  “Well?” said Mitchy as he checked himself.

  “I would never, last year, have gone to stay with you.”

  “Thank you!” Mitchy laughed.

  “Though I like you also—and extremely,” Mr. Longdon gravely pursued, “for yourself.”

  Mitchy made a sign of acknowledgement. “You like me better for HER than you do for anybody else BUT myself.”

  “You put it, I think, correctly. Of course I’ve not seen so much of Nanda—if between my age and hers, that is, any real contact is possible—without knowing that she now regards you as one of the very best of her friends, treating you, I find myself suspecting, with a degree of confidence—”

  Mitchy gave a laugh of interruption. “That she doesn’t show even to you?”

  Mr. Longdon’s poised glasses faced him. “Even! I don’t mind, as the opportunity has come up, telling you frankly—and as from my time of life to your own—all the comfort I take in the sense that in any case of need or trouble she might look to you for whatever advice or support the crisis should demand.”

  “She has told you she feels I’d be there?” Mitchy after an instant asked.

  “I’m not sure,” his friend replied, “that I ought quite to mention anything she has ‘told’ me. I speak of what I’ve made out myself.”

  “Then I thank you more than I can say for your penetration. Her mother, I should let you know,” Mitchy continued, “is with her just now.”

  Mr. Longdon took off his glasses with a jerk. “Has anything happened to her?”

  “To account for the fact I refer to?” Mitchy said in amusement at his start. “She’s not ill, that I know of, thank goodness, and she hasn’t broken her leg. But something, none the less, has happened to her—that I think I may say. To tell you all in a word, it’s the reason, such as it is, of my being here to meet you. Mrs. Brook asked me to wait. She’ll see you herself some other time.”

  Mr. Longdon wondered. “And Nanda too?”

  “Oh that must be between yourselves. Only, while I keep you here—”

  “She understands my delay?”

  Mitchy thought. “Mrs. Brook must have explained.” Then as his companion took this in silence, “But you don’t like it?” he asked.

  “It only comes to me that Mrs. Brook’s explanations—!”

  “Are often so odd? Oh yes; but Nanda, you know, allows for that oddity. And Mrs. Brook, by the same token,” Mitchy developed, “knows herself—no one better—what may frequently be thought of it. That’s precisely the reason of her desire that you should have on this occasion explanations from a source that she’s so good as to pronounce, for the immediate purpose, superior. As for Nanda,” he wound up, “to be aware that we’re here together won’t strike her as so bad a sign.”

  “No,” Mr. Longdon attentively assented; “she’ll hardly fear we’re plotting her ruin. But what then has happened to her?”

  “Well,” said Mitchy, “it’s you, I think, who will have to give it a name. I know you know what I’ve known.”

  Mr. Longdon, his nippers again in place, hesitated. “Yes, I know.”

  “And you’ve accepted it.”

  “How could I help it? To reckon with such cleverness—!”

  “Was beyond you? Ah it wasn’t my cleverness,” Mitchy said. “There’s a greater than mine. There’s a greater even than Van’s. That’s the whole point,” he went on while his friend looked at him hard. “You don’t even like it just a little?”

  Mr. Longdon wondered. “The existence of such an element—?”

  “No; the existence simply of my knowledge of your idea.”

  “I suppose I’m bound to keep in mind in fairness the existence of my own knowledge of yours.”

  But Mitchy gave that the go-by. “Oh I’ve so many ‘ideas’! I’m always getting hold of some new one and for the most part trying it—generally to let it go as a failure. Yes, I had one six months ago. I tried that. I’m trying it still.”

  “Then I hope,” said Mr. Longdon with a gaiety slightly strained, “that, contrary to your usual rule, it’s a success.”

  It was a gaiety, for that matter, that Mitchy’s could match. “It does promise well! But I’ve another idea even now, and it’s just what I’m again trying.”

  “On me?” Mr. Longdon still somewhat extravagantly smiled.

  Mitchy thought. “Well, on two or three persons, of whom you ARE the first for me to tackle. But what I must begin with is having from you that you recognise she trusts us.”

 
Mitchy’s idea after an instant had visibly gone further. “Both of them— the two women up there at present so strangely together. Mrs. Brook must too; immensely. But for that you won’t care.”

  Mr. Longdon had relapsed into an anxiety more natural than his expression of a moment before. “It’s about time! But if Nanda didn’t trust us,” he went on, “her case would indeed be a sorry one. She has nobody else to trust.”