The Awkward Age

“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.”

“Of course then there’ll be others—lots. The more the better for Harold.”

This young man’s father was silent a little. “Perhaps—if they don’t play high.”

“Ah,” said his mother, “however Harold plays he has a way of winning.”

“He has a way too of being a hopeless ass. What I meant was how he comes there at all,” Edward explained.

“Why as any one comes—by being invited. She wrote to him—weeks ago.”

Brookenham just traceably took this in, but to what profit was not calculable. “To Harold? Very good-natured.” He had another short reflexion, after which he continued: “If they don’t send he’ll be in for five miles in a fly—and the man will see that he gets his money.”

“They WILL send—after her note.”

“Did it say so?”

Her melancholy eyes seemed, from afar, to run over the page. “I don’t remember—but it was so cordial.”

Again he meditated. “That often doesn’t prevent one’s being let in for ten shillings.”

There was more gloom in this forecast than his wife had desired to produce. “Well, my dear Edward, what do you want me to do? Whatever a young man does, it seems to me, he’s let in for ten shillings.”

“Ah but he needn’t be—that’s my point. I wasn’t at his age.”

Harold’s mother took up her book again. “Perhaps you weren’t the same success! I mean at such places.”

“Well, I didn’t borrow money to make me one—as I’ve a sharp idea our young scamp does.”

Mrs. Brookenham hesitated. “From whom do you mean—the Jews?”

He looked at her as if her vagueness might be assumed. “No. They, I take it, are not quite so cordial to him, since you call it so, as the old ladies. He gets it from Mitchy.”

“Oh!” said Mrs. Brookenham. “Are you very sure?” she then demanded.

He had got up and put his empty cup back on the tea-table, wandering afterwards a little about the room and looking out, as his wife had done half an hour before, at the dreary rain and the now duskier ugliness. He reverted in this attitude, with a complete unconsciousness of making for irritation, to an issue they might be supposed to have dropped. “He’ll have a lovely drive for his money!” His companion, however, said nothing and he presently came round again. “No, I’m not absolutely sure—of his having had it from Mitchy. If I were I should do something.”

“What would you do?” She put it as if she couldn’t possibly imagine.

“I’d speak to him.”

“To Harold?”

“No—that might just put it into his head.” Brookenham walked up and down a little with his hands in his pockets, after which, with a complete concealment of the steps of the transition, “Where are we dining to-night?” he brought out.

“Nowhere, thank heaven. We grace our own board.”

“Oh—with those fellows, as you said, and Jane?”

“That’s not for dinner. The Baggers and Mary Pinthorpe and—upon my word I forget.”

“You’ll see when she comes,” suggested Brookenham, who was again at the window.

“It isn’t a she—it’s two or three he’s, I think,” his wife replied with her indifferent anxiety. “But I don’t know what dinner it is,” she bethought herself; “it may be the one that’s after Easter. Then that one’s this one,” she added with her eyes once more on her book.

“Well, it’s a relief to dine at home”—and Brookenham faced about. “Would you mind finding out?” he asked with some abruptness.

“Do you mean who’s to dine?”

“No, that doesn’t matter. But whether Mitchy HAS come down.”

“I can only find out by asking him.”

“Oh I could ask him.” He seemed disappointed at his wife’s want of resource.

“And you don’t want to?”

He looked coldly, from before the fire, over the prettiness of her brown bent head. “It will be such a beastly bore if he admits it.”

“And you think poor I can make him not admit it?” She put the question as if it were really her own thought too, but they were a couple who could, even face to face and unlike the augurs behind the altar, think these things without laughing. “If he SHOULD admit it,” Mrs. Brookenham threw in, “will you give me the money?”

“The money?”

“To pay Mitchy back.”

She had now raised her eyes to her husband, but, turning away, he failed to meet them. “He’ll deny it.”

“Well, if they all deny it,” she presently remarked, “it’s a simple enough matter. I’m sure I don’t want them to come down on us! But that’s the advantage,” she almost prattled on, “of having so many such charming friends. They DON’T come down.”

This again was a remark of a sweep that there appeared to be nothing in Brookenham’s mind to match; so that, scarcely pausing in the walk he had resumed, he only said: “Who do you mean by ‘all’?”

“Why if he has had anything from Mitchy I dare say he has had something from Van.”

“Oh!” Brookenham returned as if with a still deeper drop of interest.

“They oughtn’t to do it,” she declared; “they ought to tell us, and when they don’t it serves them right.” Even this observation, however, failed to rouse in her husband a response, and, as she had quite formed the habit of doing, she philosophically answered herself. “But I don’t suppose they do it on spec.”

It was less apparent than ever what Edward supposed. “Oh Van hasn’t money to chuck about.”

“Ah I only mean a sovereign here and there.”

“Well,” Brookenham threw out after another turn, “I think Van, you know, is your affair.”

“It ALL seems to be my affair!” she lamented too woefully to have other than a comic effect. “And of course then it will be still more so if he should begin to apply to Mr. Longdon.”

“We must stop that in time.”

“Do you mean by warning Mr. Longdon and requesting him immediately to tell us? That won’t be very pleasant,” Mrs. Brookenham noted.

“Well then wait and see.”

She waited only a minute—it might have appeared she already saw. “I want him to be kind to Harold and can’t help thinking he will.”

“Yes, but I fancy that that will be his notion of it—keeping him from making debts. I dare say one needn’t trouble about him,” Brookenham added. “He can take care of himself.”

“He appears to have done so pretty well all these years,” she mused. “As I saw him in my childhood I see him now, and I see now that I saw then even how awfully in love he was with mamma. He’s too lovely about mamma,” Mrs. Brookenham pursued.

“Oh!” her husband replied.

The vivid past held her a moment. “I see now I must have known a lot as a child.”

“Oh!” her companion repeated.

“I want him to take an interest in us. Above all in the children. He ought to like us”—she followed it up. “It will be a sort of ‘poetic justice.’ He sees the reasons for himself and we mustn’t prevent it.” She turned the possibilities over, but they produced a reserve. “The thing is I don’t see how he CAN like Harold.”

“Then he won’t lend him money,” said Brookenham with all his grimness.

This contingency too she considered. “You make me feel as if I wished he would—which is too dreadful. And I don’t think he really likes ME!” she went on.

“Oh!” her husband again ejaculated. “I mean not utterly REALLY. He has to try to. But it won’t make any difference,” she next remarked. “Do you mean his trying?”

“No, I mean his not succeeding. He’ll be just the same.” She saw it steadily and saw it whole. “On account of mamma.”

Brookenham also, with his perfect propriety, put it before himself. “And will he—on account of your mother—also like ME?”

She weighed it. “No, Edward.” She covered him with her loveliest expression. “No, not really either. But it won’t make any difference.” This time she had pulled him up.

“Not if he doesn’t like Harold or like you or like me?” Edward clearly found himself able to accept only the premise.

“He’ll be perfectly loyal. It will be the advantage of mamma!” Mrs. Brookenham cried. “Mamma, Edward,” she brought out with a flash of solemnity—“mamma WAS wonderful. There have been times when I’ve always felt her still with us, but Mr. Longdon makes it somehow so real. Whether she’s with me or not, at any rate, she’s with HIM; so that when HE’S with me, don’t you see—?”

“It comes to the same thing?” her husband intelligently asked. “I see. And when was he with you last?”

“Not since the day he dined—but that was only last week. He’ll come soon—I know from Van.”

“And what does Van know?”

“Oh all sorts of things. He has taken the greatest fancy to him.”

“The old boy—to Van?”

“Van to Mr. Longdon. And the other way too. Mr. Longdon has been most kind to him.”

Brookenham still moved about. “Well, if he likes Van and doesn’t like US, what good will that do us?”

“You’d understand soon enough if you felt Van’s loyalty.”

“Oh the things you expect me to feel, my dear!” Edward Brookenham lightly moaned.

“Well, it doesn’t matter. But he IS as loyal to me as Mr. Longdon to mamma.”

The statement produced on his part an unusual vision of the comedy of things. “Every Jenny has her Jockey!” Yet perhaps—remarkably enough—there was even more imagination in his next words. “And what sort of means?”

“Mr. Longdon? Oh very good. Mamma wouldn’t have been the loser. Not that she cared. He MUST like Nanda,” Mrs. Brookenham wound up.

Her companion appeared to look at the idea and then meet it. “He’ll have to see her first.”

“Oh he shall see her!” she rang out. “It’s time for her at any rate to sit downstairs.”

“It was time, you know, I thought, a year ago.”

“Yes, I know what you thought. But it wasn’t.”

She had spoken with decision, but he seemed unwilling to concede the point. “You allowed yourself she was all ready.”

“SHE was all ready—yes. But I wasn’t. I am now,” Mrs. Brookenham, with a fine emphasis on her adverb, proclaimed as she turned to meet the opening of the door and the appearance of the butler, whose announcement—“Lord Petherton and Mr. Mitchett”—might for an observer have seemed immediately to offer support to her changed state.

IV

Lord Petherton, a man of five-and-thirty, whose robust but symmetrical proportions gave to his dark blue double-breasted coat an air of tightness that just failed of compromising his tailor, had for his main facial sign a certain pleasant brutality, the effect partly of a bold handsome parade of carnivorous teeth, partly of an expression of nose suggesting that this feature had paid a little, in the heat of youth, for some aggression at the time admired and even publicly commemorated. He would have been ugly, he substantively granted, had he not been happy; he would have been dangerous had he not been warranted. Many things doubtless performed for him this last service, but none so much as the delightful sound of his voice, the voice, as it were, of another man, a nature reclaimed, supercivilised, adjusted to the perpetual “chaff” which kept him smiling in a way that would have been a mistake and indeed an impossibility if he had really been witty. His bright familiarity was that of a young prince whose confidence had never had to falter, and the only thing that at all qualified the resemblance was the equal familiarity excited in his subjects.

Mr. Mitchett had so little intrinsic appearance that an observer would have felt indebted for help in placing him to the rare prominence of his colourless eyes and the positive attention drawn to his chin by the precipitation of its retreat from discovery. Dressed on the other hand not as gentlemen dress in London to pay their respects to the fair, he excited by the exhibition of garments that had nothing in common save the violence and the independence of their pattern a belief that in the desperation of humility he wished to render public his having thrown to the winds the effort to please. It was written all over him that he had judged once for all his personal case and that, as his character, superficially disposed to gaiety, deprived him of the resource of shyness and shade, the effect of comedy might not escape him if secured by a real plunge. There was comedy therefore in the form of his pot-hat and the colour of his spotted shirt, in the systematic disagreement, above all, of his coat, waistcoat and trousers. It was only on long acquaintance that his so many ingenious ways of showing he appreciated his commonness could present him as secretly rare.

“And where’s the child this time?” he asked of his hostess as soon as he was seated near her.

“Why do you say ‘this time’ as if it were different from any other time?” she replied as she gave him his tea.

“Only because, as the months and the years elapse, it’s more and more of a wonder, whenever I don’t see her, to think what she does with herself—or what you do with her. What it does show, I suppose,” Mr. Mitchett went on, “is that she takes no trouble to meet me.”

“My dear Mitchy,” said Mrs. Brookenham, “what do YOU know about ‘trouble’—either poor Nanda’s or mine or anybody’s else? You’ve never had to take any in your life, you’re the spoiled child of fortune and you skim over the surface of things in a way that seems often to represent you as supposing everybody else has wings. Most other people are sticking fast in their native mud.”

“Mud, Mrs. Brook—mud, mud!” he protestingly cried as, while he watched his fellow visitor move to a distance with their host, he glanced about the room, taking in afresh the Louis Seize secretary which looked better closed than open and for which he always had a knowing eye. “Remarkably charming—mud!”

“Well, that’s what a great deal of the element really appears to-day to be thought; and precisely as a specimen, Mitchy dear, those two French books you were so good as to send me and which—really this time, you extraordinary man!” She fell back, intimately reproachful, from the effect produced on her, renouncing all expression save that of the rolled eye.

“Why, were they particularly dreadful?”—Mitchy was honestly surprised. “I rather liked the one in the pink cover—what’s the confounded thing called?—I thought it had a sort of a something-or-other.” He had cast his eye about as if for a glimpse of the forgotten title, and she caught the question as he vaguely and good-humouredly dropped it.

“A kind of a morbid modernity? There IS that,” she dimly conceded.

“Is that what they call it? Awfully good name. You must have got it from old Van!” he gaily declared.

“I dare say I did. I get the good things from him and the bad ones from you. But you’re not to suppose,” Mrs. Brookenham went on, “that I’ve discussed your horrible book with him.”

“Come, I say!” Mr. Mitchett protested; “I’ve seen you with books from Vanderbank which if you HAVE discussed them with him—well,” he laughed, “I should like to have been there!”

“You haven’t seen me with anything like yours—no, no, never, never!” She was particularly positive. “Van on the contrary gives tremendous warnings, makes apologies, in advance, for things that—well, after all, haven’t killed one.”

“That have even perhaps a little, after the warnings, let one down?”

She took no notice of this coarse pleasantry, she simply adhered to her thesis. “One has taken one’s dose and one isn’t such a fool as to be deaf to some fresh true note if it happens to turn up. But for abject horrid unredeemed vileness from beginning to end—”

“So you read to the end?” Mr. Mitchett interposed.

“I read to see what you could possibly have sent such things to me for, and because so long as they were in my hands they were not in the hands of others. Please to remember in future that the children are all over the place and that Harold and Nanda have their nose in everything.”

“I promise to remember,” Mr. Mitchett returned, “as soon as you make old Van do the same.”

“I do make old Van—I pull old Van up much oftener than I succeed in pulling you. I must say,” Mrs. Brookenham went on, “you’re all getting to require among you in general an amount of what one may call editing!” She gave one of her droll universal sighs. “I’ve got your books at any rate locked up and I wish you’d send for them quickly again; one’s too nervous about anything happening and their being perhaps found among one’s relics. Charming literary remains!” she laughed.

The friendly Mitchy was also much amused. “By Jove, the most awful things ARE found! Have you heard about old Randage and what his executors have just come across? The most abominable—”

“I haven’t heard,” she broke in, “and I don’t want to; but you give me a shudder and I beg you’ll have your offerings removed, since I can’t think of confiding them for the purpose to any one in this house. I might burn them up in the dead of night, but even then I should be fearfully nervous.”

“I’ll send then my usual messenger,” said Mitchy, “a person I keep for such jobs, thoroughly seasoned, as you may imagine, and of a discretion—what do you call it?—a toute epreuve. Only you must let me say that I like your terror about Harold! Do you think he spends his time over Dr. Watts’s hymns?”

Mrs. Brookenham just hesitated, and nothing, in general, was so becoming to her as the act of hesitation. “Dear Mitchy, do you know I want awfully to talk to you about Harold?”

“About his French reading, Mrs. Brook?” Mitchy responded with interest. “The worse things are, let me just mention to you about that, the better they seem positively to be for one’s feeling up in the language. They’re more difficult, the bad ones—and there’s a lot in that. All the young men know it—those who are going up for exams.”

She had her eyes for a little on Lord Petherton and her husband; then as if she had not heard what her interlocutor had just said she overcame her last scruple. “Dear Mitchy, has he had money from you?”