“Lady Fanny’s visitors?”—and, though her eyes rather avoided than met his own, she seemed to cover her ladyship’s husband with a vague but practised sympathy. “What on earth are you saying to Harold about them?” Thus it was that at the end of a few minutes Mr. Cashmore, on the sofa face to face with her, found his consciousness quite purged of its actual sense of his weakness and a new turn given to the idea of what, in one’s very drawing-room, might go on behind one’s back. Harold had quickly vanished—had been tacitly disposed of, and Mrs. Brook’s caller had moved even in the short space of time so far in another direction as to have drawn from her the little cold question: “‘Presents’? You don’t mean money?”
He clearly felt the importance of expressing at least by his silence and his eye-glass what he meant. “Her extravagance is beyond everything, and though there are bills enough, God knows, that do come in to me, I don’t see how she pulls through unless there are others that go elsewhere.”
Mrs. Brookenham had given him his tea—her own she had placed on a small table near her; and she could now respond freely to the impulse felt, on this, of settling herself to something of real interest. Except to Harold she was incapable of reproach, though there were of course shades in her resignation, and her daughter’s report of her to Mr. Longdon as conscious of an absence of prejudice would have been justified for a spectator by the particular feeling that Mr. Cashmore’s speech caused her to disclose. What did this feeling wonderfully appear unless strangely irrelevant? “I’ve no patience when I hear you talk as if you weren’t horribly rich.”
He looked at her an instant as if guessing she might have derived that impression from Harold. “What has that to do with it? Does a rich man enjoy any more than a poor his wife’s making a fool of him?”
Her eyes opened wider: it was one of her very few ways of betraying amusement. There was little indeed to be amused at here except his choice of the particular invidious name. “You know I don’t believe a word you say.”
Mr. Cashmore drank his tea, then rose to carry the cup somewhere and put it down, declining with a motion any assistance. When he was on the sofa again he resumed their intimate talk. “I like tremendously to be with you, but you mustn’t think I’ve come here to let you say to me such dreadful things as that.” He was an odd compound, Mr. Cashmore, and the air of personal good health, the untarnished bloom which sometimes lent a monstrous serenity to his mention of the barely mentionable, was on occasion balanced or matched by his playful application of extravagant terms to matters of much less moment. “You know what I come to you for, Mrs. Brook: I won’t come any more if you’re going to be horrid and impossible.”
“You come to me, I suppose, because—for my deep misfortune, I assure you—I’ve a kind of vision of things, of the wretched miseries in which you all knot yourselves up, which you yourselves are as little blessed with as if, tumbling about together in your heap, you were a litter of blind kittens.”
“Awfully good that—you do lift the burden of my trouble!” He had laughed out in the manner of the man who made notes for platform use of things that might serve; but the next moment he was grave again, as if his observation had reminded him of Harold’s praise of his wit. It was in this spirit that he abruptly brought out: “Where, by the way, is your daughter?”
“I haven’t the least idea. I do all I can to enter into her life, but you can’t get into a railway train while it’s on the rush.”
Mr. Cashmore swung back to hilarity. “You give me lots of things. Do you mean she’s so ‘fast’?” He could keep the ball going.