Mrs. Brook just showed the chill of it, but she had always her courage. “Why that you don’t like her.” She had the courage of carrying off as well as of backing out. “She too has her little place with the circus—it’s the way we earn our living.”
Mr. Longdon said nothing for a moment and when he at last spoke it was almost with an air of contradiction. “She’s your mother to the life.”
His hostess, for three seconds, looked at him hard. “Ah but with such differences! You’ll lose it,” she added with a headshake of pity.
He had his eyes only on Vanderbank. “Well, my losses are my own affair.” Then his face came back. “Did she tell you I didn’t like her?”
The indulgence in Mrs. Brook’s view of his simplicity was marked. “You thought you succeeded so in hiding it? No matter—she bears up. I think she really feels a great deal as I do—that it’s no matter how many of us you hate if you’ll only go on feeling as you do about mamma. Show us THAT—that’s what we want.”
Nothing could have expressed more the balm of reassurance, but the mild drops had fallen short of the spot to which they were directed. “‘Show’ you?”
Oh how he had sounded the word! “I see—you DON’T show. That’s just what Nanda saw you thought! But you can’t keep us from knowing it—can’t keep it in fact, I think, from affecting your own behaviour. You’d be much worse to us if it wasn’t for the still warm ashes of your old passion.” It was an immense pity for Vanderbank’s amusement that he was at this moment too far off to fit to the expression of his old friend’s face so much of the cause of it as had sprung from the deeply informed tone of Mrs. Brook’s allusion. To what degree the speaker herself made the connexion will never be known to history, nor whether as she went on she thought she bettered her case or she simply lost her head. “The great thing for us is that we can never be for you quite like other ordinary people.”
“And what’s the great thing for ME?”
“Oh for you, there’s nothing, I’m afraid, but small things—so small that they can scarcely be worth the trouble of your making them out. Our being so happy that you’ve come back to us—if only just for a glimpse and to leave us again, in no matter what horror, for ever; our positive delight in your being exactly so different; the pleasure we have in talking about you, and shall still have—or indeed all the more—even if we’ve seen you only to lose you: whatever all this represents for ourselves it’s for none of us to pretend to say how much or how little YOU may pick out of it. And yet,” Mrs. Brook wandered on, “however much we may disappoint you some little spark of the past can’t help being in us—for the past is the one thing beyond all spoiling: there it is, don’t you think?—to speak for itself and, if need be, only OF itself.” She pulled up, but she appeared to have destroyed all power of speech in him, so that while she waited she had time for a fresh inspiration. It might perhaps frankly have been mentioned as on the whole her finest. “Don’t you think it possible that if you once get the point of view of realising that I KNOW—?”
She held the note so long that he at last supplied a sound. “That you know what?”