His tone betrayed so special a meaning that the words had a sound of suddenness; yet there was always in Nanda’s face that odd preparedness of the young person who has unlearned surprise through the habit, in company, of studiously not compromising her innocence by blinking at things said. “How CAN I?” she asked, but appearing rather to take up the proposal than to put it by.
“Can’t you, CAN’T you?” He spoke pressingly and kept her hand. She shook her head slowly, markedly; on which he continued: “You don’t do justice to Mr. Mitchy.” She said nothing, but her look was there and it made him resume: “Impossible?”
“Impossible.” At this, letting her go, Mr. Longden got up; he pulled out his watch. “We must go back.” She had risen with him and they stood face to face in the faded light while he slipped the watch away. “Well, that doesn’t make me wish it any less.”
“It’s lovely of you to wish it, but I shall be one of the people who don’t. I shall be at the end,” said Nanda, “one of those who haven’t.”
“No, my child,” he returned gravely—“you shall never be anything so sad.”
“Why not—if YOU’VE been?” He looked at her a little, quietly, and then, putting out his hand, passed her own into his arm. “Exactly because I have.”
III
“Would you” the Duchess said to him the next day, “be for five minutes awfully kind to my poor little niece?” The words were spoken in charming entreaty as he issued from the house late on the Sunday afternoon—the second evening of his stay, which the next morning was to bring to an end—and on his meeting the speaker at one of the extremities of the wide cool terrace. There was at this point a subsidiary flight of steps by which she had just mounted from the grounds, one of her purposes being apparently to testify afresh to the anxious supervision of little Aggie she had momentarily suffered herself to be diverted from. This young lady, established in the pleasant shade on a sofa of light construction designed for the open air, offered the image of a patience of which it was a questionable kindness to break the spell. It was that beautiful hour when, toward the close of the happiest days of summer, such places as the great terrace at Mertle present to the fancy a recall of the banquet-hall deserted—deserted by the company lately gathered at tea and now dispersed, according to affinities and combinations promptly felt and perhaps quite as promptly criticised, either in quieter chambers where intimacy might deepen or in gardens and under trees where the stillness knew the click of balls and the good humour of games. There had been chairs, on the terrace, pushed about; there were ungathered teacups on the level top of the parapet; the servants in fact, in the manner of “hands” mustered by a whistle on the deck of a ship, had just arrived to restore things to an order soon again to be broken. There were scattered couples in sight below and an idle group on the lawn, out of the midst of which, in spite of its detachment, somebody was sharp enough sometimes to cry “Out!” The high daylight was still in the sky, but with just the foreknowledge already of the long golden glow in which the many-voiced caw of the rooks would sound at once sociable and sad. There was a great deal all about to be aware of and to look at, but little Aggie had her eyes on a book over which her pretty head was bent with a docility visible even from afar. “I’ve a friend—down there by the lake—to go back to,” the Duchess went on, “and I’m on my way to my room to get a letter that I’ve promised to show him. I shall immediately bring it down and then in a few minutes be able to relieve you,—I don’t leave her alone too much—one doesn’t, you know, in a house full of people, a child of that age. Besides”—and Mr. Longdon’s interlocutress was even more confiding—“I do want you so very intensely to know her. You, par exemple, you’re what I SHOULD like to give her.” Mr. Longdon looked the noble lady, in acknowledgement of her appeal, straight in the face, and who can tell whether or no she acutely guessed from his expression that he recognised this particular juncture as written on the page of his doom?—whether she heard him inaudibly say “Ah here it is: I knew it would have to come!” She would at any rate have been astute enough, had this miracle occurred, quite to complete his sense for her own understanding and suffer it to make no difference in the tone in which she still confronted him. “Oh I take the bull by the horns—I know you haven’t wanted to know me. If you had you’d have called on me—I’ve given you plenty of hints and little coughs. Now, you see, I don’t cough any more—I just rush at you and grab you. You don’t call on me—so I call on YOU. There isn’t any indecency moreover that I won’t commit for my child.”
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?”