IV
Many things at Mertle were strange for her interlocutor, but nothing perhaps as yet had been so strange as the sight of this arrangement for little Aggie’s protection; an arrangement made in the interest of her remaining as a young person of her age and her monde—so her aunt would have put it—should remain. The strangest part of the impression too was that the provision might really have its happy side and his lordship understand definitely better than any one else his noble friend’s whole theory of perils and precautions. The child herself, the spectator of the incident was sure enough, understood nothing; but the understandings that surrounded her, filling all the air, made it a heavier compound to breathe than any Mr. Longdon had yet tasted. This heaviness had grown for him through the long sweet summer day, and there was something in his at last finding himself ensconced with the Duchess that made it supremely oppressive. The contact was one that, none the less, he would not have availed himself of a decent pretext to avoid. With so many fine mysteries playing about him there was relief, at the point he had reached, rather than alarm, in the thought of knowing the worst; which it pressed upon him somehow that the Duchess must not only altogether know but must in any relation quite naturally communicate. It fluttered him rather that a person who had an understanding with Lord Petherton should so single him out as to wish for one also with himself; such a person must either have great variety of mind or have a wonderful idea of HIS variety. It was true indeed that Mr. Mitchett must have the most extraordinary understanding, and yet with Mr. Mitchett he now found himself quite pleasantly at his ease. Their host, however, was a person sui generis, whom he had accepted, once for all, the inconsequence of liking in conformity with the need he occasionally felt to put it on record that he was not narrow-minded. Perhaps at bottom he most liked Mitchy because Mitchy most liked Nanda; there hung about him still moreover the faded fragrance of the superstition that hospitality not declined is one of the things that “oblige.” It obliged the thoughts, for Mr. Longdon, as well as the manners, and in the especial form in which he was now committed to it would have made him, had he really thought any ill, ask himself what the deuce then he was doing in the man’s house. All of which didn’t prevent some of Mitchy’s queer condonations—if condonations in fact they were—from not wholly, by themselves, soothing his vague unrest, an unrest which never had been so great as at the moment he heard the Duchess abruptly say to him: “Do you know my idea about Nanda? It’s my particular desire you should—the reason, really, why I’ve thus laid violent hands on you. Nanda, my dear man, should marry at the very first moment.”
This was more interesting than he had expected, and the effect produced by his interlocutress, as well as doubtless not lost on her, was shown in his suppressed start. “There has been no reason why I should attribute to you any judgement of the matter; but I’ve had one myself, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t say frankly that it’s very much the one you express. It would be a very good thing.”
“A very good thing, but none of my business?”—the Duchess’s vivacity was not unamiable.
It was on this circumstance that her companion for an instant perhaps meditated. “It’s probably not in my interest to say that. I should give you too easy a retort. It would strike any one as quite as much your business as mine.”
“Well, it ought to be somebody’s, you know. One would suppose it to be her mother’s—her father’s; but in this country the parents are even more emancipated than the children. Suppose, really, since it appears to be nobody’s affair, that you and I do make it ours. We needn’t either of us,” she continued, “be concerned for the other’s reasons, though I’m perfectly ready, I assure you, to put my cards on the table. You’ve your feelings—we know they’re beautiful. I, on my side, have mine—for which I don’t pretend anything but that they’re strong. They can dispense with being beautiful when they’re so perfectly settled. Besides, I may mention, they’re rather nice than otherwise. Edward and I have a cousinage, though for all he does to keep it up—! If he leaves his children to play in the street I take it seriously enough to make an occasional dash for them before they’re run over. And I want for Nanda simply the man she herself wants—it isn’t as if I wanted for her a dwarf or a hunchback or a coureur or a drunkard. Vanderbank’s a man whom any woman, don’t you think? might be—whom more than one woman IS—glad of for herself: beau comme le jour, awfully conceited and awfully patronising, but clever and successful and yet liked, and without, so far as I know, any of the terrific appendages which in this country so often diminish the value of even the pleasantest people. He hasn’t five horrible unmarried sisters for his wife to have always on a visit. The way your women don’t marry is the ruin here of society, and I’ve been assured in good quarters—though I don’t know so much about that—the ruin also of conversation and of literature. Isn’t it precisely just a little to keep Nanda herself from becoming that kind of appendage—say to poor Harold, say, one of these days, to her younger brother and sister—that friends like you and me feel the importance of bestirring ourselves in time? Of course she’s supposedly young, but she’s really any age you like: your London world so fearfully batters and bruises them.” She had gone fast and far, but it had given Mr. Longdon time to feel himself well afloat. There were so many things in it all to take up that he laid his hand—of which, he was not unconscious, the feebleness exposed him—on the nearest. “Why I’m sure her mother—after twenty years of it—is fresh enough.”
“Fresh? You find Mrs. Brook fresh?” The Duchess had a manner that, in its all-knowingness, rather humiliated than encouraged; but he was all the more resolute for being conscious of his own reserves. “It seems to me it’s fresh to look about thirty.”
“That indeed would be perfect. But she doesn’t—she looks about three. She simply looks a baby.”
“Oh Duchess, you’re really too particular!” he retorted, feeling that, as the trodden worm will turn, anxiety itself may sometimes tend to wit.
She met him in her own way. “I know what I mean. My niece is a person I call fresh. It’s warranted, as they say in the shops. Besides,” she went on, “if a married woman has been knocked about that’s only a part of her condition. Elle l’a lien voulu, and if you’re married you’re married; it’s the smoke—or call it the soot!—of the fire. You know, yourself,” she roundly pursued, “that Nanda’s situation appals you.”