She had moved, looking off and about her—little Aggie always on her mind—to the flight of steps, where she again hung fire; and had really ended by producing in him the manner of keeping up with her to challenge her. “Been in what?”
She went down a few steps while he stood with his face full of perceptions strained and scattered. “Why in the air they themselves have infected for her!”
V
Late that night, in the smoking room, when the smokers—talkers and listeners alike—were about to disperse, Mr. Longdon asked Vanderbank to stay, and then it was that the young man, to whom all the evening he had not addressed a word, could make out why, a little unnaturally, he had prolonged his vigil. “I’ve something particular to say to you and I’ve been waiting. I hope you don’t mind. It’s rather important.” Vanderbank expressed on the spot the liveliest desire to oblige him and, quickly lighting another cigarette, mounted again to the deep divan with which a part of the place was furnished. The smoking-room at Mertle was not unworthy of the general nobleness, and the fastidious spectator had clearly been reckoned on in the great leather-covered lounge that, raised by a step or two above the floor, applied its back to two quarters of the wall and enjoyed most immediately a view of the billiard-table. Mr. Longdon continued for a minute to roam with the air of dissimulated absence that, during the previous hour and among the other men, his companion’s eye had not lost; he pushed a ball or two about, examined the form of an ash-stand, swung his glasses almost with violence and declined either to smoke or to sit down. Vanderbank, perched aloft on the bench and awaiting developments, had a little the look of some prepossessing criminal who, in court, should have changed places with the judge. He was unlike many a man of marked good looks in that the effect of evening dress was not, with a perversity often observed in such cases, to over-emphasise his fineness. His type was rather chastened than heightened, and he sat there moreover with a primary discretion quite in the note of the deference that from the first, with his friend of the elder fashion, he had taken as imposed. He had a strong sense for shades of respect and was now careful to loll scarcely more than with an official superior. “If you ask me,” Mr. Longdon presently continued, “why at this hour of the night—after a day at best too heterogeneous—I don’t keep over till to-morrow whatever I may have to say, I can only tell you that I appeal to you now because I’ve something on my mind that I shall sleep the better for being rid of.”
There was space to circulate in front of the haut-pas, where he had still paced and still swung his glasses; but with these words he had paused, leaning against the billiard-table, to meet the interested urbanity of the answer they produced. “Are you very sure that having got rid of it you WILL sleep? Is it a pure confidence,” Vanderbank said, “that you do me the honour to make me? Is it something terrific that requires a reply, so that I shall have to take account on my side of the rest I may deprive you of?”
“Don’t take account of anything—I’m myself a man who always takes too much. It isn’t a matter about which I press you for an immediate answer. You can give me no answer probably without a good deal of thought. I’VE thought a good deal—otherwise I wouldn’t speak. I only want to put something before you and leave it there.”
“I never see you,” said Vanderbank, “that you don’t put something before me.”
“That sounds,” his friend returned, “as if I rather overloaded—what’s the sort of thing you fellows nowadays say?—your intellectual board. If there’s a congestion of dishes sweep everything without scruple away. I’ve never put before you anything like this.”
He spoke with a weight that in the great space, where it resounded a little, made an impression—an impression marked by the momentary pause that fell between them. He partly broke the silence first by beginning to walk again, and then Vanderbank broke it as through the apprehension of their becoming perhaps too solemn. “Well, you immensely interest me and you really couldn’t have chosen a better time. A secret—for we shall make it that of course, shan’t we?—at this witching hour, in this great old house, is all my visit here will have required to make the whole thing a rare remembrance. So I assure you the more you put before me the better.”
Mr. Longdon took up another ash-tray, but with the air of doing so as a direct consequence of Vanderbank’s tone. After he had laid it down he put on his glasses; then fixing his companion he brought out: “Have you no idea at all—?”