“Of what you have in your head? Dear Mr. Longdon, how SHOULD I have?”
“Well, I’m wondering if I shouldn’t perhaps have a little in your place. There’s nothing that in the circumstances occurs to you as likely I should want to say?”
Vanderbank gave a laugh that might have struck an auditor as a trifle uneasy. “When you speak of ‘the circumstances’ you do a thing that—unless you mean the simple thrilling ones of this particular moment—always of course opens the door of the lurid for a man of any imagination. To such a man you’ve only to give a nudge for his conscience to jump. That’s at any rate the case with mine. It’s never quite on its feet—so it’s now already on its back.” He stopped a little—his smile was even strained. “Is what you want to put before me something awful I’ve done?”
“Excuse me if I press this point.” Mr. Longdon spoke kindly, but if his friend’s anxiety grew his own thereby diminished. “Can you think of nothing at all?”
“Do you mean that I’ve done?”
“No, but that—whether you’ve done it or not—I may have become aware of.”
There could have been no better proof than Vanderbank’s expression, on this, of his having mastered the secret of humouring without appearing to patronise. “I think you ought to give me a little more of a clue.”
Mr. Longdon took off his glasses. “Well—the clue’s Nanda Brookenham.”
“Oh I see.” His friend had responded quickly, but for a minute said nothing more, and the great marble clock that gave the place the air of a club ticked louder in the stillness. Mr. Longdon waited with a benevolent want of mercy, yet with a look in his face that spoke of what depended for him—though indeed very far within—on the upshot of his patience. The hush between them, for that matter, became a conscious public measure of the young man’s honesty. He evidently at last felt it as such, and there would have been for an observer of his handsome controlled face a study of some sharp things. “I judge that you ask me for such an utterance,” he finally said, “as very few persons at any time have the right to expect of a man. Think of the people—and very decent ones—to whom on so many a question one must only reply that it’s none of their business.”
“I see you know what I mean,” said Mr. Longdon.