Vanderbank once more debated. “One doesn’t quite know what they live on. But they’ve means—for it was just that fact, I remember, that showed Brookenham’s getting the place wasn’t a job. It was given, I mean, not to his mere domestic need, but to his notorious efficiency. He has a property—an ugly little place in Gloucestershire—which they sometimes let. His elder brother has the better one, but they make up an income.”
Mr. Longdon for an instant lost himself. “Yes, I remember—one heard of those things at the time. And SHE must have had something.”
“Yes indeed, she had something—and she always has her intense cleverness. She knows thoroughly how. They do it tremendously well.”
“Tremendously well,” Mr. Longdon intelligently echoed. “But a house in Buckingham Crescent, with the way they seem to have built through to all sorts of other places—?”
“Oh they’re all right,” Vanderbank soothingly dropped.
“One likes to feel that of people with whom one has dined. There are four children?” his friend went on.
“The older boy, whom you saw and who in his way is a wonder, the older girl, whom you must see, and two youngsters, male and female, whom you mustn’t.”
There might by this time, in the growing interest of their talk, have been almost nothing too uncanny for Mr. Longdon to fear it. “You mean the youngsters are—unfortunate?”
“No—they’re only, like all the modern young, I think, mysteries, terrible little baffling mysteries.” Vanderbank had found amusement again—it flickered so from his friend’s face that, really at moments to the point of alarm, his explanations deepened darkness. Then with more interest he harked back. “I know the thing you just mentioned—the thing that strikes you as odd.” He produced his knowledge quite with elation. “The talk.” Mr. Longdon on this only looked at him in silence and harder, but he went on with assurance: “Yes, the talk—for we do talk, I think.” Still his guest left him without relief, only fixing him and his suggestion with a suspended judgement. Whatever the old man was on the point of saying, however, he disposed of in a curtailed murmur; he had already turned afresh to the series of portraits, and as he glanced at another Vanderbank spoke afresh.
“It was very interesting to me to hear from you there, when the ladies had left us, how many old threads you were prepared to pick up.”