“You came on a bicycle?” Mitchy enquired.
“No, I walked.” She still spoke without a gleam. “Mother wants me to do everything.”
“Even to walk!” Mitchy laughed. “Oh yes, we must in these times keep up our walking!” The ingenious observer just now suggested might even have detected in the still higher rise of this visitor’s spirits a want of mere inward ease.
She had taken no notice of the effect upon him of her mention of her mother, and she took none, visibly, of Mr. Longdon’s manner or of his words. What she did while the two men, without offering her, either, a seat, practically lost themselves in their deepening vision, was to give her attention all to the place, looking at the books, pictures and other significant objects, and especially at the small table set out for tea, to which the servant who had admitted her now returned with a steaming kettle. “Isn’t it charming here? Will there be any one else? Where IS Mr. Van? Shall I make tea?” There was just a faint quaver, showing a command of the situation more desired perhaps than achieved, in the very rapid sequence of these ejaculations. The servant meanwhile had placed the hot water above the little silver lamp and left the room.
“Do you suppose there’s anything the matter? Oughtn’t the man—or do you know our host’s room?” Mr. Longdon, addressing Mitchy with solicitude, yet began to show in a countenance less blank a return of his sense of relations. It was as if something had happened to him and he were in haste to convert the signs of it into an appearance of care for the proprieties.
“Oh,” said Mitchy, “Van’s only making himself beautiful”—which account of their absent entertainer gained a point from his appearance at the moment in the doorway furthest removed from the place where the three were gathered.
Vanderbank came in with friendly haste and with something of the look indeed—refreshed, almost rosy, brightly brushed and quickly buttoned—of emerging, out of breath, from pleasant ablutions and renewals. “What a brute to have kept you waiting! I came back from work quite begrimed. How d’ye do, how d’ye do, how d’ye do? What’s the matter with you, huddled there as if you were on a street-crossing? I want you to think this a refuge—but not of that kind!” he laughed. “Sit down, for heaven’s sake; lie down—be happy! Of course you’ve made acquaintance all—except that Mitchy’s so modest! Tea, tea!”—and he bustled to the table, where the next minute he appeared rather helpless. “Nanda, you blessed child, do YOU mind making it? How jolly of you!—are you all right?” He seemed, with this, for the first time, to be aware of somebody’s absence. “Your mother isn’t coming? She let you come alone? How jolly of her!” Pulling off her gloves Nanda had come immediately to his assistance; on which, quitting the table and laying hands on Mr. Longdon’s shoulder to push him toward a sofa, he continued to talk, to sound a note of which the humour was the exaggeration of his flurry. “How jolly of you to be willing to come—most awfully kind! I hope she isn’t ill? Do, Mitchy, lie down. Down, Mitchy, down!—that’s the only way to keep you.” He had waited for no account of Mrs. Brookenham’s health, and it might have been apparent—still to our sharp spectator—that he found nothing wonderful in her daughter’s unsupported arrival.
“I can make tea beautifully,” she said from behind her table. “Mother showed me how this morning.”
“This morning?”—and Mitchy, who, before the fire and still erect, had declined to be laid low, greeted the simple remark with uproarious mirth. “Dear young lady, you’re the most delicious family!”
“She showed me at breakfast about the little things to do. She thought I might have to make it here and told me to offer,” the girl went on. “I haven’t yet done it this way at home—I usually have my tea upstairs. They bring it up in a cup, all made and very weak, with a piece of bread-and-butter in the saucer. That’s because I’m so young. Tishy never lets me touch hers either; so we had to make up for lost time. That’s what mother said”—she followed up her story, and her young distinctness had clearly something to do with a certain pale concentration in Mr. Longdon’s face. “Mother isn’t ill, but she told me already yesterday she wouldn’t come. She said it’s really all for ME. I’m sure I hope it is!”—with which there flickered in her eyes, dimly but perhaps all the more prettily, the first intimation they had given of the light of laughter. “She told me you’d understand, Mr. Van—from something you’ve said to her. It’s for my seeing Mr. Longdon without—she thinks—her spoiling it.”