# The Awkward Age (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1899)/Book 2/Chapter 6

VI
When Mr. Brookenham appeared his wife was prompt. "She's coming back for Lord Petherton."
"Oh!" he simply said.
"There's something between them."
"Oh!" he merely repeated. But it would have taken many such sounds on his part to represent a spirit of response discernible to any one but his wife.
"There have been things before," she went on, "but I haven't felt sure. Don't you know how one has sometimes a flash?"
It could not be said of Edward Brookenham, who seemed to bend, for sitting down, more hinges than most men, that he looked as if he knew either this or anything else. He had a pale, cold face, marked and made regular, made even in a manner handsome, by a hardness of line in which, oddly, there was no significance, no accent. Clean shaven, slightly bald, with unlighted gray eyes and a mouth that gave the impression of not working easily, he suggested a stippled drawing by an inferior master. Lean moreover and stiff, and with the air of having here and there in his person a bone or two more than his share, he had once or twice, at fancy-balls, been thought striking in a dress copied from one of Holbein's English portraits. But when once some such meaning as that had been put into him it took a long time to put another, a longer time than even his extreme exposure, or anybody's study of the problem, had yet made possible. If anything particular had finally been expected from him it might have been a summary, or an explanation, of the things he had always not said, but there was something in him that had long since pacified impatience and drugged curiosity. He had never in his life answered such a question as his wife had just put ​him and which she would not have put had she feared a reply. So dry and decent and even distinguished did he look, as if he had positively been created to meet a propriety and match some other piece, his wife, with her notorious perceptions, would no more have appealed to him seriously on a general proposition than she would, for such a response, have rung the drawing-room bell. He was none the less held to have a great general adequacy."What is it that's between them?" he demanded.
"What's between any woman and the man she's making up to?"
"Why, there may often be nothing. I didn't know she even particularly knew him," Brookenham added.
"It's exactly what she would like to prevent any one's knowing, and her coming here to be with him when she knows I know she knows—don't you see?—that he's to be here, is just one of those calculations that are subtle enough to put off the scent a woman who has but half a nose." Mrs. Brookenham, as she spoke, appeared to testify, by the pretty star-gazing way she thrust it into the air, to her own possession of the totality of such a feature. "I don't know yet quite what I think, but one wakes up to such things soon enough."
"Do you suppose it's her idea that he'll marry her?" Brookenham asked in his colorless way.
"My dear Edward!" his wife murmured for all answer.
"But if she can see him in other places, why should she want to see him here?" Edward persisted in a voice destitute of intonation.
Mrs. Brookenham now had plenty of that. "Do you mean if she can see him in his own house?"
"No cream, please," her husband said. "Hasn't she a house too?"
"Yes, but so pervaded all over by Aggie and Miss Merriman."
​"Oh!" Brookenliam observed.
"There has always been some man—I've always known there has. And now it's Petherton," said his companion.
"But where's the attraction?"
"In him? Why, lots of women could tell you. Petherton has had a career."
"But I mean in old Jane."
"Oh, I dare say she's all right," Brookenham returned as if his interest in the case had dropped. You might have felt you got a little nearer to him on guessing that, in so peopled a circle, satiety was never far from him.
"I mean for instance she has such a grand idea of duty. She thinks we're nowhere?"
"Nowhere?"
"With our children—with our home life. She's awfully down on Tishy."
"Tishy?"—Brookenham appeared for a moment at a loss.
"Tishy Grendon—and her craze for Nanda."
"Has she a craze for Nanda?"
"Surely I told you Nanda's to be with her for Easter."
"I believe you did," Brookenham bethought himself, "but you didn't say anything about a craze. And where's Harold?" he went on.
"He's at Brander. That is he will be by dinner. He has just gone."
"And how does he get there?"
"Why, by the Southwestern. They'll send to meet him."
Brookenham appeared to view this statement, for a moment, in the dry light of experience. "They'll only send if there are others too."
​"Of course then there'll be others—lots. The more the better for Harold."
This young man's father was silent a little. "Perhaps—if they don't play high."
"Ah," said his mother, "however Harold plays, he has a way of winning."
"He has a way, too, of being a hopeless ass. What I meant was how he comes there at all," Brookenham explained.
"Why, as any one comes—by being invited. She wrote to him—weeks ago."
Brookenham was discoverably affected by this fact, but it would not have been possible to say if his satisfaction exceeded his surprise. "To Harold? Very good-natured." He had another short reflection, after which he continued: "If they don't send, he'll be in for five miles in a fly—and the man will see that he gets his money."
"They will send—after her note."
"Did it say so?"
Mrs. Brookenham's melancholy eyes seemed, from afar, to run over the page. "I don't remember—but it was so cordial."
Again Brookenham meditated. "That often doesn't prevent one's being let in for ten shillings."
There was more gloom in this forecast than his wife had desired to produce. "Well, my dear Edward, what do you want me to do? Whatever a young man does, it seems to me, he's let in for ten shillings."
"Ah, but he needn't be—that's my point, I wasn't at his age."
Harold's mother took up her book again. "Perhaps you weren't the same success! I mean at such places."
"Well, I didn't borrow money to make me one—as I have a sharp idea our young scamp does."
Mrs. Brookenham hesitated. "From whom do you mean—the Jews?"
​He looked at her as if her vagueness might be assumed. "No. They, I take it, are not quite so 'cordial' to him, as you call it, as the old ladies. He gets it from Mitchy."
"Oh!" said Mrs. Brookenham. "Are you very sure?" she then demanded.
He had got up and put his empty cup back upon the tea-table, wandering afterwards a little about the room and looking out, as his wife had done half an hour before, at the dreary rain and the now duskier ugliness. He reverted in this attitude, with a complete unconsciousness of making for irritation, to a question they might be supposed to have dropped. "He'll have a lovely drive for his money!" His companion, however, said nothing, and he presently came round again. "No, I'm not absolutely sure—of his having had it from Mitchy. If I were, I should do something."
"What would you do?" She put it as if she couldn't possibly imagine.
"I would speak to him."
"To Harold?"
"No—that might just put it into his head." Brookenham walked up and down a little with his hands in his pockets; then, with a complete concealment of the steps of the transition, "Where are we dining to-night?" he brought out.
"Nowhere, thank Heaven. We grace our own board."
"Oh—with those fellows, as you said, and Jane?"
"That's not for dinner. The Baggers and Mary Pinthorpe and—upon my word I forget."
"You'll see when she comes," suggested Brookenham, who was again at the window.
"It isn't a she—it's two or three he's, I think," his wife replied with her indifferent anxiety. "But I don't know what dinner it is," she bethought herself; "it may be the one that's after Easter. Then that one's this one," she added with her eyes once more on her book.
​"Well, it's a relief to dine at home"—and Brookenham faced about. "Would you mind finding out?" he asked with some abruptness.
"Do you mean who's to dine?"
"No, that doesn't matter. But whether Mitchy has come down."
"I can only find out by asking him."
"Oh, I could ask him." He seemed disappointed at his wife's want of resource.
"And you don't want to?"
He looked coldly, from before the fire, over the prettiness of her brown, bent head. "It will be such a beastly bore if he admits it."
"And you think poor I can make him not admit it?" She put the question as if it were really her own thought too, but they were a couple who could, even face to face and unlike the augurs behind the altar, think these things without laughing. "If he should admit it," Mrs. Brookenham threw in, "will you give me the money—?"
"The money?"
"To pay Mitchy back."
She had now raised her eyes to her husband, but, turning away, he failed to meet them. "He'll deny it."
"Well, if they all deny it," she presently remarked, "it's a simple enough matter. I'm sure I don't want them to come down on us! But that's the advantage," she almost prattled on, "of having so many such charming friends—they don't come down."
This again was a remark of a sweep that there appeared to be nothing in Brookenham's mind to match; so that, scarcely pausing in the walk into which he had again fallen, he only said: "Who do you mean by 'all'?"
"Why, if he has had anything from Mitchy, I dare say he has had something from Van."
"Oh!" Brookenham returned, as if with a still greater drop of interest.
​"They oughtn't to do it," she declared; "they ought to tell us, and when they don't it serves them right." Even this observation, however, failed to rouse in her husband a response, and, as she had quite formed the habit of doing, she philosophically answered herself. "But I don't suppose they do it on spec."
It was less apparent than ever what Edward supposed. "Oh, Van hasn't money to chuck about."
"Ah, I only mean a sovereign here and there."
"Well," Brookenham threw out after another turn, "I think Van, you know, is your affair."
"It all seems to be my affair!" she exclaimed with too dolorous a little wail to have other than a comic effect. "And of course then it will be still more so if he should begin to apply to Mr. Longdon."
"We must stop that in time."
"Do you mean by warning Mr. Longdon and requesting him immediately to tell us? That won't be very pleasant," Mrs. Brookenham sighed.
"Well, then, wait and see."
She waited only a minute—it might have seemed that she already saw. "I want him to be kind to Harold, and I can't help thinking he will."
"Yes, but I fancy that that will be his notion of it—keeping him from making debts. I dare say one needn't trouble about him," Brookenham added. "He can take care of himself."
"He appears to have done so pretty well all these years," his wife mused. "As I saw him in my childhood I see him now, and I see now that I saw then even how awfully in love he was with mamma. He's too lovely about mamma," Mrs. Brookenham pursued.
"Oh!" her husband replied.
This delicate past held her a moment. "I see now I must have known a lot as a child."
"Oh!" her companion repeated.
​"I want him to take an interest in us. Above all in the children. He ought to like us"—she followed it up. "It will be a sort of 'poetic justice.' He sees, himself, the reasons, and we mustn't prevent it." She turned the possibilities over a moment, but they produced another soft wail. "The thing is that I don't see how he can like Harold."
"Then he won't lend him money," said Brookenham.
This contingency too she considered. "You make me feel as if I wished he would—which is too dreadful. And I don't think he really likes me," she went on.
"Oh!" her husband again ejaculated.
"I mean not utterly really. He has to try to. But it won't make any difference," she next remarked.
"Do you mean his trying?" Brookenham inquired.
"No—I mean his not succeeding. He'll be just the same." She saw it steadily and saw it whole. "On account of mamma."
Her husband also, with his perfect propriety, put it before himself. "And will he—on account of your mother—also like me?"
Mrs. Brookenham weighed it. "No, Edward." She covered him with her loveliest expression. "No, not really, either. But it won't make any difference." This time she had pulled him up.
"Not if he doesn't like Harold, or like you, or like me?" Brookenham, clearly, found himself able to accept only the premise.
"He'll be perfectly loyal. It will be the advantage of mamma!" Mrs. Brookenham exclaimed. "Mamma, Edward," she brought out with a flash of solemnity—"mamma was wonderful. There have been times when I've felt that she's still with us, but Mr. Longdon makes it vivid. Whether she's with me or not, at any rate, she's with him; so that when he's with me, don't you see—?"
​"It comes to the same thing?" her husband intelligently asked. "I see. And when was he with you last?"
"Not since the day he dined—but that was only last week. He'll come soon—I know from Van."
"And what does Van know?"
"Oh, all sorts of things. He has taken the greatest fancy to him."
"The old man—to Van?"
"Van to Mr. Longdon. And the other way too. Mr. Longdon has been most kind to him."
Brookenham still moved about. "Well, if he likes Van and doesn't like us, what good will that do us?"
"You would understand soon enough if you felt Van's loyalty."
"Oh, the things you expect me to feel, my dear!" Edward Brookenham lightly moaned.
"Well, it doesn't matter. But he is as loyal to me as Mr. Longdon to mamma."
The statement produced on Brookenham's part an unusual vision of the comedy of things. "Every Jenny has her Jockey!" Yet perhaps—remarkably enough—there was even more imagination in his next words. "And what sort of means—?"
"Mr. Longdon? Oh, very good. Mamma wouldn't have been the loser. Not that she cared. He must like Nanda," Mrs. Brookenham wound up.
Her companion appeared to look at the idea and then meet it. "He'll have to see her first."
"Oh, he shall see her!" Mrs. Brookenham affirmed. "It's time for her, at any rate, to sit downstairs."
"It was time, you know, I thought, a year ago."
"Yes, I know what you thought. But it wasn't."
She had spoken with decision, but he seemed unwilling to concede the point. "You admitted yourself that she was ready."
​"She was ready—yes. But I wasn't. I am now," Mrs. Brookenham, with a fine emphasis on her adverb, proclaimed as she turned to meet the opening of the door and the appearance of the butler, whose announcement—"Lord Petherton and Mr. Mitchett"—might, for an observer, have seemed immediately to offer support to her changed state.