The Awkward Age. Генри Джеймс

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СКАЧАТЬ usual messenger,” said Mitchy, “a person I keep for such jobs, thoroughly seasoned, as you may imagine, and of a discretion—what do you call it?—a toute epreuve. Only you must let me say that I like your terror about Harold! Do you think he spends his time over Dr. Watts’s hymns?”

      Mrs. Brookenham just hesitated, and nothing, in general, was so becoming to her as the act of hesitation. “Dear Mitchy, do you know I want awfully to talk to you about Harold?”

      “About his French reading, Mrs. Brook?” Mitchy responded with interest. “The worse things are, let me just mention to you about that, the better they seem positively to be for one’s feeling up in the language. They’re more difficult, the bad ones—and there’s a lot in that. All the young men know it—those who are going up for exams.”

      She had her eyes for a little on Lord Petherton and her husband; then as if she had not heard what her interlocutor had just said she overcame her last scruple. “Dear Mitchy, has he had money from you?”

      He stared with his good goggle eyes—he laughed out. “Why on earth—? But do you suppose I’d tell you if he had?”

      “He hasn’t really borrowed the most dreadful sums?”

      Mitchy was highly diverted. “Why should he? For what, please?”

      “That’s just it—for what? What does he do with it all? What in the world becomes of it?”

      “Well,” Mitchy suggested, “he’s saving up to start a business. Harold’s irreproachable—hasn’t a vice. Who knows in these days what may happen? He sees further than any young man I know. Do let him save.”

      She looked far away with her sweet world-weariness. “If you weren’t an angel it would be a horror to be talking to you. But I insist on knowing.” She insisted now with her absurdly pathetic eyes on him. “What kind of sums?”

      “You shall never, never find out—not if you were never to speak to me again,” Mr. Mitchett replied with extravagant firmness. “Harold’s one of my great amusements—I really have awfully few; and if you deprive me of him you’ll be a fiend. There are only one or two things I want to live for, but one of them is to see how far Harold will go. Please give me some more tea.”

      “Do you positively swear?” she asked with intensity as she helped him. Then without waiting for his answer: “You have the common charity to US, I suppose, to see the position you’d put us in. Fancy Edward!” she quite austerely threw off.

      Mr. Mitchett, at this, had on his side a wonder. “Does Edward imagine—?”

      “My dear man, Edward never ‘imagined’ anything in life.” She still had her eyes on him. “Therefore if he SEES a thing, don’t you know? it must exist.”

      Mitchy for a little fixed the person mentioned as he sat with his other guest, but whatever this person saw he failed just then to see his wife’s companion, whose eyes he never met. His face only offered itself after the fashion of a clean domestic vessel, a receptacle with the peculiar property of constantly serving yet never filling, to Lord Petherton’s talkative splash. “Well, only don’t let him take it up. Let it be only between you and me,” Mr. Mitchett pleaded; “keep him quiet—don’t let him speak to me.” He appeared to convey with his pleasant extravagance that Edward looked dangerous, and he went on with a rigour of levity: “It must be OUR little quarrel.”

      There were different ways of meeting such a tone, but Mrs. Brookenham’s choice was remarkably prompt. “I don’t think I quite understand what dreadful joke you may be making, but I dare say if you HAD let Harold borrow you’d have another manner, and I was at any rate determined to have the question out with you.”

      “Let us always have everything out—that’s quite my own idea. It’s you,” said Mr. Mitchett, “who are by no means always so frank with me as I recognise—oh, I do THAT!—what it must have cost you to be over this little question of Harold. There’s one thing, Mrs. Brook, you do dodge.”

      “What do I ever dodge, dear Mitchy?” Mrs. Brook quite tenderly asked.

      “Why, when I ask you about your other child you’re off like a frightened fawn. When have you ever, on my doing so, said ‘my darling Mitchy, I’ll ring for her to be asked to come down so that you can see her for yourself’—when have you ever said anything like that?”

      “I see,” Mrs. Brookenham mused; “you think I sacrifice her. You’re very interesting among you all, and I’ve certainly a delightful circle. The Duchess has just been letting me have it most remarkably hot, and as she’s presently coming back you’ll be able to join forces with her.”

      Mitchy looked a little at a loss. “On the subject of your sacrifice—”

      “Of my innocent and helpless, yet somehow at the same time, as a consequence of my cynicism, dreadfully damaged and depraved daughter.” She took in for an instant the slight bewilderment against which, as a result of her speech, even so expert an intelligence as Mr. Mitchett’s had not been proof; then with a small jerk of her head at the other side of the room made the quickest of transitions. “What IS there between her and him?”

      Mitchy wondered at the other two. “Between Edward and the girl?”

      “Don’t talk nonsense. Between Petherton and Jane.”

      Mitchy could only stare, and the wide noonday light of his regard was at such moments really the redemption of his ugliness. “What ‘is’ there? Is there anything?”

      “It’s too beautiful,” Mrs. Brookenham appreciatively sighed, “your relation with him! You won’t compromise him.”

      “It would be nicer of me,” Mitchy laughed, “not to want to compromise HER!”

      “Oh Jane!” Mrs. Brookenham dropped. “DOES he like her?” she continued. “You must know.”

      “Ah it’s just my knowing that constitutes the beauty of my loyalty—of my delicacy.” He had his quick jumps too. “Am I never, never to see the child?”

      This enquiry appeared only to confirm his friend in the view of what was touching in him. “You’re the most delicate thing I know, and it crops up with effect the oddest in the intervals of your corruption. Your talk’s half the time impossible; you respect neither age nor sex nor condition; one doesn’t know what you’ll say or do next; and one has to return your books—c’est tout dire—under cover of darkness. Yet there’s in the midst of all this and in the general abyss of you a little deepdown delicious niceness, a sweet sensibility, that one has actually one’s self, shocked as one perpetually is at you, quite to hold one’s breath and stay one’s hand for fear of ruffling or bruising. There’s no one in talk with whom,” she balmily continued, “I find myself half so often suddenly moved to pull up short. You’ve more little toes to tread on—though you pretend you haven’t: I mean morally speaking, don’t you know?—than even I have myself, and I’ve so many that I could wish most of them cut off. You never spare me a shock—no, you don’t do that: it isn’t the form your delicacy takes. But you’ll know what I mean, all the same, I think, when I tell you that there are lots I spare YOU!”

      Mr. Mitchett fairly glowed with the candour of his attention. “Know what you mean, dearest lady? How can a man handicapped to death, a man of my origin, my appearance, my general weaknesses, drawbacks, immense indebtedness, all round, for the start, as it were, that I feel my friends have been so good as to allow me: how can such a man not be conscious every moment that every one about him goes on СКАЧАТЬ