Brookenham had received with no flush of betrayal the various discriminations thus conveyed by her visitor, and her only revenge for the moment was to look as sweetly resigned as if she really saw what was in them. Where were they going for Easter? She had to think an instant, but she brought it out. “Oh to Pewbury—we’ve been engaged so long that I had forgotten. We go once a year—one does it for Edward.”
“Ah you spoil him!” smiled the Duchess. “Who’s to be there?”
“Oh the usual thing, I suppose. A lot of my lord’s tiresome supporters.”
“To pay his debt? Then why are you poor things asked?”
Mrs. Brookenham looked, on this, quite adorably—that is most wonderingly—grave. “How do I know, my dear Jane, why in the world we’re ever asked anywhere? Fancy people wanting Edward!” she exhaled with stupefaction. “Yet we can never get off Pewbury.”
“You’re better for getting on, cara mia, than for getting off!” the Duchess blandly returned. She was a person of no small presence, filling her place, however, without ponderosity, with a massiveness indeed rather artfully kept in bounds. Her head, her chin, her shoulders were well aloft, but she had not abandoned the cultivation of a “figure” or any of the distinctively finer reasons for passing as a handsome woman. She was secretly at war moreover, in this endeavour, with a lurking no less than with a public foe, and thoroughly aware that if she didn’t look well she might at times only, and quite dreadfully, look good. There were definite ways of escape, none of which she neglected and from the total of which, as she flattered herself, the air of distinction almost mathematically resulted. This air corresponded superficially with her acquired Calabrian sonorities, from her voluminous title down, but the colourless hair, the passionless forehead, the mild cheek and long lip of the British matron, the type that had set its trap for her earlier than any other, were elements difficult to deal with and were at moments all a sharp observer saw. The battle-ground then was the haunting danger of the bourgeois. She gave Mrs. Brookenham no time to resent her last note before enquiring if Nanda were to accompany the couple.
“Mercy mercy, no—she’s not asked.” Mrs. Brookenham, on Nanda’s behalf, fairly radiated obscurity. “My children don’t go where they’re not asked.”
“I never said they did, love,” the Duchess returned. “But what then do you do with her?”
“If you mean socially”—Mrs. Brookenham looked as if there might be in some distant sphere, for which she almost yearned, a maternal opportunity very different from that—“if you mean socially, I don’t do anything at all. I’ve never pretended to do anything. You know as well as I do, dear Jane, that I haven’t begun yet.” Jane’s hostess now spoke as simply as an earnest anxious child. She gave a vague patient sigh. “I suppose I must begin!”
The Duchess remained for a little rather grimly silent. “How old is she—twenty?”
“Thirty!” said Mrs. Brookenham with distilled sweetness. Then with no transition of tone: “She has gone for a few days to Tishy Grendon.”
“In the country?”
“She stays with her to-night in Hill Street. They go down together to-morrow. Why hasn’t Aggie been?” Mrs. Brookenham went on.
The Duchess handsomely stared. “Been where?”
“Why here, to see Nanda.”
“Here?” the Duchess echoed, fairly looking again about the room. “When is Nanda ever here?”
“Ah you know I’ve given her a room of her own—the sweetest little room in the world.” Mrs. Brookenham never looked so comparatively hopeful as when obliged to explain. “She has everything there a girl can want.”
“My dear woman,” asked the Duchess, “has she sometimes her own mother?”
The men had now come in to place the tea-table, and it was the movements of the red-haired footman that Mrs. Brookenham followed. “You had better ask my child herself.”
The Duchess was frank and jovial. “I would, I promise you, if I could get at her! But isn’t that woman always with her?”
Mrs. Brookenham smoothed the little embroidered tea-cloth. “Do you call Tishy Grendon a woman?”
Again the Duchess had one of her pauses, which were indeed so frequent in her talks with this intimate that an auditor could sometimes wonder what particular form of relief they represented. They might have been a habit proceeding from the fear of undue impatience. If the Duchess had been as impatient with Mrs. Brookenham as she would possibly have seemed without them her frequent visits in the face of irritation would have had to be accounted for. “What do YOU call her?” she demanded.
“Why Nanda’s best friend—if not her only one. That’s the place I SHOULD have liked for Aggie,” Mrs. Brookenham ever so graciously smiled.
The Duchess hereupon, going beyond her, gave way to free mirth. “My dear thing, you’re delightful. Aggie OR Tishy is a sweet thought. Since you’re so good as to ask why Aggie has fallen off you’ll excuse my telling you that you’ve just named the reason. You’ve known ever since we came to England what I feel about the proper persons—and the most improper—for her to meet. The Tishy Grendons are not a bit the proper.”
Mrs. Brookenham continued to assist a little in the preparations for tea. “Why not say at once, Jane”—and her tone, in its appeal, was almost infantine—“that you’ve come at last to placing even poor Nanda, for Aggie’s wonderful purpose, in the same impossible class?”
The Duchess took her time, but at last she accepted her duty. “Well, if you will have it. You know my ideas. If it isn’t my notion of the way to bring up a girl to give her up, in extreme youth, to an intimacy with a young married woman who’s both unhappy and silly, whose conversation has absolutely no limits, who says everything that comes into her head and talks to the poor child about God only knows what—if I should never dream of such an arrangement for my niece I can almost as little face the prospect of throwing her MUCH, don’t you see? with any young person exposed to such an association. It would be in the natural order certainly”—in spite of which natural order the Duchess made the point with but moderate emphasis—“that, since dear Edward is my cousin, Aggie should see at least as much of Nanda as of any other girl of their age. But what will you have? I must recognise the predicament I’m placed in by the more and more extraordinary development of English manners. Many things have altered, goodness knows, since I was Aggie’s age, but nothing’s so different as what you all do with your girls. It’s all a muddle, a compromise, a monstrosity, like everything else you produce; there’s nothing in it that goes on all-fours. I see but one consistent way, which is our fine old foreign way and which makes—in the upper classes, mind you, for it’s with them only I’m concerned—des femmes bien gracieuses. I allude to the immemorial custom of my husband’s race, which was good enough for his mother and his mother’s mother, for Aggie’s own, for his other sisters, for toutes ces dames. It would have been good enough for my child, as I call her—my dear husband called her HIS—if, not losing her parents, she had remained in her own country. She would have been brought up there under an anxious eye—that’s the great point; privately, carefully, tenderly, and with what she was NOT to learn—till the proper time—looked after quite as much as the rest. I can only go on with her in that spirit and make of her, under Providence, what I consider any young person of her condition, of her name, of her particular traditions, should be. Voila, ma chere. Should you put it to me whether I think you’re surrounding Nanda with any such security as that—well, I shouldn’t be able to help it if I offended
