The product of Beccles accepted at all events a cigarette—still much as a joke and an adventure—and looked about him as if even more pleased than he expected. Then he broke, through his double eye-glass, into an exclamation that was like a passing pang of envy and regret. “You young men, you young men—!”
“Well, what about us?” Vanderbank’s tone encouraged the courtesy of the reference. “I’m not so young moreover as that comes to.”
“How old are you then, pray?”
“Why I’m thirty-four.”
“What do you call that? I’m a hundred and three!” Mr. Longdon at all events took out his watch. “It’s only a quarter past eleven.” Then with a quick change of interest, “What did you say is your public office?” he enquired.
“The General Audit. I’m Deputy Chairman.”
“Dear!” Mr. Longdon looked at him as if he had had fifty windows. “What a head you must have!”
“Oh yes—our head’s Sir Digby Dence.”
“And what do we do for you?”
“Well, you gild the pill—though not perhaps very thick. But it’s a decent berth.”
“A thing a good many fellows would give a pound of their flesh for?”
Vanderbank’s visitor appeared so to deprecate too faint a picture that he dropped all scruples. “I’m the most envied man I know—so that if I were a shade less amiable I should be one of the most hated.”
Mr. Longdon laughed, yet not quite as if they were joking. “I see. Your pleasant way carries it off.”
Vanderbank was, however, not serious. “Wouldn’t it carry off anything?”
Again his friend, through the pince-nez, appeared to crown him with a Whitehall cornice. “I think I ought to let you know I’m studying you. It’s really fair to tell you,” he continued with an earnestness not discomposed by the indulgence in Vanderbank’s face. “It’s all right—all right!” he reassuringly added, having meanwhile stopped before a photograph suspended on the wall. “That’s your mother!” he brought out with something of the elation of a child making a discovery or guessing a riddle. “I don’t make you out in her yet—in my recollection of her, which, as I told you, is perfect; but I dare say I soon shall.”
Vanderbank was more and more aware that the kind of amusement he excited would never in the least be a bar to affection. “Please take all your time.”
Mr. Longdon looked at his watch again. “Do you think I HAD better keep it?”
“The cab?” Vanderbank liked him so, found in him such a promise of pleasant things, that he was almost tempted to say: “Dear and delightful sir, don’t weigh that question; I’ll pay, myself, for the man’s whole night!” His approval at all events was complete.
“Most certainly. That’s the only way not to think of it.”
“Oh you young men, you young men!” his guest again murmured. He had passed on to the photograph—Vanderbank had many, too many photographs—of some other relation, and stood wiping the gold-mounted glasses through which he had been darting admirations and catching side-lights for shocks. “Don’t talk nonsense,” he continued as his friend attempted once more to throw in a protest; “I belong to a different period of history. There have been things this evening that have made me feel as if I had been disinterred—literally dug up from a long sleep. I assure you there have!”—he really pressed the point.
Vanderbank wondered a moment what things in particular these might be; he found himself wanting to get at everything his visitor represented, to enter into his consciousness and feel, as it were, on his side. He glanced with an intention freely sarcastic at an easy possibility. “The extraordinary vitality of Brookenham?”
Mr. Longdon, with nippers in place again, fixed on him a gravity that failed to prevent his discovering in the eyes behind them a shy reflexion of his irony. “Oh Brookenham! You must tell me all about Brookenham.”
“I see that’s not what you mean.”
Mr. Longdon forbore to deny it. “I wonder if you’ll understand what I mean.” Vanderbank bristled with the wish to be put to the test, but was checked before he could say so. “And what’s HIS place—Brookenham’s?”
“Oh Rivers and Lakes—an awfully good thing. He got it last year.”
Mr. Longdon—but not too grossly—wondered. “How did he get it?”
Vanderbank laughed. “Well, SHE got it.”
His friend remained grave. “And about how much now—?”
“Oh twelve hundred—and lots of allowances and boats and things. To do the work!” Vanderbank, still with a certain levity, added.
“And what IS the work?”
The young man had a pause. “Ask HIM. He’ll like to tell you.”
“Yet he seemed to have but little to say.” Mr. Longdon exactly measured it again.
“Ah not about that. Try him.”
He looked more sharply at his host, as if vaguely suspicious of a trap; then not less vaguely he sighed. “Well, it’s what I came up for—to try you all. But do they live on that?” he continued.
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
