Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/227

BOOK FIFTH: THE DUCHESS "Well, I'm wondering if I shouldn't perhaps have a little in your place. There's nothing that, in the circumstances, occurs to you as likely for me to want to say?"

Vanderbank gave a laugh that might have struck an auditor as slightly uneasy. "When you speak of 'the circumstances' you do a thing that—unless you mean the simple thrilling ones of this particular moment—always, of course, opens the door of the lurid for a man of any imagination. To such a man you've only to say 'Boh!' in a certain tone for his conscience to jump. That's at any rate the case with mine. It's never quite on its feet—so it's now, already, on its back." He stopped a little—his smile was a trifle strained. "Is what you want to put before me something awful I've done?"

"Excuse me if I press this point"—Mr. Longdon spoke kindly, but if his friend's want of ease grew his own thereby diminished. "Can you think of nothing at all?"

"Do you mean that I've done?"

"No, but that—whether you've done it or not—I may have become aware of."

There could have been no better proof than Vanderbank's expression, on this, of his having mastered the secret of humoring without appearing to patronize. "I think you ought to give me a little more of a clew."

Mr. Longdon took off his glasses. "Well—the clew's Nanda Brookenham."

"Oh, I see." Vanderbank had responded quickly, but for a minute he said nothing more, and the great marble clock that gave the place the air of a club ticked louder in the stillness. Mr. Longdon waited with a benevolent want of mercy, yet with a look in his face that spoke of what depended for him—though indeed very far within—on the upshot of his patience. The hush, for that matter, between them, became a conscious, public 217