It had been understood that he was to take his leave on the morrow, though Vanderbank was to stay another day. Mr. Longdon had for the Sunday dinner invited three or four of his neighbours to “meet” the two gentlemen from town, so that it was not till the company had departed, or in other words till near bedtime, that our four friends could again have become aware, as between themselves, of that directness of mutual relation which forms the subject of our picture. It had not, however, prevented Nanda’s slipping upstairs as soon as the doctor and his wife had gone, and the manner indeed in which, on the stroke of eleven, Mr. Longdon conformed to his tradition of appropriating a particular candle was as positive an expression of it as any other. Nothing in him was more amiable than the terms maintained between the rigour of his personal habits and his free imagination of the habits of others. He deprecated as regards the former, it might have been seen, most signs of likeness, and no one had ever dared to learn how he would have handled a show of imitation. “The way to flatter him,” Mitchy threw off five minutes later, “is not to make him think you resemble or agree with him, but to let him see how different you perceive he can bear to think you. I mean of course without hating you.”
“But what interest have YOU,” Vanderbank asked, “in the way to flatter him?”
“My dear fellow, more interest than you. I haven’t been here all day without arriving at conclusions on the credit he has opened to you--!”
“You have it in your power,” said Mitchy, “to make it anything you like.”
Mitchy was on his feet in the apartment in which their host had left them, and he had at first for this question but an expressive motion of the shoulders in respect to everything in the room. “See, judge, guess, feel!”
But it was as if Vanderbank, before the fire, consciously controlled his own attention. “Oh I don’t care a hang!”
This passage took place in the library and as a consequence of their having confessed, as their friend faced them with his bedroom light, that a brief discreet vigil and a box of cigars would fix better than anything else the fine impression of the day. Mitchy might at that moment, on the evidence of the eyes Mr. Longdon turned to them and of which his innocent candle-flame betrayed the secret, have found matter for a measure of the almost extreme allowances he wanted them to want of him. They had only to see that the greater window was fast and to turn out the library lamp. It might really have amused them to stand a moment at the open door that, apart from this, was to testify to his conception of those who were not, in the smaller hours, as HE was. He had in fact by his retreat--and but too sensibly--left them there with a deal of midnight company. If one of these presences was the mystery he had himself mixed the manner of our young men showed a due expectation of the others. Mitchy, on hearing how little Vanderbank “cared,” only kept up a while longer that observant revolution in which he had spent much of his day, to which any fresh sense of any exhibition always promptly committed him, and which, had it not been controlled by infinite tact, might have affected the nerves of those in whom enjoyment was less rotary. He was silent long enough to suggest his fearing that almost anything he might say would appear too allusive; then at last once more he took his risk. “Awfully jolly old place!”