There was space to circulate in front of the haut-pas, where he had still paced and still swung his glasses; but with these words he had paused, leaning against the billiard-table, to meet the interested urbanity of the answer they produced. “Are you very sure that having got rid of it you WILL sleep? Is it a pure confidence,” Vanderbank said, “that you do me the honour to make me? Is it something terrific that requires a reply, so that I shall have to take account on my side of the rest I may deprive you of?”
“Don’t take account of anything--I’m myself a man who always takes too much. It isn’t a matter about which I press you for an immediate answer. You can give me no answer probably without a good deal of thought. I’VE thought a good deal--otherwise I wouldn’t speak. I only want to put something before you and leave it there.”
“I never see you,” said Vanderbank, “that you don’t put something before me.”
“That sounds,” his friend returned, “as if I rather overloaded--what’s the sort of thing you fellows nowadays say?--your intellectual board. If there’s a congestion of dishes sweep everything without scruple away. I’ve never put before you anything like this.”
He spoke with a weight that in the great space, where it resounded a little, made an impression--an impression marked by the momentary pause that fell between them. He partly broke the silence first by beginning to walk again, and then Vanderbank broke it as through the apprehension of their becoming perhaps too solemn. “Well, you immensely interest me and you really couldn’t have chosen a better time. A secret--for we shall make it that of course, shan’t we?--at this witching hour, in this great old house, is all my visit here will have required to make the whole thing a rare remembrance. So I assure you the more you put before me the better.”
Mr. Longdon took up another ash-tray, but with the air of doing so as a direct consequence of Vanderbank’s tone. After he had laid it down he put on his glasses; then fixing his companion he brought out: “Have you no idea at all--?”
“Of what you have in your head? Dear Mr. Longdon, how SHOULD I have?”
“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 I should want to say?”