Front matter (continued 2)

This was a character to which every item involved in Mr. Pendrel's bequest quite naturally and directly contributed. They were all items of duration and evidence, all smoothed with service and charged with accumulated messages. The house was of about 1710, and nothing of that age had ever spoken of it to Ralph in such a tone of having dropped nothing by the way to reach him. Large, simple and straight, effective from a happy relation of line to line and space to space, from a dignity that seemed somehow a product of rightnesses even as an effect in arithmetic is a concord of numbers, it was exemplary in its kind, and its kind was for its new master the kind with which he could least imagine ever having a quarrel. The type carried him back and back till he remembered that such offices were solemn for honours after all not rare; yet at the same time that he tasted the sweet staleness almost to intoxication he rejoiced in the fact that the animating presences, all the other figures involved, could still be fitted together. They were of an age so remote and yet of an imagery so near. None of the steps were missing and the backward journey took no turns. It wasn't for Ralph as if he had lost himself, as he might have done in a deeper abyss, but much rather as if in respect to what he most cared for he had never found himself till now. As the house was his house, so the time, as it sank into him, was his time. It sank into him as he sat in the handsome chairs, specimens surely of price, as he figured the fineness of inlaid tables, rejoicing in the form of panels and pilasters and pronouncing the whole scene inimitably "quiet." It had never been either overloaded or despoiled; everything was in place and answered and acted; the large clear rooms almost furnished themselves, moreover, thanks to pleasant proportion and surface, without the aid of redundancy. He gave himself with relief, with gratitude for their luck, to all they had escaped knowing, all that, in the vulgarest of ages, they had succeeded in not inheriting. There wasn't a chimney-piece, an arched recess, a glazed and columned cupboard, that hadn't for our young man the note of structural style, not a cornice nor a moulding that his eye didn't softly brush, not a sunk glass, above a shelf, unevenly bevelled and however tarnished, in which shadows didn't condense themselves into shapes, not an old hinge nor an old brass lock that he couldn't work with love of the act, not an echo on the great stairs—he had from the first classed the staircase as "great"—that he didn't each time pause to catch again. He drew himself along the banister like a schoolboy yearning for a slide; all the more that the banister of hammered iron, admirably flourished and scalloped and with a handrail of polished oak, vaguely commended itself to him as French and matchable in an old Paris hôtel. A museum the place on this occasion more than ever became, but a museum of held reverberations still more than of kept specimens. It contained more of these latter than his fondest dream had originally pleaded for, but he felt at moments that even had they all been absent the sense of the whole would have been scarce less saved or the composition less happy. The walls and windows and floors sufficiently produced the effect—the perfect "state" of everything sufficiently sounded the note.

There were questions—more even than he could meet—that came up for him in the act of absence; but these questions either practically answered themselves by contact, or, so far as they didn't, merged themselves in others to which the answers might wait. Had the array of appurtenances, such as it was, been there from of old, or were they objects got together with the modern motive and precisely for the sake of their suggestion? Did they in their elegant sparseness render the house technically "furnished," and could it in point of fact be lived in without additions and excrescences that would make it wrong? Were the things honest rarities such as collectors would jump at, or only a fortuitous handful that roughly and loosely harmonised? How came it that if they were really "good" they were not on everyone's tongue, and how above all that if they were poor they so convinced and beguiled? These would have been matters to clear up by putting them to the test, and Ralph knew of more ways than one in which, should he ask for an hour from an obliging expert, his eyes would probably open. But experts and tests were, as it happened, and as I have already signified, quite what he was as yet least moved to cultivate; his instinct, with so much more on his consciousness, from the first concussion, than he could fairly handle, having been all to postpone the social complication, the presentation of letters, the looking up of friends. It had struck him that, marked out by his odd fate for an hospitality so rare and so special, he might temporarily neglect any minor appeal. There was already before him, goodness knew, matter enough for response.

This evening at any rate, while the day darkened and the weather shrouded his vigil, he invoked convenient illusions with a tremour he had not yet felt; he arrived, between his fondness and his fear, at the easiest compromise with concentration. Unmistakeably, as the afternoon waned, he held off as much as he hovered. It was a natural effect of his restlessness that he didn't for the present see himself settled. It was positively as if, with the cup so held to his lips, the taste of 1710 might prove too stiff a dose. He would judge, as it were, when he came back—back, as who should say also, from everywhere else. He would go of course everywhere else; intellectually now he could so well afford to. This would make all the general initiation that, as a preliminary, was indispensable—the series of scattered dashes and superficial dips. Strange his divination, or whatever one might call it, that from such a plunge at Number Nine as would thoroughly penetrate he might possibly not emerge undamaged—or even, it was actually to be figured, not emerge at all. He might remain there below, remain in the quintessential depth that stood so ready for a real resident. He pulled up his patrol as it again came to him that for this privilege of real residence he had a candidate in hand. He loitered anew, looked and listened, strolled and stopped, paused at moments, with hands in pockets, to gaze all too gravely at a mere panel in a wainscot, a mere seam in a curtain, and repeat over vaguely the name of Mrs. Midmore of Drydown. She had gradually become for him less abstract, and he reflected with interest that she was the one historic figure he was as yet in position to introduce into the view. There were in fact moments of desultory thought when he felt as if she were already in it by her own act—so close a relation to it seemed asserted by her proved resolution. This proved resolution was, so far as his wondering mind could now place her before him, what was most the mark of her aspect, and there were literally for him flights of fancy through which, as she stood there, she looked out at him with a hard old face. Yes, she would be old, Mrs. Midmore of Drydown—in the sense at least that she wouldn't be new: she wouldn't without that have what he could only phrase as the connection; and she would not less assuredly be hard: she wouldn't without that have what he could only think of as the nerve. He dressed her, with unwitting confusion, in the old manner of the house—the manner of the two or three portraits of women (these, alas, plainly enough, not from illustrious or even from known hands) inserted in the woodwork of the reception rooms, he heard for an instant, hallucinated, the scrape of her stiff petticoat on the floor, and the tap of her shoes, if it weren't rather the click of her small crutch, on the stone stair. She wore a little black hood fastened under her chin by an ornament—that old-time trinket would be priceless of a truth; and her pronunciation of certain words made her, as she talked, difficult to understand. Could she, he wistfully wondered, live in the house as it stood?—it being, as might have been made out, a puzzle to him to see her there so poorly convenienced, and yet not less a pain to equip her with a background of cosy corners or photographs framed in leather, of tailor-made ladies doing tricks with little dogs and gentlemen in tweed mixtures tilting back "good" chairs.

The few portraits of men in the house were not sensibly superior to the three or four women's, besides being, in a couple of cases, of a date observably later; but they had alike that prime and sufficient property of the old portrait—they had, as Ralph put it to himself, their more or less attaching "look" to give out. They had in short those painted eyes for the particular purpose of following their friend as he moved; and one of the things he actually found himself most doing was to circulate in their presence just to see for his amusement how far they would in this fashion go. They all had somehow the art of going further than he had ever perceived such a company—on the walls of a museum for instance—to coincide in going. His amusements, it will be noted, were for a rainy hour simple enough, and a protected observer of some of his proceedings would doubtless have pronounced them pointless to the verge of puerility. This, however, would result partly from the difficulty of his making a lucid plea for what all the while took place within him. It was a ferment deep enough—even while he might superficially have appeared but to be asking the flat framed images what they thought of the question of his admitting Mrs. Midmore. He read into them as he lingered before them the knowledge of her being of their company; they had had on occasion, it would seem, to live with her, they had witnessed her ways and could give him the answer he watched and waited for. Nothing could have been more amusing, if, always, he was amused—than his impression at once that they really gave it and that he yet quite as really couldn't make it out. Portraits of the dead are at best ironic things, but, unknown and unnamed as were these victims of fate, none had ever so affected him as after all reacting upon it. This general innuendo, as he felt himself take it from them, was quite out of scale with their general obscurity. It represented none the less for his question neither a yea nor a nay; though it might have made one or the other if he could only have told which. It was thus their character, excepting only one, that they defied interpretation, and the character of the exception scarce bettered the case.

In presence of the single picture in which anything to call art had been appreciably active Ralph was luckily able—from the point of view of diversion—to treat himself to the sense of something like a prodigy. Let into the upper wainscot of the innermost and smallest of the three drawing-rooms, a charming panelled parlour lighted from the large walled court behind the house, which made a decent distance for other roofs, chimneys and windows, this work, prominent in its place over the mantel, depicted a personage who simply appeared to have sought to ignore our friend's appeal by turning away his face. This it was that constituted the prodigy, for Ralph had truly never seen a gentleman painted, and painted beautifully, in so thankless a posture. It gave the figure a conscious air which might have made for ridicule had it not so positively made for life; whereby to laugh at it would verily have been, in spite of its averted look, too much like laughing in a gentleman's face. The gentleman in question here had turned his back, and for all the world as if he had turned it within the picture. This of course was far from the first time Ralph had admired and studied him, but it was the first time of his finding his attention throb with the idea that the actual attitude might change—that it had even probably, that it had in fact repeatedly, done so. Extravagant enough such an imagination, but now settling on our young man in force—the prodigy that when one wasn't there the figure looked as figures in portraits inveterately look, somewhere into the room, and that this miraculous shift, the concealment of feature and identity, took place only when one's step drew near. Who in the world had ever "sat"—though in point of fact the model in this case stood—in a position that so trifled with the question of resemblance? The only explanation conceivable was some motive on the sitter's part—since it surely wouldn't have been on the artist's—for wishing resemblance minimised; a situation in which a refusal to sit at all would have been a much easier course. From the first occasion of his pausing there Ralph Pendrel had spun his fine thread, matching the wilful position with this and that hypothesis; only not till now had his view of the possible taken this monstrous jump. He had read into the picture the notion of a wager, a joke, or even of some particular vanity as to poise of head, form of ear, shape of shoulder, or even fit of coat, some whim of old-time elegance, some conceit of the age of the bucks—among whom, not indistinguishably, the original of the portrait might have figured. Had he otherwise, failing these possibilities, a face to be so deprecated, a face so inferior to the rest of his person as to constitute a deformity prohibitive or represent an identity in some way compromised? There was nothing Ralph had in fine been able to think of that was not more or less met by the objection that an easier choice is usually open to the afflicted and the dishonoured.

The honours were exactly what this representation in a high degree enjoyed; for if it had not been placed in the largest and best room it had claimed, still better, a room all to itself. The little innermost parlour was moreover for its new proprietor the most consecrated corner of the house. It was there that, as he had repeatedly said to himself, the spell worked best; it was there, for instance, that, as he was perfectly sure, Mrs. Midmore of Drydown would like best to sit; but didn't it by the same token precisely happen that the absence of another portrait was what would permit the fullest license within the frame to the subject of this one? He might turn about as he liked when he didn't turn before other eyes. When once this conceit of his turning had lodged itself in Pendrel's brain the way our friend played with it would have exposed him perhaps more than anything else—had there been observation of him too—to that charge of apparent levity which we have rejoiced for him that there was no one to bring. He came and went, passed into the next room and then returned quickly, presented his own back to the chimney-piece and wheeled round on a sudden—all as if he might have caught his mystificator bringing off the trick. No other trick however was probably played on him but that, little by little and as dusk began to gather, he found himself interested almost to impatience, perplexed almost to pain. His companion on the wall indescribably lived, and yet lived only to cheat him. When he had at last in meditation fixed the ground of his complaint he found in it the quite defensible position that, painted as people are always painted, the subject would have had something to say to him. That was a contention valid enough, and one with which he was at last able to associate his grievance. He had somehow lost a friend by the perversity of the posture—he was so sure of the friend he should have gained had the face been presented.

The more he looked at everything else the less it was credible there should have been anything to hide. The subject had been young, gallant, generous; these things, even on the scant showing, were his mysteries and marks. Ralph ended in fact by asking himself what other mere male back would so have produced the effect of sharpening curiosity. It was enough to say for this gentleman's close compact dark curls, for his long straight neck, which emerged from a high stock and rolled collar, for the fall of his shoulder and the cut of his dark-green sleeve, from the way his handsome left hand, folding easily over a pair of grey gloves, rested its knuckles on his hip and conveyed the impression of a beaver, of the earliest years of the century, held out of view in the right—it was enough to say for these few indications that they provoked to irritation the desire for others. He was a son of his time, and his time was the dawn of the modern era—which, bringing him to that extent within range, made it more of an offence to curiosity so to have missed him. He was a young English gentleman of a happy "position" and of a time in which his youth, given that position, could only be dedicated to the god of all the battles of which Waterloo was to be the greatest and the last. Who could say what had become of him or on what far-off field of Spain or of Flanders he mightn't have left his life? These were rare questions and quick flights, though Ralph had in truth on his first visit begun to presume and combine and construct. With opportunities renewed he had arrived under the effect of the last occasion previous at a complete and consistent scheme of vision. These present hours disconcerted him therefore the more that they poured again the elements into the crucible. The violet fumes went up afresh, but were thick and confounding. It was not that he didn't, the figure in the frame, remain extraordinarily persuasive, but that he on the contrary quite harassed credulity. It was not that there was less of him than one wanted, but rather that there was too inordinately much and that there would be more and more of the measure to come. Ralph repeatedly felt, as he let himself go, that it would come in force. He was like the worshipper in a Spanish church who watches for the tear on the cheek or the blood-drop from the wound of some wonder-working effigy of Mother or of Son. When he moved away a little it was to let these things start at their ease, and when he next turned upon them it was to assist at the prodigy before it should stop.

It must at the same time be mentioned that he knew at moments the chill of intermissions, that he had more than once to shake himself in the lapse of faith. He saw during these revulsions but what he had seen before, the sharpest mere suggestion, no doubt, in the whole range of the effective art of suggestion. The young man looked away, but not from any embarrassment that he could produce. It wasn't what he hid that he thought of, but what he saw for himself. The practical snub to poor Ralph was thus that he looked away into a world of his own—off into the dark backward that at once so challenged and so escaped his successor. Just so his own was in his tremendous "pull" and reach, the fact of his positively living enjoyment of some relation or other, not to say some cluster of relations, that during those very minutes determined his considering air, and even, of a sudden, invested him with something of that effect which poor Ralph, wondering about great Italian church pictures and ruefully conscious of knowing them but by hearsay, imputed to the beauty and sincerity of the portrayed, the attentive donatorio in the corner of the Venetian or other masterpiece. What was the presence of the pious magnifico, say, but our very Ralph Pendrel's presence, not a little mixed, as he supposed that of the old-time devotee represented in the act to be, with the immemorial smoke of altar candles?—yet leaving the upper spaces, those where the sacred or the saintly image itself reigned, clear and sublime. The clearness, or call it even the sublimity, was here for all the world the same sort of thing: didn't it place round the handsome uplifted head, as by the patina of the years, the soft rub of the finger of time, that ring of mystic light? In the Titian, the Tintoret or the Veronese such a melting of the tone, such a magic as grew and grew for Ralph as soon as he once had caught the fancy of it, would have expressed the supernatural even as the circling nimbus expresses.

He had at intervals an eye to his watch, but what kept him on and on was precisely the force of the stillness in which nothing happened. There had come to him at the end of an hour or two a special and peculiar sense of being alone in the house. If his good friends in charge were below—he had had with them this evening no contact—never were good friends so respectful of what he was quite ready to call for their sake his absurdity. He was fully aware of how absurd it might appear in a quiet gentleman of unannounced intentions to perambulate an ordered house after the fashion of some carpet-man or plumber deprived by a catastrophe of foot-rule or pocket-book. He listened at the mouth of the lower regions and found them soundless; he remounted to the chambers above, and then he again descended to apply that test. Practically, in any case, he was beyond all observation and if self-effaced agents but worked to make him feel so, that only assured the freedom. Perhaps they had in fact gone out, finding him in murmured counsel more uncanny than they liked; it came to him whimsically while he paused anew at one of the windows as if on purpose to feel cut off by the gathering night and the patter of cold rain, it came to him agreeably that they might have been scared of a person whose range was so restless, who, declining at the outset a fire, seemed to like the gruesome chill, and who now let the shadows multiply without so much as ringing for a light.

The windy lanterns flickered in the square and were reflected in the wet, and as he turned about for another prowl—his last decidedly this one—he assured himself that he had in his pocket matches for tobacco and that, should he require them, the numerous brave stiff candle-sticks of silver and brass (oh what people he knew, even Aurora herself, would have given for them!) were furnished with tall tapers. On his reaching again for his final round the first drawing-room, which occupied with its fine windows the width of the house and into which, as the curtains were still undrawn, the street-lamp before the outer door played up with a gusty rise and fall that made objects, chairs, cabinets, sofas, pictures, look the least bit equivocal and like some vague human company that blinked or grimaced at him—on his thus finding himself once more where he seemed most to hold the key of the place he resumed the pointless pacing that had occupied so much of his visit. He walked from end to end as with a problem to think out; listened to his tread on the carpetless floor, for the perfect polish of which (no material note in the whole scale being more to his taste) he had made from the first a point of commending the housekeeper; he stayed on without knowing why, only clinging to this particular room just because he could measure its length, and even a little because of the very ambiguity, half sociable and half sinister, that made its different features, as he might have said, take action. He trifled at moments with the idea of spending the night—which he was indeed spending to the extent that he so hung on. Nights spent in peculiar houses were a favourite theme of the magazines, and he remembered tales about them that had been thought clever—only regretting now that he had not heard on the retreat of his fellow-occupants (for was not that always the indispensable stroke?) the terrified bang of the door. The real deterrent to sitting up at Number Nine would just be, he lucidly reasoned, its coincidence with the magazines. Nothing would induce him, he could at least fondly convince himself, to make the place the subject of one of the vulgar experiments that pass into current chatter. He would presently go with his mind made up; but meanwhile he walked.

He walked and walked—walked till he received a check in the form of a bump from a piece of furniture. This brought him back to the fact of the complete fall of night and to more darkness in the room than his enlarged vision had for the time needed to reckon with. He looked about him and felt as cold as if he had really passed a vigil; without his certainty that he had been on his legs he might fairly believe he had slept. He wondered what time had elapsed, but, taking out his watch to see, found its face indistinct even at the window. He then felt in his waistcoat for matches, but immediately after, in the act of striking one, had a happy change of thought. It was as if he had already proof positive of being there alone. It was vivid to him at this instant, in the flame of his match, that for reasons he didn't stop to question—the fact itself made so for intenser moments—he had been peculiarly disconnected and left, left to himself and to whatever else might be; with which consciousness he instead of consulting his watch, though he took another look about, made for the first candlestick that just showed its upright silver gleam. His match went out before he reached it, but he struck another, and it was in the act of lighting the candle that his hand told him how he trembled. This was the shake, he felt, however, of excitement—not of a baser state of nerves; an excitement that marked simply his at last knowing himself, as not yet, in possession of what he had come in for. His doubt was settled: he had asked himself if he were prepared, if he should "elect," to be; but here he was, in fine, without more question or more ado. The only ado was, with his candle lighted, to face the consequence of that particular preparation.

This act employed him, thanks to the bunchy wick, a minute or two; but no sooner was the little flame assured and he had raised aloft the glimmering torch than he was filled with the sense of a quite new relation to the house. It was but a trifle, yet he had not hitherto so much used the place even as to light a candle. This triviality made all the difference of raising him from the condition, comparatively poor, of a visitor who betrayed timidity. It registered in a single brief insistence the fact that he was master, and when he now almost waved in the air his light, of which the wax hadn't time to melt, it was in sign—tremble though his hand still might—of a confidence sharply gained. The impression was strong with him of having traversed a crisis—served, and all in half an hour, one of those concentrated terms of pious self-dedication or whatever by which the aspirants of the ages of faith used to earn their knighthood. What was it he had emerged from after this fashion of the accepted probationer? He had had his idea of testing the house, and lo it was the house that by a turn of the tables had tested him. He had at all events grasped his candle as if it had been sword or cross, and his attitude may pass for us as sufficiently his answer or his vow. It had already occurred to him that, so completely consecrated, he must make one more round. He moved to the end of the room and then moved back; it had begun to give him extraordinary pleasure thus to march with his light. He marched out to the lobby and the staircase and then down, slow and solemn, to the hall he had supposed Jacobean and in which, illumined, he could once more, by the mere play of his arm, make due amends for his mistake. He came up again to the landing by the great room and, after a slight hesitation, continued his ascent. He revolved through the chambers above and amused himself, at successive windows, with the thought of the observation possibly incurred, out in the square, by such a wandering twinkle from floor to floor and in the small hours on the part of some soaked and sleepy policeman not already, in respect to the old house, without a working hypothesis. On his return to the level of the drawing rooms he had another of his pauses; he stood with his candle aloft and his eyes attached a minute to the door that, open at the end of the passage, would have admitted him straight to the panelled parlour.

The effect of this consideration was that he went roundabout, turning directly again to the front and the row of dark windows lashed afresh by a great gust of the rain. It was as if the wind had of a sudden grown wild in order to emphasise with its violence all the elements of his case. It was somehow too by this time—with such a stride—two o'clock in the morning and terrible weather. The forward exposure most met the assault, the small square black panes rattled in their tall white sashes, the objects around him creaked, and his candle came as near going out as if a window had blown through. The commotion was in fact so great, shaking all the place, that under the sense of the draught he wasn't for the moment sure something hadn't somewhere been forced open. He instinctively moved, half for inquiry, half for shelter, to the inner room, the second; which brought him, still with his clutched and raised light, to view of the other door of the panelled parlour, the access independent of the hall. He had after this an instant of confusion, an instant during which he struck himself as catching at a distance the chance reflection of his candle-flame on some polished surface. If the flame was there, however, where was the surface?—the duplication of his light showing, he quickly perceived, in the doorway itself. He received in those instants an amazing impression—knew himself convinced that in his absence the thing he had thought of and put away had taken place. Somebody was in the room more prodigiously still than he had dreamed—on his level, on the floor itself and but ten yards off, and now, all intelligence and response, vividly aware of him, fixed him across the space with eyes of life. It was like the miracle prayed for in the church—the figure in the picture had turned; but from the moment it had done so this tremendous action, this descent, this advance, an advance, and as for recognition, upon his solitary self, had almost the effect at first of crushing recognition, in other words of crushing presumption, by their immeasurable weight. The huge strangeness, that of a gentleman there, a gentleman from head to foot, to meet him and share his disconnection, stopped everything; yet it was in nothing stranger than in the association that they already, they unmistakeably felt they had enjoyed. With this last apprehension at any rate the full prodigy was there, for what he most sharply knew while he turned colder still was that what he had taken for a reflection of his light was only another candle. He knew, though out of his eye's range any assurance, that the second of the pair on the shelf below the portrait was now not in its place. He raised his own still higher to be sure, and the young man in the doorway made a movement that answered; but so, while almost as with brandished weapons they faced each other, he saw what was indeed beyond sense. He was staring at the answer to the riddle that had been his obsession, but this answer was a wonder of wonders. The young man above the mantel, the young man brown-haired, pale, erect, with the high-collared dark blue coat, the young man revealed, responsible, conscious, quite shining out of the darkness, presented him the face he had prayed to reward his vigil; but the face—miracle of miracles, yes—confounded him as his own.

BOOK THIRD

The upshot of the state in which he found himself for three or four days was a sudden decision to call on the Ambassador. The idea, in coming to him, brought him ease, offered an issue to his pressing need to communicate. He had been divided between this need and the equal one—the profound policy—of silence; than which conflict nothing in his life had ever more tormented him. He wished he had been a Catholic, that he might go to confession; his desire, remarkably enough, being no less for secrecy than for relief. He recalled the chapter in Hawthorne's fine novel in which the young woman from New England kneels, for the lightening of her woe, to the old priest at St. Peter's, and felt that he sounded as never before the depth of that passage. His case in truth was worse than Hilda's and his burden much greater, for she had been but a spectator of what weighed upon her, whereas he had been a close participant. It mattered little enough that his sense was not the sense of crime; it was the sense, in an extraordinary degree, of something done in passion, and of an experience far stranger than a mere glimpse, or than, if it came to that, a positive perpetration, of murder. He wondered that a knowledge of anything less than murder could be able to constitute in one's soul such a closed back room; but what was of course now most present to him was that he had hitherto grasped of life a sadly insignificant shred. There were at least as many more things in it for one's philosophy than poor Hamlet himself was to have found in heaven and earth. He went about and took his food and did his business; he had tested the truth of the promise made, the promise that he should successively present, even to himself, on reappearance; he was in fact fully aware that he had never yet had for the world—yes, and perhaps too for himself—so much to rest on as in the appearance he presented.

Nothing perhaps was more strange than that what he had accepted he still accepted; he was not attended with disorders or fears; he had neither alarms nor lapses nor returns, neither cold sweats nor hot flushes: it was much nearer true that he found in the excitement—for it was after all, however muffled and compressed, the felt throb of a pulse—an inordinate charm. But if it might be a charm, for the time, as much as one would, just so it might become later on, and was probably sure to, a terror; whatever form one should finally best know it by, he wanted in some single instance to impart his knowledge. He desired, he chose, that one other person, anxiously selected, should share his charge of it. One person would do—in fact more than one would spoil everything. There was a difference for him that he conceived this would make if he could only be sure of the safety of the vessel. His word once dropped into that moral receptacle and the key turned upon it and pocketed, he should come the more assuredly back to life, or might rather, and as for the first time, attack and perhaps surmount it. The motive he obeyed was indeed on the occasion of the visit itself as completely expressed as might be. The Ambassador, blest and distinguished man, was not a personal friend, was only the friend of friends. These latter had so taken the field that Ralph was more "introduced" than he had ever been to anyone, or than his Excellency could ever have known any bearer of letters. Such, however, was the high urbanity of this personage that our young man was as well received as if the heralds had been dumb. To the blare of trumpets Ralph had moreover not himself contributed, leaving his letters at the Embassy as little as elsewhere: he only knew that suggestion would have been applied from over the sea without action of his own, and this in fact put further delay at odds with good manners. It was sufficient that the representative of his country should be pre-eminent, accomplished, witty and kind, and that, much addicted to good cigars, he should usually be accessible at about six o'clock.

On the spot of course and in presence of his easy host, who must have adopted, he could see, defensively and professionally, the plan of taking for granted only the usual—it was naturally there and so difficult enough to state; at the same time that he had not been three minutes in the room without feeling how fully he should at last deliver himself. The way, it was true, was not smoothed by the Ambassador's remark that he knew all about him: there was at present so much more to know than even an Ambassador could possibly imagine. He remembered his excellent father; and was also good enough to mention that he remembered his beautiful mother, concerning whose later years he inquired; and they talked for some minutes of the several friends who had, as his Excellency was so good as to call it, brought them together, and of whom our young man found himself surprised, for particular reasons, to be able to give coherent news. He felt the charm of his host's tone, with its note of free recognition, which seemed to make him for the moment something almost of an equal; and yet even while he wondered if these were perhaps not, as minor instances, high refinements of that very diplomacy which he had studied, afar off, in dusty books and tracked through the wilderness of history, he was quite aware of not being made ashamed, as a person received with such special marks possibly ought to have been, of what he had there up his sleeve. He was only a little abashed when the Ambassador, who had read everything, spoke of having read his book and found it remarkably clever. He himself had learnt three days after landing in England how clever it wasn't, but the case was now above all that this faint effort of a groundless presumption had forfeited even such claim to existence as might belong to some nameless baby of the prehistoric age who should have died at birth. But only after he had shaken his head quite sadly and too sharply had he the sense of having, by this contradiction, appeared to attribute to his entertainer more innocence than was altogether just. He had not at all events come to put him in his place, and his need was immediately, that this should be clear, to explain for what he had come—a question the more urgent as he was really full of it to the brim. "I know but too well," he said, "that nine compatriots out of ten approach you with a Story. But no strayed maniac of them all can have bored you with one like mine."

The Ambassador, from his deep chair, in his "own" room on the ground floor, where books and papers were many and colours brown and sounds soft, smiled across the old Turkey rug through his beard and his fumes. "Is it very, very good?"

"For credibility no. But for everything else," said poor Ralph, "lovely."

"And very, very long?"

"Only as long—beyond the prime fact or two—as your Excellency himself may make it. It hasn't for me somehow at all that sort of dimension. I don't know at least how long it is. I wish I did!"

"Do you mean," the Ambassador asked, "that it's only broad? Why don't you, with your cleverness," he pursued before his visitor could answer, "put it on paper?"

"They generally do write them, you mean?" Ralph on his side returned. "I daresay, but if I did, you see, you might be obliged by the rules of your position to reply—not that I'm at all acquainted with them; and any reply is exactly what I ask your leave to assure you that my communication absolutely doesn't look for. I simply want to make it—so that I shan't be the only person living to know; and my sole request of you is kindly to keep it altogether to yourself. There's nothing in the world you can 'do.' You can't lend me money. I've the advantage, which I fully appreciate, of having enough for my business. I'm not in love—or at least if I am it's not what I propose to trouble you with. I'm not in a scrape—that is I hope I'm not; for if I shall prove to be I fear the good offices of the Embassy even will scarce avail me and that I shall have to get out of it very much as I've got in."

"And how have you got in?" the Ambassador went on.

Ralph already felt how right his idea had been and how this application of it would help him. It was as if he had held in his hand the key he wished to confide for safe keeping. His friend's face—by this time quite that of a friend—was by itself as perfect a promise as the case required. It was exactly as if the key—too precious an object to be carried about the person—were to be taken over before his eyes and placed in the official strong-box. "I think, sir, you will make it long."

"That won't matter if I don't find it so."

His Excellency had spoken with such kindness that Ralph laughed out. It was the kindness of indulgence; he saw, as he thought, what was behind it. "I'm at the worst," he replied, "one of the quiet kind—for I'm sure you see all sorts; but I shall nevertheless, if you'll pardon me, need to move a little as I talk." He was in fact out of his chair, and as he remained there before the fire, on the rug, the men exchanged a long look, a look which, as it gave the younger everything he wanted, must also more or less have comprised some gain for the elder. Ralph was willing to be taken for anything: he didn't mind the estimate—all that was important was the considerate form. It had quite begun, as we have seen, to draw him on and on. "I shan't even expect you to believe me," he after an instant resumed, "I simply say to myself that my secret is one that your own interest will lead you to keep—though it can be but an interest merely intellectual, not at all official; if you permit me," our young man finally smiled, "to make the difference. I somehow see that you'll be sure to feel that giving it any publicity would somehow spoil it for you."

The Ambassador blandly smoked. "You mean I must keep it for my pleasure?"

Ralph, who had declined with thanks so much as a cigarette, met this from where he had continued to stand. "That will be exactly my strength. It will leave me as much at ease as the seal of confession. And there's another thing," he frankly added, "I don't fear to appear ridiculous; but with your Excellency, naturally, it won't be the same."

His Excellency was too delightful. "You don't fear to appear ridiculous to me. That's all. I can meet you at least on the same ground. I shan't fear to appear so to you. I'm perfectly willing," he went on, "to give you my definite word. If you do tell nobody else you may take it that I shall tell as little."

Ralph watched him a moment. "You think I will tell somebody else?"

The Ambassador got up at this to help himself from the chimney-piece to another cigar, the end of which he nipped off and lighted before replying. When he did reply it was with a reassuring hand on Ralph's shoulder. "No—it's just what I don't think. Your difficulty in expressing it, whatever it may be, strikes me as the gage of your general reserve."

The words were as kind as all the others, but they practically, and happily enough, acted for Ralph as a challenge. He took it up then, and it afterwards appeared that, in the act, he had also taken the Ambassador's left hand, removing it by his own right from his shoulder, where it had remained in soothing and, as he was sure, rather compassionate intent. He thus appropriated the protection which enabled him after an instant: "The point is that I'm not myself."

But his friend smiled as if in tribute to his lucidity. "Oh yes you are!"

Ralph's look, on this, seemed to deprecate, and even in still greater pity, any tendency to the superficial; it being marked for him more and more that what had happened to him made him see things in a way compared to which the ways of others—positively of such brilliant others as his host—could show but for the simplest. "You don't take it as I mean it; or rather perhaps I should say I don't mean it as you take it. Take it, however," he pursued, "as you must: I have the advantage that your courtesy to me leaves both of us such a margin." And then he explained. "I'm somebody else."

The Ambassador's hand had during these instants still submitted to his own for reassurance; but its possessor now disengaged it and turned away, briefly presenting a meditative back. He was soon reestablished none the less in his chair with his fresh cigar and every preparation, it would seem, for the issue. Yet he smoked another moment. "And is the other person you?"

"That's what I count him; though for certainty one should be able to ask him—which one isn't. It's he himself only who can know; and I've enough," said Ralph, "with my own side of the matter. But the whole affair," he continued, "was that we should exchange identities; an arrangement all the more easy that he bears an extraordinary resemblance to me and that on my first meeting him I even made the mistake of taking him for a wondrous reflection—in a glass or wherever—of my own shape."

The Ambassador was slow; yet as Ralph, once launched, panted a little, he had the effect of breaking in. "And did he take you for a reflection of his? You're sure," he asked, "that you know which of you is which?"

Ralph waited a little; then very gently and reasonably, "Be as patient as you can with me," he returned. "You shall have it all, and as clear as possible. But be very kind." His host, as to correct the idea of anything else, made a quick expressive movement, which was, however, checked by our friend's manner. "It's a most extraordinary thing, you see, to have befallen a man, and I don't wonder at the queer figure I must make to you. But you'll see too for yourself in a moment how easily you'll wish to let me down. It's the most extraordinary thing that ever happened in the world—but at the same time there's no danger," he cheerfully declared, "of my losing my way. I'm all here, or rather"—Ralph was gay about it—"he is."

There was little enough doubt of how his confidant would let him down; and, the idea of his being "humoured" apart, he welcomed whatever would help him. There was at any rate no failure of respect in the next attentive inquiry. "But who is this party to your remarkable affair? Or if you would rather I should put it so, who was he? I mean," said the Ambassador, "before what you call your exchange."

"Just exactly, by the amazing chance, what I was myself—and what I am still, for that matter; the strangest part of all being that it doesn't interfere nearly as much as you might suppose, and that I'm in fact not nearly so different."

The way the Ambassador followed amounted—though it wasn't so wonderful in him—to inspiration. "So different as I might suppose from what you were before?"

Ralph's face became a tribute to such prompt intelligence. "I'm still a gentleman, thank God; and no bigger fool, either, than I already was. I'm not worse looking, even if I'm not better."

"You couldn't very well be better!" his companion handsomely replied.

But Ralph was now so full of the whole fact itself as scarce to appreciate the compliment. "If I'm so very much the same thing I'm still an American, you see—and not a Briton."

"I'm awfully glad of that!" the Ambassador laughed.

"Oh it's the great point—our common ground. I mean mine and his. We're both here—at the same age—for the first time, and but freshly disembarked. That is," said our young man, "we were." It pulled him up a little, but not, he was instantly eager to show, too much. "I'm not losing my way—it comes to the same thing."

But he had had to consider it, and the Ambassador smoked. "If that then is the case with everything, what is—or what was the difference?"

"Between us?"—Ralph was prompt. "Nothing but our age."

"But I thought you said your age was the same."

"Oh," Ralph explained, "I meant in the sense of our time, our period. That's the difference of the greater part of a century. It was then—that time ago—he came over."

There would have been a failure of verisimilitude if his host hadn't visibly wondered. "And where has he been since?"

Ralph looked an instant, from where he stood, through the window and out into the world of things less strange than those he might so well be felt to have filled the room with. But if he was grave he was not blank. "You see I don't know everything." And for a moment again he dropped.

During this lapse the Ambassador on his side smoked; to the effect of his presently saying: "Is he ninety—nine years old?"

It brought back his visitor. "No—for if he were I should be; and I'm exactly thirty, which does very well; for since I've become him, in particular, I call it young." Ralph hung fire—but really from the sense of now so interesting his auditor that keeping it up was almost a strain. Quite for himself, however, nothing was easier. "He's magnificent. He's really beautiful." That indeed made him catch himself, and this time he turned away. "What I mean is he was! Before he ceased to be?"

"He hadn't—or he hasn't," Ralph returned, "ceased to be; for if that were the case I myself shouldn't be here before you in the solid soundness I've undertaken to impress you with. He was in a perfect prime that it was a joy, as a fellow-countryman, to behold. It was in that form that he again, for an hour, existed to me."

"For an hour?" the Ambassador asked as if to be exact.

"It was probably less—even for all that passed between us; but the fact of my situation is that he did exist."

"Is the fact of your situation that you've seen a ghost?"

"Oh," Ralph raised his head high to say, "I decline to admit for a moment that he was that. He was much better than any ghost."

It seemed to make for the Ambassador a distinction that he desired to grasp. "'Better'?"

"Well, much more contrary to nature."

"I don't understand then," the Ambassador said, "why you don't rather call it worse. Isn't the impression strange in proportion as it's contrary to nature, and isn't it by the same token agitating or upsetting or appalling, for any relation with such a matter, in proportion as it's strange?" After which he went on while Ralph felt his considering look: "Do you really like such impressions?"

"I see I'm an impression to you—and of course an extraordinary one; but he wasn't one to me," Ralph pursued, "in any such sense as that—for the interest of our relation, as you justly term it, is so much more interesting, you see, than any with which, even at the best, I can hope to inspire you. He was a man as substantial for me as I am—or as I was!" Ralph pulled up a moment to smile—"for myself; and interesting most of all, I suppose, because so extraordinarily interested."

"Interested in you?" his host inquired as with the care to avoid alike too much or too little gravity.

"Well, yes—interested in me by his being so possessed of the kind of thing that interests us both. I've been ridden all my life, I think I should tell you"—for our young man thought it but fair to develop this—"by the desire to cultivate some better sense of the past than has mostly seemed sufficient even for those people who have gone in most for cultivating it, and who with most complacency," Ralph permitted himself to add, "have put forth their results. So you can fancy what a charm it was," he wound up, "to catch a person, and a beautifully intelligent one, in the very act of cultivating——"

The Ambassador was on his feet at this, with an effect of interruption, as by the very quickness of his apprehension. "His sense of the present!" he triumphantly smiled.

But his visitor's smile reduced that felicity. "His sense of the future, don't you see?—which had at last declined to let him rest, just as my corresponding expression had declined to let me. Only after his being worried," Ralph's scruple explained, "nearly a century longer."

"A century's a long time to be worried!" the Ambassador remarked through his smoke, but permitting himself this time a confession of amusement.

"Oh a terrible time of course—but all leading up, you see, to this tremendous relief I've brought him. I've brought him, I've given him, I've introduced him to, the Future. So there we are!" Ralph gloried.

His companion, though visibly impressed, appeared a little to wonder where indeed they were. Then this wonder found voice. "How could you bring him what you didn't have yourself?"

Ralph needed but a moment to consider. "Why, I am the Future. The Future, that is, for him; which means the Present, don't you see——?"

"The Present, I see, for me!" his host, fairly flushed with divination, broke in.

"Yes," Ralph promptly returned, "nothing could do more beautifully than your Present, not to say, literally, your presence, for the Future he has waited so long, poor dear chap, to know about."

"What it comes to then," the Ambassador considered in all apparent sympathy—"what it comes to in fine," this functionary smoked, "is that I and my contemporaries are his Future."

Ralph accepted the conclusion. "It would come to that if he could get into relation with you."

It might have been by reason of something conveyed in his visitor's tone that the Ambassador said: "With me in particular you mean?"

Ralph met it handsomely. "Ah I could wish nothing better for him than you!"

"And nothing better for me than him?"

Ralph kept his eyes kindly on his country's representative. "Yes, since I find you so remarkably good for myself."

The Ambassador acknowledged the tribute, yet couldn't but formulate after all a certain inward confusion. "I'm only puzzled by your not having spoken to me of your friend and yourself a moment ago as separate persons—but on the contrary of your having arrived, wasn't it? at some common identity or wonderful unity. You are the other fellow, you said, didn't you?—and the other fellow, by the same stroke, is you. So that when I wonder where the other fellow is," he genially pursued, "it would seem that I've only to suppose him here in this room with me, in your interesting person."

These words might have struck us as insidious enough just to trip up our young man, but his lucidity was in fact perfectly proof. "I didn't say, kindly understand, that we have merged personalities, but that we have definitely exchanged them—which is a different matter. Our duality is so far from diminished that it's only the greater—by our formulation, each to the other, of the so marked difference in our interest. The man ridden by his curiosity about the Past can't, you'll grasp, be one and the same with the man ridden by his curiosity about the Future. He has given me his chance for this, while I have given him mine for that. Recognise accordingly," said Ralph, "that we're at the opposite poles—or at least in quite different places."

It was wonderful more and more what the Ambassador could recognise by the aid of his kind wise little intervals of thought and indulgences of contemplation. "Yes, yes—but if I of course see that you, as the distinct individual you are so fortunately able to claim to be, stand here delightfully before me, that doesn't in the least tell me where he is located, as we say, in time and space."

"Why, he's down at the door in the cab," Ralph returned with splendid simplicity.

His host might have been lost for a moment in the sheer radiance of it—even to the point indeed of a gesture guarding against excess of impression or for that matter just gaining time. "Do you mean to say you're all this while keeping your hansom?"

"It's not a hansom—in this eternal rain: it's a four-wheeler with the glasses up. And he only wants," our young man explained, "to wait as long as I require. So at least I understand," he remarked as an afterthought.

"So that you'll find him—in his rather tried patience, it strikes me—when you go down? And I should have the pleasure of seeing him too," the Ambassador further ventured, "if I were to go down with you?"

This truly was the first of his Excellency's questions to induce in our friend a pause at all ominous. "Surely—if he has not, under the strain of my absence, as you suggest, gone off on his own account."

The Ambassador faced this contingency. "Where in that case will he have gone?"

"Why, as I've explained, into the Future. Say," Ralph threw off, "into Regent Street or Piccadilly." And then as his companion, at this, frankly laughed out: "They didn't exist, you see, at that time in any such form as they have to-day."

"I see, I see"—his Excellency again was prepared. "But fancy them," he clearly couldn't help at the same time exclaiming, "fancy them the reward for him of so sublime a self-projection!"

"Well," Ralph readily reasoned, "my idea is that, with all they represent for him, they're not unlikely to prove as great a reward as any this extravagance of my own may come in for."

"It's wonderful for me," the Ambassador soon replied, "by which I mean it's quite out of my common routine, to allow myself—as you see I do!—such intimate strange participations. I understand you that I'm to regard myself as mixed in the concern of your friend down there no less than in your own."

Ralph considered of that, but with all equanimity and to the upshot of his saying very naturally: "You want to be sure, properly enough, of what you may at the worst be let in for; you want to be guaranteed against undue inconvenience. Well, I don't think I see you let in for anything worse than having thus heard me out and taken my name and address." With which our young man smiled. "May they lie light on your conscience!"

"They will lie there, I assure you, in a place quite of their own"—and the Ambassador took up the card brought in to him on his visitor's arrival and left close at hand. "This shall be carefully preserved, and I shall cherish, for the interest you inspire me with, the good hope of our some time meeting again."

Ralph didn't discourage this hope, though whatever support he offered it was but to be inferred from what was left for recognition of such connections in his more and more preoccupied face. That countenance, charged for a moment with further fair acknowledgments, seemed to turn away from them, before they were uttered, in the interest of something more urgent. "Of course I perfectly understand that you think me, that you must think me, more or less raving mad. I perfectly understand that you must want to keep me in view and be able as far as possible to track me and give some account of me in case of future inquiry. I appreciate that, and it was even exactly for it, I think, that I came. I really believe I ought to be tracked, to be subject to identification, to have an eye kept on me. I'm like one starting a perhaps perilous journey and wanting not to have neglected precautions in advance. I don't in the least mind your thinking me mad—I should be so, or should be at least idiotic, not to conceive my making the impression. At the same time I strike myself as of a sanity I've never enjoyed before. Don't be afraid of offending me, for what is it but your very protection against myself that I've thus invoked? Not that I fear I shall destroy myself—at least in any common way; I'm so far from intending or wishing to commit suicide that I'm proposing to push my affair all the way it will go, or in other words to live with an intensity unprecedented."

"Well, if you live with the intensity to which you help others I don't see what responsibility you're likely to be accused of shirking. I can't keep still," the Ambassador then flatly declared, "till I've been down with you to verify that question of your friend in the cab."

Ralph offered so little objection to this—his looking for a moment intensely grave about it amounting to no real objection—that they had within a couple of minutes more descended together to the hall; where the servant in waiting, Ralph was afterwards to reflect, must at once have attested his conviction that his master was not simply seeing to the door a visitor of no inscribed importance. His Excellency would therefore be going further—under some exceptional stress; and to this end would have been placed without delay in possession of his hat, gloves and stick; equipped with which objects it verily was that the Ambassador presently stood with his guest on the outer pavement and in presence of the waiting vehicle, any further domestic attendance repressed and the door of the house closed behind them. There they remained a little, it may be mentioned—long enough at least for the exchange of a smile now rather strained on either side, strained even to breaking, possibly, before Ralph could decide to approach his cab near enough for an effective view of its inner state. He had before this checked the motion of the roused driver, dozing on the box, toward a heavy officious descent, and then had himself faced the consequences of another step and a sufficient thrust of his head through the window of his "growler" to assure himself of the degree of dissimulation under which a conceivable companion might lurk there. His renewed look at the Ambassador after this was a confession that nothing lurked, though without its being at all a confession of consequent defeat; so that, himself opening the door and inviting his distinguished friend to pass in, he signalled a perfect readiness to explain disappointment away. The Ambassador, it must be added, allowed him at once and ever so considerately the largest license of apology for the production of a groundless hope; the great man's words in fact represented a glance at grounds that had lived their little hour.

"His failure of patience through my having kept you so long—you did, I recognise, mention the possibility of that," was his Excellency's noble remark.

There came to Ralph's assistance on this a suddenly enlarged interest of vision; he had indeed within the house given utterance to that precautionary thought, but it was for all the world as if the same idea on the lips of his friend suggested something to go on with beyond even what his own intelligence had found. That was it!—nothing in the least discredited the report he had been occupied in making. That other party to the drive ending at the Embassy door was, with the most conceivable congruity, and thanks to a passion of curiosity that nothing could longer bridle, off on his own irresistible adventure: one had asked too much of him, at the point reached by their relation, in expecting so to choke off his own criticism. The interview upstairs had drawn itself out, and what had he had to do meanwhile, poor dear creature, but count the minutes that would lead to the striking of his hour? That the hour would strike for each of them as soon as the wise step now achieved had been taken—this had been their assumption on settling together that afternoon, so much more for the accommodation, when all was said, Ralph could see now, of the victim of the sense of the Past than for that of the victim of the sense of the Future. The latter, it came to our friend, taking no precaution and making no provision, none at least that one could one's self know anything about, brought the business a more hurrying passion: as would be perhaps of the very essence for a man so concerned as compared with a man concerned as he himself was. He was conscious of ten rather bedimmed seconds during which he had positively to see the appeal he had obeyed as a thing in itself inferior to the motive under the force of which his late companion, no longer able merely to oblige him, had doubtless begun to beat fine wings and test brave lungs in the fresh air of his experiment. He had the real start, so to speak, while the subject of the Ambassador's interest had doubtless only the advantage that might, on some contingency as yet of the vaguest, reside in that.

There thus breathed on our young man a momentary chill—which, however, didn't prevent the Ambassador's seating himself without further delay, nor his own perhaps slightly more contracted occupation of the second seat, nor their presently effective, their in fact rather confessedly contemplative, start for Mansfield Square. It was to appear to Ralph later on, at any rate, that they had at this stage been reduced to unembarrassed contemplation; which is perhaps indeed but a proof that while he gazed out of the cab window during this extraordinary progress what he looked at so fixedly as to take note of no interval of speech was neither the exhibition of successive streets, with their aspects and their varieties of identity, but the portentous truth of his being launched, since, so conclusively, his counterpart in the circumstance was, and of his fate's having thereby shut down on any backward step. Not that he wanted to take one, not that he wanted to take one——he kept repeating that as the vehicle rolled; to be as "in" for whatever awaited him as he now felt, as he now absolutely knew, himself, was a strong simplification—with which wasn't it positively a blest one too? which question had not been answered in the negative, at any rate, even by the time they pulled up at the address he had given. This was what had taken place during their transit, he afterwards knew; the minutes had been so wholly given, in their course, to his inwardly sealing the charter of accommodation, as he would have called it, to whatever might now confront him that after he had got out, on the stoppage of the cab, he addressed to his companion a "Will you keep it on?" which left things taken for granted between them without a scrap of a loose end dangling. He at least suffered none such, though there might have been just the sign of a difference in his good friend's face while the latter stepped straight out by way of answer. "Oh my dear man, I'll walk," he seemed to be saying; "I don't in the least mind your knowing that you've given me the fidgets or that I shall extremely need to think you over: which indulgence the use of my legs will healthily stimulate."

Something of that sort Ralph was much later on, as I say, to recover the appearance of his having found words for; just as he was to piece together the presumption that, the cabman paid, magnificently paid, and getting again into motion, he and his protector—for hadn't they after all rather exquisitely agreed to leave it at this?—stood face to face a little, under the prolongation of a handclasp; followed then by the mutual release that left his Excellency standing there on the pavement with the graver face of the two, he at least little doubted. Our young man was after that aware of a position of such eminence on the upper doorstep as made him, his fine rat-tat-tat-ah of the knocker achieved, see the whole world, the waiting, the wondering, the shrunkenly staring representative of his country included, far, far, in fact at last quite abysmally below him. Whether these had been rapid or rather retarded stages he was really never to make out. Everything had come to him through an increasingly thick other medium; the medium to which the opening door of the house gave at once an extension that was like an extraordinarily strong odour inhaled—an inward and inward warm reach that his bewildered judge would literally have seen swallow him up; though perhaps with the supreme pause of the determined diver about to plunge just marked in him before the closing of the door again placed him on the right side and the whole world as he had known it on the wrong.

BOOK FOURTH

I

He was so far prepared as that, on the footman's saying, after he had asked who was at home, "I think Miss Midmore is, sir," he had not been unduly agitated; though the effect was of making him at the same time wonder if he oughtn't, more decently, to have had his approach heralded in the course of the morning by the bearer of a note. Such questions as these, from the arrival of his ship at Plymouth, had repeatedly come up for him, and he had not lacked leisure, since the evening before, when the west country mail had set him down in Piccadilly amid a great bustle of general recognition, to advise his cousins of his immediate intention to wait on them. The sense had grown within him during the last three days that mistakes of one sort and another would easily be open to a young man just alighted from New York; he had made several already between Devonshire and London, even if without paying for them in heavier coin than a handful of new observations. His observations multiplied at such a rate that fifty to the minute would have been a short account of them; but there was one in particular that had from the first kept repeating itself and that might certainty have done as much to point his address as some of the others had done to remind him of danger. The danger was flagrant and consisted of the number of things to be known and reckoned with in England as compared to the few that had so sufficiently served him at home. He but wanted to know, though he would rather have liked to learn secretly; which for that matter he was now, he conceived, catching a little the trick of—and this in spite of his wonted way, from far back, on receipt of a new impression or apprehension of a new fact, and under correction, in particular, of a wrong premise; which was to lose himself quite candidly and flagrantly in the world of meaning so conveyed. That disclosed quantity was apt fairly to make him stand still for wonder—whereby it might well have happened that whosoever took note of him would scarce have known whether to conclude most on his simplicity or on his wit. If it was strange to have had so to wait for familiar appearances—familiar, that is, all round him, seemingly, to everyone but himself—it was perhaps more remarkable yet not to succeed in concealing how much one was on the spot ready to make of them by the working of some inward machinery.

The great reassurance just mentioned at any rate, and which ministered still more to surprise than to confidence, came from his somehow making out that Ralph Pendrel enjoyed an advantage beyond any he missed; had a manner, a look or a tone, some natural brightness, some undesigned but conciliatory art, which perceptibly paved his way and which perhaps, should he incline to presume upon it, might really gain him favour. This inference he had had, and without gross vanity, time to make—though arriving doubtless for the moment at no finer conclusion on it than that his spirits were all the while, beneath however small a bent to swagger or bluster, undiscourageably high, and that youth and good proportions, a clear face, a free hand and a brave errand, all borne on that tide, were capable of casting a spell of a sort that he should find occasion either to measure or to press. It had been odd assuredly to come thus soon to a thought of spells—especially in the midst of a consciousness of blunders; but it possibly reinforced a little even this degree of presumption that the very blunders, which might have been all to his confusion save that various other persons had promptly and obligingly, as it were, taken them over, appeared grandly imputable to the same spring of freshness. He couldn't deny to himself his eagerness—extraordinarily strong and which people made way for, to the extent even of a large margin, as if they liked to see it and to wait for what it might further show. It was an eagerness certainly to enjoy, yet not at any one's cost, any one's in particular; and this might to those dealing with him have seemed rare, or in other words have seemed charming, the sticking out of an impulse not as a pike on a charge but after the fashion of a beggar's hat presented for the receipt of alms. That was the figure, that the case—the pennies had hour after hour veritably rained in; and what but a perfect rattle of them, by that token, accompanied him at the footman's heels upstairs to where it could only be that Molly Midmore awaited—though perhaps but just in a general way—his presenting himself as a suitor for her hand?

He had been touched in the hall and on the staircase as by the faint odd brush of a suggestion that what was before his eyes during certain seconds had already been before them and was playing upon his attention, was quite seeking to, even though in the lightest, softest tug at it, by the recall of a similar case or similar conditions. Just so when the door above was opened to him and he heard himself announced the first flush of his impression was that of stepping straight into some chapter of some other story—other than his own of that moment, since he was by the evidence of every felt pulse up to his eyes in a situation, which glimmered upon him in the light, the bright strong light, of an aspect recognised; before failing of that effect indeed under his next full rush of perception. Wasn't it a place known, the great square wainscotted room, like several perhaps in which he had seen a sort of life led at home, only fairer and finer than those; with handsome objects and four or five portraits rather largely interspaced, and a daylight freshness in possession, the air at once of an outer clearness, of an emptier world looking in, and of windows unembarrassed to match, multiplied panes, one would say, but withal a prim spare drapery? It wouldn't have been that the world was emptier than he had known it beyond the sea, but that the scene itself, as it appeared for the ten seconds that challenged memory and comparison, would have worn its other face with a difference, confessing somehow to thicker shadows and heavier presences, the submission to a longer assault. Such matter of record, even on the part of a young man of the highest sensibility, is at the best elusive enough, however, and Ralph's general awareness was at once swallowed up in the particular positive certainty that nobody in all his experience in the least answered to the young lady seated near one of the windows before a piece of fine tense canvas framed and mounted on slim wooden legs, through which she was in the act of drawing a long filament of silk with the finest arm in the world raised as high as her head. He himself so far answered to something in her own intelligence that at sight and sound of him she slowly got up from before her work, with never a hint of interruption or confusion, and smiled across at him as if knowing all about him. She kept in this movement her arm still aloft—she might have been just balancing herself or wishing not to loosen her stitch; he was to remember afterwards how the crook of her little finger, in the raised hand, caught his eye at the distance, and how this helped him in a manner at once to take in that the arm itself, its sleeve shortened to very near the shoulder, was of the most beautiful rounded shape. That light of her knowing all about him doubtless helped to flood his own mind with the assurance immediately needed: he felt at this stage, in the most wonderful way, that things came to him, everything a right carriage required for the closer personal relation, in the very nick of being wanted, and wore thus, even under the gasp of a slight danger escaped, a certain charm and cheer of suddenness. That he was to make love, by every propriety, to Molly Midmore, and that he had in fact reached his goal on the very wings of that intention, this foretaste as of something rare had for days and days past hung about him like the scent of a flower persisting in life; but the sweetness of his going straight up to her with an offered embrace hadn't really been disclosed till her recognition, as we have said, breathed upon it with force and filled him at once with an extraordinary wealth of confidence.

He had stepped straight into that with his stepping into the room, and while he stood but long enough to know himself lifted and carried the taking in of what she was through all his senses completed the splendid rightness. Nothing might have been stranger than so repeated a jump, so flying a leap, to firm ground which hadn't been there before in any measurable manner but which his feet just felt beneath them at the crisis of need. Was it going to be enough simply to do the thing, whatever it might be, for it to "come" right, as they said, and for him above all to like it, as who should also say, after the fact? Surprising perhaps that questions of so comparatively general a kind should press with their air of particular business into an active apprehension unconditioned and absolute enough to forestall any conceivable lapse; yet nothing could well be pleasanter than such a quickening, and this even under the possibility that he might after a little get used to it. The young woman there in her capacious corner was admirably, radiantly handsome, and all the while still kept the posture she had at once risen to—kept it as for fear of his loss of the pleasure by her breaking it ever so little. The case was of course really that a mere moment sufficed for these enormities of attestation; the air roundabout them was prodigiously clean and clear, and so favoured happy certitude that by the time he had advanced a trifle further he was, in addition to everything else we have indicated, aware that, modest as she would indubitably prove, she was neither awkward nor shy, and was in fact quite as inspired and inflamed as himself. She came out from behind her frame, to which she had given a light push, and then it was that her splendid fairness, a complexion white and pink, and that her friendly laughing eyes and full parted lips and thickness of loose brown hair, helped the dress of sprigged muslin which kept as clear of her neck as it did of her elbows to tell him about her, from head to foot—and she was more than middling tall—everything that most pressingly concerned him. There played round him before he took her to his arms the glimmer of a comment kindled at some other flame than that of desire, the wonder of her being rather more imaged for him, and ever so typically, than likely to be, whatever fulness of reality awaited them, possessed by him; which pair of contradictions, however, melted together in the tide of happy intelligence that next flooded and seemed verily almost to drown them. That he should thus on the instant have clasped to his heart and his lips a young woman with whom in all his life he had never yet exchanged a word settled the relation for each alike as soon as it had been so nobly and freely sketched; which was again a case of that felt security after the fact already noted by him, as we have seen, and scarce open, of a truth, to more vivid illustration. The security was felt just as much by herself: this made the harmony full, this acted to keep it still quite possible for him that the comparatively superficial commerce, the inquiry and explanation that might have figured as preliminary, should follow at a lower level what had just taken place, and do so without either casting absurdity back on the passage or their themselves incurring ridicule.

"I reached London but last night—so you see I haven't lost much time. Perhaps I should first have asked your mother's leave," Ralph said; but she had already at the word taken him up.

"Oh she would certainly have given it!" And he at once saw from the tone of this that what she referred to as so licensed was the plunge into intimacy just enacted. It put him a trifle out of tune that the most he himself had meant was that he might have inquired of his cousin's convenience as to presenting himself; and to feel his deference to that propriety—or to almost any, it might seem—so swept away reminded him afresh that he couldn't, by every appearance, be too bold, since he plainly created in others, straight off and by his presence, the liveliest dispositions and allowances. If it was true that Mrs. Midmore, as he had figured her, would have smiled upon his silent rush at her daughter from their very threshold, what could this signify but that the house and the whole circle contained a treasure of welcome on which he was infinitely to draw? Well, it was still then in the highest degree agreeable to find everyone so understanding him as to help him to understand himself; no example of which felicity could be greater than such a promise of ease with the lady of Drydown, given the forms of deference he had tried to prepare himself to pay her. "You mustn't speak as if we have been thinking of you in the least as a stranger; for how can that be," Molly asked, "when everything was so made up between us all by your father's writing in that way to mamma so shortly before he died, wasn't it?" Her fine expressive eyes, he at once recognised, were charged with an appeal to him on the ground of this interesting history; and once more, after the merest repeated brush of the wing of that bewilderment by which he was thus effectually admonished and aided to escape, he knew the flood of consciousness within him to raise its level. His father, dear man, had died, his father had written, and even while they looked at each other under allusions so abounding it came and came and came that there had been an estrangement among those of their name on the two sides of the sea, and then, through a fortunate chance, a great healing of the breach, a renewal of good relations as to which his character of acclaimed wooer left no doubt. He was in actual free use of the whole succession of events, and only wanted these pages, page after page, turned for him: much as if he had been seated at the harpsichord and following out a score while the girl beside him stirred the air to his very cheek as she guided him leaf by leaf. She seemed verily after that fashion to hold out to his eyes the solemn scroll of history, on which they rested an instant to such a further effect of danger dissipated that before either she or he knew it they were once more in each other's arms. It was as if this repetition, this prolongation had been potently determined, and for each alike, by her free knowledge of what had gone before—he lagging a little behind, it was true, in the rapid review of reasons, but suddenly confident and quite abreast of her after they had thus irrepressibly and for the second time exchanged their vows. He had for the next thing even the sense of being, and in the gallantest way, beforehand with her when he heard himself strike out as from the push of multiplied forces behind him: there was all the notoriety—for what had it been but notoriety?—of the loyalism of the American Pendrels during the Revolution, in the rigour of which they had emigrated, restoring themselves to England for a ten years' stay and not a little indebted under that stress to the countenance and even the charity of their English kindred. A freshness of interest in this adventure surged through our young man's blood and sought expression, without the least difficulty, in an attitude about it to his young hostess as competent as if he had by some extraordinary turn become able to inform her ignorance.

"My grandfather—yes," he said, "must of course, thirty years ago have been rather a wild sort of character and anything but a credit to us. But he was terribly handsome, you know," Ralph smiled, "and if your great-aunt, while we hung on here, had cause to complain of his fickleness, I think we're all now aware that she fell quite madly in love with him and paid him attentions of an extravagance that he couldn't after all ignore—not in common civility." He liked to go back to that—since it was all indeed, under growing freedom of reference, so much more behind him than before; it was truly brave matter for talk, warming his blood, as we say, while it flowed; and he had at the end of another minute so mastered it that he would have liked to catch her mistaken in order to put her right. Her face, for that matter, glowed with the pleasure, wasn't it? of his assurance thus made positive; assurances, roundabout them, couldn't, she showed, too much multiply, and it wasn't to be till considerably after that the sense of this moment marked her for him as really rather listening, though in all delight, to his recital of a learnt lesson, than as herself taking from him an inspiration she might have lacked. He was amused—even if why so amused?—at the vividness of the image of the too susceptible or too adventurous daughter of their earlier house with whose affections, the acknowledged kinship of the two families offering approved occasion, his unscrupulous ancestor had atrociously trifled. The story had anything but grace, thanks to the facts of its hero's situation, his responsibility to a patient young wife and three children—these kept indeed at a distance, quartered, by his care, in a small French town, during most of the term of his extravagance; the climax of which last had been the brutal indifference, as it at least appeared, of his return to New York with nothing done for mitigation of the exposure awaiting the partner, as the phrase was, of his guilt. It didn't make the scandal less—since a different face might somehow or other have been put upon it—that he prospered in America against every presumption attaching to the compromised civil state of the family; that he succeeded in carrying their name again almost insolently high, in recovering and enlarging their ancient credit, in retrieving their wasted, their forfeited resources, in putting them at last back into such a posture that after his death and with the lapse of the condoning years they could perfectly pass for people, had in fact conspicuously become people, incapable not only of gross infractions but of the least lapse from good manners. The defunct worthy, with whatever discomfort of conscience, had had a high hand for affairs of profit and had flourished as the undoer of virtue or confidence or whatever other shaky equilibrium is often observed to flourish. The proofs of his mastery were naturally, however, much more evident to the followers in his line than any ground for imputations less flattering; with which it seemed further unmistakeable that a posterity in such good humour with itself and its traditions might have even enough of that grace to spare for cases of the minor felicity. How at any rate had it come about that the minor felicity, of all things in the world, could be a distinguishable mark of the English Pendrels, the legend of any awkward accident or any foregone advantage in whose annals would so scantly have emerged as matter for free reference? This was a question that might with the extraordinary swell of our young man's present vision find itself as answerable as the next before or the next after. Every question became answerable, in its turn, the moment it was touched; so that when his companion, as she had so bravely become, mentioned the repair of the family breach he jumped at the occasion for a full illustration of the subject.

"You see how little difference your mother's marriage made to us, with the extinction of our name here involved in it; since if Pendrels had at last failed us, for the pleasure over there of thinking of them, we could make Midmores answer almost as well at the worst—take them up even with a resignation which, now that I know you, cousin," Ralph went on, "seems to put our acquaintance in a light that couldn't possibly be bettered."

"Certainly the Midmores are as good as anybody," the young lady bearing their name flared out in the charmingest way to reply; "for we're not forgetting, are we? that it was a Pendrel after all, one of yours, though of mamma's own recognised blood too, who came out as if on purpose to make the trouble among us; the trouble we doubtless needn't go into again now, even if it seems to have been thought as ill as possible of at the time."

"No, we needn't go into that of course," Ralph smiled—smiled verily through his exhilarated sense that whereas the best of reasons for their not doing so would have dwelt a few moments before in his imperfect grasp of that affair, he now enjoyed the superior view of it as well before him and only a bit embarrassing to handle. "You didn't like us then, and we must have been brought up not greatly to like you—all the more even, no doubt, if we were in the wrong," he cleverly put it; "so that things got worse, and we thought still more evil, on both sides, than there was to think; which perhaps didn't matter, nevertheless," he added, "when once all commerce was quite broken off. Nothing can have passed between us, I make out, for at least twenty years; during which"—for that also came to him—"we lost every remnant of the credit originally enjoyed with you all by the stiffness of our stand on your side during the dreadful War."

She took this from him with a clear competence that yet didn't belittle his own—though his own, it might be added, was to indulge, the very next thing, in a throb of finer complacency. She stared a moment before saying, as she did with much point, that she hadn't heard of any American who when their capital fell before the British arms had given them any credit for anything; on which remark he commented in turn, smiling at what she appeared to have meant. "Don't you happen to have heard, my dear, of the great revolutionary struggle with your poor mad old king, now at his last gasp as they tell me, through which my country won the independence it enjoys?"

He thought he had never in life seen anything handsomer than the way Miss Midmore had of tossing her head with a spirit and an air that might have been partly a fruit of breeding and partly an extravagance of humour. It made him note even at the moment that he had really in New York never seen a head prescriptively tossed, or never at least with that high grace; in spite of its being withal supposed there that the young American ladies were unsurpassed in their frank pretension to consequence. "We haven't forgotten how dreadfully ill you all behaved long ago," were the words with which she met this reflection on her intelligence; "but it's lucky for you that you had made overtures—to ourselves here I mean—before we came to blows with you again a few years since."