Front matter (continued 4)

He put that question, but neither abating nor enlarging his distance; it was one of the moments of his holding them under the spell of his growing brilliancy, as he might for all the world have imagined—too much under it to move an eyelid for the time, and yet also with the betrayed impulse to exchange a wink, vulgarly so to call it, between themselves; the very impulse, all of sharpened comfort surely, to show each other where they felt together, which he had already more than once caught in the act of profiting by its quick opportunity. Not their impulse, however, and not any play of comment that should attest his success with them, was most matter for thought with him now; but exactly his himself so wishing to cry out that he was pleased, to say again and yet again that he liked what was before him, so that there might be no mistake about it for his own nerves. His nerves, happily and helpfully active from the first, had been in just that proportion a pleasure to themselves—so that up to the moment of his first hearing of sweet Nan, whom he was now so oddly unable to figure save as very peculiarly one with this term of allusion to her, which might all have been, as they said in Boston, her "given" name, up to that moment his sail had done nothing but swell in the breeze. Why the mere hint of more sweetness still than the already looked for and the already grasped should have suddenly caused the breeze to drop and the sail to indulge in its first, its single flap, was not so much his concern as to arrest the possibility of any like further little waste of force. It was glorious so to vibrate, but to do it you needed your force—in fact all there was of it; so that to spend even one throb of it on any mystery of a particular muffled point or fact was at the best a loose form of contribution. So played the instinct to make surer still what was sure; yes, such a truth, for instance, as the perfect practicability of Perry even, once he should be really reduced to matter of splendid sport. For didn't it all keep becoming again splendid sport?—that is if he left out the question of sweet Nan, which seemed something different and possibly either of a lower sort of interest or of none at all; unless indeed possibly of a yet greater.

The pitch therefore was at all events that there was no hint of a doubt as to the clear taste of his feast while it thus continued to be served, as well as that the right expression could only consist accordingly of the loudest smack of his lips. The company then, after the fashion we have noted, admired him at this exercise, and his sense of rich free words on Mrs. Midmore's and Molly's part, to the effect that their passing muster with him was perhaps nothing to gape at, had for its sequel a silent turn of Perry back to the window, though whether or no in more complete accommodation remained to be seen. He had at any rate been sufficiently beguiled by his guest's renewed overture of a moment previous not to wish to rebut at once any impression of this. Ralph consequently continued a minute longer to celebrate that idea of his success, as he could but treat himself to the crudity of calling it; while Mrs. Midmore, on her side, and with the breadth of her wisdom, recommended him never to overdo the act of humility, since in their world at least, however it might be in his native, you didn't get much more than what you were ready to fight for, and had always best set an example to people's opinion of you.

"Well," he answered to this, "if I like you, all three, for every mark you carry, every one of 'em without exception, as I again declare, so I want you to believe in me to the same tune, without my leaving in the dark a single side by which I may shine. I'll be as proud as you choose—look at me now," he went on, "and see if you can doubt of that; but I'll be hanged if you shan't love me for my modesty too, since otherwise you'll miss it when it comes to your giving your friends the right account of me. You'll want to be able to say enough to excuse you——!"

"To excuse us pray from what?" Mrs. Midmore sought to know at the very top of her grand air. "Understand, for goodness' sake, that we excuse ourselves here, in the civil way, but from things we haven't done, and that the things we have, the course once taken, the act performed or the need obeyed, we stick to, please, with nobody's leave whatever asked. I should like to see, sir," she wound up at this great elevation, "who you won't be good enough for if you're good enough for us!"

It was just the kind of thing he found he liked to draw from her, though Molly showed now such a peculiar play of consideration for him as made his own eyes while he replied signal back to her. "Oh I leave it to you, I leave it to you—you'll see, as soon as it becomes a question of my really flourishing, for my own opinion at least, how much I shall leave to you. I don't say," he added after this fashion to Molly as well, "that I mayn't do you credit and service as much as you do me, but I'm not flattering myself that Molly at the utmost will know all my reasons for delighting in her, or even guess the half of them."

"I'm perhaps better at guessing than you think," the girl returned, "but I've never myself indeed wanted more reasons for anything than that my taste is my taste and my choice my choice and that I believe myself able to defend them."

"Ah you splendour!"—he radiantly took her up. But she had at once gone on.

"I hope there's nobody I shall praise you to for your being humble-minded, for I can't think of an acquaintance of ours with whom it would do you the least good even if you should need the benefit. Look after your own interests, as mamma says—and we'll look after ours and let other people look after their's; they seem mostly able to!" And then as the glow of the sentiment on which she so could practise was still there in his face it virtually invited, as he could feel, another turn of her hand. "If that was a compliment to us just now about the strength of the passions in us, is it your notion that a person's modesty should figure as one of them? It puts the question, you see, of whether one would be modestly passionate or passionately modest—and I don't mind telling you, if you need the information, which you'll have to take from me."

"You give me wondrous choices," Ralph laughed, "but I hope I can get on with the information I've by this time gained. That is about you, about you," and he drew out his considering look at her—any further intention in which, however, Mrs. Midmore impatiently checked.

"If you can get on with the nonsense she talks you'll do more than I sometimes can; but I really think, you know," she added, "that you're teaching us a new language altogether and that in our own dull company we don't say half such odd things."

"It's perfectly true, mother"—and the girl kept it up at her friend; "he has made me say more of them in the last half hour, not to speak of doing 'em, the happy wretch, than in all my long life before!"

"Ah don't speak of any influence of mine," Ralph cried on as earnest a note as had yet sounded from him—"don't speak as if you didn't yourself put into my head all the wonder and the pleasure. The proportion in which I take these things from you is beyond any in which I can give others back. Do you see what I mean?"—and his earnestness appealed even to Perry, who had within a minute faced about again as for intelligence of what was said. Mrs. Midmore's appearance bore out in truth the hint that her intelligence had reached its term—a fact rendering perhaps more remarkable any fresh aspiration of her son's. It was at the worst of immediate interest to Ralph that this worthy, with a positively amused look at him, at once showed signs.

"If Molly's modest at all," he maturely observed, "she makes the point, I judge, that she's passionately so; whatever that may mean, she's welcome to the comfort. But I make the point," he said with increasing weight, "that my sister Nan, sweet Nan as you properly name her, fits on the other cap—the more becoming, as I understand it, to any young woman."

"Sweet Nan, he wants you to understand," Molly intervened on this, "is a shrinking flower of the field, whereas I'm no better than one of the bedraggled!"

"I see, I see"—our hero jumped to the vision: "you're the one infinitely talked about, as how shouldn't you be? But your sister has her virtue."

"Her virtue, Lord bless us," Mrs. Midmore took him up: "why I hope to heaven she has, with so little to speak of else; though she'll be glad, no doubt, cousin, to know that you answer for it!"

"Oh there are all kinds of virtue!" Ralph still laughed in his harmonising way—which his hostess, however, on that article, wouldn't have too much of.

"I never heard of but one kind, which is quite enough. Thank you for putting on us more!" And she wished to know of her son what possessed him to make such claims. "If we work you up so about the child," she inquired of Ralph as well, "how shall you not be disappointed?—let her have as she will for you the making of a brave little sister."

"Oh but I can imagine nothing better than a little sister to match the bravery of the rest of you, the brave little brother and the brave little bride, walking all three in the steps of the brave great mother—since you're so good, madam, as to become in some degree mine too. I'm sure," our young man declared, "that all Perry wants is to fit to our shy sister that other cap of Molly's—which one is it, my dear?" he asked directly of this young woman; and then before she could say: "Oh yes, the pale passion of modesty, which you won't let me fall back on: for the want, I mean, of a better one among ourselves at home."

"How do you know Nan's shy?" the girl demanded straight; "for it can't be as if you knew by being so yourself! Can't you understand," Molly pursued, "that the man of my taste has only to be as bold as a lion and to think of nothing less?"

"Well, I don't of course know that she's shy—that is I didn't; though I was guided so well by my apprehension of yourself. Yes"—and he looked about at them with the fairly musing gravity of this recognition—"I shouldn't much mind, you see, if I didn't fairly seem so to miss it!"

"Miss what, sir, in the name of goodness?" Molly asked with impatience; "when you pull a face as long as if you were missing your purse! You don't suspect us, I hope, of hugging you to rifle your pockets!"

He felt himself flush, and also, with his eyes on them again successively as to show them how he smiled, felt the probability of his looking silly. "I make too much of it, I know; but what I miss is my having been right; I mean, don't you see," and still foolishly he heard himself explain, "about—well, about what we were saying."

"Do you understand our clever cousin, mother dear, after all?" Molly wailed in a filial appeal.

Mrs. Midmore's own attention helped to point the doubt. "He mustn't be too terribly clever for us, certainly! We enjoy immensely your being so extraordinary; but I'm sure you'll take it in good part if I remind you that there is a limit."

"Yes, of course there must be!" he quite seriously agreed.

"A limit, I mean"—she bridled a little—"to our poor old English wit."

"Oh that's another matter—and when you look at me in a certain way—even when Perry does," he declared, though he could have bitten his lip the next moment for his "even"—"I'm more afraid of it than I ever was of anything in my life. I took your reminder to be for the limit of our pleasure together; though why," he demanded of Molly, "should we fall to speech of that when the article itself has scarcely so much as begun? I do enjoy you—I do, I do!"—and he showed, almost with vehemence, that he meant it for them all. "It's for that very reason I should have liked to be wholly right. But there I am again!" he laughed—"I can't keep off that strangeness of my momentary lapse, for though it was short it was sharp. However——!" And he beamed in resolute relief upon brave Molly.

"You can't keep off my everlasting little sister—that's what you can't keep off!" her bravery answered, though rather as to put it as helpfully as possible to his comprehension than to make a circumstance of her pretending to a jealousy that might or that mightn't become her. She struck him at that instant as not a little puzzled, and he had already felt how moving, in a person of her force, an unexpected patience would easily be. He had even for this one of those rarest reaches of apprehension on which he had been living and soaring for the past hour and which represented the joy he had just reasseverated; impatience was surely one of her bright marks, but he saw that to live with her would be to find her often deny it in ways unforeseen and that thus seemed for the moment to show themselves as the most delightful things in nature.

"Well, but it isn't she, it's my own stupidity where I ought particularly not to have been stupid." He replied with the good-humour which he desired to feel so much more than anything else, and would have explained further but that she cut him straight off—he did of a truth, in spite of everything, keep giving her such opportunities.

"Is what's so dreadfully the matter with you, pray, that if you had known there were two of us I'm exactly the one you wouldn't have preferred?—so that you took me in other words only because supposing there was nobody better!"

"There could be nobody better, love!" he promptly enough laughed—and yet somehow felt it a little weak for the absurd intensity of the question; since the case was really that, more and more desirable as she grew with every point she made, it did inwardly and inexpugnably beset him that the fine possession of truth on which he had been acting wasn't then so very fine if it left a secret humiliation possible. There was a word on his tongue that would help indeed to preserve the secrecy; which was stayed, however, by a prior word of Mrs. Midmore's.

"Does the younger girl, in America, cousin, push in for an establishment before her elders are properly settled?" The question, uttered with all kind coolness, referred itself, as he felt, to the perfect proprieties, yet nothing had so placed the speaker in the light of the manners surrounding them, and he couldn't have told why it was unanswerable save by his going into more things, and perhaps even meaner things, than he then could care for. He wasn't, was he? pledged to Molly, or she to him, through her being offered in the order of the proprieties; but his kinswoman, in spite of this, could easily have convinced him that his not taking her point would be low. For what was the old order in which he found himself so triumphantly, even so pantingly, float but a grand order? and what his having at some moments to breathe so hard but the very attestation of his equal strength? It was when he breathed hardest, he again recognised, that his throbs meant most to him; and he perhaps hadn't been so little at a loss for anything as now for the right humour and the right look. "It's everywhere easier, I suppose, to find a wife than to find a husband, but marrying, as in all new countries, I take it, proceeds so fast that you'd scarce notice by watching among us, in any company, who comes in first. Those who do that here," he developed at this high level of urbanity, "do it doubtless by a longer stretch than we ever have to show; but how shall I tell you what I mean by there not being perhaps so many there to come in last—or such a difference even, for that matter, between last and first? I dare say you wouldn't at once know many of 'em apart."

These were still for his audience wondrous explanations—they plainly required among the three some art of following; though the three, it was to be added, combined at moments, rather oddly, an appearance, a positive hush, of blankness, with the signified sufficiency of their own usual names for things. "We're not accustomed to think here that the last are as good as the first," Mrs. Midmore said, "and if you want to see the differences there can be between them I flatter myself we shall have plenty to show you. You must let me tell you too," she went on, "that now that I know you I don't believe a word of their all dancing in America to such a tune as yours, and I believe it exactly least when you argue in such a pretty way for it."

This appeared so to express her daughter's feeling too that Molly borrowed at once the fortunate word. "And his being a bachelor in spite of it, what's his argument for that, I should like to know! If it's so easy to marry there, and nobody can keep out of it, somebody ought to have caught you before poor me—though I'm sure I'm much obliged to all of those who failed."

"Ah, my dear, none of 'em quite 'failed'" Ralph laughed.

"'Quite, quite'?"—she echoed his amusement. "A miss is as good as a mile, and a girl either gets a husband or doesn't. Unless you mean"—she kept it up—"that though single you're engaged: to some other sweet creature, or perhaps to a dozen, as well as to me." And then while he felt himself exceed his smile as she blazed on him with this, "I don't hold a man single who drags about twenty hearts: he's no better than Bluebeard himself—unless found out in time."

"Fortunately I'm found out in time then," Ralph again laughed—"that is in time to give you the key of the dreadful room and yet trust in spite of it to your courage—not to say to your regard."

"'Regard' is a fine word when you mean my foolish curiosity!" With which of a sudden she looked at him, he seemed to know, still harder and more intendingly than hitherto—to the effect in fact of his feeling more than ever how sufficiently he must meet it. That sufficiency, yes, took all his care—pulling on it there quite supremely; but there was notably always the luck that whereas such exchanges with her might have resulted for him most of all in the impression of something almost deadly in her force, what kept overriding them was the truth of her beauty. If this last indeed was of itself a deadly force he could but oppose to it an accepted fate—for what turn of her head, of her hand or of her spirit wasn't somehow a flash of that treasure? How she knew as much herself too, and fairly bettered it by rejoicing in it! "If I stare you out of countenance—and I do, mother, don't I, if you'll look at him!—it's because I'm not ashamed of my curiosity, or of any other good reason for looking at you! I thank you for the key, as you call it," she laughed on, "and I'm sure I already see the poor things strung up in their dreadful row."

"You must really forgive her for a nasty torment," said Mrs. Midmore on this, and not a little as if she had seen that he was out of countenance. "I should think very ill of you if you had broken no heart—I had clean broken a dozen before I patched up my husband's. After that, however, I assure you I kept my hands quite off; and if Molly will expect you to do as much now yourself, it's no more than you'll expect of her and that I give you my word for it I'll back you in. I should be ashamed of her as well, I don't mind saying, if nobody had been the worse for her—though of course one knows how much less a gentleman need be the worse than a female. It isn't to me at any rate that I ask you to confess," she nobly and brightly added.

"Well, I confess to one!" Ralph on this felt himself moved to break out. He had visitations, had been having them uninterruptedly and with a vengeance—looking for them, invoking them, enjoying them as they came; but there was one that took him by surprise and that in the oddest way sinned by excess. He hadn't three minutes before expected it, and as soon as he had spoken it seemed irrelevant. There it was none the less for himself, and at least, with his bravest ring, he could stick to it. "One, yes, one. I won't disown her. That is," he qualified, "I was myself greatly smitten, and seem to have let her know it. But I must have let her know it," he laughed, "in vain!"

"You 'seem to have'?" Miss Midmore echoed—"but you're not quite sure, any more than of how she treated you? It must have been one of your pale passions, as you call 'em, truly—so that even if her ghost does hover I shan't be afraid of so very thin a shade."

Our young man cast about as in some wonder of his own, meeting now but for a moment the eyes of none of them. "Yes, it's a thin shade—and melts away hiding its face, even while I look back at it."

"She may well hide her face," Mrs. Midmore improvingly cried, "if she was ever such a fool as not to have felt your worth. Still," Ralph's hostess went on with her fine air at its finest, "it's a comfort to know the worst of you—which seems to be no more than that you recover easily from disappointments."

Ralph faced her for this, his wonder again in his eyes—that wonder at himself which had on occasion, as appeared, a sharper play than any inspired by his friends. "I don't know about that—no! But as I'm not disappointed now, and am plainly not going to be," he at once added, "I don't see that the question matters. And when once I learn a thing I learn it—I do really make it my own," he added by an odd transition. "I had to learn—that was my point—about sweet Nan; but now that I have, but now that I know it's as if I had known always, or have at any rate lived down my surprise." He put that to them thus with earnest frankness and as if it might much relieve and interest them; and was moved with it in fact further to image their general dependence. "It's as if there were a few doors that don't yield to my push—though we've seen most of them fly open, haven't we? Those I mean have to be opened from within, as you've also seen." And again his point was made for his listening friends by that fine ingenuity which they either, to judge by something recurrent in their faces, couldn't sufficiently admire in him or couldn't sufficiently follow. "The case is that when once I am in the room it takes on quite the look of nature—at the end of almost no time." And then as with the quality of a certain hush in them beyond any of the several he had already had occasion to note his bringing about, he plunged deeper rather than shook himself free—dived to pick up, as who should say, just the right pearl of cheer. "I'm not speaking literally of this room—though it does strike me as extraordinarily beautiful. I've taken it all in—there isn't a spare cool grace in it that I don't admire." He waved at it all vaguely while they stared—yes, more than ever stared. What was he saying, what was he saying? he even inwardly questioned under the effect of that; which effect too, however, was that of his not caring so long as he cleared the matter for himself. "I mean a kind of idea of a room; so that catching the idea is what I call crossing the threshold. The thing is that when I catch it I really hold it, don't you see? The thing is that when I know where I am all the rest falls together and I then defy any bewilderment. But I have to know where I am first. I did that perfectly the moment I came in here, the moment I came in there below. I defy you," he smiled and smiled to the three, "to prove on me any bewilderment—save that of course about sweet Nan, which we've all now got completely over." The pearl of cheer, held up between his fingers, threw out its light at them after the manner of pearls. "I've lived into her truth—yes, lived on into it, and all in a few minutes, shouldn't you say, doing me that justice? So that now I'm ready for anything."

It was Perry who took this up first, though not till after an interval, curiously prolonged to Ralph's measure, during which that appearance for our friend of his companions' helpless failure of any sign of their reading into his solicitous speech an imputable sense, however off-hand the imputation, amounted practically to a rupture of relation with them and presented them to his vision, during a series of moments, wellnigh as an artful, a wonderful trio, some mechanic but consummate imitation of ancient life, staring through the vast plate of a museum. It was for all the world as if his own interpretation grew, under this breath of a crisis, exactly by the lapse of theirs, lasting long enough to suggest that his very care for them had somehow annihilated them, or had at least converted them to the necessarily void and soundless state. He could understand that they didn't, and that this would have made them take him for mad, the chill and the dismay of which—felt for that matter by Ralph too—turned them to stone or wood or wax, or whatever it was they momentarily most resembled. The chill was a true felt drop of the temperature, the waft across them all of a mortal element, mortal at least to the others and menacing, should it have continued, to himself. That it couldn't possibly have continued, at such a portentous pitch, however, was the next instant standing out to sharpness in the fact of natural sound, sound borne up to them as from the cobbles of the Square and floating familiar life back to them. Perry's voice it was, positively, that had the warmth, and that was already, for the good of all of them, translating the suspense into terms. "Are you ready for Sir Cantopher?" he asked of Ralph with a pertinence which, as soon as thus attested, seemed to have picked up our young man's declaration with an overreaching hand. There was something they could rally to, particularly as a loud rubadubdub at the door had followed the report of arrested coach-wheels before it. "Ah, there the dear man is!" Mrs. Midmore at once recovered her faculty to say—even if all to the immediate effect of calling on Ralph first to search his own.

"Sir Cantopher, Sir Cantopher?" It was nature again for Ralph even if it was in its prime newness uncertainty. And it was uncertainty but just enough to prepare his glow of response. "Sir Cantopher Bland? Why, there's nothing I shall more prize than the honour of his acquaintance."

"He looks forward eagerly to the pleasure of yours," Mrs. Midmore remarked with clear assurance; so that Molly was the last to speak—which she did all to the tune again of her own high colour.

"I hope it won't interfere with your liking him, sir, that as you've been so taken with the fancy of my sister, he's taken worse still and from years and years ago."

"Oh he's in love with her? Yes surely, I know that—know it now," Ralph added.

"Of course you know it when I tell you, dear," the girl returned smiling, but with her eyes, it struck him, searching him as we have just noted his having had to search himself. He felt it as more of a watch of him in spite of his word than anything had yet been, and this he resented in proportion to his pride in the fine presence of mind he had so quickly recovered. So that made him positively go further, go in fact a length which was the longest he had used up to now.

"Ah I know more than you tell me, I know what I've been knowing. Of course he is in love with Nan," he made out "almost as much in love with her as I'm with you. Only with the difference," it came to him, "that his passion isn't returned——!"

"As I return yours is what you mean, dear?"—she took him straight up. And then when he had quickly pronounced this exactly what he meant, with a glance too at the fact that so much was evident, he had still to meet her asking how he could be so sure when they had been having it from him, and to the extent of his fairly complaining, that no information about her sister had ever reached him. The effect—he at once took this in—was of his being fairly cross-questioned, so that he should somehow be put to the proof of what he might say with the very entrance of the gentleman who would have already alighted below and perhaps be now on the stair. She really pushed it quite home. "You complained, you know, my dear, that we had left you in such ignorance."

"Ignorance of Nan, yes—only not ignorance of Sir Cantopher, at least as a ground of complaint. But I don't mind a bit, you see, what I didn't know before: that's all made up to me," he found himself pleading, "and I want so, don't you understand? to be with you in everything."

It was not unapparent to him meanwhile either that Mrs. Midmore, during this exchange, was momentarily mystified at her daughter's share in it, or that Perry, quite detached apparently from any question of a step toward their visitor, had witnessed for his attention by turning again to the window. But it was to himself directly that his hostess addressed a more confessedly puzzled expression than had yet comported for her with her dignity. "My child must sometimes seem to give you the absurdest notice of a temper!" And then after an instant to the girl: "Don't, you gipsy, make yourself out more of a romp than nature has done." With which she appeared really, as the surer way, to appeal again to Ralph, who noted at the same time, however, that she might, by the betrayal of her eye, have caught some sense of her daughter's reason. "When everything's so right," she asked, "how can anything be wrong?"—and she had put no other question with so near an approach to a quaver.

"Do you think that to turn your head isn't what I most wish in the world?" were the only words, and splendidly spoken to her lover, with which Molly took up the remonstrance. "Mother herself knows that, just as I know how she wants it scarce less. But all the same, dear sir," she continued thus forcibly to reason, "I must put common sense between us for your sake even if I can do with fancy for my own. It isn't a thing to quarrel about, even if anything could be," she shiningly pursued, "but you must keep your head steady enough to satisfy me here. If you hadn't been aware of our friend's cross mistress, how could you be aware of our friend himself, who thinks of nobody else, and even talks of nobody, when he can get tired ears to listen?"

Ralph felt himself in the box, but also that never was a witness to have seen his embarrassment so enrich his interest. "Oh is she cross——?" The tone of the cry must have been comically candid, for it moved the ladies together to such a spasm of mirth that Perry, who wasn't amused, looked round to see why. Before which even, however, their kinsman had continued much to the same effect: "And he thinks and talks of nobody——?" Though with all gaiety, since they were gay, he corrected it a little for Perry. "Of course, of course—he does as he likes!"

Perry faced him on it. "He does indeed—and why in the world shouldn't he? It's the kind of gentleman he is."

This was really, for Perry, an explanation, and Ralph beamed acknowledgment. "It will be delightful to see the kind as you grow them here!"

"Ah nobody could be more civil," Mrs. Midmore interposed, "and very few, I assure you, cousin, are so clever and so keen. But surely, as he doesn't come up, you should wait on him below," she said to her son.

This worthy none the less didn't stir; he only stood looking at Ralph; with which, to the latter's surprise, he carried explanation further. "I don't say he's my man, mind you"—it was positively pacific. "And you can guess whether I'd be his, as my mother describes him—apart I mean from his liking Nan and our wishing to see her suited."

"Which she isn't of course," Ralph said, "if she doesn't like him!" It was as if Perry of a sudden had opened to him, and as if moreover, feeling this, he couldn't too cordially meet it. He met it most indeed by carrying his response on to Molly. "I see her as 'cross'—so far as 'sweet Nan' admits of that—because of her perhaps fearing that you want to overbear her. That is that you all together do, I mean—for I don't make it personal to yourself, dear!—and, as she holds out against you, treat her to the discipline of bread and water in a moated grange to see if it won't bring her round." The way to deal with his mistress, he more than ever felt, was to deal to extravagance—which was clearly at this moment so right that it seemed to invite him to pile it up. "If she'll have him you'll take her back, but if she won't, that is till she gives way, she's reduced to her crust and her cell. Only," he asked to the same effect, "how can Sir Cantopher himself suppose such rigours will serve him?"

"Here is Sir Cantopher himself, to satisfy you!" Mrs. Midmore cried—for the opened door now gave passage to the footman who had admitted Ralph and who announced the awaited friend. She called her welcome to this personage almost before he appeared. "You take your time, you pampered thing—when we've never so much wanted to see you!"

III

If the moments at which Ralph had felt the happy enlargement of his situation, during the past half-hour, had been much more numerous than those at which he was held of a sudden in a sort of constriction, he now knew within the minute that the elation of ease had caught him up high and higher. This came at once from the sight of the gentleman who entered to kiss Mrs. Midmore's hand before he did anything else, though indeed he gave Ralph a glance by the way, and of whom our young man at once conveniently noted that he performed the pretty act not at all as by prescription but somehow as by special inspiration, or even by the custom of oddity. He made a difference, the quickest—his arrival made it, and his look at Ralph and his fine good-morning to the others, before he had spoken a word but this last; the difference, that is, of replacing by their interest in his presence a certain self-consciousness on the part of each of the four into which their commerce of the last ten minutes had perhaps a trifle awkwardly tightened. And this verily, wasn't it? just by no more than the glance of his eye, a small sharp eye in a long narrow face, giving a sense as it did on the spot for Ralph's imagination to Mrs. Midmore's warrant of his keenness. Was it anything more than that he was intelligent?—though why if it wasn't could Ralph's heart leap up so without thereby implying that the others, the so agreeable others (for hadn't Perry turned agreeable too!) had beguiled him but with the common? However the question hovered but to drop, for there was no conceivable tribute to taste that his grand kinswoman didn't seem to render as she said to her new visitor: "I desire your acquaintance for our cousin Mr. Pendrel—a faraway cousin, but a near relation of another sort, as he is about to become my son-in-law."

"Do you settle such grand matters in the turn of a hand?—if, as I gather, Mr. Pendrel, whom I rejoice to see, has scarce had time to draw breath in your house!" Sir Cantopher addressed this to the others, but paying Ralph the compliment of it, as our young man felt, and letting him see that he might figure for unduly driven should he choose. It took, however, but this first vision of his fellow-visitor to put such a choice quite out of the question; the effect of this gentleman was so to make him throb again with the responsive curiosity that had carried him the whole length of his first initiation. That tide was once more full and strong, for here was a new relation, of the liveliest, which was already in the brief moment drawing him on and which in fact had in its different way as much force to that end, whatever the end might prove, as had been put forth for his original welcome by Molly herself. Molly had desired him, and Molly still did, as much as ever, he perfectly felt, all outer ruffles of accident notwithstanding, just as his own strongest pulse beat upon her for its satisfaction with a quickness undiminished; but the very face and air and note of the man before him, and who was as much taken with him, in the way of wonder, he could see, as he was himself taken, now multiplied at a stroke his relations with his actual world. Sir Cantopher's forehead was high and his chin long, without other fulness, as was also his nose; his mouth, with its thin tight edges and its inconsiderable size, repeated to the attention the fashion of his eyes and their drawn lids, which showed the sharpness of the pupil intermittently, much as the lips, opening too little, showed the gleam of scarce more than a couple of such teeth as would have announced on more liberal terms a proper array. Sir Cantopher's facial terms were precisely not liberal—in the sense, as we might have put it, that they made, in spite of resources close at hand, a hard bargain with expression; Ralph even noting for it at once that he had his aspect certainly, and that one took it somehow as a thing of high sufficiency, if not of beauty or symmetry, but that not less surely, should it continue to be denied larger play, it would have to do, unlike even the Greek theatric mask, both for tragedy and comedy. Would one ever, without other help, know which of the two he fixedly meant?—though doubtless he was meaning comedy now and moreover was, by some indescribable art and unsupported by a single direct grace, expressing a high degree of elegance and of consequence. It might be a small world in which he so much mattered, but there was exactly the charm, or at least the challenge—curiosity always predominant—that one might come quite to learn and to enjoy his conditions. His shoulders sloped, his stature but sufficed, and wasn't some slight deflection from the straight to be confessed to by his extraordinarily thin legs, in their understrapped buff pantaloons, a pretty match to a complete puce-coloured frock of the very finest smooth cloth, now left open to the bristle of frill and the ribboned dangle of watch-fob? The point most of all made by him at any rate was that of his being in his way, and the more remarkably as without her facilities, not less the fine gentleman than Mrs. Midmore was the fine lady.

"Oh our happy understanding was arrived at long ago!"—Ralph found himself liking to speak as if endless generations had prepared it. "You'll understand how with such a wind in my sails I couldn't be slow to get into port. And the kindness," he said, "with which I have been treated this hour——!" He left that to bridge all gaps while his face invited his relatives to see how for others still than themselves he put himself in their hands.

They saw it at once, they rallied, as he felt, altogether, and Sir Cantopher's presence crowned all their confidence without at all impairing his own. Ralph had been having from them this and that about him, but to see him there was to understand him as the supremely valid family friend, with certain of whose aspects liberties of remark might be taken behind his back, but with whose judgment and whose taste they would ever, and most particularly, wish their appearance as a family to consort. Our young man, with the divinatory gift that so unfailingly flared up in him under stress, was quickly mastering the truth that, for that matter, criticism of his friends would enjoy a range on this visitor's part which it could scarce hope to achieve in any conditions on Molly's or her mother's, affirm their claim to the luxury as they might. It was wonderful, it was already inspiring, that Sir Cantopher, by the mere action of a sign or two of the simplest, seemed to blow on the perceptive flame as if he had directly applied his breath. He recognised, he recognised—Ralph took that almost exultingly in for the quickening of interest it surely promised. What he recognised was that the American cousin appeared to justify himself to sight; which was perhaps no great showing, especially as an effect of but two or three glances—yet it offered that pilgrim an inviting extension, one he only asked to make the most of.

"I know how they've looked out for you, sir—and don't mind telling you that I've myself looked out with them; so that I perfectly conceive their present satisfaction. We've landed our prize—the expression seems peculiarly just, and you of course are assuring yourself with the last conviction that your own is at least equal to anything you could have imagined." Of these words Sir Cantopher delivered himself in a voice of such an odd high nasality as again threw Ralph back on the question of voices and caused him to note that he had never before heard a like tone applied with such confidence. It was with confidence and to the happiest effect that Mrs. Midmore applied hers, but hers was a charm and a rich comfort, whereas Sir Cantopher's excited surprise, or was exciting Ralph's at least, in proportion as it developed. There again accordingly was our friend learning at a leap, learning that here was a scene where the safe retention of properties and honours didn't in the least depend on a gentleman's either denying a single mark of his ease or attempting to please in violation of it. He himself had been acquainted, hadn't he? with the reign of the nasal, but when and where had it flourished to his ear as this gentleman, and doubtless quite unconsciously, made it flourish? People were supposed at home to enjoy in that particular an unresented license—which he had, however, never heard taken as he now heard it without its having somehow seemed to pull the speaker down. Sir Cantopher was up, up, up—yes, as he went on, up at the topmost note of his queer fine squeak, which was clearly not less an element of felt assurance in him than the most settled of his other titles. This didn't withal diminish the fact that if you had caught the sound the first time without sight of its source, you might have turned to expect some rather ancient lady, of the highest fashion indeed, but playing her part, presumably to her disadvantage, upon an organ cracked beyond repair.

It was furthermore of moment that not a shade of disadvantage, even while the impression was suddenest and sharpest, appeared attachable by Ralph's fancy to Sir Cantopher's similar exercise, for how could one in that case have been so moved more and more to advance in proportion as it was suggested that one was awaited? It took no great number of more words to represent to him that he was now in presence, and might ever so fortunately continue to be, of more cleverness even than his cousins had engaged for on behalf of their patron—his pulses telling him in this remarkable way that the finest parts of it would probably come out to him, and that, yes, positively, they were already wanting to come out. He, Ralph Pendrel, should enjoy them even were that ambiguity of the oral medium a condition involved. Mightn't he too grow with association prolific enough fairly to like the ambiguity?—even as it couldn't but be that the company Sir Cantopher kept had either to like it or, as the phrase might be, lump it. Ralph had really not to wait longer than this for the first glint of a truth that was soon to gather more force, the virtual perception that the only way not to find one's self rather afraid of such a companion might well be the device of getting and keeping so near him that his power to alarm should by positive human pressure be deprived of range and action. Not this calculation indeed do we impute to our partaker of impressions during the first stages of the relation that had begun so quickly to move him; it was quite enough that a surrender to it—though to have only just to surrender was a most extraordinary turn—looked for all the world like the door of a society, of knowledge, of pleasure in a rich sense in which he hadn't yet encountered pleasure, standing ajar before him and asking but for a push of his young hand.

"You'll understand, please, sir," Sir Cantopher had at any rate soon said, "that I'm here this morning to pay you in particular my respects and to offer you any service in my power. I've only to meet your eye, haven't I? to judge that our manners and customs will be an open book to you almost at once, so far as a quick understanding is concerned; but there may be a page here and there that I can help you to turn over—even if your cousin Perry, who is also my good friend, may be a much better guide for you to the sights of the town, as they are called, let alone too most of the humours of the country. There are things Perry could show me, I'm sure, that I've never seen in my life—but that must be because he has never thought me worthy of 'em: isn't it, you great keeper of your own counsel?" the family friend asked again of the family hope, who now stood with his thumbs in his waistcoat armholes and his eyes anywhere but on Sir Cantopher's. He had no answer for the question addressed to him, which flowered out of the speaker's urbanity with a special effect for that vivacity of observation in our own young man of which Sir Cantopher, to his high credit, had lost so remarkably little time in making sure.

What even he, however, in spite of that sharpness, couldn't have guessed, and this by Ralph's private and immediate certainty, was what the latter was at these instants most thinking of: which was neither more nor less than that whereas their companions, not many minutes before, had visibly not known what to make of various odd matters drawn by the rare force of the situation from their kinsman's candour, so no felt want of ease whatever could possibly greet on the score of its ambiguity even the boldest push of this quite other and very much greater cleverness. Yes, very much greater, Ralph at once owned, for nothing yet had perhaps brushed his perception with such a wing as the absolute interest of that light on the fact that Sir Cantopher, with superior resources to his of every kind (if the facial were excepted, though perhaps indeed the facial but worked in their own way,) might irritate, might exasperate, might really, to put it at the worst, humiliate, his present auditors, but would never produce in them that odd consequence, recently noted, of their finding themselves disconcertedly at sea. Should Ralph again by any accident so leave them? He hoped not, he had somehow felt the warning, we know, as the chill of a misadventure. Still, amid the wondrous things that so positively promised to happen, that, even that, had its suspended possibility; which in fact cast a shadow just appreciably the larger and the darker by reason of this appearance that he was in danger of expressing least, to any practical end, just when desiring to express most, and that there was on the other hand nothing his fellow-guest might treat them to, for that gentleman's special amusement, that wouldn't be intelligible, and quite cruelly so if need be, exactly in proportion to the fine taste of it.

That was the point to which our adventurer reached out, the attraction of such fine taste as he had heard of, as he had dreamed of, as he knew existed in the world, without his having come even within remotest hail of it, but which he now by the mere act of a step or two might positively feel his hand touch. Of this he had for the instant so intent an awareness that the precious quantity in question and its curious master might, by the measure of the recognition, have seemed to supersede his appointed mistress and her bloom and her beauty as the main and original reading of his lesson and object of his aim. Wasn't he afterwards quite to allow to himself that he had during certain moments just then fairly invited the girl herself, so far as laughing toward her as if he desired it went, to be glad with him for his so liking what was thus promised them together, as might be—there having begun in him too, under the very sense we commemorate, who should have been able to say what instinct of the rightness of his making no sort of surrender to which he shouldn't be able to introduce her as well? Was he to pretend there, however, after but five minutes of their visitor's company, to be ready himself with services in any such particular?—services from which he might easily, if he didn't look out, borrow the air of an officious ass. It quickened everything, it somehow, with a kind of still and not absolutely harsh violence, jostled all things together, that she didn't, no, didn't at all glow responsive to this evidence that he could show eagerness, and eagerness so gapingly flagrant, for a cause with which her concern would be but what she chose to let it. How long had it been before he noted, and then almost with a start, that during the establishment of his good relation with their fine friend, which clearly was proceeding by Sir Cantopher's action still more than by his own, she hadn't so much as once taken visual account of that worthy's presence, had in fact turned an eye upon him as little as Perry himself was doing? This would have been perhaps made up by her leaving of her lover to grin demonstrative if she hadn't markedly appeared to fail of coming to his help in it. They didn't help people with Sir Cantopher, Perry and she; which fact might possibly be already a guiding influence, unless it was a mere mark of the momentary case. On the former supposition it involved more matters than required present attention, though throwing so much light on the latter as might spring from one's guessing—what one after all had by this time independently guessed!—that the girl wouldn't love without jealousy and that here was a juncture for her at which, through some occult cause, the sharp passion stood in front of the soft. Her brother's incalculable attitude had become under the shift of the general pressure just her brother's affair, but Ralph hadn't to wait to see how Molly's discrimination against his own extravagance of sociability corrected as much as he could possibly have wished that quick fancy in him of her having through the sudden strange stress of a short time before held off from him altogether. That had been an alarm, and this even at the very worst wasn't, for that she didn't hold off in ignoring the author of their actual complication, that she much rather held on, held as she had at no moment held, could only be the true sense of her manner. She had reasons, and what were they? for not caring that he should want to see so supremely much of what other people, and this one in particular should it come to that, could do for him. These reasons of course essentially counted, even while she kept the expression of them back, for a renewed assurance of all she felt she could herself do; a truth contributing not a little to our hero's sense of himself as more bedevilled at this moment perhaps than at any yet, ridden since he was by the wish to lose nothing that he could on any terms whatever grasp.

He faced at that moment, to all appearance, the signal inference that he had come out, as who should say, for nothing singly and solely, not even for bestowing his heart and plighting his troth; he had come out for the whole, the finest integrity of the thing—the insistence of which now flashed upon him with the hard cold light of a flourished steel blade. In that light the whole was promised and figured ever so much more by Sir Cantopher than by Molly and her mother and her brother—in whatever separate harmony these three should move or act together. He gave it out as they couldn't possibly give it, and as their attitude, in very truth—for wasn't there a telltale shade even in Mrs. Midmore's too?—showed they didn't so much as want to. Sir Cantopher cut across them as with the edge of his fineness, waving them back a little and keeping them in place by one free and practised hand while by the other he sketched a hundred like possibilities upon the stretched expanse of Ralph's vision, which might have been an artist's uppermost fair sheet. Absolutely he drew things, their companions turning away their heads (and poor Ralph needing indeed to keep his own,) in recognition that as they of course could flourish no such pencil, so might they not either prudently snatch it from him; it not being in every house, even of the best traditions, that such a master was content to perform—it having in fact been to all probability quite noted that all impatience of his time or disposition to finish worked infallibly against the challenger.

"Yes, I've collections, treasures, and all as pretty things of their kind as you can hope anywhere to see"—this, Ralph knew at the end of three minutes, was one of the points he had most promptly made, and had then dropped for some other, though only next to retouch it with a neatness of caprice, repeating it as in provision of interest for himself and at once adding that there was nothing he either so loved or so hated as to play showman—it all depended on the case. "I've things I'd as soon smash with a hammer as invite people to admire who haven't some struggling germ of a natural taste. I don't care a fig, you see, for what's called an acquired one, which is sure to have been begged or borrowed or stolen, sure not to have been grown. I don't know where you've picked up yours, sir," he was so good as to remark to Ralph with his sharpest civility—"for I can scarce imagine where you should. It must grow therefore in the soil of your mind—in fact, upon my word, I seem to see it grow in your very face while I speak to you: which is as becoming to you as possible and as promising, mayn't I say? for my own opportunity."

Sir Cantopher was struck—and Ralph was at once struck, as well, with his being so: he had put his fine finger so straight upon the spot where our young man's consciousness then most throbbed. Ralph did, as we know, grow many of his perceptions and possibilities from moment to moment and as they were wanted, but his sense of this had been up to that instant that he grew them deep down within and then served them up in the outer light only all prepared and garnished and denying their improvised state. Here was Sir Cantopher catching them crude, and as good as saying that he did; this at least with a confidence betrayed neither by Molly nor by Perry, symptoms of something like their friend's confounding note though they might have confusedly given. Ralph flushed under the effect of the liveliest observation he had had to meet, and we have already seen that flushing rather inevitably counted for him as blushing—and not the less either for the fact that when he blushed he took a perfect oddity of alarm, as if the telltale suffusion threatened him by a nasty little law of its own with loss or defeat or exposure; though exposure of what, in the name of goodness? These awarenesses during the moment or two, so pressed upon him and upon each other, that it was as if a recognition of what Sir Cantopher might mean fairly surged up, under the squeeze, from his conscience to his countenance, where it could thus only give such increased signs as made his critic the more frankly appreciate them.

"Don't you see what I mean and what a treat it is to seize in the fact such a candour of intelligence, a play of apprehension so full and yet so fresh?—as if born but three minutes ago and yet already stepping out as straight as you like!" So he pursued, the terrible man, inviting the others fairly to admire their kinsman's expression, embarrassed or no, and thereby, as we feel, making that expression almost glare about for a refuge, some dart to cover, some snatch of a tag of disguise, from its own very heat. "The next thing I shall cry!" Ralph reflected in a central gasp; but if he felt the tears rise he couldn't for his life rightly have apportioned the weight of shame in them against the joy of emotion just as emotion. The joy was for the very tribute itself of Sir Cantopher's advance upon him, whereas the shame was ever so much more vague, attaching as it did at the most to its being rather ridiculous to be so held up for transparent. They had seemed to him transparent, even with dim spots—he had been fairly on his way, hadn't he? to reduce Sir Cantopher to it; so he panted a little, after his fashion, while the Midmores, and just exactly as through some blur of tears, affected him as rallying to their friend's invitation to see him in the light of that damning charm. He was what he was of course, and with the full right to be; but hadn't he half-seconds as of a push against dead walls, a sense of the dash at them in the dark?—so that they were attested as closely near without the fruit of it, since for one to call people reachable they had really to be penetrable. He said things—that is he was a little afterwards sure he must have said them, laughing, interrupting, deprecating, though he hoped not too literally—for he wouldn't as yet have it that he didn't on the whole and at the pinch carry almost any trouble off and see at the given moment more in the given matter than the others did. He was seeing even now surely more than Sir Cantopher was—which in fact however was exactly his complication, face to face as it placed him of a truth with his need to betray that he saw only what would save him; the idea of things that would lose him thus making its discriminations.

If he stood up, at any rate, the most pressing of his four patrons not only did that but struck him through it all as fairly spinning round with excess of balance—so at least poor Ralph felt on hearing it expressed as relevant that there was his handsome mistress, the finest young woman in England, for such were Sir Cantopher's terms, in whom, despite her thousand charms, no spark of the noble interest they referred to could possibly be kindled. "I don't complain of that," Sir Cantopher promptly added, "for she's a perfectly honest creature, with the very highest spirit and no shade of affectation, and in fact so rare a piece in herself that who can ask for more? You don't of course, sir, and I don't advise you to!"—Sir Cantopher's jerk of these last words was on an especially high note; "but there is a person in the family, if you don't happen to know it, from whom you may expect anything in life on the ground of taste; so long, of course I mean, as you don't propose yourself—as a mere brother-in-law to be—for the object of it. She has the most perfect understanding in the world," the speaker lucidly pursued, "in addition to being formed otherwise very sufficiently to please, and I'm such a fancier of every mode of the exquisite that I should delight in finding her young mind open to me if she didn't insist on keeping it perfectly closed. This is to show Mr. Pendrel"—he now addressed himself to Mrs. Midmore—"that I speak without prejudice, that I'm the most patient creature in the world, that I know when I'm beaten, and that I'm hoping for better luck!"

"Luck with sweet Nan is what I'm to understand?" Ralph had broken out, at the touch of this spring, before he could think twice, and very much in fact as if at last fairly dizzied by a succession of perspectives.

It seemed to add an instant's brightness to Sir Cantopher's hard little eyes, but Mrs. Midmore forestalled him. "Our cousin likes to name her so, though he complains of never having heard of her. You're making that up!" she said rather grandly to Ralph.

"Oh I seem to know all about her now," he more easily laughed, "and many of your names do strike me as differing from ours and as having a kind of charm." He was determined indeed to be easy at any cost. "I'm ever so taken with Sir Cantopher's—we've nothing at home like that," he instanced with a smile that covered the liberty taken, if liberty it should appear.

"Do you find it so much better than your own?" Molly inquired on this, in her outright way and as with a hint at impatience of many things.

"Ah, my dear, if mine's to be good enough for you I'm quite content with it—and it's indeed better than a great many we have. But I like Sir Cantopher more than I can perhaps make you understand"—our young man but desired to explain. It had at once, however, the effect of so moving to a queer small stridency of mirth the personage indicated, that a further remark was required. "I mean of course that we've no such honours, for the fine sound, and what shall I call it but the matching of the parts, of 'em?"

Whenever he explained—this perception grew—he produced a particular attention, the attention to which even Molly's impatiences yielded, and which had been most marked in the cold hush, consequent to all appearance on too much precipitation, vaguely scaring him just before his fellow-guest's arrival. It was the way indeed in which this fellow-guest now fixed him that made him grasp for an instant, as a sort of ban upon scares, the idea either of explaining a great deal more or of not explaining a mite. Yes, there was an extraordinary moment during which the four of them, Sir Cantopher included, affected him really as hanging on his choice—watching, that is, to see which course he would take. It was as if he did precipitate wonders, at a given juncture, just by some shade of a tone, a mere semiquaver, perhaps lighted too with a flicker of facial earnestness—though there was something all the while that he clearly couldn't help. It might, it must, have been the sense itself of spreading his wings, which would catch him up this way again and again, and which, when it came to that, he wouldn't have checked if he could, for how otherwise was he to surmount?—to surmount and surmount being exactly his affair, and success in it his inspiration, together with the fine truth that if the choice had to be between their puzzlement and his he'd be blest if he wouldn't risk theirs, since this there would doubtless after all be ways of surmounting, whereas he felt that mightn't be at all the case for his own. It had been repeated for him that each time he didn't flounder made somehow, almost immediately after, for the greater felicity of another time, and thus not to flounder at the actual point he was dealing with would be best assured by his right selection of the alternative they seemed so to wait for him to take.

He had taken it within ten seconds, had chosen: not again, no, not again would he explain the least mite; and they might make what they could of that—they would make more of it at the worst than they surely would make of its opposite. He kept up his gaiety for Sir Cantopher, hard as his innocence sought to temper it; which was what had just all but happened in his ridiculous identification of his sister-in-law to be. He mustn't use ridiculous terms—for now he could see that the name of his designation of her was so tainted, and what a trap had virtually been set him by Mr. Perry there, prodigiously instinctive Mr. Perry, who withal gave him the impression of a straighter and easier relation with Sir Cantopher than that enjoyed by the ladies of his house. This might have been but because they were ladies, any woman's relation with almost any man proceeding, it was needless to reflect, by curves and crooks and hooks much more than by ruled line. Ralph, however that might be, felt himself face Sir Cantopher as with an accepted exposure to such penalties as would attach to leading him a bit of a dance by some turn that should possibly affect him as violent. Yes, he risked so affecting him, so far as the withholding of conciliatory graces of thought, those he had been scattering too many of, represented a danger. It would do most toward leaving him blankish, and being so left was probably always the accident with which Sir Cantopher had least to reckon. Ralph moreover wouldn't have been able to say, reducing it to that finest point, that if such a condition on the part of the patron of the Midmores might amount to a rather arid complication it would be after all the complication he should most mind. He was minding, that is he was averting, another much more than this in taking up what Sir Cantopher had been saying about his affianced bride. He did so under the conviction that leaving that personage to make the best of things would prove a less danger than leaving it to Molly—who, for that matter, waited upon his dealing with his difficulties, since as difficulties he so oddly chose to feel them, in a manner that almost put words into his mouth.

"I haven't the least idea where this young lady may be deficient for other people—I can only feel that I haven't a single flaw to pick either in her beauty, her mind, or her manners." Not only so much as that Ralph rejoiced to hear himself say, liking the sound of it still more, as ever, the moment he had uttered it, but he knew at once also how long he could have kept it up if he hadn't presently been stopped. "As far as ever she'll go in any sense I'll go with her all the way, and wherever she stops or wanders off I shall like her reasons for it, because they'll be hers—let alone that I'll wander with her too, believing that whatever turn we take together can only be for our happiness." The further words were perhaps a bit sententious, spoken that way before the others, but not enough, certainly not enough, could he publicly commit himself, with the effect of it again and still again that fresh and strange one of the motive, with all its rich force, constituted so much more after the fact than before it. He knew moreover, knew by something now as much represented in her face as if it had been a face painted on canvas just to express it, that he was acting as directly upon his mistress as if no word of it concerned their companions. That was his boon, to whatever result he did it, for he measured at this moment that he couldn't again have borne her having lost touch of him. It was indeed now as if he had read the words from her lips before she spoke them.

"I do like so waiting for what you say to such clever people—and then," she added with the greatest gravity, "not being in the least disappointed."

"My dear, my dear, how can a man as much in love as I am be disappointing?—I mean," Ralph laughed, "to the loved object herself?"

"I don't know. I'm sure, sir," Molly returned with a sort of solemnity, almost a sort of anxiety, that made her handsomer than any look she had yet worn. "If there were a way you'd be wise enough to find it; because, so far from my believing possible that you can fall short anywhere, as you have had to listen to so much about my doing, I see that the cleverness even of the most famous people will always find you ready, and don't care with whom it may ever be that I pass for a fool if I have wit enough for you as between ourselves. I like you as you are, sir. I like you as you are," Molly Midmore repeated.

"Now do you see sir, how fortune insists and insists on smiling on me?" Ralph asked of Sir Cantopher after he had done the most radiant justice to this declaration.

"I shall believe in you whatever you do—whatever, whatever!" the girl went on, her head very high, before their friend, whose curious hard connoisseurship had never strayed from Ralph's face, could reply to this appeal. And then it was that for the first time she rested her eyes on Sir Cantopher, whose own, however, they failed to divert. "You find out things about people, sir—though I really think them for the most part things for which one needn't mind your outcry. If I were to commit a crime, no matter what villainy, you wouldn't be the wiser, but you'd feel it at once in every bone, even if you were fifty miles away, should I knock over the dark blue jar that you gave my mother once upon a time and that's the pride of the breakfast-parlour at Drydown."

"And pray, Miss, wouldn't you call that a villainy?" Sir Cantopher said without taking other notice. "When I next go to Drydown," he continued to Ralph, "I shall count on finding it smashed——!"

"Oh sir, not if I interpose to save it!" Ralph again laughed, though keeping his eyes on the girl with a satisfaction that candidly grew. It was a queer necessity perhaps, this of his holding fast with one hand to a relation that he playfully ruffled with the other, even if not at all queerer, no doubt, than Sir Cantopher's own appearance of not being able to afford for an instant to remit his observation of our friend. It was at a triumph of the interesting that Ralph at this time thus assisted, and not a bit the less that the interest was imputed to himself. Was it in danger of disappearing if the sharpest of the pairs of eyes were for an instant removed from him? Ralph asked himself this with an odd recognition, it must be confessed, that what kept him up to expectation, if indeed it mightn't be what perhaps pretended to find him below it, really did, as an applied force, keep him up. "The worst you shall ever find out about Molly (though it's no more indeed than what she herself says) is that the blue pot at Drydown will stand as steady as I keep my balance here, for all your so watching me as if I were on the tight-rope; and, so far as she or I at least are concerned, will rule the scene there from the, from the—wherever the place is: wait a minute, wait!" He checked himself suddenly to plead for that indication, and yet too that they should let it come to him of itself; taking them all in now as if it glimmered and snapping with a fine impatience his thumb and his middle finger. "Don't tell me, don't tell me; I really all but see the thing and the very place: yes, a pot of about the size of—well, of that one there: only of a darker and richer blue. Bleu du Roy, don't you call it? and with something or other on the cabinet or wherever, the place where it 'lives', as we say, rather branching out on either side of it."

Ralph had been again caught up, as he had learnt to figure it: there had been nothing like it but his production, out of the breast-pocket of his coat, under Molly's inspiration, of that miniature portrait of herself which he hadn't then a minute before been so much as aware of his carrying about him and which had yet on his exhibition of it served all the purpose. How long ago had this been? He couldn't have said, such waves of experience had coursed through him since; but his present growth of confidence, recalling that other, seemed to be serving the purpose too, with a quick appeal to Mrs. Midmore, and a very impatient withal, determined by it on Sir Cantopher's part. "Have you really left that perfect piece with those clumsy candlesticks——?"

Ralph couldn't for a few instants have said what had happened: the effect was of his having by a word or two shaken his position, and that of his companions with it, quite as by seizing it in two strong hands and feeling it momentarily sway there. Mrs. Midmore, so far from replying to Sir Cantopher's challenge, just expressed that very sense—expressed it in a "What in the world is the matter with you, cousin?" which would doubtless have recalled to him that he positively glared with vision had the glare not, within the few seconds, caught a still bigger reflection from Perry. He was taken up for the instant with seeing, seeing what was half across the world, his world of these intense moments, at Drydown; and Perry, on whom in their searching way his eyes had thus lighted, seemed at that moment to be telling him things beyond belief. It wasn't even Molly now, still less was it Mrs. Midmore, so sharply spoken to and, in her indifference to it, with wonder only for him; it wasn't the prodigy of his right guess, so right, yes, clearly so right, about the posture of the prize at Drydown, attested thus by Sir Cantopher's recognition: it was the very horror in poor Perry's countenance, which conversed ever so straitly, as who should say, with the amused growth of confidence in his own and which once more lighted matters up for him while they were unexplained. Blest if he wasn't, therefore, before he knew it, in spite of lessons already learnt, mounted on the back of explanation—even though that winged horse whirled round as if to throw him; which it wouldn't do, however, so long as he held on to Perry's attention. Other things reached him but through his sense of that, above all Molly's comment on the question of how the blue pot was neighboured, guarded or whatever; this uttered, he knew, but without his caring, immediately after her mother's remark on his manner. He in fact scarce cared when his mistress pursued, as if it would account for almost anything:

"Most certainly she can't be accused of not heeding how things look: the place, when she's there, is at her mercy—she can keep her hands off nothing and spends her time in moving articles about to see how they look in other places. If Sir Cantopher means that I wouldn't touch a thing for the world I plead as guilty as he likes," the girl wound up while Ralph simply let the information float and fade—he had of a sudden got so beyond it.

Yes, launched on his demonstration he saw and saw—since it was his extraordinary communion with the affrighted Perry that helped him. Wasn't he seeing something that Perry himself had seen, or learning at least something that Perry knew, just by this compulsion of feeding, as it were, on his young kinsman's terror—for it had frankly to be taken for nothing less—and drawing to himself the sense of it? "Sweet Nan, poor sweet Nan!" he next found himself exclaiming, for what had happened was that he had with the strangest celerity read a particular knowledge into Perry's expression, and read into it as well the consciousness that he was giving it up, though to one's self only, not to the others, and that nothing so strange had in all his life befallen the hapless youth as to feel thus under the pressure of such an intelligence, which did definitely at last show the man betraying it for different, quite dreadfully different, from other men. Perry knew, unmistakeably, something intensely relevant to what they had been speaking of, and had known it all along, had had it in the place with him there from the moment, whenever that had been, of his first coming in; and now what was our friend not capable of, as a climax for this certainty, but just the final twist of appropriation which gave him use of the truth? Something had happened at Drydown between the head of the house and his younger sister, something of the day before, or of the day before that, which he would have made no great matter of hadn't the thought going on before him, to his scant participation, pulled it into view, into Ralph's, that is, as Ralph mutely showed him—but as Ralph also now at once next gave him reassurance for. Yes, yes again, there was something to save the girl at Drydown from, and he himself, with the flagrancy of his happy guess at the usual position there of Sir Cantopher's grand gift, had just grazed the treachery of publishing it. To have apprehended the accident, to have caught Perry catching him aware of it, like that, from one moment to the other, was by the same stroke to feel himself close his bodily eyes to it, ever so tight, and with more intention, for the three seconds, than in any act of all his life; this too in the midst of their mutual glare and, by what he could tell, after Sir Cantopher's attention, as well as that of the two women, was back upon the queer proceeding, which Molly's indeed had not quitted.

The duration of the exchange was assuredly to have been measured but in seconds, though in no such number of them had so much happened up to now, by Ralph's private measure, which indeed had considerably grown; only he couldn't not keep looking at Perry—wish as he might to explain, to go on explaining, for the benefit of the others, whose three pair of eyes treated him with anxiety, with admiration, or to the effect again of the sinister estrangement, whichever of these things it might be. The great reality was that his words, as they came, had to mean most to Perry, and could only come thus also by the help of his horror. That horror, by the end of a couple of moments, was what he was afraid of for the others still more than of his own queer visionary pull-up, his invitation to them to see him in presence of the Drydown sideboard, or whatever the ambiguous object, and then see him, in the very act, both turn his back upon it and try to scatter gold-dust round his revulsion.

"I'm not a prophet or a soothsayer, and still less a charlatan, and don't pretend to the gift of second sight—I only confess to have cultivated my imagination, as one has to in a country where there is nothing to take that trouble off one's hands. Therefore perhaps it is that things glimmer upon me at moments from a distance, so that I find myself in the act of catching them, but am liable to lose them again, and to feel nervous, as if I had made a fool of myself, when an honest man like my cousin Perry looks at me as if he thought me a little mad. I'm not mad, cousin Perry—I'm only a mite bewildered by the way I seem to affect you, since it might be catching for your mother and Molly and Sir Cantopher if I didn't convince you that I don't on the whole confess myself anything worse than rather a free talker."

"I like your free talk—I like it, I like it!" Molly broke in at this. "I wouldn't have it a bit different, though we have certainly never heard anything like it in all our lives. I'm not afraid of you now," the girl continued, "or else I'm no more so than I want to be—for I think I told you a while ago that I should miss your not sometimes putting me in fear. If you're doing that now—and I see you are doing it to Perry, whom I declare I'm sorry for!—I'm enjoying it still more than I could have hoped, and wishing I could only have some of my friends about me to see my pride, which means perhaps to see what they would make of you for a grand match. You'll understand that I'm in the greatest possible hurry to show you off," Miss Midmore wound up.

"Ah but I don't engage to perform by appointment," Ralph laughed—"at least in the sense of making our friends uneasy."

He rejoiced in Molly's reassurances, even if he couldn't yet let go of Perry either to acknowledge them properly or to be clear again as to the particular shade now of Sir Cantopher's curiosity. He somehow felt Sir Cantopher suspended, almost dangling in air, but ready to alight on one or the other side of a line that Ralph had himself the sense of actually tracing. As for Mrs. Midmore, it was as if she had just sunk down somehow or somewhere, looking very handsome on every contingency, but vague, certainly vague at present, and positively rather white. These things he took in while still resolute that he couldn't drop Perry till Perry had turned to safety for him or otherwise than by mere limpness. There was always the obvious chance that almost any far range of wit, which he never could have beheld such a stretch of as just now, would stir him to something of the same suspicion as a case of proved dementia. Moreover the young man was during these instants really plastic: he didn't want to back away—he but wanted again (and it recalled what he had seemed to want just after their making acquaintance) to have a perch held out to him across the fall-away of familiar ground, long enough to be grasped without his moving. "I do guess I figure rightly the features of Drydown," Ralph said, "and seem to see them, in perfect order, absolutely perfect order, thanks to you, sir, and the earnest young lady there, await my paying them a visit—which, however, you're to understand I shall only pay in your company, as master of the house and my proper first, introducer."

Molly had been herself launched by her speech of a moment before and her voice, as she did renewed justice to the pitch of her preference, fairly betrayed to Ralph's ear how finely she was agitated. "If you mean that to signify that you'd like to start for the country at once on a visit to my sister, I give you leave with all my heart to wait upon her there until you're tired of her. Because, you see, if I grant that you torment me by pretending you're already, after so little of me, tired of myself (of which, however, I don't believe a word!) the least I could do would be to torment you in return by the air of indifference under outrage. Of course, really, we're neither of us pretending, and you've more for all of us to be pleased with than we as yet understand. In that confidence of my own I think I should wait for you to come back to me from even further away than the breakfast-parlour at Drydown. You're to understand, please, that nothing you can do—so far as I rightly conceive what a gentleman may!—will break my confidence down."

"It's a poor reply to those beautiful things, isn't it, Perry? to say, if I haven't by now convinced her, that I'm not a gadabout, and that if your friends are so good as to want to see me it's they who have only to wait upon me here—it's a poor reply," Ralph went on, "but it must serve till I have it from yourself that you take me for accommodating and believe that I shall make you like me if you'll only help me a little to do it. Haven't I already as good as said to you that I'll do for you anything in life that you may be kind enough to mention, from the moment it's the least in my power? There it is, and I think you do already see that I absolutely want but to oblige you"—with which Ralph hung fire an instant as to drive it in by his very pleasantest intelligence, and then went on—"am in fact obliging you, have supremely obliged you. Good, good—and steady, steady:" he took it up in triumph, turning with it now to the others and inwardly sustained in his free attitude of inviting them to witness something that he didn't much care at that moment whether they understood or not, so long as he overrode them by a blinding assumption. It would be extraordinary to blind Sir Cantopher, but under that inward pressure he was ready to risk almost anything for it, as he had risked everything successfully, hadn't he? for the bedazement, the renewed conquest, or whatever he might call it, of Molly, of his action on whose nerves and senses and own pride of conquest he felt with each instant more certain. He smiled at them all again, carrying it off, carrying them on, and still but wanting Perry to take in that he impressed them. Molly in fact left her brother in as little doubt of that as if she had understood more than was supposable of the remarkable exchange, just concluded on his part, with their kinsman.

"You see we've never known any great wit, or any brilliant person at all except Sir Cantopher—and my brother, like the rest of us, has got used to him. Give him time, give my mother time, give even our friend here time," the girl pursued with a courage that was a match for his own—"though I ask you for no more myself: I don't know whether you've made me blind or made me see as never before, but what I really want is that you shall take me so for granted, in spite of all your odd ways, not one of which I'd now nevertheless have you fail of, that if I'm noticed at all when we begin to go out together, as we presently shall, I shall be noticed no more than your shadow and just according as you happen to cast it!"

This assuredly corresponded for Ralph to his own actual spirit of play, and even went beyond it for the great air it gave her, something akin to which he was hoping he had himself put forth. He met it to extravagance, wanting to know if he hadn't taken her for granted with the very first stir of his response from the other side of the world, protesting he'd go out with her on the spot and cast his shadow in any light she should choose; which was at once reflected on, however, in the most anxious admonition that Mrs. Midmore had uttered.

"We'll have our friends here first, please, and it will be your mother. Miss, and not you, who will make our cousin and your relation to him known."

She had gathered herself up for this, though it was visible again to Ralph that if she uttered the proviso for Molly's control, not less than in a high degree for his own, she yet appeared to press it, restlessly and appealingly, upon her son and her other guest, who nevertheless, engaged for the time in considerations of their own, gave it no particular heed. Ralph, at sight and in suspicion of a certain effect produced in her which was the very opposite of what he intended—for this evasion of his aspect didn't come, did it? to his overriding her—blinked for an instant at a splendid impulse, and then fairly lost sight of its splendour in the straightest, friendliest, homeliest application of it; moving from his place straight across to her, laying a hand on each of her shoulders and, with the bravest, kindest face in the world, making as if she should look at him in spite of herself. He had entertained, during these extraordinary hours that he had been in the room (few or many, he couldn't have said which,) a hundred wondrous sentiments, but hadn't yet, to the clearest of his consciousness, been sorry for anyone—which was what he desired under that special stress to testify to his being for this great and distressed, though nobly resisting and now of a sudden coldly submissive lady. Was he going to be sorry for people on any such scale as this accepted prompting portended?—so he dimly wondered, as if it were the last thing that had been in the bargain, even while Mrs. Midmore closed her eyes under his touch and left him fairly to appeal to the others, to her son, to her daughter, to Sir Cantopher himself, whose lids indeed were not noticeably much less narrowed than those of their hostess, for attestation that he meant the very most charming things. If he only hadn't once more, all the same, to wince the while with awareness of that overdone grimace of his own!—he had effectively enough shaken it off some time previous, but his relative's pale rigour, while his action lasted, threatened to set it up afresh! Nothing, however, could have exceeded the respectful form of the freedom he now used. He had kissed her on either cheek, under encouragement offered, on first seeing her, and he at present repeated the homage in conditions that might well have suggested to him that ever so much time, days or weeks instead of mere mixed moments, had elapsed between the two transactions.

"I desire so to conform to your every wish and to renew every assurance. I get every now and then the impression that I'm not quite so much with you, or you not quite so much with me, as you would like me to be, and as I certainly should like to—and then I wonder what's really the matter. Nothing surely is the matter, with our perfect understanding—unless it be that I worry you somehow just from ignorance. Yes, I'm clever"—Ralph kept it up—"but I'm not so sure I'm wise; at the same time that I am sure I shall be able to learn not to trouble you if you'll only name to me always at the moment just how I'm doing it."

Marked withal was her oddity of not really meeting his face; he was close to her, he had folded his hands as in supplication the most suggestive, but she looked straight down at his feet. "I wouldn't for the world, sir, take you up on anything. I like too much to listen to you, and you've only too many grand fancies. The great thing is that you like us—for if you like us you won't hurt us." She had a pause, but while he still waited she did at last look up at him. "There," she exhaled; "there!"—and she showed him, clearly wishing to do it, that she could smile a bit convulsively, and with the most excruciating dimness, as well as he; holding up her head, drawing in her lips, meeting his eyes and after an instant letting him see, as he thought, something in them like the strange long look, the questioning fear, that he had just been dealing with in her son. He hadn't hitherto caught in her face any such hint of resemblance, but here she was fairly overcoming something, even something akin to what he knew, or what he at least hoped, that he had just made Perry overcome. There was the pity, his having to think of being sorry; she talked of his "hurting", or rather of his not hurting them, and he'd be hanged if he'd hurt them in whatever disconcertment—he'd himself suffer in any way first; which he was on the point of making, gaily and familiarly, his answer, when it struck him that this would be openly to take account of danger, the idea he sought most to repudiate. So he uttered his cheer, which indeed truly, from the tone of it, might have been his compassion, in another form.