Just these high considerations were in all probability the influence most active in his attitude toward the only approach to an adverse interest with which he was to perceive himself confronted. It had been at their first interview made known to him by his kinsman's main representative that the house stood, for the time, subject to a short lease—a lease for the "season" given by its late proprietor, apparently in one of his rare fits of response to the economic motive, the previous year; which arrangement constituted in fact but the renewal of an understanding arrived at, on more than one other occasion, in the same conditions. The tenant bequeathed by Mr. Pendrel to his successor had in other words already three times enjoyed the tenancy, and though it was not impossible the agreement might be amicably rescinded it was for this successor to judge whether he preferred to sacrifice so substantial a gain. The gain, Ralph understood, was of a round weekly sum, as to the weight of which in the scale he reserved his decision. He had a general wish not to begin by a failure to oblige, as well, positively quite at first, as an imperfect, almost a deprecatory, sense of possession. It pulled him up a little on the other hand, after he had seen the place, to think of prior possession, so far as he was concerned, insisted on and enjoyed by a parcel of people whose very name was new to him. Mrs. Midmore of Drydown in Hampshire embodied the claim with which he had to reckon, but he knew little of Mrs. Midmore, save that she had, with her address, as his firm of friends called it, rather an old-time imaging sound. It was judiciously remarked by the firm that she was of a family with which Mr. Pendrel's relations appeared, so far as they were traceable, to have been close; and moreover that some such tradition was needed to account for his departure from a custom of indifference to the pecuniary argument so patent in other connections. Except in these instances the house had practically never been let—within, as might be said, the modern era. It might be even now, as was hinted to Ralph, offered at a much higher figure than the rental subscribed to by Mrs. Midmore. This last little fact it really was that had in its perverse operation most weight with our young man. Full of scruples and refinements and of the clash of cross-lights in which he saw things, he knew the arrangement would have troubled him more had a handsomer bargain been made for him. If he accepted at all the necessity of trafficking in his treasure it was a salve to discomfort that the traffic was poor.
By the time he solemnly entered it had been further mentioned to him that the lady's appreciation of the place—unless its appeal were more especially to her son, or to one or other, if not both, of her two daughters—had been noted as almost extravagant. Signs in short had not been wanting of the length to which such an attachment could go. Poor Ralph at the end of an hour indeed would have understood any length; but it was under this impression precisely that he fell into a train of delays. The immediate effect of his first visit had been the wish to "move in" that afternoon; the next had been a gathering doubt as to whether he had better do so at all. The inner scene spoke to him with a hundred voices, yet not one of these phrased to him quite happily the terms of the single life there. The strangest part of this moreover was that his hesitation—which fairly partook of the nature of a sort of sacred terror—rested not in the least on any vision of what was wanting, but wholly on the consciousness, almost as strong as a shock, of what was impressively, what was tremendously, involved. He tried to put it to himself simply, yet was not sure he put it sincerely, in pronouncing it impossible he should fill out so many rooms. He apprehended at bottom what might be going to happen—his making up his mind on some uncandid basis that temporary lodgings elsewhere were his indicated course. The want of candour would lie in the plea of absurdity—the absurdity of his organising, with so much else to do, such an establishment as would consort with such a setting. It would be swagger, it would be vulgar precipitate eagerness, he on the one side reasoned, to waste time in the pretence of really "running" such a place; and there would be on the other a distinct offence in attempting to inhabit it meanly. He should have time enough to ask himself what would have been his benefactor's idea. The idea would come to him in some way of its own: evidently it had been thrown out in the offered facts themselves; they held it there in reserve and in subtle solution. On its appearing he should know it, and he mustn't before that make a mistake.
This was meanwhile in the interest of all the things for which in his queer position he wanted a free hand. His queer position was that, as he privately panted, everything had dropped on him at once. He saw the face of Aurora Coyne whenever he winced with one of those livelier throbs of the sense of "Europe" which had begun to consume him even before his ship sighted land. He had sniffed the elder world from afar very much as Columbus had caught on his immortal approach the spices of the Western Isles. His consciousness was deep and confused, but "Europe" was for the time and for convenience the sign easiest to know it by. It hovered before him, this sign, in places as to which signs were mainly of another sort; on his dusty Liverpool dock, in his rattling train to Euston, when he called, betimes, on the Clifford Street tailor recommended to him, when he helped himself at his "private hotel" from the inveterate muffin-plate that protected at breakfast the tepidity of his slop-bowl, and when he swayed, aloft, with the movement of the bus that brought him back through historic ways from his prime pilgrimage to the City. It scarce took even the bus to make him sway; he was at the mercy, wherever he found himself and to whatever he clung, of such incalculable gusts. This was what he meant by his almost scared consciousness of the simultaneous and the many. He had first of all his base arrears to make up, after which he could settle with his special relation. He gasped on reminding himself as his tenth day dawned that the glimpse accompanied for him with so much ado was yet but a small millionth of the whole. The whole waited, for didn't there hang behind this troublous foreground the vast vagueness which the English themselves spoke of as "abroad"? Ah he was in all conscience already abroad enough!
It was on the morning of this tenth day that he definitely promised his friends in the City the expression on the morrow of his final view of Mrs. Midmore. He had hung the night before, again postponing re-entrance, in front of the habitation contingently reserved for her, and he had now returned westward with a certain gathered and penitent sharpness on the subject of action. Action would be to drive straight to Mansfield Square, indulge himself with another impression, let this impression settle the case and then wire to the City the result of it. It so befell none the less that he repaired again—and as if mechanically and in the beguiling intensity of this conclusion—to his lodgings, where, instead of taking, after a glance at some letters that had come in, a prompt fresh start, he dropped into a chair and drew it a foot or two nearer the fire that a particularly English April seemed huskily to have prescribed. The day was dark and damp, and it had suddenly occurred to him that not once yet, since the hour, at home, of his sombre station in the Park, had he so much as stopped to think. He had in very fact, as we make out, not stopped thinking, for what had it been but thought that drove him on and kept him going?—the thought of all the use he should have for the abounding fruits of a larger perception, the thought of the really wonderful book, as it would be this time, that he foresaw himself writing. That was as far as he had got with the book, of which the plan still remained sketchy; he prefigured it mainly as a volume that should "count"—which meant for him to be noticed by the half-dozen persons who themselves counted and who would more or less understand. He had already, and even repeatedly, asked himself when he should be able so to detach himself as to think at all straight about his book; detachment and selection, prime aids of the artist, were the sacred sparenesses menaced by a rank growth of material. It was perhaps the better to think that he now put back his head and closed his eyes; he at any rate considered to such purpose that he never moved for two hours. The first conception his mind had registered was that he was brutally tired. When he woke the day was darker, and on shaking himself for a look from his window he was met by a state of rain. Wet, muddy, ugly, the spring afternoon offered nothing of its own and seemed to mark a general break of the spells it had hitherto helped to work. Number Nine, from beyond its interposing spread of splashy crossings, faced him for the first time without its high authority. But this note of the hour soon determined him only the more: if he had in fact let too fresh a fancy run away with him it positively concerned his self-respect that the extravagance should cease. There was a question in a word to clear up—a question sufficiently identical, moreover, with the other and immediate one, the one he must no longer leave open. He signed from where he stood to a passing hansom, and in a few minutes was rolling, with the glass down, toward Mansfield Square. It was an occasion at last on which he could lift with assurance the knocker he hadn't once even yet taken a proprietor's full liberty with—an engine huge, heavy, ancient, brazen, polished, essentially defiant of any trifling, but now resoundingly applied.
It was the merit of the good couple in charge that they at least let him alone, and he had at present more than ever a sense, not unembroidered by fond prejudice, of the figure he made for them, of which it harmlessly amused him to think. It agreed with he knew not what interior ancientry and was truly but part of the deep picture that had already drawn him into a bottomless abyss of "tone" whenever the high door closed behind him and he stood with his sharp special thrill in the wide white hall, which he had from the first noted with rapture as paved in alternate squares of white marble and black, each so old that the white was worn nearly to yellow and the black nearly to blue. He had never for an instant doubted of the virtue, the value he would have called it in his esoteric sense, of this particular spot; which had originally given him, on the instant, under his first flush, the measure of a possible experience. He had said to himself crudely and artlessly "It's Jacobean"—which it wasn't, even though he had thought but of the later James. The intensity of the inference and the charm of the mistake had marked withal his good faith; the memory of which was to remind him later on of how everything still to come was then latent in that plot of space, and of how everything thathad, was accorded and attested by it. The door to-day had but once more to close with the slight heaviness that inevitably defeated discretion and the overpaid and dismissed hansom to be heard for a minute get again into empty motion on the other side of it, for Ralph to feel at ease about the lapsed influence he had come to start up. The influence was on this occasion not only all there—it was really there as it had been on no other. His friends in charge, effacing themselves and leaving him to roam, appeared literally to have provided the particular hush into which it would best step forth, and he liked to figure them as types of ancient servitude, quaint and knowing their place, properly awestruck by the outland gentleman who had suddenly become the providence of their compact round world. It was a world clearly that they desired to remain shut up in, and a happy instinct had admonished them that they best appeased fortune by holding their breath. They could scarce have done better had they known of spells and superstitions and been possessed with a recipe for causing them to flourish. They even stayed downstairs too consistently to give their new patron his chance of expressing to them how honestly he judged them to keep his house.
That was what struck him afresh after he had mounted the large old stair and begun to pass from room to room: there was something in his impression so indefinably prepared by other hands that acknowledgment surely ought somehow and somewhere to be made. It all came back of course soon enough to thanking Mr. Pendrel, and this in truth Ralph sufficiently did by his mere attitude from point to point. That was the question on the whole as to which he was easiest; wherever he paused to draw a long breath and again look round he felt his gratitude carry and his appreciation in a singular degree picked up and noted. Not yet for that matter had it so affected him this evening as returning richly upon himself. The cold rain was on his window-pane, and it damped the great London hum. These squares of old glass were small and many and the frames that enclosed them thick; the appropriate recess, of which no window failed, was deep, and Ralph could as he looked out rest a knee on the flat cushion, all flowered and faded, that covered the solid bench. He looked out only to look in again under the charm of isolation and enclosure, of being separated from the splashed Square and its blurred and distant life much more by time than by space; under the charm above all of the queer incomparable London light—unless one frankly loved it rather as London shade—which he had repeatedly noted as so strange as to be at its finest sinister, and which just now scattered as never before its air over what surrounded him. However else this air might have been described it was signally not the light of freshness and suggested as little as possible the element in which the first children of nature might have begun to take notice. Ages, generations, inventions, corruptions had produced it, and it seemed, wherever it rested, to have filtered through the bed of history. It made the objects about show for the time as in something "turned on"—something highly successful that he might have seen at the theatre. What was one to call the confounding impression but that of some stamp, some deposit again laid bare, of a conscious past, recognising no less than recognised?
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 Parishôtel.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—thatold-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 whattheythought 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 indescribablylived, 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 andleft, 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.
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.Hiscase 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 yethadfor 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 hehadcome—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'tknowat 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 howhaveyou 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, youwillmake 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 tome.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 Iwilltell 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 Idon'tthink. 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—"heis."
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, "wewere." 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 hewas!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 wasthat.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 reallylikesuch 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 Iwas!" Ralph pulled up a moment to smile—"for myself; and interesting most of all, I suppose, because so extraordinarily interested."
"Interested inyou?" 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, Iamthe Future. The Future, that is, forhim; which means the Present, don't you see——?"
"The Present, I see, forme!" 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 contemporariesarehis 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. Youarethe 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 havemergedpersonalities, 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 Pastcan'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 Ambassadorcouldrecognise 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 whereheis 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 hasnot, 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, "fancythemthe 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.Ican'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.