There thus breathed on our young man a momentary chill—which, however, didn't prevent the Ambassador's seating himself without further delay, nor his own perhaps slightly more contracted occupation of the second seat, nor their presently effective, their in fact rather confessedly contemplative, start for Mansfield Square. It was to appear to Ralph later on, at any rate, that they had at this stage been reduced to unembarrassed contemplation; which is perhaps indeed but a proof that while he gazed out of the cab window during this extraordinary progress what he looked at so fixedly as to take note of no interval of speech was neither the exhibition of successive streets, with their aspects and their varieties of identity, but the portentous truth of his being launched, since, so conclusively, his counterpart in the circumstance was, and of his fate's having thereby shut down on any backward step. Not that he wanted to take one, not that he wanted to take one——he kept repeating that as the vehicle rolled; to be as "in" for whatever awaited him as he now felt, as he now absolutely knew, himself, was a strong simplification—with which wasn't it positively a blest one too? which question had not been answered in the negative, at any rate, even by the time they pulled up at the address he had given. This was what had taken place during their transit, he afterwards knew; the minutes had been so wholly given, in their course, to his inwardly sealing the charter of accommodation, as he would have called it, to whatever might now confront him that after he had got out, on the stoppage of the cab, he addressed to his companion a "Will you keep it on?" which left things taken for granted between them without a scrap of a loose end dangling.Heat least suffered none such, though there might have been just the sign of a difference in his good friend's face while the latter stepped straight out by way of answer. "Oh my dear man, I'll walk," he seemed to be saying; "I don't in the least mind your knowing that you've given me the fidgets or that I shall extremely need to think you over: which indulgence the use of my legs will healthily stimulate."
Something of that sort Ralph was much later on, as I say, to recover the appearance of his having found words for; just as he was to piece together the presumption that, the cabman paid, magnificently paid, and getting again into motion, he and his protector—for hadn't they after all rather exquisitely agreed to leave it at this?—stood face to face a little, under the prolongation of a handclasp; followed then by the mutual release that left his Excellency standing there on the pavement with the graver face of the two,heat least little doubted. Our young man was after that aware of a position of such eminence on the upper doorstep as made him, his fine rat-tat-tat-ah of the knocker achieved, see the whole world, the waiting, the wondering, the shrunkenly staring representative of his country included, far, far, in fact at last quite abysmally below him. Whether these had been rapid or rather retarded stages he was really never to make out. Everything had come to him through an increasingly thickothermedium; the medium to which the opening door of the house gave at once an extension that was like an extraordinarily strong odour inhaled—an inward and inward warm reach that his bewildered judge would literally have seen swallow him up; though perhaps with the supreme pause of the determined diver about to plunge just marked in him before the closing of the door again placed him on the right side and the whole world as he had known it on the wrong.
He was so far prepared as that, on the footman's saying, after he had asked who was at home, "I think Miss Midmore is, sir," he had not been unduly agitated; though the effect was of making him at the same time wonder if he oughtn't, more decently, to have had his approach heralded in the course of the morning by the bearer of a note. Such questions as these, from the arrival of his ship at Plymouth, had repeatedly come up for him, and he had not lacked leisure, since the evening before, when the west country mail had set him down in Piccadilly amid a great bustle of general recognition, to advise his cousins of his immediate intention to wait on them. The sense had grown within him during the last three days that mistakes of one sort and another would easily be open to a young man just alighted from New York; he had made several already between Devonshire and London, even if without paying for them in heavier coin than a handful of new observations. His observations multiplied at such a rate that fifty to the minute would have been a short account of them; but there was one in particular that had from the first kept repeating itself and that might certainty have done as much to point his address as some of the others had done to remind him of danger. The danger was flagrant and consisted of the number of things to be known and reckoned with in England as compared to the few that had so sufficiently served him at home. He but wanted to know, though he would rather have liked to learn secretly; which for that matter hewasnow, he conceived, catching a little the trick of—and this in spite of his wonted way, from far back, on receipt of a new impression or apprehension of a new fact, and under correction, in particular, of a wrong premise; which was to lose himself quite candidly and flagrantly in the world of meaning so conveyed. That disclosed quantity was apt fairly to make him stand still for wonder—whereby it might well have happened that whosoever took note of him would scarce have known whether to conclude most on his simplicity or on his wit. If it was strange to have had so to wait for familiar appearances—familiar, that is, all round him, seemingly, to everyone but himself—it was perhaps more remarkable yet not to succeed in concealing how much one was on the spot ready to make of them by the working of some inward machinery.
The great reassurance just mentioned at any rate, and which ministered still more to surprise than to confidence, came from his somehow making out that Ralph Pendrel enjoyed an advantage beyond any he missed; had a manner, a look or a tone, some natural brightness, some undesigned but conciliatory art, which perceptibly paved his way and which perhaps, should he incline to presume upon it, might really gain him favour. This inference he had had, and without gross vanity, time to make—though arriving doubtless for the moment at no finer conclusion on it than that his spirits were all the while, beneath however small a bent to swagger or bluster, undiscourageably high, and that youth and good proportions, a clear face, a free hand and a brave errand, all borne on that tide, were capable of casting a spell of a sort that he should find occasion either to measure or to press. It had been odd assuredly to come thus soon to a thought of spells—especially in the midst of a consciousness of blunders; but it possibly reinforced a little even this degree of presumption that the very blunders, which might have been all to his confusion save that various other persons had promptly and obligingly, as it were, taken them over, appeared grandly imputable to the same spring of freshness. He couldn't deny to himself his eagerness—extraordinarily strong and which people made way for, to the extent even of a large margin, as if they liked to see it and to wait for what it might further show. It was an eagerness certainly to enjoy, yet not at any one's cost, any one's in particular; and this might to those dealing with him have seemed rare, or in other words have seemed charming, the sticking out of an impulse not as a pike on a charge but after the fashion of a beggar's hat presented for the receipt of alms. That was the figure, that the case—the pennies had hour after hour veritably rained in; and what but a perfect rattle of them, by that token, accompanied him at the footman's heels upstairs to where it could only be that Molly Midmore awaited—though perhaps but just in a general way—his presenting himself as a suitor for her hand?
He had been touched in the hall and on the staircase as by the faint odd brush of a suggestion that what was before his eyes during certain seconds had already been before them and was playing upon his attention, was quiteseekingto, even though in the lightest, softest tug at it, by the recall of a similar case or similar conditions. Just so when the door above was opened to him and he heard himself announced the first flush of his impression was that of stepping straight into some chapter of some other story—other than his own of that moment, since he was by the evidence of every felt pulse up to his eyes in a situation, which glimmered upon him in the light, the bright strong light, of an aspect recognised; before failing of that effect indeed under his next full rush of perception. Wasn't it a place known, the great square wainscotted room, like several perhaps in which he had seen a sort of life led at home, only fairer and finer than those; with handsome objects and four or five portraits rather largely interspaced, and a daylight freshness in possession, the air at once of an outer clearness, of an emptier world looking in, and of windows unembarrassed to match, multiplied panes, one would say, but withal a prim spare drapery? It wouldn't have been that the world was emptier than he had known it beyond the sea, but that the scene itself, as it appeared for the ten seconds that challenged memory and comparison, would have worn its other face with a difference, confessing somehow to thicker shadows and heavier presences, the submission to a longer assault. Such matter of record, even on the part of a young man of the highest sensibility, is at the best elusive enough, however, and Ralph's general awareness was at once swallowed up in the particular positive certainty that nobody in all his experience in the least answered to the young lady seated near one of the windows before a piece of fine tense canvas framed and mounted on slim wooden legs, through which she was in the act of drawing a long filament of silk with the finest arm in the world raised as high as her head. He himself so far answered to something in her own intelligence that at sight and sound of him she slowly got up from before her work, with never a hint of interruption or confusion, and smiled across at him as if knowing all about him. She kept in this movement her arm still aloft—she might have been just balancing herself or wishing not to loosen her stitch; he was to remember afterwards how the crook of her little finger, in the raised hand, caught his eye at the distance, and how this helped him in a manner at once to take in that the arm itself, its sleeve shortened to very near the shoulder, was of the most beautiful rounded shape. That light of her knowing all about him doubtless helped to flood his own mind with the assurance immediately needed: he felt at this stage, in the most wonderful way, that things came to him, everything a right carriage required for the closer personal relation, in the very nick of being wanted, and wore thus, even under the gasp of a slight danger escaped, a certain charm and cheer of suddenness. That he was to make love, by every propriety, to Molly Midmore, and that he had in fact reached his goal on the very wings of that intention, this foretaste as of something rare had for days and days past hung about him like the scent of a flower persisting in life; but the sweetness of his going straight up to her with an offered embrace hadn't really been disclosed till her recognition, as we have said, breathed upon it with force and filled him at once with an extraordinary wealth of confidence.
He had stepped straight into that with his stepping into the room, and while he stood but long enough to know himself lifted and carried the taking in of what she was through all his senses completed the splendid rightness. Nothing might have been stranger than so repeated a jump, so flying a leap, to firm ground which hadn't been there before in any measurable manner but which his feet just felt beneath them at the crisis of need. Was it going to be enough simply to do the thing, whatever it might be, for it to "come" right, as they said, and for him above all to like it, as who should also say, after the fact? Surprising perhaps that questions of so comparatively general a kind should press with their air of particular business into an active apprehension unconditioned and absolute enough to forestall any conceivable lapse; yet nothing could well be pleasanter than such a quickening, and this even under the possibility that he might after a little get used to it. The young woman there in her capacious corner was admirably, radiantly handsome, and all the while still kept the posture she had at once risen to—kept it as for fear of his loss of the pleasure by her breaking it ever so little. The case was of course really that a mere moment sufficed for these enormities of attestation; the air roundabout them was prodigiously clean and clear, and so favoured happy certitude that by the time he had advanced a trifle further he was, in addition to everything else we have indicated, aware that, modest as she would indubitably prove, she was neither awkward nor shy, and was in fact quite as inspired and inflamed as himself. She came out from behind her frame, to which she had given a light push, and then it was that her splendid fairness, a complexion white and pink, and that her friendly laughing eyes and full parted lips and thickness of loose brown hair, helped the dress of sprigged muslin which kept as clear of her neck as it did of her elbows to tell him about her, from head to foot—and she was more than middling tall—everything that most pressingly concerned him. There played round him before he took her to his arms the glimmer of a comment kindled at some other flame than that of desire, the wonder of her being rather more imaged for him, and ever so typically, than likely to be, whatever fulness of reality awaited them, possessed by him; which pair of contradictions, however, melted together in the tide of happy intelligence that next flooded and seemed verily almost to drown them. That he should thus on the instant have clasped to his heart and his lips a young woman with whom in all his life he had never yet exchanged a word settled the relation for each alike as soon as it had been so nobly and freely sketched; which was again a case of that felt security after the fact already noted by him, as we have seen, and scarce open, of a truth, to more vivid illustration. The security was felt just as much by herself: this made the harmony full, this acted to keep it still quite possible for him that the comparatively superficial commerce, the inquiry and explanation that might have figured as preliminary, should follow at a lower level what had just taken place, and do so without either casting absurdity back on the passage or their themselves incurring ridicule.
"I reached London but last night—so you see I haven't lost much time. Perhaps I should first have asked your mother's leave," Ralph said; but she had already at the word taken him up.
"Oh she would certainly have given it!" And he at once saw from the tone of this that what she referred to as so licensed was the plunge into intimacy just enacted. It put him a trifle out of tune that the most he himself had meant was that he might have inquired of his cousin's convenience as to presenting himself; and to feel his deference to that propriety—or to almost any, it might seem—so swept away reminded him afresh that he couldn't, by every appearance, be too bold, since he plainly created in others, straight off and by his presence, the liveliest dispositions and allowances. If it was true that Mrs. Midmore, as he had figured her, would have smiled upon his silent rush at her daughter from their very threshold, what could this signify but that the house and the whole circle contained a treasure of welcome on which he was infinitely to draw? Well, it was still then in the highest degree agreeable to find everyone so understanding him as to help him to understand himself; no example of which felicity could be greater than such a promise of ease with the lady of Drydown, given the forms of deference he had tried to prepare himself to pay her. "You mustn't speak as if we have been thinking of you in the least as a stranger; for how can that be," Molly asked, "when everything was so made up between us all by your father's writing in that way to mamma so shortly before he died, wasn't it?" Her fine expressive eyes, he at once recognised, were charged with an appeal to him on the ground of this interesting history; and once more, after the merest repeated brush of the wing of that bewilderment by which he was thus effectually admonished and aided to escape, he knew the flood of consciousness within him to raise its level. His father, dear man, had died, his father had written, and even while they looked at each other under allusions so abounding it came and came and came that there had been an estrangement among those of their name on the two sides of the sea, and then, through a fortunate chance, a great healing of the breach, a renewal of good relations as to which his character of acclaimed wooer left no doubt. He was in actual free use of the whole succession of events, and only wanted these pages, page after page, turned for him: much as if he had been seated at the harpsichord and following out a score while the girl beside him stirred the air to his very cheek as she guided him leaf by leaf. She seemed verily after that fashion to hold out to his eyes the solemn scroll of history, on which they rested an instant to such a further effect of danger dissipated that before either she or he knew it they were once more in each other's arms. It was as if this repetition, this prolongation had been potently determined, and for each alike, by her free knowledge of what had gone before—he lagging a little behind, it was true, in the rapid review of reasons, but suddenly confident and quite abreast of her after they had thus irrepressibly and for the second time exchanged their vows. He had for the next thing even the sense of being, and in the gallantest way, beforehand with her when he heard himself strike out as from the push of multiplied forces behind him: there was all the notoriety—for what had it beenbutnotoriety?—of the loyalism of the American Pendrels during the Revolution, in the rigour of which they had emigrated, restoring themselves to England for a ten years' stay and not a little indebted under that stress to the countenance and even the charity of their English kindred. A freshness of interest in this adventure surged through our young man's blood and sought expression, without the least difficulty, in an attitude about it to his young hostess as competent as if he had by some extraordinary turn become able to inform her ignorance.
"My grandfather—yes," he said, "must of course, thirty years ago have been rather a wild sort of character and anything but a credit to us. But he was terribly handsome, you know," Ralph smiled, "and if your great-aunt, while we hung on here, had cause to complain of his fickleness, I think we're all now aware that she fell quite madly in love with him and paid him attentions of an extravagance that he couldn't after all ignore—not in common civility." He liked to go back to that—since it was all indeed, under growing freedom of reference, so much more behind him than before; it was truly brave matter for talk, warming his blood, as we say, while it flowed; and he had at the end of another minute so mastered it that he would have liked to catch her mistaken in order to put her right. Her face, for that matter, glowed with the pleasure, wasn't it? of his assurance thus made positive; assurances, roundabout them, couldn't, she showed, too much multiply, and it wasn't to be till considerably after that the sense of this moment marked her for him as really rather listening, though in all delight, to his recital of a learnt lesson, than as herself taking from him an inspiration she might have lacked. He was amused—even if why so amused?—at the vividness of the image of the too susceptible or too adventurous daughter of their earlier house with whose affections, the acknowledged kinship of the two families offering approved occasion, his unscrupulous ancestor had atrociously trifled. The story had anything but grace, thanks to the facts of its hero's situation, his responsibility to a patient young wife and three children—these kept indeed at a distance, quartered, by his care, in a small French town, during most of the term of his extravagance; the climax of which last had been the brutal indifference, as it at least appeared, of his return to New York with nothing done for mitigation of the exposure awaiting the partner, as the phrase was, of his guilt. It didn't make the scandal less—since a different face might somehow or other have been put upon it—that he prospered in America against every presumption attaching to the compromised civil state of the family; that he succeeded in carrying their name again almost insolently high, in recovering and enlarging their ancient credit, in retrieving their wasted, their forfeited resources, in putting them at last back into such a posture that after his death and with the lapse of the condoning years they could perfectly pass for people, had in fact conspicuously become people, incapable not only of gross infractions but of the least lapse from good manners. The defunct worthy, with whatever discomfort of conscience, had had a high hand for affairs of profit and had flourished as the undoer of virtue or confidence or whatever other shaky equilibrium is often observed to flourish. The proofs of his mastery were naturally, however, much more evident to the followers in his line than any ground for imputations less flattering; with which it seemed further unmistakeable that a posterity in such good humour with itself and its traditions might have even enough of that grace to spare for cases of the minor felicity. How at any rate had it come about that the minor felicity, of all things in the world, could be a distinguishable mark of the English Pendrels, the legend of any awkward accident or any foregone advantage in whose annals would so scantly have emerged as matter for free reference? This was a question that might with the extraordinary swell of our young man's present vision find itself as answerable as the next before or the next after. Every question became answerable, in its turn, the moment it was touched; so that when his companion, as she had so bravely become, mentioned the repair of the family breach he jumped at the occasion for a full illustration of the subject.
"You see how little difference your mother's marriage made to us, with the extinction of our name here involved in it; since if Pendrels had at last failed us, for the pleasure over there of thinking of them, we could make Midmores answer almost as well at the worst—takethemup even with a resignation which, now that I know you, cousin," Ralph went on, "seems to put our acquaintance in a light that couldn't possibly be bettered."
"Certainly the Midmores are as good as anybody," the young lady bearing their name flared out in the charmingest way to reply; "for we're not forgetting, are we? that it was a Pendrel after all, one of yours, though of mamma's own recognised blood too, who came out as if on purpose to make the trouble among us; the trouble we doubtless needn't go into again now, even if it seems to have been thought as ill as possible of at the time."
"No, we needn't go into that of course," Ralph smiled—smiled verily through his exhilarated sense that whereas the best of reasons for their not doing so would have dwelt a few moments before in his imperfect grasp of that affair, he now enjoyed the superior view of it as well before him and only a bit embarrassing to handle. "You didn't like us then, and we must have been brought up not greatly to like you—all the more even, no doubt, if we were in the wrong," he cleverly put it; "so that things got worse, and we thought still more evil, on both sides, than therewasto think; which perhaps didn't matter, nevertheless," he added, "when once all commerce was quite broken off. Nothing can have passed between us, I make out, for at least twenty years; during which"—for that also came to him—"we lost every remnant of the credit originally enjoyed with you all by the stiffness of our stand on your side during the dreadful War."
She took this from him with a clear competence that yet didn't belittle his own—though his own, it might be added, was to indulge, the very next thing, in a throb of finer complacency. She stared a moment before saying, as she did with much point, that she hadn't heard of any American who when their capital fell before the British arms had giventhemany credit for anything; on which remark he commented in turn, smiling at what she appeared to have meant. "Don't you happen to have heard, my dear, of the great revolutionary struggle with your poor mad old king, now at his last gasp as they tell me, through which my country won the independence it enjoys?"
He thought he had never in life seen anything handsomer than the way Miss Midmore had of tossing her head with a spirit and an air that might have been partly a fruit of breeding and partly an extravagance of humour. It made him note even at the moment that he had really in New York never seen a head prescriptively tossed, or never at least with that high grace; in spite of its being withal supposed there that the young American ladies were unsurpassed in their frank pretension to consequence. "We haven't forgotten how dreadfully ill you all behaved long ago," were the words with which she met this reflection on her intelligence; "but it's lucky for you that you had made overtures—to ourselves here I mean—before we came to blows with you again a few years since."
"I see, I see—friendly assurances had passed; so friendly that when the public breach was healed there was very little of the private left to be patched up with it." He rendered this justice to her not having gone so astray. "But I think the great thing must have been that I myself, such as you see me, don't remember the time when I didn't fairly languish for the sight of you. I mean," he explained, "for a view of London and of the dear old country—which my grandparents, you understand, when here in 1806 and lay it on as they would, I know, couldn't write home to us flattering enough accounts of."
"It was in 1807, if you please," Molly Midmore said, "and it was that visit of theirs, in which they showed such a desire to be civil, that began the great difference of which you and I enjoy at last the full advantage. They must have done very well," she next declared, "seeing the small cause we had to make much of you. They showed how they wished to change that and did their utmost for it. It was afterwards remembered among us that they had taken great pains."
"Yes indeed, theywouldhave wanted to smooth down any awkwardness," Ralph gaily returned; while the mere saying it made him within the moment see much beyond that supposititious truth, see everything exactly as it had happened. So very much thus emerged to distinctness, so much more than he could have gone into just then even hadn't she, in her way, apparently wished to produce a signal fact before he might, as he would perhaps have said, get in. He got in none the less now with another assured hit. "The notion of our coming together in this way was the best of what they had left behind them when they went off again:thatwas the real beginning, as you say, of your and my happiness that's to be."
She made less and less scruple of showing him how he charmed and amused. "The only thing is that they could scarce have plotted that out before either of us was born. I don't exaggerate my youth," said Molly, "since I've waited for you till now. But I'm not so old as that they could have told by the sight of me that you were going to grow up so certain to like me."
"I thinkIcould have told it, my dear, even at the hour of my birth. At any rate," Ralph laughed, "it was a fancy I took to as soon as it was ever mentioned to me——!"
"Which it can't have been," she broke in, "before a little more was known about your servant, sir, than you would seem to allow for, even granting she's the wonder you behold!"
"I beheld the wonder, and I took it completely in," Ralph instantly answered, "the minute I clapped eyes on the elegant portrait that reached us in New York some time back, of course—yet so lately as to show you all in your present bloom." On his reference to which valuable object there befell him something he might have noted as more remarkable than whatever else had most seemed so, save that each improvisation, as he might fairly have called them all, gave way without fear to the brightening of further lights. Had he expressed at the very moment what hovered there before him he would have called it the gleam of an uncertainty on his young woman's part as to whether, or at least as to when, she had sat for the picture the truth of which was so present to him. He might have caught her in the act of not acknowledging his reference—which it was somehow fortunate for her, wasn't it? that she nevertheless didn't repudiate before he had carried his hand to the inner left pocket of his coat and drawn out in its red morocco case the miniature that was to confirm his words. He had looked at her hard, as to hold her while he made sure of this, and the eyes that met his own, for the space of five seconds, wondered, not obscurely, if he were going to; after which, at the mere feel of the thing in his hand, his lips couldn't help closing an instant as for giddiness, the positive swing of the excitement that declined so to fail. It was at each stroke as if he were treating himself to a wanton degree of it without the least menace of a penalty. Aren't we perhaps able to guess that he felt himself for the ten elapsing seconds the most prodigious professor of legerdemain likely ever to have existed?—and even though an artist gasping in the act of success. The consciousness of that force took a fresh flight on the spot—it meant so the revelation of successes still to come. This particular one triumphed over the ambiguity in the girl's face which had not immediately yielded to his gesture—but which did yield, he beautifully found, on his handing her the morocco case open and without his having himself so much as dropped his eyes on it. The intoxication of mere happy tact might really have paralysed in him for the moment any other sense. Yes, he extraordinarily felt, it was happy tact that made the object in his pocket respond to the fingers suddenly seeking it—and this, all so wonderfully, before they had either given it notice or received notice from it. It wasn't exactly success, no doubt, that he next imputed to his friend—since success withher, the success under which recognition, on her first glance at the offered picture, played straight out of her, would clearly have had to represent a triumph over truth, a pretence of recollection, instead of, as in this case, the very finest coincidence with it. "Oh yes,thatpicture!" Molly at once exclaimed, much as if her beauty had been often portrayed, and with the addition, the next instant, that they hadn't at home held the artist, for whom she quite remembered sitting, to have done her much justice; so that indeed, as she now made out, her mother must have sent the thing off without her being herself in the secret. "It's well enough," she went on, her handsome head just tipping to consider; "but if your mamma had sent us such a bungle as a likeness ofyou, my dear, I should have been in less hurry, I think, to make your precious acquaintance. It wasn't very gallant," she further splendidly observed, "that you should have needed a trumpery proof of what's thought of me while I on my side was ready to take you on trust!"
Nothing could have exceeded for him meanwhile the luxury of increase for what he might have called the filling-in of his fortune; odd enough though it still might be to hang with her thus over a gage which at the end of a minute she handed back to him, the case closed, under her light thumb, with a snap, and which he restored to his bosom with an air that perhaps carried off but imperfectly his not having desired to refresh his own eyes with the painter's presentation. Not till afterwards had he, for all his confirmed elation, high spirits enough to ask himself why he would so singularly have hated to put the content of the neat pair of covers to any ocular test. A content bravely attested after all by his companion they indubitably had; which inscrutable fact still so sufficed him, even at the later hour we mention, that his thumb ignored any itch to press the small clasp again. By that time he might have recalled how little he had been aware of the miniature against his breast before its being there was in so odd a fashion disclosed; with its coming back to him as well that his unawareness might have struck the girl herself, and not less, at any rate, that he had noted their flushing together under the force of something tacit, something that wasn't quite, that wasn't verily at all, in their speech. He was nevertheless for the present not to review any one of the felicities that more and more assured his steps, and that still made him, in living them over, catch his breath a little, he was not to recur to them without a finer and finer joy, without a positive pride, in the growth of his wit. It had broken out quite brilliantly, this wit, in that production of the morocco case, and what had it done less with his finding the very rightest terms for putting it, while Molly listened, that if he hadn't been able to repay in kind the compliment of her beautiful offering this was because the kind, the article worth her acceptance, was alas not produced in America? He was later on to remember indeed how she had answered with a frankness scarce failing of provocation that since he himself had been produced the country didn't at least lack fine material; with which too she had carried it off quite on his own level by making the point that the real repair of his neglect would be to sit as soon as possible to one of the great London hands. There were plenty to choose from, he would see, as he would see many other things that might be new to him; and wasn't it certain moreover that the fancy would then be—from the moment he humoured it, that is—not for a trifle to be carried about in a pocket, but for something of a style and size to hang there roundabout them, where it would have for company as many Pendrels as Midmores? These lively impressions were, as we say, inevitably to renew their edge, even if the sense of living to the increase of danger, or in other words to the increase of interest, rather swept away in its pulses any occasion to brood. It is nevertheless not with his eventual commentary on this course that we are concerned, so much as with the freshness of those first moments. It belonged on the spot to still another of them that he found occasion to take her up somehow, in all good faith and good humour, on that oddity she had appeared to let fall, the matter of Mrs. Midmore's being so in fear of her as to have had to make a secret of despatching the morocco case.
"We rather suppose over there, you know," he mentioned, "that in England at least the children are bred to such submission that the parents haven't to conspire for freedom behind their backs. And, to tell you all," he further explained, "we have thought of your mother as such a very high lady that to make our image fit the facts we must apparently think ofyouas a higher."
"Do you consider," the girl asked at this, "that you've met me with such extraordinary signs of awe? I won't pretend indeed I'm a bleating lamb—but you'll see for yourself that, though we're remarkably alike, I think, and have both plenty of decision, or call it even temper, there's between us an affection stronger even than our force of will on either side and which has always kept difficulties down. She happens to like what I like, just as I want to like, being so fond of her, what she does—though I don't say that if that were different there wouldn't be a touch of strife. If we've the same spirit therefore we've luckily for the most part the same tastes—which I dare say I wouldn't tell you, however, if I thought you'd be afraid of me for 'em. For all my boldness, at the same time, and which I come as honestly by as you will, I'd never look at a man of whom I shouldn't myself once in a while be afraid. Unless you're prepared, sir, properly to make me so," she laughed, "we may therefore perhaps have gone too far—for mamma herself, in this, I think, would be as disappointed as I am."
"I don't care a bit how far we've gone," Ralph answered with the richest resolution, "since the more of you all I please, no doubt, and putting any fierceness quite aside, the better it will be for our union. You don't expect me to agree to terrorise you, I suppose," he pursued with ease, "and I shall defy you to prove to me that if I suit you it won't be because I'm amiable." With which he stood ever so masterfully smiling at her.
"Oh indeed I can see you're amiable!" she cried with joy.
"I'll be hanged," he declared, quite keeping up his tone, "if I'll take the trouble ever to be anything else! I've the assurance to say that you must take me exactly as I am."
"Why what in the world do I want of you but that you should show assurance? Isn't it what I just said?—and if people don't find you ready for them, when I love you for your readiness," she cried, "I think I shall box their ears."
"Oh I shall take care for them, poor wretches," he laughed, "that they shan't be caught doubting me; since you must remember, you see, that what I've most of all come over for is peace all round." He held her so perfectly now, he seemed to know, beyond any possible slip, that putting his hands again on her shoulders scarce made it the surer. She was nevertheless in them, under their particular pressure, more and more deeply, and it made for his gravely going on, while he kept her at the distance that seemed to leave them each space and sense for a consideration all but unspeakable: "Let us once more therefore, dearest, exchange the kiss of peace."
She closed her eyes upon him, and it was as if that consenting motion were one with the spring of his closer possession. This sweetness, renewed, held them together for a time he couldn't have measured, and which might have lasted longer but that he of a sudden knew, by the very beat of her heart, that something more had happened for him and that she was again in charge of it, as she had been at first. But it didn't make her let him go—which was the greatest of the wonders, and it hung there behind him, and without his wanting at once to turn, that another person had joined them who divided now Molly's attention and whom she bravely addressed. "Mr. Pendrel, you see, has come, and is giving us the kiss of peace."
Ralph was afterwards to make sure that he had heard Mrs. Midmore's voice before he saw her face, and that his young friend must accordingly so have detained him as that the new mistress of the scene enjoyed the fullest exhibition to sight of what her daughter announced to hearing. "Well I'm sure then I'm ready to receive it too when you've both had enough of it!"—this high clear tone fell on our young man's ear and constituted at a stroke, without the aid of his in the least otherwise taking her in, his first impression of Mrs. Midmore. It was anything but the voice of alarm, and yet was as fine as a knife-edge for cutting straight into his act of union with the girl. Never had he heard a human sound so firm at once and so friendly, so rich in itself and so beautiful, and at the same time raising so the question of whom it could be used by and what presence it denoted. He was of course informed of these matters the next instant or as soon as he could turn in the disengaged way. But the few seconds had already sufficed; they gave him as nothing previous had done the note and measure of the close social order into which he had plunged, so that in facing his proper hostess he had already winced as at the chill of a tremendous admonition. Molly, during his passage with her, had, whether wittingly or no, left him unwarned and unscared; but the fashion after which her fine smiling parent both made good the fairest predictions and threatened instant confusion was as great a puzzle as, with time for it, a rash gentleman could have wished to handle. There she was, the very finest woman of her age possible, as Miss Midmore, for comparison, was the very finest of hers, but all to the instant effect of having made him just by her few words say to himself that he had never in all his days before so much as heard personal speech, and wonder in consequence what such a speaker would make of his own. The marvel was for the moment that with her handsome hard face brightened up for him not less clearly than a badge of importance, on occasion laid by, is judiciously polished for wearing, she should expose her sensibility, or in other words her social surface, to what his native expression might have at the best to treat it to. The marvel was indeed that, borrowing as she did he could scarce have said what air of authority, verily of high female office, from her rich-looking black attire, she determined in him even before he had spoken an inward gasp of confession. "I'm a rank barbarian, yes: she must, oh shemust, take me for that!"—he put this to himself at that instant with a kind of plea for his greater ease. It came to him that since he couldn't possibly succeed with her as a fine gentleman—even though, so oddly, he appeared to have succeeded as such with her daughter—his advantage would be in some quite other wild grace, on which therefore he must desperately throw himself.
However, she was herself an apparition of such force that the question of his own luck missed application and he but stared at her lost, and yet again lost, in that reflection that yes, absolutely yes, no approach to such a quality of tone as she dealt in had ever in his own country greeted his ear. Yes, again and yet again, it spoke of ten thousand things that he could guess at now in her presence, and that he had even dreamed of, beforehand, through faint echoes and in other stray lights; things he could see she didn't in the least think of at the moment either, all possessed as she was with the allowance she had in her hospitality already made for him. Every fact of her appearance contributed somehow to this grand and generous air, the something-or-other suggesting to him that he had never yet seen manner at home at that pitch, any more than he had veritably heard utterance. When or where, in any case, had his eye, alert as he might feel it naturally was, been caught by such happy pomp as that of the disposed dark veil or mantilla which, attached to her head, framed in hoodlike looseness this seat of her high character and, gathering about her shoulders, crossed itself as a pair of long ends that depended in lacelike fashion almost to her feet? He had apprehended after a few more seconds that here was "costume" beheld of him in the very fact and giving him by its effect all the joy of recognition—since he had hitherto had but to suppose and conceive it, though without being in the effort, as his own person might testify, too awkwardly far out. Yes, take him for what she would, she might see that he too was dressed—which tempered his barbarism perhaps only too much and referred itself back at all events, he might surely pretend, to a prime and after all not uncommendable intuition of the matter. If he had always been, as he would have allowed, overdressed for New York, where this was a distinct injury to character and credit, business credit at least, which he had none the less braved, so he had already found he was no more than quite right for London, and for Mansfield Square in especial; though at the same time he didn't aspire, and wouldn't for the world, to correspond with such hints as Mrs. Midmore threw off. She threw it off to a mere glance that she represented by the aid of dress the absolute value and use of presence as presence, apart from any other office—a pretension unencountered in that experience of his own which he had yet up to now tended to figure as lively. Absolutely again, as he could recover, he had never understood presence without use to play a recognised part; which would but come back indeed to the question of what use—great ambiguous question-begging term!—might on occasion consist of. He was not to go into that for some time yet, but even on the spot it none the less shone at him for the instant that he was apparently now to see ornament itself frankly recognised as use; and not only that, but boldly contented, unassailably satisfied, with a vagueness so portentous—which it somehow gave a promise to his very eyes of the moment that he should find convincingly asserted and extended. All this conspired toward offering him in this wondrous lady a figure that made ladies hitherto displayed to him, and among whom had been several beauties, though doubtless none so great as splendid Molly, lose at a stroke their lustre for memory, positively vitiated as they thus seemed by the obscurity, not to say the flat humility, of their employed and applied and their proportionately admired state.
We hasten to concede of course that Ralph entered in those few instants but into imperfect possession of the excited sense, the glimpse of more and more great things, provoked for him by his elder kinswoman's resonant arrival; yet it's no extravagance to say that the knowledge Molly had been teaching him he was already master of took a measureless bound with the act of his just kissing Mrs. Midmore's hand. She let him do this as a first sequel to her remark on her daughter's description of their commerce, but his own next consciousness was that of being kissed by her on both cheeks—he could scarce have said whether more freely or more nobly: the first sequel would have been poor without the second, she struck him as having at once admonished him, leaving on his hands his quick conception of how he should act with true elegance, the style of behaviour on which she would generally speaking most reckon. He had never before kissed a lady's hand, nor seen one kissed, save in a stage-play; also the way he did it would stamp him the barbarian she had disposed him, under the rush of his perceptions, to seek his best safety in proving himself: yet it was to become at the end of a minute a consequence of these things that he felt to the full how soundly Molly had answered for his freedom to fear nothing. This he so succeeded in achieving by the aid of the ladies conjoined that he could scarce have said when it was that his relation with the elder, now admirably sealed, had fitted him to distinctness with a fresh pair of wings and showed him there was no length to which they mightn't bear him. How had this fond presumption grown, he might afterwards have wondered, unless by just listening to her voice of voices?—her beautiful bold tone simply leading the way, as he subsequently made the matter out, and his ear, all but irrespective of its sense, holding and holding it, indifferent for the hour to what it meant, and yet withal informed, by its mere pitch and quality, of numberless things that were to guard him against possible mistakes, very much as he had been guarded during his passage with Molly. Numberless things, yes; so many that he was afterwards to see how he owed all those he could feel most at his ease about to this extraordinarily fortifying hour. He might afterwards make out that it had been fortifying, at least in part, because it had been so flattering: he soon ceased to care that he was after all apparently not able to pass for a barbarian—his connection with the secure world, that of manners and of every sort of cross-reference, that of the right tone and the clear tradition, had been settled at every point at which equivocation would otherwise have waited. If it wasn't flattering that two such women should have made him by a turn of the hand their very own and have opened out to him, without a shade of reserve that he could catch in the fact, every privilege thereunto attached, there was no sense in the great mystifying term, as he had always found it, which resembled the custom of hand-kissing in that he had hitherto known it but by name. To taste of the sweet was to feel sure he had gone to this hour without it, just as on his side he had never helped another to it—no, not in the least after the fashion according to which he had let his present companions, and Mrs. Midmore of course in especial, hand it forth as in a deep-bowled silver spoon.
What overtook him further withal, a few moments later, was that if he shouldn't be able to keep it down the measure of his new luxury might so keep itself up as to overstrain all their powers, his own stomach for it not least: the near danger of this topple seemed in fact presented to him as soon as a third member of the family had been admitted by the door of Mrs. Midmore's entrance—the servant who had waited on his own now passing in again as if to clear the approach and make another announcement. The footman in effect said nothing, or nothing at least was heard by Ralph, who was struck at once with this young man's almost wild sidelong stare at him, a positively droll departure from the strict servile propriety the fellow seemed otherwise formed to express, and with the way the gentleman so ushered in pulled up before a bolder approach and stood testifying, as might have seemed, to a form of apprehension scarce more happily controlled. The fresh apparition, it was easy to see, could be but a Midmore of Midmores; which was doubtless in great part why his arrest, his frightened bulging eyes, his immediate failure of assurance, where assurance, by Ralph's conception, would so have consorted, represented the honest tribute of a person hugely impressed. Our own young man's high accessibility to impressions on his side, and all, however quickly multiplied, kept separate in spite of their number, showed him during the minute that ensued quite half-a-dozen different things of the first importance—such as that Mrs. Midmore must promptly have spoken, must have said something like "Oh Perry dear, don't hang back; come and bid our great cousin welcome!" such as that, for all the pitch of her flattery, as the scene fairly flushed with it, she didn't like her son quite so artlessly to gape, preferring, for herself, more intention and thereby, as it were, more profit; such as that, at the same time, Perry Midmore, whose name of Peregrine our remarkable friend immediately fixed on him, had quite other signs than those of general, of easy or precipitate deference. Short and sturdy, stocky, as Ralph, reproducing the image, might have described him, he was so stout and direct an assertion of ready brute force that his air of misgiving, his confession of shyness, his discountenanced first looks at the possible adversary awaiting him might, on the ground of any comparison of matter with mind, quite have gone to that adversary's head. Tight in his clothes, especially in the buckskin breeches which his riding-boots surmounted almost to the knee and his stout legs exposed to a strain; tight in his vividly blue coat, which had a tail but no skirts, though indeed brass buttons galore, as if to make up for that, and which suggested at the wrists, under the arms and across the chest, that he might fairly have outgrown it through daily increase of strength; tight even in the redundant neckcloth that couldn't well have strangled him, and yet above which his young face and the large fold of his chin, in particular, declared themselves purple and congested—carrying out also, with the fine bright sheen of the skin, that betrayal as of a general tense surface and of the effect of breathing hard beneath it. Ralph was afterwards thoroughly to learn both how far the fortitude of this nominal young head of the house of Midmore could go and where and why it would fail; but the immediate exhibition was that of an extraordinary diffidence, almost a chill of fear, in face of the unusual. This let our friend see, out of hand, how new and how strange he must have struck his kinsman as being, in spite of such preparations as must already have worked for him; which fact it was—just the primitive candour of Perry's revelation—that most impressed on him his fine liability to loom large.
It wouldn't be a great affair, certainly, to loom large to Perry—that he at once grasped; for while he felt himself thus play on his sensibility he felt sure that all there might be of that article, absolutely all, was engaged, with nothing left over for any other use—though this apprehension, at the same time, clothed the odd figure with a richer interest perhaps than any yet stirring in his breast. Perry would be bold, Perry would be brave, would be even, and with the last unconsciousness, brutal; and withal for those lapsing moments Perry would have given anything not to have to deal with a presence that deprived him at a stroke of those of his advantages, as he knew these, that had accompanied him up to the very door. Ralph felt in the full measure of this perception the desire he should keep them, and for the very fullest exhibition; which he would be hanged if he didn't positivelymakehim do—so that to begin this effect on the spot he smiled and smiled, smiled verily as perhaps never in his life before, and alas but at first with the apparent consequence of inspiring more mistrust. It was probably at this instant that there fell upon our friend the first light sense of a predicament on his own part the gravity of which he was before long not to mistake—the faintest symptomatic hint, that is, of a dilemma so extraordinary that we shall scarcely be able to do it justice enough, consisting as it did in the prevision of his probable failure to keep himself unperturbed, in the right proportion, by the mistrust it was open to him, on a certain side, or at least in certain quarters, to inspire. Why should he, why should he? he was to be able to say to himself, though indeed after much else had happened, that he had then inwardly and rather sickishly begun to inquire; for in the least degree to determine wonderments that should be beyond answering was the last thing he had dreamed of, and we may in fact all but feel his heart even now stand still for half a second under that noted first breath of a fear. That he wanted but to please and soothe and satisfy him, that he was ready to sacrifice to so doing all but the blood of his veins, this came over him to the point of bringing out sweat-drops on his brow while he met his kinsman's bulging eyes with the grace of reassurance we have just imputed to his own. He understood, he understood—which was the challenging interest: Perry scented his cleverness, so to call it, scented his very act of understanding, as some creature of the woods might scent the bait of the trapper; whereby it was that to prosecute success by wiles more manifest yet and then but watch them brilliantly fail might well mean at last finding no issue in a case that depended on issues. Was this perfect example of whatever he should really prove—his absolute transparency making him preciously perfect—going to defeat by mere alarm the true, the extreme felicity of a right relation with him? that relation which would consist of seeing how he was shut up to his three or four parts as to the rooms of a house of three or four windows and only a bolted door, and attending him there with the due allowance for this. The point would be in the young man's dim perception and possible resentment of allowances—conceivably productive in him of positive unrest; thanks, no less conceivably, to his being probably as neat a case as one could desire of impenetrable density before the unfamiliar. The unknown, however presented to him, would remain for him the unknowable, and by just so much the detestable and the impossible, calling on quasi-brutish instincts of danger and self-defence. The danger would be to the element of pride in him, one of the three or four properties that a Midmore had easily at hand, and that could quite naturally make the embodiment of such a privilege recognise whatever might menace it, even though with no resource or comfort in the matter but a dull direct hate, a straight if unpolished arm.
To divine these things, however, was also, while one was about it, to divine the presence, lurking among them, of the question of calculable profit, the power, elementary enough, to compare inconveniences and choose the least—the greatest being of course the one that would most interfere with such a gentleman's material ease. It was solid, it had always been, to be a Midmore of Drydown—that pressed heavier upon Ralph each instant; but the virtue of the solid was exactly that you couldn't see through it, as you might, or as unmannerly people at least, looking hard at it, might, should financial inanition begin to make it at all thin. Horrid for the great—since, strangely enough, the young man, staring, lowering, vainly dissimulating, or at least ineffectually pretending, did in his way represent greatness—to have to feel less at home in the world, or certainly in Mansfield Square, let alone at Drydown itself, by the want of anything their quality had learned from such a good way back to take for granted. Our friend vibrated to the sense of still another tenth of a second during which the measure of the want he himself was to supply made him blink as by its intense flash, directly after which he knew that his gallantry of welcome to Perry, his smile of intelligence—he might fairly have damned the intelligence he couldn't keep down!—was practically a suggestion that his cousin should advance and receive his promise to pay. His cousin did advance, at the worst, more rapidly than any effective alarm of Ralph's on this score could supervene; and then the latter scarce knew what brave distance had been covered by the exchange between them of a fine old fraternal embrace over which Mrs. Midmore's authority, dominant really, after all, through everything, had somehow presided with elegance and yet without ceremony.
Was it the fact of the embrace, was it the common stout palpability, the very human homely odour, of his relative, that had at the end of a minute dispelled all difficulties and renewed the wonderful rush, as it could only be felt, of the current? Certain it was that if Perry was going to be curious, and this most perhaps by the repudiation in him of the very rudiments of curiosity, so at the same time he had become as a creature to play with—from the moment at least of one's having something to his advantage to dangle before him. His human simplicity would surely mark itself as unlike, as quite beyond, anything of the sort that had ever confronted Ralph with pretensions or assumptions; and how should that alone not prove tempting to one's taste for a game, exasperated as this taste might become by such particular stupidities of confidence and comfort as would inevitably await it? It might be indeed that one had never seen the straight force of stupidity so attested—that straight force being, when applied, nothing very much other than brutality; which, clearly, lurked here with supports and accessories and surrounding graces, the fair and delicate house, the full-voiced mannerly women, the ordered consideration of twenty kinds, that it was so far from being able to draw upon in a country where it was mainly known but by its going naked and unashamed. Ralph easily knew that the attempt to preserve itself there in whatever approach to the conditions now before him would have had overmuch to reckon with distraction and diversion. All of which wondrous interpretation, on his part, of the few trifles light as air that achieved in as few seconds such a brushing of his sense, left him momentarily with a tight hold of Perry's hand and an ear still reached by his hard breathing—this too though the return to their orbits of his silly scared eyes was more assured.
Ralph further knew a desire to mark the distinction between being satisfied of him and amused at him, and was aware above all of something sharper for the instant than aught else, the fixed and extreme attention of the others, the look of the two ladies at their son and brother as if under stress of what they might gain or lose by the sentiment he should provoke; their major care forthat, in the connection, rather than for their visitor's own immediate action, enriching again in our young man the savour of success. It was as Molly's husband to be, who had just arrived from America to claim her hand, and who had in fact just claimed it and felt it brightly conferred, along with a fond mother's blessing, by the grand girl herself—it was under instruction to greet him in this character that he knew Perry to have been pushed into his arms; and what with the lapse of the next minute had come to hang in the balance was whether or no that youth, the head of the family but also the fool of it, and with some rude art of his own the will of it, would stand out for his right not to have been passed over by the offhand transaction. He was a gentleman to stand out for his rights up to any point at which he shouldn't get bewildered about them; for he was also a gentleman to get bewildered, that is easily to be determined in such a sense, on any ground not absolutely to be felt by the shuffle of his feet. In saying to him with fine gaiety "I want to commend myself all round, and quite understand that I must before the last word is said—so that you must give me time for it a bit, please:" in saying, in risking, he verily felt, as much as this he would have been conscious of more felicity had he not seen the very next instant that gaiety might well be too fine to please in the difficult relation; to which it would thus appear that his kinsman could only contribute in highest measure a mistrust of any semblance of manner, or at least of such manner as a glib adventurer from overseas might have brought with him. He was probably formed not to "like" manner, or to understand it, whether kept up or kept down, damn him; for if Ralph, with his own splendid sense for rising again to the surface after deep submersions, could take the quickest conceivable note of this, so there hung in his eye at the same time the lively truth, which fairly jerked out arms and legs like those of a toy harlequin worked by a string, that manner was essentially and by an extraordinary law to be his constant resort and weapon and of consistent application to every aspect of his case. It wouldn't of course always be the same, nor would he wish it to, since that would represent the really mad grimace; but the vision of it was precious in proportion as he felt how, so remarkably, in fact so unaccountably, he should need always to work frombehindsomething—something that, look as it would, he must object to Perry's staring at in return as if it were a counterfeit coin or a card from up his sleeve.
Let us frankly plead, for that matter, that he found himself affected before this passage lapsed as by the suddenest vision of a possibility of his having to appeal from the imputation, as who should say, of cheating, cheating in that sense which his above-mentioned love of the game, exactly, might expose him to suspicion of; this for all the world as if he were seated with the house of Midmore, not to speak of other company too, at a green table and between tall brave candlesticks which would at a given moment somehow perversely light the exchange of queer glances from partner to partner at his expense. So odd an apprehension could cast of course but the briefest shade: breath after breath and hint after hint—though whence directed who should say?—so spending themselves upon the surface of his sensibility that impressions, as we have already seen, were successively effaced and nothing persisted but the force of derived motion. As soon as he had heard his affianced bride, for instance, take up with infinite spirit the words of accommodation just addressed by him to her brother he seemed to see a shining clearance and to measure the span by which the three of them together, he and she and her mother, would be cleverer than any home criticism. "What puts it into your head, please, that if I'm quite content, and bold enough into the bargain to say as much to whomever it may concern, what puts it into your head that he may have a case against you that need give you the least trouble?" She spoke that out like her mother's daughter, whether like her brother's sister or no, blooming with still greater beauty and so attracting and holding Perry's eyes in consequence that when he turned them back again they reflected something of her pride.
"There's not a gentleman too grand for her anywhere," her brother observed to Ralph; "but I suppose you think yourself quite one of ourselves; which I don't say you're not," he added with due caution, "if you really please her and please my mother, to say nothing——"
"To say nothing of my pleasing you, of course"—Ralph took him up with the address that, however it might turn, he would so assuredly have to make the best of. "Yes, that's of course, but I won't pretend I don't draw a great confidence from their favour: I've felt them on the spot just as wise as they are kind. Just as kind as they are handsome too," he went on, looking at his kinsman ever so much harder and harder—which he somehow found that, though it wasn't at all what he wanted, he couldn't in the least help. It made him drive his address home, and this was, in the oddest way, as if he had his host by the body in a sort of intimate combat and were trying him and squeezing him for a fall. Perry would have totakehim, and to show that he had taken him—this was the tug; only the more he conveyed that, even if he wreathed it, so to say, in flowers and the more he thereby insisted on a relation, if not on the one, the more he seemed to give his man an opportunity the other aspect of which was that it was for himself a form of exposure. Why he should be exposed, and what, above all, exposed to, was more than he could have said—wondering as he did at this even while a passion urged and an instinct warned him. There it was, in any case: he couldn't helpsoundingPerry, even in the presence of the women; which was what brought upon him, through concentration of the visual sense, the challenge he seemed positively to advance into the enemy's county in order to invite. It was the rate at which he drew intelligence out of the dull that made him uneasy when it ought to have made him, by every presumption, feel it as wind in his sails. Violating nature, as might fairly seem, in the face before him, what was such a glimmer intelligenceof?—this he asked himself while he watched it grow and while, into the bargain, he might have marvelled at the oddity of one's wanting to be impressive without wanting to be understood. To be understood simply as impressive—it was this that would best consort; but what the devil wouldn't requiring such a creature to be more penetrable perhaps represent in the way of teaching it tricks it might use against one? In the act of impressing, Ralph felt, he encouraged familiarity—which was what people had been known to do at their cost and to the provocation of bad accident by putting primitive natures in a false position. False indeed would be the position when Perry should begin, say, to know more about Ralph Pendrel than this lover of life knew about himself. It may be added that if these considerations did lurk in the expression of countenance bent by Ralph upon his host with general ingenious intent, even a Midmore stuffed with a single prejudice might well have picked from the bunch some hint of a sinister menace to that monotony.
"You don't mean to say you're struck withmyappearance—I know it's not my strong point!" Perry said goodhumouredly enough, after all, and with a laugh which put that quantity at once in a better light. "But I like, as much as you please, to be praised for what Iam" he added—"if you'll give me time to show that; for I suppose you've already noticed that in this country wetaketime for our affairs, and perhaps no people among us all more than we of this family; which has gone on for ever so long, yon know, at its own pace and never allowed itself to be driven. We probably don'tlookto you, however, as if you could lash us up—out of breath even as you may perhaps be with your errand; and that's all the appearance I pretend to make to anyone. What I leave to my mother I do leave to her," the young man further declared—more and more articulate, clearly, on finding himself so well listened to; "and of course she and Miss Midmore are as clever as they're handsome, if that's what you want." After achieving, with some unexpectedness for Ralph, this effort of propriety, he looked as in recovered self-possession from Mrs. Midmore to Molly, and then again very hard at his sister and back at his mother, so that it shouldn't be his fault, obviously, if they didn't trust his tact. He showed himself in short the man of sense and of consequence, though while speaking he had stared straight before him, not resting his eyes on Ralph, who, none the less, at once and cordially welcomed his remarks.
"I hear you with the greatest interest, but even if we don't always take time enough in America for what we do, I'm not going to grant you that I haven't thoroughly thought of what I'm about in coming to you. And if you care to know it," Ralph continued, "it has taken but four days of old England to convince me that you're the happiest people in the most convenient country. I've been since I landed more pleased and amused than I can tell you." With which our young man again smiled and smiled.
"Oh you've seen nothing as yet compared to what you will," Mrs. Midmore impatiently broke in—"and I know," she said, "that what Perry would like to say to you is that you'll have no idea of anything till you've seen and admired Drydown. That you shall do in good time—it's a place I shall make itmycare that you shall get to love, for that's where we're at home, where we'rewhatwe are, if you understand; and where, as I see Perry desires to assure you, you shall have a horse of your own to ride, and the best home-grown victual that you'll anywhere find to eat, and a capital neighbourhood to receive civility from, to say nothing of one of the very finest views in England spread out before you."
"You shall have any horse that you can ride," Perry concurred, his clue to amiability now quite grasped, with this fine example of it given; "though it isn't when they're most to my taste, I grant, that they're apt to be most to other men's. That's what I say to my friends"—and he improved his theme, not to speak of his himself improving with it: "I tell 'em they're welcome to any mount that suits 'em, and I don't think I find it in general a freedom from which my animals suffer. Unless it be," he pursued, appealing again with his flushed but comparatively directed deliberation to his sister, "unless it be that I provide better still for Molly's liking—since I must make him understand, you know," he kept on, "how straight he has to follow if he's so bold as to allow you a lead."
"I'm sure I hope he'll be bold enough to ride with his wife!" the girl splendidly laughed—"or, if you think I put it too forwardly, with a young lady whom he has in half an hour inspired with such kindness that she wouldn't for the world do him a mite of harm." There was that in her free archness which struck again for Ralph the note of he could scarce have said what old-time breadth of the pleasant address and the frolic challenge; so that, sounded out in this way before the others, it made him pant a little as if he were in fact engaged in "following" and needed all his effort not to be left behind. He felt in comparison, before such a force of freshness, almost disembodied, and didn't know for a moment what he mightn't have said if she hadn't, still lighting the way for him with her great confident eyes, seemed to wish to give him all sorts of assurance in the single charge: "You're not to be afraid, you're not to be afraid——!"
"I hope to heaven I shan't let you see it if I am!" he interrupted. "And you and your brother must remember at any rate that though the natives of Mexico and Peru, when first discovered by the Spaniards, had never seen a horse and thought them very terrible, we have long ago got over that in our part of the country, and indeed, I think, are not much in fear of anything or anyone—unless it be perhaps of finer ladies than our simple society and our homely manners have yet taught us to deal with. I pray the powers," he went on to his kinsman, for whom once more, despite his desire to the contrary, he felt himself "figure" all too unavoidably and confoundingly, "I pray the powers I mayn't want either for wit or for any other sort of coolness when it's a question of your fine gentlemen—by which I mean of my enjoying their notice and letting them not doubt of mine. But of course my very errand shows you how marked I am for the full ravage of female loveliness and for the advantage that it gains from the perfect gentility waiting upon it among you here. It must clearly do what it will with me, you see, and if the best it can do is likely to be to kill me why I'll at least go merrily to my death."
Perry Midmore, listening to this, kept his face half averted, but his eye was now more judiciously watchful and he turned it askance in his attention. He would weigh things and be wise—they might help to make him so, when his visitor uttered them, if they couldn't always make him ready; all of which inward comment the visitor had again the vexed consciousness of not being able to keep him from suspecting. He had taught him within five minutes that there was, that there could be, such a thing, and its pointing itself at him, whatever its sense, was the new and the disquieting fact. Ralph laid a hand on his shoulder with a singular sudden impulse to prove that even if one's thought was at play, since this was on occasion of the perverse nature of thought, the letting it take its full course would really bring it round to a point, in fact to a succession of points, where another would recognise it as positively working for him; and the gesture did after an instant so far operate as that the other's queer little glare abated and he stood as stiffly passive as if, whatever this should mean, the least movement might perhaps precipitate some further complication.
Mrs. Midmore meanwhile, Ralph saw, had so completely measured his own bright promise that, quite at her ease about it, her anxiety was all for her son's somehow interfering with the prospect; which she at the same time mightn't be able to take him up upon by reason of something divinably new and strange, something perhaps even beyond his usual show of shyness and that provoked wonder at the cause of it. Ralph had in fact in this connection another of his sublime instants, as we may fairly call them, with this particular one possibly the most sublime—since her next motion, though but a momentary look at him, of the supremely searchingest, played straight out of her desire to side with him, as it were, against any hindrance to a right understanding and a convenient, an elegant smoothness that her boy should stupidly offer. Wasn't there in her face during the moment a dim glimmer of inquiry?—something like "What on earthisit, yes, that you're doing to him, what was it, yes, a few minutes ago, when if I hadn't been watching him he would have shuddered like a frightened horse who sniffs in the air the nearness of some creature of a sort he has never seen?" The whole mother would have been in that, Ralph was afterwards to make out, the mother deeply engaged for her daughter's benefit and pleasure, as well as for anything to the advantage of the race in general that could be picked up by a sufficiently dignified long arm, and at the same time so rich in instincts that had for their centre the prior consequence of the head of the house, that she could almost know alarm in the midst of jubilation, and at any rate seemed to turn upon the hero of the occasion, for the five seconds, the chill of a special quite tremendous suggestion. She wanted right resolutely to like and to further him—it would be so good for them all, and if he was destined in any degree to counter this it wouldn't be by an effect upon her directly produced, but literally through her fond attention to Perry and even should that attention amount to impatience of Perry's attitude. He would but have to show personal fear, so to call it, or perhaps to do no more than show that he was afraid in advance of knowing it, for that question of what might be the matter with him to lead to the other and the finer. Such might be taken then as the way in which the last wonder about the American cousin would doubtless usher itself in. It was, however, so far from having yet won an inch of the ground, or having indeed really foreshadowed its power to do this, that all Ralph knew, to the effect of joy, within the minute, was that she was just putting Perry as right as possible again by the renewed wealth of her tone.
"Don't turn it upon us that we take you for a savage," she laughed to her visitor, "when you talk about killing and dying among us as if we were Red Men on the war-path! If we're going to kill and eat you at any rate—isn't that what your cannibals do?—we shall at least fatten you first for the table, and you needn't fear but that you'll enjoy that as much as you may suppose us to enjoy, as good judges, the next stage of the affair. I'm an excellent judge myself, please believe, and I shall decline to have you despatched before you're in perfect condition. Meanwhile therefore," she nobly continued, "we shall live upon you inthispleasant way—and with Molly's good right to be helped to you first, always first, entirety understood by us. The only thing is that I'm not sure we're quite eager to share you at once with a hundred other people."