Perry it was, rather remarkably, who spoke in answer to these fine words before Ralph had time to meet them—obliged as the latter always was, after all, to select a little among the resources of his wit. "Shan't you have a good bit to share him with my sister Nan at least?—you, I mean," he said to his mother, his hands in his pockets now and with the effect from it of a hunch up of his shoulders which at once established somehow his air of more conscious intention. "I don't say it for Molly, of whom I shouldn't expect it, and who of course will tear her sister's eyes out if Nan takes too much for granted. But you're kinder to Nan than Molly is," he continued—"and it's I," he still went on, with a turn now to their visitor, "it's I, among the three of us, that she can look to most. Oh yes," he persisted as for the benefit of the ladies, "you want him to know all about it, so I'm just telling him, don't you see? And it's what you yourself want to know, I take it, cousin—though I don't doubt of you as one for finding out."
He had grown of a sudden extraordinarily more assured, and Ralph, quite directly faced by him with it, felt at once how the interest of him was quickened. Catching the air of their faces he could note as well that Mrs. Midmore and Molly were not differently affected; which perception—and the two women exchanged at the moment a pair of quite confirmatory glances—renewed his sense that something unprecedented had within the ten minutes happened to Perry, and was indeed continuing to happen, just as he himself continued to have to recognise that he was, no comfort of responsibility, the author of it. Not only was this there, moreover, to strain further than would have in advance seemed possible the all-engaging smile into which he kept falling back for refuge, but it was also salient in the scene that however one might interpret such an exhibited phenomenon the character showing it was himself getting used to it; so that what had in truth most acutely taken place was that the worthy in question had of a sudden almost jumped to a vision of not suffering, or at any rate of not losing, by it. Whatever it might be, in fine, there was something to be done with it—as for instance that he should thrust it straight at Ralph in this account of embarrassing matters. Wasn't the point that he would make them embarrassing, damn him, if he could, and that, detected by his mother and sister, he was at the very stroke of trying it on? If the ladies would help the embarrassment not to act, Ralph inwardly remarked, the case would still have more of amusement than anything else to give out; only—therewas the betrayal he seemed to catch—they might, for all one knew, presently find themselves not able to: which was perhaps exactly what had been meant by that tacit communication between them. "Nan is at Dry down, where I left her yesterday," Perry meanwhile went on to mention, "and would have liked beyond anything in life coming up to pay you her respects. But if you notice her delay in waiting on you my mother will explain with pleasure how many obligations she has at home—though I'll be hanged if I believe in them enough, ma'am, not to be sorry I didn't bring her to town, even if I had to put her up behind me on Rouser. She's not a girl who either mopes or rebels," he added for Ralph's benefit before his mother, taken by surprise, could meet these sudden freedoms; "but no more is she a household drudge or a mere milkmaid, and you're not to think that if she's kept at a distance it's because she's not fit to be seen. She's not a great toast like Molly, but she's much handsomer than I am, don't you think, ma'am?"—and with this he fairly advanced upon his mother, who still more markedly flushed at the style of his address. "If our cousin's to make our fortune," he wound up, "let him see as soon as possible how many he'll have to provide for."
"You've broken out into such cleverness, my lad, that you should certainly now be trusted to make your own!" Mrs. Midmore returned, the brightness of her dignity suffering a little, Ralph could see, yet being put to no great pains to carry itself off as untouched. "Should you wish to see poor Nan at once," she remarked to her visitor, "we can easily send for her by the coach, and then you can judge of what she costs me at least to keep!"
"Why don't you rather propose that he shall take the coach himself if it's such a cruelty to them to wait?" Molly asked of her mother, but rolling her fine eyes at Ralph in a manner that helped for the moment to make him feel more astray than any challenge to his perception had yet succeeded in doing. "So near a relation needn't fear any gossip, so that if you pay her a visit there it isn't I, sir," she laughed, "who shall feel a penny the worse. What in the world should my little sister be but his little sister too?—making it a new big brother, for herself, who may strike her indeed as a better fortune, not to call it even a better brother, than any she now can boast of. If you really want to go at once," she kept on to Ralph, and dropping him the smartest curtsey with it, "I'll trust you to come back to me in time—in time to marry me, I mean," she cried; "and I don't mind telling you that if you shouldn't I'd make no scruple of going to bring you. Nan is the nicest little body, and, with the gardener's wife to help, would make you, I think, comfortable enough."
On which extravagant dazzle of pleasantries she paused a moment, Ralph feeling the while that their being to such a tune mutually and, as he might have put it, crudely astare signified something that had not as yet come up between them. Oh they had been making and taking a prodigious amount of affectionate assurance, but didn't Ralph know on the spot, hadn't he in fact been advised for the last three minutes, that here was matter of intimacy beyond any token they had exchanged and a different sort of business altogether from even the sharpest need yet resting on him to patch up a sense? There had been none he didn't patch up with that effect as of a quick bright triumph over difficulty—so that we have repeatedly seen how the challenge to his awareness, when pressed, set that awareness on its feet in time, never failing after this fashion to save his confidence. What had now taken place was that unexpectedly his need seemed to betray instead of helping him: every blest reference save the present had in other words found him ready—and not just ready to show he knew, but ready quite to know; only this question of an identity thrust at him to which he couldn't rise and which didn't, like all the others, breathe on him after an instant the secret of the means of rising, only this one left him to direct at Molly (which came indeed to saying at their companions too) a smile which would turn really to sickness should it have to last but a moment longer. Stranger than anything yet for our young man was what now occurred: his getting as in the glimmer of a flash the measure of the wonders he had achieved, and getting it through this chill of the facility stayed. What made it a chill was the felt danger, drawn from her look, of Molly's speaking his case out at him before he could prevent her. "Why you don't know, truly you don't know, therefore what are you talking about?"—that was in her face or was on the point of being, and the great pang was that he minded it himself still more than she and the others certainly would if they should fairly detect it. Hedidn'tknow, he hadn't known, and he wasn't going to or it would have come by this time: there wasn't in him the first faint possibility of an "Oh yes, your sister Nan of course, who is of such-and-such an age and such-and-such a figure and such-and-such a connection with the grand image of you that we've had at home!" There was no grand image, nor even any scantest, of a nice little body, as Molly had put it, lurking in the family background and as to whom, by the same magic of wanting to enough which had constantly served him, he could be sure he was passably provided. The possibility of sickness was in the fall from such a proved independence of the baseness, as who should say, of pretending. Two or three times, yes, it might have appeared he should have to pretend, some gap in his inspiration remaining too distinctly unbridged; but with that villainyalwaysaverted—since positively it wore the villain's face—by its having become in the very nick the mere mistake of his fear. He had thus again and again escaped being too superficial, and with this gain of certitude of how little he was there to be so at all had come each time the sense of luxury in his renewals of recognition. That there would be no luxury in not recognising, his failure of vision in respect to a second daughter of the house instantly taught him, but even while it did so no repair of the lapse arrived.
What Molly saw, and what in ten seconds more she would make the others see, was the fact of the lapse unrelieved—the queerness of which for her was indeed already out with her asking him what was the matter and why in the world he looked at the mention of the dear thing at Drydown as if he were going to be ill. The extraordinary point of which withal was that she was herself ready the instant after to jump into detection verily, but detection of what wasn't—not at all of what was. His so helplessly hanging fire represented clearly, to her freshened perception, and thereby his own still sharper embarrassment, that he had been thinking more of poor Nan than of the rest of them put together; though of course when she brought her large irony to bear on this he could luckily snatch at his obvious retort and make his flushed laugh invite their companions to see how it righted him. "Did it strike you, my dear, that when I asked you a while since to take up with me for life I was really but expressing my interest in another person? If that was the case," he said to Mrs. Midmore and Perry, "I mean if I wasn't addressing her as an honest man—which she accuses me of—how could she guess it and yet at the same time make me such a blissfully happy one?" The question wasn't indeed in strictness forthemto answer, and Molly, whatever they might have said, met it to her own sufficiency by another of her wondrous freedoms. "I could love you for a wretch, cousin, I think, as well as I could love you for a saint!" she cried; and it gave him at once, he seemed to feel, the luckiest chance for putting in his most vital plea.
"I don't care what you love me for if it's only as your very truest—and don't you see that when you doubt of my being so you deny by the same stroke that I'm the honest man I pretend?"
"Just listen to him, mother—was there ever anything grander than such a speech and such an air?" Her appeal was of the promptest, and if she addressed her parent her eyes took note but of her lover, whom, with her head inclined to one side, she might almost have been regarding in the light of a splendid picture. "I don't care, I don't care—it sets you off so to let me torment you. It's when I doubt of you," she said, "that you'll find me most adoring; and if you should ever dream I'm cold just draw me on to abuse you." She gave him at this moment and for the first time the oddest impression of studying him—she had only hugged him before, with sentiment and sense there had been no pondering; and he could have wished now she would straighten her head, her carriage of which had an effect on his nerves. It didn't matter that he believed her not really to intend this when she wound up with a repetition of her idea that they must have his portrait, that they must make sure of it before that first bloom of his expression, as she curiously called it, should have died down; a particular need of his own came to a head under her scrutiny quite as much as if he feared probing. "I'm an honest man, I'm an honest man!"—he said it twice over, strongly and simply, conscious of a sudden that he enormously wanted to, wanted to with an inward sharpness of which he had not yet felt the touch. It was a pressure from within that thus spoke, a pressure quite other than the driving force that had carried him so far and that he had known but by its effects, so rapidly multiplied, and somehow as dissociated from their starting-point or first producing cause as if that origin had been a spring pressed in somebody else. It was in himself, deep down somewhere, that his motion of protest had begun, and it really eased him to give it repeated voice—even if when he had made the point, that of his honesty, four times over, he had come rather to resemble the lady in the play of whom it was remarked there that she protested too much. He felt himself verily colour with his emphasis, and that was not at once corrected by his having to face the question straightway put by Perry, who on his side repeated the word once more. "'Honest'? Pray who in the world, here, cousin, has rudely said you're not?"—thatwas what he should have had in consequence decently to answer weren't it that his wish to clear himselftohimself helped him to laugh, with whatever small flurry, at the challenge.
"It isn't your rudeness, it's your extravagant flattery, you dear people, that makes me want to warn you that you may find me, on seeing more of me, less possessed of every virtue than you're so good as to insist." He looked with his becoming blush from one of them to the other—becoming we call it because his act of difficulty and thereby of caution appeared to provoke in each of the women after all but a new, quite a brighter and fresher shade of interest. Were they going to like him uncertain better still than they had liked him certain, and if so to what should he look, besmothered as that must surely make him feel, for the comfort of knowing where he was for himself? Where he was for Molly, and by the same token for her mother, was told him by this pleasure they took in seeing how he had found, to his slight embarrassment, that there was something to explain. That it was that seemed to set him off in their eyes, which were so agreeably, if so oddly, affected by almost any trustful touch of nature or unexpectedness of truth in him. If he had hoped to please by intention, so he might perhaps have liked even better to please in spite of himself; notwithstanding which this last liability did to a degree contribute ease, or even, it might be, rather compromise dignity. He might for all the world have beengrowing, growing hard, growing fast; it had begun with the minute of his entering the house, and especially that room—so that without knowing what at such a rate one might really growto, one should not yield to the imputation of being finally measured. There was a singular space of time during which, while this consideration on the part of the two women so approved him, approved him verily as against himself, approved him almost as if their soft hands had stroked him for their pleasure, there hovered before him the wonder of what they would have done had he been ugly, what they would in fact do should he become so, in any manner or form—this idea of his full free range suddenly indulging in a glance at that mode of reaction. What it all represented was doubtless but his need to express himself over the felt shock of his ignorance, since if it amounted to a shock the last way to treat it was to pretend he didn't mind it. He minded it, he found, very much, and if he couldn't pretend to himself he wouldn't pretend to the ladies, however they might want him confused for the enjoyment of smoothing it away. "You have then another daughter whom I hear of for the first time?" he asked of Mrs. Midmore—and indeed wellnigh in the tone of defying her to smooth that.
"I'm not in the least ashamed of her or aware of having at any time tried to conceal her existence!" his hostess said with spirit, yet with no show of resentment. "And I don't see really what it signifies if you have simply forgotten her yourself."
Ralph lifted a pair of finger-tips and, with thoughtful eyes on her, applied them for a moment—in no mere humorous fashion withal—as to a helpful rubbing of his head. Therewassomething he so wished to make sure of. "No, I don't think I forget. I remember—when once I know. If I don't remember I haven't known. So there it is," he said for himself even more than for his relatives. "Somehow it does signify!"—after which, however, he threw the matter off with a laugh. "Better late than never, at any rate."
"I'm glad you grant us that," Mrs. Midmore returned, "for you mustn't have the appearance, you know, of wanting to cut us down. We're not after all such a big handful."
He gave a pacifying stroke to his disturbed crop. "No, I mustn't have any appearance that doesn't fit my understanding. But suppose I should understand," he put to her the next instant, "something or other that doesn't fit my appearance?"
"Lord, mother," Molly laughed out on this, "what on earth does the clever creature mean?"
Mrs. Midmore looked at him harder, as if she herself would have liked to know, but Perry had intervened before she could make that remark, addressing his observation, however, to herself. "I'll be hanged if I see how, if he didn't hear of sweet Nan, he could have learnt so much about the rest of us."
"Mercy, brother, what a stupid speech!" Molly impatiently exclaimed. "Does it depend so on sweet Nan that anyone should take an interest——?" She went on to her brother, but looking with this, in her rich way, at their kinsman and giving that gentleman thus any number of her frankest reminders. "How was he not to take in the news that letters asked for and that letters gave?—and how at all events, for my part, am I not to be quite content that he makes no stranger of me?"
"Yes, my dear," Ralph at once declared, "it certainly can't be said that I've made any stranger of you!" He took her reminders and gave her back for them proportionate vows—in spite of which what she seemed most to have passed on to him was the name she herself had taken from her brother. Thus it was that, incongruously enough, it broke from his lips too. "'Sweet Nan, sweet Nan!'—how could a fellownotbe taken by a thing as charming as that? Sweet Nan, sweet Nan!"—he obeyed the oddest impulse to say it over and over. With which then, none the less, as if for avoidance of his turning silly, he addressed to his companion such a vague extenuating smile as he knew he would have taken, had it been addressed to himself, for a positive grin of aggravation.
"If you make so much of it as that," Miss Midmore amiably replied, "I shall have to think you love it better than what you might callme."
"Call you? Why, I'll call you anything you like. Miss!" he laughed—but still too much, as he felt, in the sense of his vagueness.
"Oh upon my word," she tossed up her head to say, "if you can't think yourself of what I should like I'm not the girl to hunt it up for you."
"What do you say to 'jolly Molly'?" her brother, on this, took leave to ask, putting the question to Ralph with an unexpected friendly candour. "If you had heard her named that way wouldn't it have made you want to know her? But perhaps it was the way, and that it was so you were taken captive. Of course I don't know, in spite of what they say," he went on, "what has shaken us so together."
"It must have been that he had heard of you as merry Perry!" the girl at once retorted; upon which Mrs. Midmore as promptly remarked that she had never in her life listened to so much nonsense.
"One would really think," she continued to Ralph, "that such things as letters had never passed between us, and that it's a mistake or a mystery that Molly herself, from a year ago, wrote to you under my approval."
"He wrote to me under my own," Molly said, while her bold eyes, all provoking indulgence, suggested to him again in that connection more matters than any he immediately grasped. But he felt he must try to grasp, having somehow got so ridiculously off and away. Of course he would have written to her, of course hemustand with the lapse of another moment he had expressed this for his relief—making the point to extravagance in fact, in order to make it at all.
"I wrote you three to your one, you know—which I dare sayyouwill have noticed," he observed to her mother, "since I hope she was always pleased enough."
"I grant you, cousin," Perry interposed, "that there has gone on here for months past such a sight of writing and reading as would have done credit to a lawyer's office. I congratulate you and congratulatethemon what it seems to have meant." He had spoken in franker accommodation than had yet come from him, and now walked away to the window, where, looking out, he drew a deep breath again; Ralph remaining struck with his odd alternations, those, as who should say, of a man who could lose his ease and fail of his balance and then once more recover them—which was in fact very much what was happening to our friend himself.
"I suppose you've kept my letters, every one of which I remember, as I've kept yours," Molly resumed in her great gaiety—"so that I can bring them down to you tied up with pink ribbons, and then, if we compare, we'll see who wrote oftenest; though of course I quite allow," she smiled, "who wrote best."
Ralph met afresh on this one of his needs to consider. "You have 'em tied up with pink ribbon?"
"You mean," Molly asked "that you've tied up mine with blue? Or that you've tied up mother's with black?"
He was conscious, once more, that the truth of this would come to him—but meanwhile, just for the instant, he wondered and waited. "You've really got mine to show me?"
"In return for your showing me mine; which—look at him, look at him!" she said to her mother—"I don't half believe you've kept."
He was obliged to hang fire but a moment longer—it was like that question of her portrait in his pocket. He hadn't been sure of that, but the miniature was nevertheless there. Her letters weren't secreted about his person of course, but where would they be else than at the bottom of that box at his inn? "If you can prove one of them missing," he was thus in twenty seconds ready to answer, "I'll chew the rest of 'em up and swallow 'em, red tape and all."
"Have you tied mine with red tape?" Mrs. Midmore asked in full amusement.
The pleasure of being certain when he could be certain was, he rejoiced to note, as great to him as ever. "We don't deal in that article as much in America, no doubt, as you do here, but one always takes it, you know, for binding—and if I'm bound with pink ribbon," he said to Molly, "I'll have you understand thatyou'retied, my dear, as the lawyers tie up deeds and contracts. So that's the way," he laughed, "I hold you to your bargain." With which indeed, however, he had but to hear the elder lady enrich the air with her assurance that their bargain was the best witnessed as well as the fairest she had ever had to do with, in order to feel anew that pinch of conscience, as he could only have called it, which he had a few minutes before too insufficiently soothed. He might really have been telling lies within these later instants—by the measure, that is, of his recurrent wish to establish his innocence of the other recognition. His need in this connection withal was to be clearest to Mrs. Midmore. "Ten times on the voyage did I read them all over, and in fact if she dares to doubt of it I'll repeat every word of 'em before you and her brother—which is a threat, my love, that I think will keep you quiet," he gaily continued to the girl herself. And he had on it an extraordinary further inspiration—so far as one such was more extraordinary than another, and so far as what was now before him, for instance, was more so than that quick vividness, just recorded, of his sense, his positive exact vision, of the red-taped packets in the portmanteau. "I have them by heart with the funny spelling and all; and if our company only hear, without seeing, your sweetest passages, my dear, they won't know, they won't know——!"
"That I did once write 'affection' with one 'f', you mean?" Molly broke in with so little resentment as to convert into light banter on his part a stretch of allusion which he had risked with a slight fear of excess. "You'll find also when you look again that I once spelled 'frightful'ite—I remembered it after my letter had gone. And I remember something else too—which, however, I'll not confess to before them."
"You confess so charmingly," Ralph returned, "that it only makes me love you the more"—for indeed it really touched him that she didn't protest with blushes or other missish arts, but showed herself, as he might have said, splendidly shameless. This after a fashion drew them closer still—for what was it but the success of his pleasantry? and it struck him that she had at no moment yet "told" for so frankly handsome as in seeming thus to invite him but to come on with what humour he would. This allowed him once more all the taste of finding himself right—so right that, for the matter of her "friteful", he knew as well, which meant he remembered, that she had added an 'l' at the end, which she always did in like case. Of this droll grace he now reminded her, to the further consecration of the brave intimacy playing between them; the freedom of which reached a climax, however, in his being able to convict her at once of the peculiar lapse that she admitted without naming it. There were moments, light as air, at which he proceeded by spasms of exhilaration—renewals, that is, of his sense of the sudden, the happy, the far jump to the point of vantage that just offered room, and no more, for the tips of his toes, thereby making it a miracle that, besides exactly alighting, he should afterwards balance himself too in such pride, the pride well-nigh of the poet's herald Mercury on his heaven-kissing hill. There it was before him, Molly's own finest flight, toward the lower right-hand corner of one of her loosest pages. "Your guilty secret is that of the 'goast' at some haunted house where you had paid a visit—unless it was but a case of a plural gone wrong and a house really haunted with goats!"
She met him with the freshest interest over this, and it was extraordinary how nothing could more have expressed to him what a dear girl, in fact what a very fine young woman, she was; half the charm consisting moreover in the oddity that while she used, pen in hand, wrong letters galore, her lips, the loveliest in all the world, gave them to the ear in the fairest and rightest fusion, and testified to an education that would have had nothing to gain, one seemed to see, from better terms with her inkpot. It was much as if he had known in New York young women of a common literacy enough who at the same time carried no further the effect of breeding. His English cousin meanwhile denied, at any rate, the last aberration imputed to her—it wasn't a bit, she declared, her actual mistake, which latter, though really a worse one, he thereby showed he hadn't remarked.
He laughed out his desire to know what could be really finer than the flower he had culled, and was ready to prove to her that he had other flowers too by presenting her at her convenience the entire nosegay. The spirit of this contention on both sides would have continued, no doubt, to raise the pitch of pleasure hadn't Perry, turning round from his window as if to stare at a pair of comedians in a play, intervened in a manner that spoke again of the notable growth of his wit.
"As I think you've never in your life written to me in any absence," he said to his sister, "of course I can't answer for your way with it, especially as one has heard that love-letters are always distracted, and I wouldn't give a rap myself for one that wasn't"—of which last he rather solemnly notified Ralph. "My sister Nan," he further informed him, "isn't a girl to lose her head even when she loses her heart; there's never a word out in anythingshewrites, and whenever I'm away from her she does me the kindness."
"Pray how canyoujudge of her style," Molly asked in derision, "when you told me but the other day you'd bring me a specimen of your own to look over and then didn't?—which I think must have been because on your intending the first letter of your life you found the feat was beyond you. It was to have been to a lady, didn't I understand?—and you'll have lost your head, I suppose, even more than your heart, and were afraid of showing for more distracted than need have been."
Perry Midmore, under this retort, only looked at the girl as if her humour, keen though it might have been, already found his thought, drawn off; so that, unexpectedly to Ralph, his defence was but after an instant to ignore her and make, as with a decenter interest, an appeal to their guest. "I should like to showyou, sir, how Nan can acquit herself, though I'm sure of course that you understand our exchange of compliments. We bandy words in sport and among ourselves, but don't take 'em, you may well suppose, from any one else. I quite agree with my mother," he further remarked, "that we're bound to take you for a man of the greatest taste."
Ralph had already noted in him that his eyes, which seemed to wish for some restless reason to keep clear of those of his announced brother-in-law, might at the same time have been resisting with difficulty some possibly better cause for not appearing to avoid them. He almost caught himself in the act of wondering after another moment whether this member of the family were not appointed to interest him more by a round-about course than the others by the directness which matched his own and which would perhaps give his own, after all, comparatively little to do. That flight of fancy couldn't but spring from the inference, now lively, that Perry was now practising the art of the straight look very much as he might have practised that of balancing his stick on his chin. Again with this, however, the difficulty recurred: wanting himself, and wanting much, to encourage the freedom, he yet troubled it by the look returned as a sign of that. Should he have, he asked himself, to shut his eyes so that his cousin might keephisopen upon him? "Take me in, take me in, and see how little it will hurt you," he felt he should have liked to say; but what came back was that just the intention of it defeated somehow as by excess of meaning the act of reassurance. What the devil could have been at stake, he seemed to see the poor man wonder, when one of the scales, to drop enough, demanded such a weight as that? All the while, none the less, Perry's success in facing him did go on. The great thing, Ralph therefore judged, was for them to miss no breath of real communication that either might feel he could draw. If either wanted practice here it was, and by way of proving this wouldn't he himself, our friend reflected, do just the right thing in playing a little with that question of the family tone? "Yes," he smiled at his kinsman, though signifying that he made the point scarce less for the ladies too, "yes, your way with each other is the pleasantest possible; but all the same, you know, I somehow feel mixed with it the presence of stronger passions and—what shall I impute to you?—fiercer characters than I've been used to in my rather heavy and puritanical part of the world."
"Good Lord, you don't mean to say you're a Puritan!" Mrs. Midmore quickly exclaimed, in the noblest horror.
"I guess we're all Puritans over there as compared to you," Ralph had no difficulty whatever in deciding at once to reply. "You're all high-coloured and splendidly of this world." He found a pleasure in saying it out, as he had been feeling it so from the first; besides which it was the remark of broadest application that he had yet permitted himself, and there was a degree of relief in that. This not least, either, on his seeing how it stirred Mrs. Midmore up, for nothing could be clearer than that whenever stirred up she would affect him at her grandest.
"Do you mean I don't believe in another world than this?" she asked, "when, as indeed as good a churchwoman as there is in England, I never miss a proper occasion of declaring it!"
"Well, we're Church folk too in New York, thank God," Ralph said, "but we've scarcely a church that you'd know from a conventicle, and don't you see how even in this elegant talk with yourselves I can scarce keep down my own snuffle?"
"It's you, I'm sure, cousin, who give our conversation its greatest elegance," Mrs. Midmore returned, "and I can't fancy what you mean by our high colour——!"
"Any more than I do"—Molly took the word straight from her—"by his calling us fierce, forsooth, or talking of himself as pale; when he has as fine a brown skin as one would wish to see if one likes brown men; which, however, I never dreamed I should, sir!" she wound up as boldly as ever. "I shouldn't have supposed we were fiercer than a country still containing so many blacks and savages," she as lightly remarked, "and, for our passions, I don't hesitate to say, need I, mother and brother? that I but live to control mine. What in life is our religion for," she inquired of Ralph with the same ready wit, "what is it for but just to teach us to do that?" He took her in afresh as she so put the case, but could pay her the frankest tribute and still return with a laugh: "Of course it's for that, and all I mean is that you strike me as kneeling to your Maker very much as you curtsey to your king—doing it too, to judge by the splendid service I attended at Plymouth after landing, among as many feathers and frills as ever would deck you out at court." There were moments when he so liked the way they listened to him as if his cleverness was beyond their custom that, this impression just now renewing itself, he could only go on. "Our feathers in America, you know, serve for the blacks, who bristle with them from head to foot like so many porcupines when they want to fight us; but," he broke off in friendly amusement at their reception of this, "there isn't a bravery you flaunt or a passion you succeed in smothering that I don't perfectly rejoice in and bless you for. I like you just as you are, and wouldn't have you or have anything a bit different," he sociably declared; "yes, yes, I'm more pleased with what I find you than ever I've been with anything in my life, and not least pleased with my cousin Perry," he resolutely pushed on; "even though hewilllook as if he doesn't know what to make of me and wouldn't trust me a step nearer to him—or is it, still more than that, a step further than you can keep your eye on me, cousin?"
He put that question, but neither abating nor enlarging his distance; it was one of the moments of his holding them under the spell of his growing brilliancy, as he might for all the world have imagined—too much under it to move an eyelid for the time, and yet also with the betrayed impulse to exchange a wink, vulgarly so to call it, between themselves; the very impulse, all of sharpened comfort surely, to show each otherwherethey felt together, which he had already more than once caught in the act of profiting by its quick opportunity. Not their impulse, however, and not any play of comment that should attest his success with them, was most matter for thought with him now; but exactly his himself so wishing to cry out that he was pleased, to say again and yet again that he liked what was before him, so that there might be no mistake about it for his own nerves. His nerves, happily and helpfully active from the first, had been in just that proportion a pleasure to themselves—so that up to the moment of his first hearing of sweet Nan, whom he was now so oddly unable to figure save as very peculiarly one with this term of allusion to her, which mightallhave been, as they said in Boston, her "given" name, up to that moment his sail had done nothing but swell in the breeze. Why the mere hint ofmoresweetness still than the already looked for and the already grasped should have suddenly caused the breeze to drop and the sail to indulge in its first, its single flap, was not so much his concern as to arrest the possibility of any like further little waste of force. It was glorious so to vibrate, but to do it you needed your force—in fact all there was of it; so that to spend even one throb of it on any mystery of a particular muffled point or fact was at the best a loose form of contribution. So played the instinct to make surer still what was sure; yes, such a truth, for instance, as the perfect practicability of Perry even, once he should bereallyreduced to matter of splendid sport. For didn't itallkeep becoming again splendid sport?—that is if he left out the question of sweet Nan, which seemed something different and possibly either of a lower sort of interest or of none at all; unless indeed possibly of a yet greater.
The pitch therefore was at all events that there was no hint of a doubt as to the clear taste of his feast while it thus continued to be served, as well as that the right expression could only consist accordingly of the loudest smack of his lips. The company then, after the fashion we have noted, admired him at this exercise, and his sense of rich free words on Mrs. Midmore's and Molly's part, to the effect that their passing muster with him was perhaps nothing to gape at, had for its sequel a silent turn of Perry back to the window, though whether or no in more complete accommodation remained to be seen. He had at any rate been sufficiently beguiled by his guest's renewed overture of a moment previous not to wish to rebut at once any impression of this. Ralph consequently continued a minute longer to celebrate that idea of his success, as he could but treat himself to the crudity of calling it; while Mrs. Midmore, on her side, and with the breadth of her wisdom, recommended him never to overdo the act of humility, since in their world at least, however it might be in his native, you didn't get much more than what you were ready to fight for, and had always best set an example to people's opinion of you.
"Well," he answered to this, "if I like you, all three, for every mark you carry, every one of 'em without exception, as I again declare, so I want you to believe in me to the same tune, without my leaving in the dark a single side by which I may shine. I'll be as proud as you choose—look at menow," he went on, "and see if you can doubt of that; but I'll be hanged if you shan't love me for my modesty too, since otherwise you'll miss it when it comes to your giving your friends the right account of me. You'll want to be able to say enough to excuse you——!"
"To excuse us pray from what?" Mrs. Midmore sought to know at the very top of her grand air. "Understand, for goodness' sake, that we excuse ourselves here, in the civil way, but from things we haven't done, and that the things we have, the course once taken, the act performed or the need obeyed, we stick to, please, with nobody's leave whatever asked. I should like to see, sir," she wound up at this great elevation, "who you won't be good enough for if you're good enough for us!"
It was just the kind of thing he found he liked to draw from her, though Molly showed now such a peculiar play of consideration for him as made his own eyes while he replied signal back to her. "Oh I leave it to you, I leave it to you—you'll see, as soon as it becomes a question of my really flourishing, for my own opinion at least, how much I shall leave to you. I don't say," he added after this fashion to Molly as well, "that I mayn't do you credit and service as much as you do me, but I'm not flattering myself that Molly at the utmost will knowallmy reasons for delighting in her, or even guess the half of them."
"I'm perhaps better at guessing than you think," the girl returned, "but I've never myself indeed wanted more reasons for anything than that my taste is my taste and my choice my choice and that I believe myself able to defend them."
"Ah you splendour!"—he radiantly took her up. But she had at once gone on.
"I hope there's nobody I shall praise you to for your being humble-minded, for I can't think of an acquaintance of ours with whom it would do you the least good even if you should need the benefit. Look after your own interests, as mamma says—and we'll look after ours and let other people look after their's; they seem mostly able to!" And then as the glow of the sentiment on which she so could practise was still there in his face it virtually invited, as he could feel, another turn of her hand. "If that was a compliment to us just now about the strength of the passions in us, is it your notion that a person's modesty should figure as one of them? It puts the question, you see, of whether one would be modestly passionate or passionately modest—and I don't mind telling you, if you need the information, which you'll have to take fromme."
"You give me wondrous choices," Ralph laughed, "but I hope I can get on with the information I've by this time gained. That is aboutyou, aboutyou," and he drew out his considering look at her—any further intention in which, however, Mrs. Midmore impatiently checked.
"If you can get on with the nonsense she talks you'll do more than I sometimes can; but I really think, you know," she added, "that you're teaching us a new language altogether and that in our own dull company we don't say half such odd things."
"It's perfectly true, mother"—and the girl kept it up at her friend; "he has made me say more of them in the last half hour, not to speak of doing 'em, the happy wretch, than in all my long life before!"
"Ah don't speak of any influence of mine," Ralph cried on as earnest a note as had yet sounded from him—"don't speak as if you didn't yourself put into my head all the wonder and the pleasure. The proportion in which I take these things from you is beyond any in which I can give others back. Do you see what I mean?"—and his earnestness appealed even to Perry, who had within a minute faced about again as for intelligence of what was said. Mrs. Midmore's appearance bore out in truth the hint thatherintelligence had reached its term—a fact rendering perhaps more remarkable any fresh aspiration of her son's. It was at the worst of immediate interest to Ralph that this worthy, with a positively amused look at him, at once showed signs.
"If Molly's modest at all," he maturely observed, "she makes the point, I judge, that she's passionately so; whatever that may mean, she's welcome to the comfort. ButImake the point," he said with increasing weight, "that my sister Nan, sweet Nan as you properly name her, fits on the other cap—the more becoming, as I understand it, to any young woman."
"Sweet Nan, he wants you to understand," Molly intervened on this, "is a shrinking flower of the field, whereas I'm no better than one of the bedraggled!"
"I see, I see"—our hero jumped to the vision: "you're the one infinitely talked about, as how shouldn't you be? But your sister has her virtue."
"Her virtue, Lord bless us," Mrs. Midmore took him up: "why I hope to heaven she has, with so little to speak of else; though she'll be glad, no doubt, cousin, to know that you answer for it!"
"Oh there are all kinds of virtue!" Ralph still laughed in his harmonising way—which his hostess, however, on that article, wouldn't have too much of.
"I never heard of but one kind, which is quite enough. Thank you for putting on us more!" And she wished to know of her son what possessed him to make such claims. "If we work you up so about the child," she inquired of Ralph as well, "how shall you not be disappointed?—let her have as she will for you the making of a brave little sister."
"Oh but I can imagine nothing better than a little sister to match the bravery of the rest of you, the brave little brother and the brave little bride, walking all three in the steps of the brave great mother—since you're so good, madam, as to become in some degree mine too. I'm sure," our young man declared, "that all Perry wants is to fit to our shy sister that other cap of Molly's—which one is it, my dear?" he asked directly of this young woman; and then before she could say: "Oh yes, the pale passion of modesty, which you won't letmefall back on: for the want, I mean, of a better one among ourselves at home."
"How do you know Nan's shy?" the girl demanded straight; "for it can't be as if you knew by being so yourself! Can't you understand," Molly pursued, "that the man of my tastehasonly to be as bold as a lion and to think of nothing less?"
"Well, I don't of course know that she's shy—that is Ididn't; though I was guided so well by my apprehension of yourself. Yes"—and he looked about at them with the fairly musing gravity of this recognition—"I shouldn't much mind, you see, if I didn't fairly seem so to miss it!"
"Misswhat, sir, in the name of goodness?" Molly asked with impatience; "when you pull a face as long as if you were missing your purse! You don't suspect us, I hope, of hugging you to rifle your pockets!"
He felt himself flush, and also, with his eyes on them again successively as to show them how he smiled, felt the probability of his looking silly. "I make too much of it, I know; but what I miss is my having been right; I mean, don't you see," and still foolishly he heard himself explain, "about—well, about what we were saying."
"Do you understand our clever cousin, mother dear, after all?" Molly wailed in a filial appeal.
Mrs. Midmore's own attention helped to point the doubt. "He mustn't betooterribly clever for us, certainly! We enjoy immensely your being so extraordinary; but I'm sure you'll take it in good part if I remind you that there is a limit."
"Yes, of course there must be!" he quite seriously agreed.
"A limit, I mean"—she bridled a little—"to our poor old English wit."
"Oh that's another matter—and when you look at me in a certain way—even when Perry does," he declared, though he could have bitten his lip the next moment for his "even"—"I'm more afraid of it than I ever was of anything in my life. I took your reminder to be for the limit of our pleasure together; though why," he demanded of Molly, "should we fall to speech of that when the article itself has scarcely so much as begun? I do enjoy you—I do, I do!"—and he showed, almost with vehemence, that he meant it for them all. "It's for that very reason I should have liked to be wholly right. But there I am again!" he laughed—"I can't keep off that strangeness of my momentary lapse, for though it was short it was sharp. However——!" And he beamed in resolute relief upon brave Molly.
"You can't keep off my everlasting little sister—that's what you can't keep off!" her bravery answered, though rather as to put it as helpfully as possible to his comprehension than to make a circumstance of her pretending to a jealousy that might or that mightn't become her. She struck him at that instant as not a little puzzled, and he had already felt how moving, in a person of her force, an unexpected patience would easily be. He had even for this one of those rarest reaches of apprehension on which he had been living and soaring for the past hour and which represented the joy he had just reasseverated; impatience was surely one of her bright marks, but he saw that to live with her would be to find her often deny it in ways unforeseen and that thus seemed for the moment to show themselves as the most delightful things in nature.
"Well, but it isn't she, it's my own stupidity where I ought particularly not to have been stupid." He replied with the good-humour which he desired to feel so much more than anything else, and would have explained further but that she cut him straight off—he did of a truth, in spite of everything, keep giving her such opportunities.
"Is what's so dreadfully the matter with you, pray, that if you had known there were two of us I'm exactly the one you wouldn't have preferred?—so that you took me in other words only because supposing there was nobody better!"
"Therecouldbe nobody better, love!" he promptly enough laughed—and yet somehow felt it a little weak for the absurd intensity of the question; since the casewasreally that, more and more desirable as she grew with every point she made, it did inwardly and inexpugnably beset him that the fine possession of truth on which he had been acting wasn't then so very fine if it left a secret humiliation possible. There was a word on his tongue that would help indeed to preserve the secrecy; which was stayed, however, by a prior word of Mrs. Midmore's.
"Does the younger girl, in America, cousin, push in for an establishment before her elders are properly settled?" The question, uttered with all kind coolness, referred itself, as he felt, to the perfect proprieties, yet nothing had so placed the speaker in the light of the manners surrounding them, and he couldn't have told why it was unanswerable save by his going into more things, and perhaps even meaner things, than he then could care for. He wasn't, was he? pledged to Molly, or she to him, through her being offered in the order of the proprieties; but his kinswoman, in spite of this, could easily have convinced him that his not taking her point would be low. For what was the old order in which he found himself so triumphantly, even so pantingly, float but a grand order? and what his having at some moments to breathe so hard but the very attestation of his equal strength? It was when he breathed hardest, he again recognised, that his throbs meant most to him; and he perhaps hadn't been so little at a loss for anything as now for the right humour and the right look. "It's everywhere easier, I suppose, to find a wife than to find a husband, but marrying, as in all new countries, I take it, proceeds so fast that you'd scarce notice by watching among us, in any company, who comes in first. Those who do that here," he developed at this high level of urbanity, "do it doubtless by a longer stretch than we ever have to show; but how shall I tell you what I mean by there not being perhaps so many there to come in last—or such a difference even, for that matter, between last and first? I dare say you wouldn't at once know many of 'em apart."
These were still for his audience wondrous explanations—they plainly required among the three some art of following; though the three, it was to be added, combined at moments, rather oddly, an appearance, a positive hush, of blankness, with the signified sufficiency of their own usual names for things. "We're not accustomed to think here that the last are as good as the first," Mrs. Midmore said, "and if you want to see the differences therecanbe between them I flatter myself we shall have plenty to show you. You must let me tell you too," she went on, "that now that I know you I don't believe a word of their all dancing in America to such a tune as yours, and I believe it exactly least when you argue in such a pretty way for it."
This appeared so to express her daughter's feeling too that Molly borrowed at once the fortunate word. "And his being a bachelor in spite of it, what's his argument forthat, I should like to know! If it's so easy to marry there, and nobody can keep out of it, somebody ought to have caught you before poor me—though I'm sure I'm much obliged to all of those who failed."
"Ah, my dear, none of 'em quite 'failed'" Ralph laughed.
"'Quite, quite'?"—she echoed his amusement. "A miss is as good as a mile, and a girl either gets a husband or doesn't. Unless you mean"—she kept it up—"that though single you're engaged: to some other sweet creature, or perhaps to a dozen, as well as to me." And then while he felt himself exceed his smile as she blazed on him with this, "I don'tholda man single who drags about twenty hearts: he's no better than Bluebeard himself—unless found out in time."
"Fortunately I'm found out in time then," Ralph again laughed—"that is in time to give you the key of the dreadful room and yet trust in spite of it to your courage—not to say to your regard."
"'Regard' is a fine word when you mean my foolish curiosity!" With which of a sudden she looked at him, he seemed to know, still harder and more intendingly than hitherto—to the effect in fact of his feeling more than ever how sufficiently he must meet it. That sufficiency, yes, took all his care—pulling on it there quite supremely; but there was notably always the luck that whereas such exchanges with her might have resulted for him most of all in the impression of something almost deadly in her force, what kept overriding them was the truth of her beauty. If this last indeed was of itself a deadly force he could but oppose to it an accepted fate—for what turn of her head, of her hand or of her spirit wasn't somehow a flash of that treasure? How she knew as much herself too, and fairly bettered it by rejoicing in it! "If I stare you out of countenance—and I do, mother, don't I, if you'll look at him!—it's because I'm not ashamed of my curiosity, or of any other good reason for looking at you! I thank you for the key, as you call it," she laughed on, "and I'm sure I already see the poor things strung up in their dreadful row."
"You must really forgive her for a nasty torment," said Mrs. Midmore on this, and not a little as if she had seen that hewasout of countenance. "I should think very ill of you if you had broken no heart—Ihad clean broken a dozen before I patched up my husband's. After that, however, I assure you I kept my hands quite off; and if Molly will expect you to do as much now yourself, it's no more than you'll expect of her and that I give you my word for it I'll back you in. I should be ashamed of her as well, I don't mind saying, if nobody had been the worse for her—though of course one knows how much less a gentleman need be the worse than a female. It isn't to me at any rate that I ask you to confess," she nobly and brightly added.
"Well, I confess toone!" Ralph on this felt himself moved to break out. He had visitations, had been having them uninterruptedly and with a vengeance—looking for them, invoking them, enjoying them as they came; but there was one that took him by surprise and that in the oddest way sinned by excess. He hadn't three minutes before expected it, and as soon as he had spoken it seemed irrelevant. There it was none the less for himself, and at least, with his bravest ring, he could stick to it. "One, yes, one. I won't disown her. That is," he qualified, "I was myself greatly smitten, and seem to have let her know it. But I must have let her know it," he laughed, "in vain!"
"You 'seem to have'?" Miss Midmore echoed—"but you're not quite sure, any more than of how she treated you? It must have been one of your pale passions, as you call 'em, truly—so that even if her ghost does hover I shan't be afraid of so very thin a shade."
Our young man cast about as in some wonder of his own, meeting now but for a moment the eyes of none of them. "Yes, it's a thin shade—and melts away hiding its face, even while I look back at it."
"She may well hide her face," Mrs. Midmore improvingly cried, "if she was ever such a fool as not to have felt your worth. Still," Ralph's hostess went on with her fine air at its finest, "it's a comfort to know the worst of you—which seems to be no more than that you recover easily from disappointments."
Ralph faced her for this, his wonder again in his eyes—that wonder at himself which had on occasion, as appeared, a sharper play than any inspired by his friends. "I don't know about that—no! But as I'm not disappointed now, and am plainly not going to be," he at once added, "I don't see that the question matters. And when once I learn a thing I learn it—I do really make it my own," he added by an odd transition. "I had to learn—that was my point—about sweet Nan; but now that I have, but now that I know it's as if I had known always, or have at any rate lived down my surprise." He put that to them thus with earnest frankness and as if it might much relieve and interest them; and was moved with it in fact further to image their general dependence. "It's as if there were a few doors that don't yield to my push—though we've seen most of them fly open, haven't we? Those I mean have to be opened from within, as you've also seen." And again his point was made for his listening friends by that fine ingenuity which they either, to judge by something recurrent in their faces, couldn't sufficiently admire in him or couldn't sufficiently follow. "The case is that when once I am in the room it takes on quite the look of nature—at the end of almost no time." And then as with the quality of a certain hush in them beyond any of the several he had already had occasion to note his bringing about, he plunged deeper rather than shook himself free—dived to pick up, as who should say, just the right pearl of cheer. "I'm not speaking literally of this room—though it does strike me as extraordinarily beautiful. I've taken it all in—there isn't a spare cool grace in it that I don't admire." He waved at it all vaguely while they stared—yes, more than ever stared. What was he saying, what was he saying? he even inwardly questioned under the effect of that; which effect too, however, was that of his not caring so long as he cleared the matter for himself. "I mean a kind of idea of a room; so that catching the idea is what I call crossing the threshold. The thing is that when I catch it I really hold it, don't you see? The thing is that when I know where I am all the rest falls together and I then defy any bewilderment. But I have to know where I am first. I did that perfectly the moment I came in here, the moment I came in there below. I defy you," he smiled and smiled to the three, "to prove on me any bewilderment—save that of course about sweet Nan, which we've all now got completely over." The pearl of cheer, held up between his fingers, threw out its light at them after the manner of pearls. "I've lived intohertruth—yes, lived on into it, and all in a few minutes, shouldn't you say, doing me that justice? So that now I'm ready for anything."
It was Perry who took this up first, though not till after an interval, curiously prolonged to Ralph's measure, during which that appearance for our friend of his companions' helpless failure of any sign of their reading into his solicitous speech an imputable sense, however off-hand the imputation, amounted practically to a rupture of relation with them and presented them to his vision, during a series of moments, wellnigh as an artful, a wonderful trio, some mechanic but consummate imitation of ancient life, staring through the vast plate of a museum. It was for all the world as if his own interpretation grew, under this breath of a crisis, exactly by the lapse of theirs, lasting long enough to suggest that his very care for them had somehow annihilated them, or had at least converted them to thenecessarilyvoid and soundless state. He could understand that they didn't, and that this would have made them take him for mad, the chill and the dismay of which—felt for that matter by Ralph too—turned them to stone or wood or wax, or whatever it was they momentarily most resembled. The chill was a true felt drop of the temperature, the waft across them all of a mortal element, mortal at least to the others and menacing, should it have continued, to himself. That it couldn't possibly have continued, at such a portentous pitch, however, was the next instant standing out to sharpness in the fact of natural sound, sound borne up to them as from the cobbles of the Square and floating familiar life back to them. Perry's voice it was, positively, that had the warmth, and that was already, for the good of all of them, translating the suspense into terms. "Are you ready for Sir Cantopher?" he asked of Ralph with a pertinence which, as soon as thus attested, seemed to have picked up our young man's declaration with an overreaching hand.Therewas something they could rally to, particularly as a loud rubadubdub at the door had followed the report of arrested coach-wheels before it. "Ah, there the dear man is!" Mrs. Midmore at once recovered her faculty to say—even if all to the immediate effect of calling on Ralph first to search his own.
"Sir Cantopher, Sir Cantopher?" It was nature again for Ralph even if it was in its prime newness uncertainty. And it was uncertainty but just enough to prepare his glow of response. "Sir Cantopher Bland? Why, there's nothing I shall more prize than the honour of his acquaintance."
"He looks forward eagerly to the pleasure of yours," Mrs. Midmore remarked with clear assurance; so that Molly was the last to speak—which she did all to the tune again of her own high colour.
"I hope it won't interfere with your liking him, sir, that as you've been so taken with the fancy of my sister, he's taken worse still and from years and years ago."
"Oh he's in love with her? Yes surely, I know that—know it now," Ralph added.
"Of course you know it when I tell you, dear," the girl returned smiling, but with her eyes, it struck him, searching him as we have just noted his having had to search himself. He felt it as more of a watch of him in spite of his word than anything had yet been, and this he resented in proportion to his pride in the fine presence of mind he had so quickly recovered. So that made him positively go further, go in fact a length which was the longest he had used up to now.
"Ah I know more than you tell me, I know what I'vebeenknowing. Of course he is in love with Nan," he made out "almost as much in love with her as I'm with you. Only with the difference," it came to him, "that his passion isn't returned——!"
"As I return yours is what you mean, dear?"—she took him straight up. And then when he had quickly pronounced this exactly what he meant, with a glance too at the fact that so much was evident, he had still to meet her asking how he could be so sure when they had been having it from him, and to the extent of his fairly complaining, that no information about her sister had ever reached him. The effect—he at once took this in—was of his being fairly cross-questioned, so that he should somehow be put to the proof of what he might say with the very entrance of the gentleman who would have already alighted below and perhaps be now on the stair. She really pushed it quite home. "You complained, you know, my dear, that we had left you in such ignorance."
"Ignorance of Nan, yes—only not ignorance of Sir Cantopher, at least as a ground of complaint. But I don't mind a bit, you see, what I didn't know before: that's all made up to me," he found himself pleading, "and Iwantso, don't you understand? to be with you in everything."
It was not unapparent to him meanwhile either that Mrs. Midmore, during this exchange, was momentarily mystified at her daughter's share in it, or that Perry, quite detached apparently from any question of a step toward their visitor, had witnessed forhisattention by turning again to the window. But it was to himself directly that his hostess addressed a more confessedly puzzled expression than had yet comported for her with her dignity. "My child must sometimes seem to give you the absurdest notice of a temper!" And then after an instant to the girl: "Don't, you gipsy, make yourself outmoreof a romp than nature has done." With which she appeared really, as the surer way, to appeal again to Ralph, who noted at the same time, however, that she might, by the betrayal of her eye, have caught some sense of her daughter's reason. "When everything's so right," she asked, "how can anything be wrong?"—and she had put no other question with so near an approach to a quaver.
"Do you think that to turn your head isn't what I most wish in the world?" were the only words, and splendidly spoken to her lover, with which Molly took up the remonstrance. "Mother herself knows that, just as I know how she wants it scarce less. But all the same, dear sir," she continued thus forcibly to reason, "I must put common sense between us foryoursake even if I can do with fancy for my own. It isn't a thing to quarrel about, even if anythingcouldbe," she shiningly pursued, "but you must keep your head steady enough to satisfy me here. If you hadn't been aware of our friend's cross mistress, how could you be aware of our friend himself, who thinks of nobody else, and even talks of nobody, when he can get tired ears to listen?"
Ralph felt himself in the box, but also that never was a witness to have seen his embarrassment so enrich his interest. "Oh is she cross——?" The tone of the cry must have been comically candid, for it moved the ladies together to such a spasm of mirth that Perry, who wasn't amused, looked round to see why. Before which even, however, their kinsman had continued much to the same effect: "And he thinks and talks of nobody——?" Though with all gaiety, since they were gay, he corrected it a little for Perry. "Of course, of course—he does as he likes!"
Perry faced him on it. "He does indeed—and why in the world shouldn't he? It's the kind of gentleman heis."
This was really, for Perry, an explanation, and Ralph beamed acknowledgment. "It will be delightful to see the kind as you grow them here!"
"Ah nobody could be more civil," Mrs. Midmore interposed, "and very few, I assure you, cousin, are so clever and so keen. But surely, as he doesn't come up, you should wait on him below," she said to her son.
This worthy none the less didn't stir; he only stood looking at Ralph; with which, to the latter's surprise, he carried explanation further. "I don't say he'smyman, mind you"—it was positively pacific. "And you can guess whether I'd behis, as my mother describes him—apart I mean from his liking Nan and our wishing to see her suited."
"Which she isn't of course," Ralph said, "if she doesn't likehim!" It was as if Perry of a sudden had opened to him, and as if moreover, feeling this, he couldn't too cordially meet it. He met it most indeed by carrying his response on to Molly. "I see her as 'cross'—so far as 'sweet Nan' admits of that—because of her perhaps fearing that you want to overbear her. That is that you all together do, I mean—for I don't make it personal to yourself, dear!—and, as she holds out against you, treat her to the discipline of bread and water in a moated grange to see if it won't bring her round." The way to deal with his mistress, he more than ever felt, was to deal to extravagance—which was clearly at this moment so right that it seemed to invite him to pile it up. "If she'll have him you'll take her back, but if she won't, that istillshe gives way, she's reduced to her crust and her cell. Only," he asked to the same effect, "how can Sir Cantopher himself suppose such rigours will serve him?"
"HereisSir Cantopher himself, to satisfy you!" Mrs. Midmore cried—for the opened door now gave passage to the footman who had admitted Ralph and who announced the awaited friend. She called her welcome to this personage almost before he appeared. "You take your time, you pampered thing—when we've never so much wanted to see you!"
If the moments at which Ralph had felt the happy enlargement of his situation, during the past half-hour, had been much more numerous than those at which he was held of a sudden in a sort of constriction, he now knew within the minute that the elation of ease had caught him up high and higher. This came at once from the sight of the gentleman who entered to kiss Mrs. Midmore's hand before he did anything else, though indeed he gave Ralph a glance by the way, and of whom our young man at once conveniently noted that he performed the pretty act not at all as by prescription but somehow as by special inspiration, or even by the custom of oddity. He made a difference, the quickest—his arrival made it, and his look at Ralph and his fine good-morning to the others, before he had spoken a word but this last; the difference, that is, of replacing by their interest in his presence a certain self-consciousness on the part of each of the four into which their commerce of the last ten minutes had perhaps a trifle awkwardly tightened. And this verily, wasn't it? just by no more than the glance of his eye, a small sharp eye in a long narrow face, giving a sense as it did on the spot for Ralph's imagination to Mrs. Midmore's warrant of his keenness. Was it anything more than that he was intelligent?—though why if it wasn't could Ralph's heart leap up so without thereby implying that the others, the so agreeable others (for hadn't Perry turned agreeable too!) had beguiled him but with the common? However the question hovered but to drop, for there was no conceivable tribute to taste that his grand kinswoman didn't seem to render as she said to her new visitor: "I desire your acquaintance for our cousin Mr. Pendrel—a faraway cousin, but a near relation of another sort, as he is about to become my son-in-law."
"Do you settle such grand matters in the turn of a hand?—if, as I gather, Mr. Pendrel, whom I rejoice to see, has scarce had time to draw breath in your house!" Sir Cantopher addressed this to the others, but paying Ralph the compliment of it, as our young man felt, and letting him see that he might figure for unduly driven should he choose. It took, however, but this first vision of his fellow-visitor to put such a choice quite out of the question; the effect of this gentleman was so to make him throb again with the responsive curiosity that had carried him the whole length of his first initiation. That tide was once more full and strong, for here was a new relation, of the liveliest, which was already in the brief moment drawing him on and which in fact had in its different way as much force to that end, whatever the end might prove, as had been put forth for his original welcome by Molly herself. Molly had desired him, and Molly still did, as much as ever, he perfectly felt, all outer ruffles of accident notwithstanding, just as his own strongest pulse beat upon her for its satisfaction with a quickness undiminished; but the very face and air and note of the man before him, and who was as much taken with him, in the way of wonder, he could see, as he was himself taken, now multiplied at a stroke his relations with his actual world. Sir Cantopher's forehead was high and his chin long, without other fulness, as was also his nose; his mouth, with its thin tight edges and its inconsiderable size, repeated to the attention the fashion of his eyes and their drawn lids, which showed the sharpness of the pupil intermittently, much as the lips, opening too little, showed the gleam of scarce more than a couple of such teeth as would have announced on more liberal terms a proper array. Sir Cantopher's facial terms were precisely not liberal—in the sense, as we might have put it, that they made, in spite of resources close at hand, a hard bargain with expression; Ralph even noting for it at once that he had his aspect certainly, and that one took it somehow as a thing of high sufficiency, if not of beauty or symmetry, but that not less surely, should it continue to be denied larger play, it would have to do, unlike even the Greek theatric mask, both for tragedy and comedy. Would one ever, without other help, know which of the two he fixedly meant?—though doubtless he was meaning comedy now and moreover was, by some indescribable art and unsupported by a single direct grace, expressing a high degree of elegance and of consequence. It might be a small world in which he so much mattered, but there was exactly the charm, or at least the challenge—curiosity always predominant—that one might come quite to learn and to enjoy his conditions. His shoulders sloped, his stature but sufficed, and wasn't some slight deflection from the straight to be confessed to by his extraordinarily thin legs, in their understrapped buff pantaloons, a pretty match to a complete puce-coloured frock of the very finest smooth cloth, now left open to the bristle of frill and the ribboned dangle of watch-fob? The point most of all made by him at any rate was that of his being in his way, and the more remarkably as without her facilities, not less the fine gentleman than Mrs. Midmore was the fine lady.
"Oh our happy understanding was arrived at long ago!"—Ralph found himself liking to speak as if endless generations had prepared it. "You'll understand how with such a wind in my sails I couldn't be slow to get into port. And the kindness," he said, "with which I have been treated this hour——!" He left that to bridge all gaps while his face invited his relatives to see how for others still than themselves he put himself in their hands.
They saw it at once, they rallied, as he felt, altogether, and Sir Cantopher's presence crowned all their confidence without at all impairing his own. Ralph had been having from them this and that about him, but to see him there was to understand him as the supremely valid family friend, with certain of whose aspects liberties of remark might be taken behind his back, but with whose judgment and whose taste they would ever, and most particularly, wish their appearance as a family to consort. Our young man, with the divinatory gift that so unfailingly flared up in him under stress, was quickly mastering the truth that, for that matter, criticism of his friends would enjoy a range on this visitor's part which it could scarce hope to achieve in any conditions on Molly's or her mother's, affirm their claim to the luxury as they might. It was wonderful, it was already inspiring, that Sir Cantopher, by the mere action of a sign or two of the simplest, seemed to blow on the perceptive flame as if he had directly applied his breath. He recognised, he recognised—Ralph took that almost exultingly in for the quickening of interest it surely promised. What he recognised was that the American cousin appeared to justify himself to sight; which was perhaps no great showing, especially as an effect of but two or three glances—yet it offered that pilgrim an inviting extension, one he only asked to make the most of.
"I know how they've looked out for you, sir—and don't mind telling you that I've myself looked outwiththem; so that I perfectly conceive their present satisfaction. We've landed our prize—the expression seems peculiarly just, and you of course are assuring yourself with the last conviction that your own is at least equal to anything you could have imagined." Of these words Sir Cantopher delivered himself in a voice of such an odd high nasality as again threw Ralph back on the question of voices and caused him to note that he had never before heard a like tone applied with such confidence. It was with confidence and to the happiest effect that Mrs. Midmore applied hers, but hers was a charm and a rich comfort, whereas Sir Cantopher's excited surprise, or was exciting Ralph's at least, in proportion as it developed. There again accordingly was our friend learning at a leap, learning that here was a scene where the safe retention of properties and honours didn't in the least depend on a gentleman's either denying a single mark of his ease or attempting to please in violation of it. He himself had been acquainted, hadn't he? with the reign of the nasal, but when and where had it flourished to his ear as this gentleman, and doubtless quite unconsciously, made it flourish? People were supposed at home to enjoy in that particular an unresented license—which he had, however, never heard taken as he now heard it without its having somehow seemed to pull the speaker down. Sir Cantopher was up, up, up—yes, as he went on, up at the topmost note of his queer fine squeak, which was clearly not less an element of felt assurance in him than the most settled of his other titles. This didn't withal diminish the fact that if you had caught the sound the first time without sight of its source, you might have turned to expect some rather ancient lady, of the highest fashion indeed, but playing her part, presumably to her disadvantage, upon an organ cracked beyond repair.