Chapter VII: Part 7

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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