Chapter II: Part 2

"And what's the meaning," Ralph asked, "of your talking of mine?"

"Why, that I take in the same way my chance of yours." She paused--he must understand.

This took him indeed no great time. "You'll have me if I do come?"

She hesitated again but an instant. "If you come on your honour. If you come----!" But it was as if she couldn't put it.

He tried to help her. "Without regret?"

Ah this wasn't good enough. "If you come with desire."

Ralph stared. "How in the world can I come without it if I come for you?"

She used again her large ease. "That won't help you if you're loyal."

"Loyal?" he wondered.

"To the real truth. To your genius."

"Oh I'll take care of my genius!"

"You will," she presently returned, "if you remember well this: that if you do rejoin me you engage to me to stay."

"Very good--I shall remember it well."

"Good-bye then," said Aurora Coyne.

She saw him to the door, where he paused for a last light. "Does that mean you hold you're safe?"

"It means that I hold you are," she answered as she turned away.

BOOK SECOND

It was not till he reached the street that he took in all she meant--as in particular by those last words. Without sense or sight, on leaving the house, he turned mechanically to the left and went blankly before him. This was not his way home, but he had no thought for ways. He moved simply because if he didn't there was nothing for him but to sit down on the first other doorstep. He felt mainly a great weakness--felt almost nothing else; yet it was a weakness that, oddly, sustained him for a long stretch, carried him up to the Park, determined his passing in, and then made him proceed unheedingly from the nearer to the further end. It was only on reaching the distant limit that he so much as noted a bench. The one he noted, however, he quickly sank upon; and little by little, thereafter, he gained a second consciousness. This was a perception of the beauty of the day, the mildest mood of March. The windless air, charged with spring, was like a brimming cup held still. The weather was divine, but the person supposed by him an hour before as dear to him as life had since then turned him out into the world. Well, the world was there to take him. Yes, he increasingly felt, he was there and his bench, placed near the top of the spread of a great alley, seemed to give him a general view of it. The object indeed after a while most distinct in this view was Ralph Pendrel himself, who rose there conspicuous and held our young friend's eyes. What marked him most was that he was a man humiliated. Arrange it as he would--or as _she_ would--he had not been good enough. What it really came to--she might say what she liked--was that he was not of the type. Who _was_ then?--he could but put himself the question. He even presently reflected that it might serve her right to find after a while there was nobody. Thus it was that Ralph Pendrel, with the world taking him, was yet thrown back on that gentleman. If he was not good enough for _her_ he would be so for this alternative friend; and he gathered about him in thought for an hour all the merits he could muster. One of them precisely was that he had another and quite a different passion. He kept repeating to himself that just this, for his hard mistress, was his defect. He had wondered much before he got up whether he had it with such intensity as to constitute a vice--an inhuman side, that is, which she might pardonably distrust. The only thing for him doubtless now therefore would be to attest the intensity. He at last quitted the place with the step of a man proposing to test it on the spot. All this while, however, the anxiety truly deepest in him was about another affair. What in the world had happened to her in Europe?

It was when he reached the quiet scene which the recent lapse of his mother's soft pervasion had made so inconsequently, though now the abode of a more single state, not wider but narrower, that the next great thing befel him. He found on his table a letter from a firm of London solicitors, a communication on the face of it most harmoniously timed. It appeared that under the will of his late kinsman, Mr. Philip Augustus Pendrel, he inherited property--a fact enriched by the further mention, on the part of his informants, that should he find it convenient to come to England without undue delay his being on the spot would contribute to their action in his interest. It may immediately be said that the light wind of this stroke had even at the moment a happy effect on the heat of his wound. The event would certainly appeal with no great directness to the author of that injury, but its connection with the object of his other passion, as we have termed this source of inspiration, became at once of the liveliest. He made as rapidly as possible his arrangements for a journey to London, but he had time, before winding up the situation in New York, to hear from his cousin's representatives of matters still further concerning him and to receive from them in especial a letter addressed in that gentleman's hand and not at first found among his effects. It contained the only words that had, so far as he knew, come to any member of the American kinship, for two generations, from any member of the English. The English, he was perfectly aware, had been held by the American to be offish and haughty, and the American had stiffened itself to show that, since the question was of turning an unconscious back, the game was playable wherever backs were broad enough to show--which they made bold to feel themselves in the new country too. It was familiar to Ralph Pendrel that his father and his grandfather had fairly studied, and had practised with consistency, the art of the cold shoulder. They had each been more than once to England, but had "looked up" nobody and nothing--had clearly not acquainted themselves either by inquiry or closer visitation with those thin possibilities of something some day to their advantage, or to that of their posterity, that might have been dreamed of at the best. The property mainly accruing to Ralph loomed large now as a house--it was described as commodious--in a fine quarter of the town; this remained at first the limit of his charmed apprehension. No light, of the dimmest, had previously reached him as to the English view of what he had always heard called at home "the American attitude." He had in growing older not much believed there could be an English view; but it would seem after all that over this ground his fancy had too shyly hovered.

Mr. Pendrel's letter practically expressed the unsupposed quantity, and nothing surely could have been of more flattering effect. Written to be delivered after his death, it explained and enhanced, the delightful document--shaking the tree, as it were, for the golden fruit to fall. What it came to was that he had read as an old man his young relative's remarkable volume, "An Essay in Aid of the Reading of History," and, wishing somehow to testify to the admiration he felt for it, had come to consider that no symbol would be so solid as the old English house forming the sole item, in a long list of heavily hampered possessions, that he was free thus to dispose of. It was a mere town tenement, and none of the newest, but it was the best repayment of his debt he could make. He had nowhere seen the love of old things, of the scrutable, palpable past, nowhere felt an ear for stilled voices, as precious as they are faint, as seizable, truly, as they are fine, affirm a more remarkable power than in the pages that had moved him to gratitude. Unpretending though the title, the spare volume, but in which every word reached the mark, was a contribution to causes he had always had much at heart, a plea with which he rejoiced that the name of their family should have been associated. There were old things galore in Mansfield Square; the past, he considered, held its state there for those with the wit to make it out; and, should his young kinsman accept his bequest, he would find himself master of a scene in which a chapter of history--obscure, though not so remote as might perhaps have been wished--would perhaps by his intervention step more into the light. The generations at least had passed through it, clinging indeed as long as they might, and couldn't have failed to leave something of their mark, which it would doubtless interest Mr. Ralph to puzzle out. It was the testator's wish that he should do so at his ease. The letter in fine was, as Ralph said, a deucedly beautiful gentlemanly one, and the turn of the wheel of fortune. The material advantage might be uncertain; but it was blessedly not for the economic question, it was for the historic, the aesthetic, fairly in fact for the cryptic, that he cared. A big London house sounded in truth on the face of the matter less like an aid to research than like an exposure to rates and taxes, a legacy of the order vulgarly known as thumping. But verily too even London, for our rare young man, was within the pale of romance. His "other" passion in short had soon begun freshly to glow.

Within a month it had shaken him still harder, and all the more that, this time, his impatience had fallen and two or three of his illusions with it: his curiosity had sat down to its feast. He had encountered in London more business than he expected, but had not encountered what he most feared, the display of a swarm of litigants. This greatly eased his mind, since if injustice had been done it would have taken much from the savour of the feast. There was no nearer relative, it surprisingly seemed, no counter-claimant, no hint in the air of a satisfaction disputed. No unfortunate and expropriated person came, in a word, to light, and there was therefore neither a cause to defend nor a sacrifice to consider. The only thing really to consider in such a stroke of luck was its violation of the common law of prose. Life was at best good prose--when it wasn't bad; and Mr. Pendrel's succession was--all "town tenement" as it might be--poetry undefiled. It was none the less poetry that the value of the property was so easily ascertained to be high. Ralph reflected not even for a moment after he had been to see it that a fine country estate would have been more to his purpose. He _had_ no purpose, he freely recognised, but to begin at once to cultivate whatever relation should seem most fruitful to his so suddenly acquired "stake" in an alien order. The circumstance of its being exactly what it was--of no greater extent, yet of no less dignity--ministered beyond anything else for the new master to a sense of close communication with the old. It was extraordinary how on this ground the young man felt himself understood; and he reflected endlessly as well as amazedly on the fact that it had all been done for him by his slim composition of five years before, so timid, so futile in the light of his subsequent growth. The affair would have been less of a fairytale--and had indeed thereby less of a charm--if Mr. Pendrel's impulse had been determined by such a book as he might now write. What a book, what books, moreover, should properly proceed, he said to himself, from a longer and nearer view of the silent secrets of the place! _These_ were what had been bequeathed him, these were what the hand of death had placed before him, on the table, as in a locked brass-bound box the key of which he was to find. It would not be by any weakness of his, please God, that a single one of them should fail of its message.

He liked to think, as he took possession, that his kinsman was watching, and therewith waiting, beyond the grave; though the way he had abstained from restrictive conditions--from all, that is, save a single one hereafter to be mentioned--was perhaps the deepest note in his good taste. The part played in the whole business by that happy principle was in truth at moments almost such as to make poor Ralph uneasy. There was a roundness in his fortune that might seem too much to beguile. Were blessings so unexpected ever, beyond a certain point, anything but traps? Should he begin to make his way into the secrets, as they hovered and hung there, wearing a sort of sensible consistency, who could say where he might come out, into what dark deeps of knowledge he might be drawn, or how he should "like," given what must perhaps at the best stick to him of insuperable modern prejudice, the face of some of his discoveries? He encountered however on this ground of a possible menace to his peace a reassurance that sprang, and with all eagerness, from the very nature of his mind. He lived, so far as a wit sharpened by friction with the real permitted him, in his imagination; but if life was for this faculty but a chain of open doors through which endless connections danced there was yet no knowledge in the world on which one should wish a door closed. There was none at any rate that in the glow of his first impression of his property he didn't desire much more to face than to shirk. If he was even in this early stage a little disconcerted it came only from the too narrow limits in which Mr. Pendrel's personal image, meeting his mind's eye at odd moments on the spot and constantly invoked by his gratitude, appeared to have arranged to reveal itself. He would have been particularly grateful for a portrait; but though there were in the house other framed physiognomies these were things--and not unluckily either!--of a different order of reference, an order in which the friendly photograph for instance, whether of the late tenant of the place or of any other subject, played no part. The friendly photograph had been with us for half a century, but there was nothing there to Ralph's vision so new as that. Number Nine Mansfield Square affected that vision, in short, to a degree presently to be explained, as with an inimitable reserve in respect to the modern world. It had crossed the threshold of the century, the nineteenth, it had even measured a few steps of the portentous prospect, but where it had stopped, pulled up very short and as with its head in the air--it had stopped, one might have surmised, with a kind of disgust. It had determined clearly, on the apprehension then interchanged, to have as little to say to the future as an animated home, of whatever period, might get off with. "And yet I am the future," Ralph Pendrel mused, "and I dream of making it speak."

Face to face with it then, when he felt that already and quite distinctly it was speaking--which happened the first time that ever, key in hand, he was able to enter it unaccompanied--there was an inconsequence to note, and one from which he drew a fine pleasure. He was thus moved more shrewdly to reflect that if he was so trusted there must have been something in him to inspire it. Was he to such a tune the future? Had not his taste for "research," which was more personally his passion for the past, worked rather, and despite his comparative youth, to transmute him? On the day he disembarked in England he felt himself as never before ranged in that interest, counted on that side of the line. It was to this he had been brought by his desire to remount the stream of time, really to bathe in its upper and more natural waters, to risk even, as he might say, drinking of them. No man, he well believed, could ever so much have wanted to look behind and still behind--to scale the high wall into which the successive years, each a squared block, pile themselves in our rear and look over as nearly as possible with the eye of sense into, unless it should rather be called out of, the vast prison yard. He was by the turn of his spirit oddly indifferent to the actual and the possible; his interest was all in the spent and the displaced, in what had been determined and composed roundabout him, what had been presented as a subject and a picture, by ceasing--so far as things ever cease--to bustle or even to be. It was when life was framed in death that the picture was really hung up. If his idea in fine was to recover the lost moment, to feel the stopped pulse, it was to do so as experience, in order to be again consciously the creature that had been, to breathe as he had breathed and feel the pressure that he had felt. The truth most involved for him, so intent, in the insistent ardour of the artist, was that art was capable of an energy to this end never yet to all appearance fully required of it. With an address less awkward, a wooing less shy, an embrace less weak, it would draw the foregone much closer to its breast. What he wanted himself was the very smell of that simpler mixture of things that had so long served; he wanted the very tick of the old stopped clocks. He wanted the hour of the day at which this and that had happened, and the temperature and the weather and the sound, and yet more the stillness, from the street, and the exact look-out, with the corresponding look-in, through the window and the slant on the walls of the light of afternoons that had been. He wanted the unimaginable accidents, the little notes of truth for which the common lens of history, however the scowling muse might bury her nose, was not sufficiently fine. He wanted evidence of a sort for which there had never been documents enough, or for which documents mainly, however multiplied, would never _be_ enough. That was indeed in any case the artist's method--to try for an ell in order to get an inch. The difficult, as at best it is, becomes under such conditions so dire that to face it with any prospect one had to propose the impossible. Recovering the lost was at all events on this scale much like entering the enemy's lines to get back one's dead for burial; and to that extent was he not, by his deepening penetration, contemporaneous and present? "Present" was a word used by him in a sense of his own and meaning as regards most things about him markedly absent. It was for the old ghosts to take him for one of themselves.

The spirit of gossip governed but little, he had promptly seen, the commerce of his friends the London solicitors with their clients; they were persons of a hard professional and facial surface and of settled dull complexion, giving back, on a rap of the knuckle, the special sharp answer, but not thereby corrupted to any human resonance. They betrayed to him in consequence few of Mr. Pendrel's secrets, and he shrank on his side from giving the measure of his ignorance of the source of so large a bounty. This was perhaps the weakness of a slightly lame pride; he had not been too proud to accept, but he felt that in asking many questions he should show himself indebted to a stranger. He accordingly made out little more than that his kinsman had read books, possibly even pursued studies and entertained ideals, had had another habitation, the estate of Driffle, in the country, much more frequented, and had never, since forming, on the occasion of an inheritance in the maternal line, the connection with Mansfield Square, been disposed to pass in London--it was even a little odd--more than two or three weeks together. Odder still, though to our young man's but half informed view, was it that his visits to town appeared to have been almost always of the autumn and the winter, had indeed often taken place at Christmas and at Easter, the periods, by the rigid London law, of gregarious intermission. He had been a person, it was clear, of few commonplace conformities, a person with a fine sense for his own taste and his own freedom, one in whose life the accents, as who should say, were not placed where people in general place them. There were moreover in the history points of indistinctness which would doubtless clear up under pressure; as the fact for instance that though he had entered into possession in middle life he had yet affirmed this possession so thoroughly that confusion and a grey vagueness had already settled on the memory of whatever predecessors, who seemed to lurk indistinguishable behind him. At the same time that he had loved and guarded the place, he had none the less, as might have been remarked and as was somehow to be divined, not admitted it to the last familiarity. This went so far as to suggest that in keeping it clear and inviolate he had had in view betimes the convenience of some other considerable person.

That beneficiary, in the form of his American cousin, so rejoiced in such an inference that, during the first few days, he hung about under cover of night, and with mingled diffidence and pride, before the inexpressive front. The pride was for all he was already aware of within, while the diffidence was for the caretaker and her husband, a mature and obese but irreproachably formal policeman--persons of high respectability both, placed in charge by Mr. Pendrel's executors, to whom he feared to show as frivolous in knocking yet again. Was he _not_ for that matter frivolous actually and sufficiently, he more than once asked himself, carried off his intellectual feet to such a point by an accident that would have had for most people a mere relation to their income? He was conscious enough that what had thus caught him up to flights of fancy was an object of a class more definable than almost any other as of the reverse of extraordinary, a London house of the elder, larger, finer type, of an age long anterior to the age of jerry-building, but still after all a mere grey square section of a street, passed and repassed by cabs and costermongers, called at by the milkman, numbered by the vestryman, and marked by the solicitude of this last functionary to the extent exactly of an unimpressive street-lamp placed straight, or rather in fact placed considerably crooked, before the door. The street-lamp was a disfavour to the dark backward into which Ralph loved to look, and yet he was perhaps a little glad of its presence on the two or three occasions just mentioned--occasions of his patrolling the opposite side in covert contemplation. The dusky front at these times showed its eyes--admirable many-paned windows, at once markedly numerous and markedly interspaced--in a manner more responsive to his own. He had moments of stopping when the coast was clear for a longer stare and then of going on in pronounced detachment at the approach of observation. There was still a want of ease in his ecstasy, if it were not rather that the very essence of the ecstasy was a certain depth of apprehension.

If as he paced he sought to avoid suspicion, of what was it at bottom that he was to have been suspected? He would have confessed, had the question been put to him, that it was only of his thoughts, which he was himself moreover the only person to know anything about. If he desired so extremely to hide them was it then that his conscience was bad about them? An examination of the state of his conscience would perhaps in truth have shown him as entertaining a hope scarce seriously to be confessed. If he had an underhand dream that his house might prove "haunted"--the result of an inordinate conception, in his previous time, of old and doubtless foolish tales--the thing might after all have been forgiven to his so belated freedom. Experience had lagged with him behind interpretation, and the worst that could have been said was that his gift for the latter might do well to pause awhile till an increase of the former could catch up. By the time it did catch up he might perhaps have come to make out for himself that, as is perfectly known to biases millions, despair seldom fails to settle on any surmise that the common forces of solicitation in respectable neighbourhoods may be in a given case much transcended. He was sufficiently a man of the world, further, not to care to face the smile that would greet his having had that lesson to learn. He had disembarked with an immense provision of prepared sensibility, but had packed into its interstices various fine precautions against his passing for a fool. He was slightly ashamed, if the truth be told, of the bounds he had honestly to set to his reach of reminiscence, and he understood that he should most please himself by making his pretensions few. It would be simple enough, he seemed to see, to betray on occasion his ignorance, but he might find it in general awkward to betray some sides of his knowledge. He knew too much for a man who had seen so little, and nothing could be more fatuous than to go about apologising. Of course he exaggerated the danger of the perception of either excess in so preoccupied a world. He was at any rate careful to keep to himself his real reason for disgustedly flushing in hours of privacy at the thought of the figure his acquisition would make at the hands, or at least under the pen, of auctioneers and agents eager to invite him to regard it as a source of income. The reason was simply that the language of advertisement, the inimitable catchpenny flourish, depressed him by the perfection of its missing of the whole point. The whole point, that of the exceptional eligibility they panted to express in their terms, was the ineffable genius itself of the place, which while he kept indirectly raking it, grew upon him day by day. He couldn't go so far as to tell anyone that he had never seen anything so old--so old at once and so elaborate--as a structure dating only from the earlier years of the previous century. He couldn't decently cry it on the housetops that he had never yet so wetted his lips at the founts of romance. It was indeed without doubt, as he reflected, in favour of one's not finding people laugh in one's face that he happened to be in general little addicted to crying from the housetops.

Just these high considerations were in all probability the influence most active in his attitude toward the only approach to an adverse interest with which he was to perceive himself confronted. It had been at their first interview made known to him by his kinsman's main representative that the house stood, for the time, subject to a short lease--a lease for the "season" given by its late proprietor, apparently in one of his rare fits of response to the economic motive, the previous year; which arrangement constituted in fact but the renewal of an understanding arrived at, on more than one other occasion, in the same conditions. The tenant bequeathed by Mr. Pendrel to his successor had in other words already three times enjoyed the tenancy, and though it was not impossible the agreement might be amicably rescinded it was for this successor to judge whether he preferred to sacrifice so substantial a gain. The gain, Ralph understood, was of a round weekly sum, as to the weight of which in the scale he reserved his decision. He had a general wish not to begin by a failure to oblige, as well, positively quite at first, as an imperfect, almost a deprecatory, sense of possession. It pulled him up a little on the other hand, after he had seen the place, to think of prior possession, so far as he was concerned, insisted on and enjoyed by a parcel of people whose very name was new to him. Mrs. Midmore of Drydown in Hampshire embodied the claim with which he had to reckon, but he knew little of Mrs. Midmore, save that she had, with her address, as his firm of friends called it, rather an old-time imaging sound. It was judiciously remarked by the firm that she was of a family with which Mr. Pendrel's relations appeared, so far as they were traceable, to have been close; and moreover that some such tradition was needed to account for his departure from a custom of indifference to the pecuniary argument so patent in other connections. Except in these instances the house had practically never been let--within, as might be said, the modern era. It might be even now, as was hinted to Ralph, offered at a much higher figure than the rental subscribed to by Mrs. Midmore. This last little fact it really was that had in its perverse operation most weight with our young man. Full of scruples and refinements and of the clash of cross-lights in which he saw things, he knew the arrangement would have troubled him more had a handsomer bargain been made for him. If he accepted at all the necessity of trafficking in his treasure it was a salve to discomfort that the traffic was poor.

By the time he solemnly entered it had been further mentioned to him that the lady's appreciation of the place--unless its appeal were more especially to her son, or to one or other, if not both, of her two daughters--had been noted as almost extravagant. Signs in short had not been wanting of the length to which such an attachment could go. Poor Ralph at the end of an hour indeed would have understood any length; but it was under this impression precisely that he fell into a train of delays. The immediate effect of his first visit had been the wish to "move in" that afternoon; the next had been a gathering doubt as to whether he had better do so at all. The inner scene spoke to him with a hundred voices, yet not one of these phrased to him quite happily the terms of the single life there. The strangest part of this moreover was that his hesitation--which fairly partook of the nature of a sort of sacred terror--rested not in the least on any vision of what was wanting, but wholly on the consciousness, almost as strong as a shock, of what was impressively, what was tremendously, involved. He tried to put it to himself simply, yet was not sure he put it sincerely, in pronouncing it impossible he should fill out so many rooms. He apprehended at bottom what might be going to happen--his making up his mind on some uncandid basis that temporary lodgings elsewhere were his indicated course. The want of candour would lie in the plea of absurdity--the absurdity of his organising, with so much else to do, such an establishment as would consort with such a setting. It would be swagger, it would be vulgar precipitate eagerness, he on the one side reasoned, to waste time in the pretence of really "running" such a place; and there would be on the other a distinct offence in attempting to inhabit it meanly. He should have time enough to ask himself what would have been his benefactor's idea. The idea would come to him in some way of its own: evidently it had been thrown out in the offered facts themselves; they held it there in reserve and in subtle solution. On its appearing he should know it, and he mustn't before that make a mistake.

This was meanwhile in the interest of all the things for which in his queer position he wanted a free hand. His queer position was that, as he privately panted, everything had dropped on him at once. He saw the face of Aurora Coyne whenever he winced with one of those livelier throbs of the sense of "Europe" which had begun to consume him even before his ship sighted land. He had sniffed the elder world from afar very much as Columbus had caught on his immortal approach the spices of the Western Isles. His consciousness was deep and confused, but "Europe" was for the time and for convenience the sign easiest to know it by. It hovered before him, this sign, in places as to which signs were mainly of another sort; on his dusty Liverpool dock, in his rattling train to Euston, when he called, betimes, on the Clifford Street tailor recommended to him, when he helped himself at his "private hotel" from the inveterate muffin-plate that protected at breakfast the tepidity of his slop-bowl, and when he swayed, aloft, with the movement of the bus that brought him back through historic ways from his prime pilgrimage to the City. It scarce took even the bus to make him sway; he was at the mercy, wherever he found himself and to whatever he clung, of such incalculable gusts. This was what he meant by his almost scared consciousness of the simultaneous and the many. He had first of all his base arrears to make up, after which he could settle with his special relation. He gasped on reminding himself as his tenth day dawned that the glimpse accompanied for him with so much ado was yet but a small millionth of the whole. The whole waited, for didn't there hang behind this troublous foreground the vast vagueness which the English themselves spoke of as "abroad"? Ah he was in all conscience already abroad enough!

It was on the morning of this tenth day that he definitely promised his friends in the City the expression on the morrow of his final view of Mrs. Midmore. He had hung the night before, again postponing re-entrance, in front of the habitation contingently reserved for her, and he had now returned westward with a certain gathered and penitent sharpness on the subject of action. Action would be to drive straight to Mansfield Square, indulge himself with another impression, let this impression settle the case and then wire to the City the result of it. It so befell none the less that he repaired again--and as if mechanically and in the beguiling intensity of this conclusion--to his lodgings, where, instead of taking, after a glance at some letters that had come in, a prompt fresh start, he dropped into a chair and drew it a foot or two nearer the fire that a particularly English April seemed huskily to have prescribed. The day was dark and damp, and it had suddenly occurred to him that not once yet, since the hour, at home, of his sombre station in the Park, had he so much as stopped to think. He had in very fact, as we make out, not stopped thinking, for what had it been but thought that drove him on and kept him going?--the thought of all the use he should have for the abounding fruits of a larger perception, the thought of the really wonderful book, as it would be this time, that he foresaw himself writing. That was as far as he had got with the book, of which the plan still remained sketchy; he prefigured it mainly as a volume that should "count"--which meant for him to be noticed by the half-dozen persons who themselves counted and who would more or less understand. He had already, and even repeatedly, asked himself when he should be able so to detach himself as to think at all straight about his book; detachment and selection, prime aids of the artist, were the sacred sparenesses menaced by a rank growth of material. It was perhaps the better to think that he now put back his head and closed his eyes; he at any rate considered to such purpose that he never moved for two hours. The first conception his mind had registered was that he was brutally tired. When he woke the day was darker, and on shaking himself for a look from his window he was met by a state of rain. Wet, muddy, ugly, the spring afternoon offered nothing of its own and seemed to mark a general break of the spells it had hitherto helped to work. Number Nine, from beyond its interposing spread of splashy crossings, faced him for the first time without its high authority. But this note of the hour soon determined him only the more: if he had in fact let too fresh a fancy run away with him it positively concerned his self-respect that the extravagance should cease. There was a question in a word to clear up--a question sufficiently identical, moreover, with the other and immediate one, the one he must no longer leave open. He signed from where he stood to a passing hansom, and in a few minutes was rolling, with the glass down, toward Mansfield Square. It was an occasion at last on which he could lift with assurance the knocker he hadn't once even yet taken a proprietor's full liberty with--an engine huge, heavy, ancient, brazen, polished, essentially defiant of any trifling, but now resoundingly applied.

It was the merit of the good couple in charge that they at least let him alone, and he had at present more than ever a sense, not unembroidered by fond prejudice, of the figure he made for them, of which it harmlessly amused him to think. It agreed with he knew not what interior ancientry and was truly but part of the deep picture that had already drawn him into a bottomless abyss of "tone" whenever the high door closed behind him and he stood with his sharp special thrill in the wide white hall, which he had from the first noted with rapture as paved in alternate squares of white marble and black, each so old that the white was worn nearly to yellow and the black nearly to blue. He had never for an instant doubted of the virtue, the value he would have called it in his esoteric sense, of this particular spot; which had originally given him, on the instant, under his first flush, the measure of a possible experience. He had said to himself crudely and artlessly "It's Jacobean"--which it wasn't, even though he had thought but of the later James. The intensity of the inference and the charm of the mistake had marked withal his good faith; the memory of which was to remind him later on of how everything still to come was then latent in that plot of space, and of how everything that _had_, was accorded and attested by it. The door to-day had but once more to close with the slight heaviness that inevitably defeated discretion and the overpaid and dismissed hansom to be heard for a minute get again into empty motion on the other side of it, for Ralph to feel at ease about the lapsed influence he had come to start up. The influence was on this occasion not only all there--it was really there as it had been on no other. His friends in charge, effacing themselves and leaving him to roam, appeared literally to have provided the particular hush into which it would best step forth, and he liked to figure them as types of ancient servitude, quaint and knowing their place, properly awestruck by the outland gentleman who had suddenly become the providence of their compact round world. It was a world clearly that they desired to remain shut up in, and a happy instinct had admonished them that they best appeased fortune by holding their breath. They could scarce have done better had they known of spells and superstitions and been possessed with a recipe for causing them to flourish. They even stayed downstairs too consistently to give their new patron his chance of expressing to them how honestly he judged them to keep his house.

That was what struck him afresh after he had mounted the large old stair and begun to pass from room to room: there was something in his impression so indefinably prepared by other hands that acknowledgment surely ought somehow and somewhere to be made. It all came back of course soon enough to thanking Mr. Pendrel, and this in truth Ralph sufficiently did by his mere attitude from point to point. That was the question on the whole as to which he was easiest; wherever he paused to draw a long breath and again look round he felt his gratitude carry and his appreciation in a singular degree picked up and noted. Not yet for that matter had it so affected him this evening as returning richly upon himself. The cold rain was on his window-pane, and it damped the great London hum. These squares of old glass were small and many and the frames that enclosed them thick; the appropriate recess, of which no window failed, was deep, and Ralph could as he looked out rest a knee on the flat cushion, all flowered and faded, that covered the solid bench. He looked out only to look in again under the charm of isolation and enclosure, of being separated from the splashed Square and its blurred and distant life much more by time than by space; under the charm above all of the queer incomparable London light--unless one frankly loved it rather as London shade--which he had repeatedly noted as so strange as to be at its finest sinister, and which just now scattered as never before its air over what surrounded him. However else this air might have been described it was signally not the light of freshness and suggested as little as possible the element in which the first children of nature might have begun to take notice. Ages, generations, inventions, corruptions had produced it, and it seemed, wherever it rested, to have filtered through the bed of history. It made the objects about show for the time as in something "turned on"--something highly successful that he might have seen at the theatre. What was one to call the confounding impression but that of some stamp, some deposit again laid bare, of a conscious past, recognising no less than recognised?

This was a character to which every item involved in Mr. Pendrel's bequest quite naturally and directly contributed. They were all items of duration and evidence, all smoothed with service and charged with accumulated messages. The house was of about 1710, and nothing of that age had ever spoken of it to Ralph in such a tone of having dropped nothing by the way to reach him. Large, simple and straight, effective from a happy relation of line to line and space to space, from a dignity that seemed somehow a product of rightnesses even as an effect in arithmetic is a concord of numbers, it was exemplary in its kind, and its kind was for its new master the kind with which he could least imagine ever having a quarrel. The type carried him back and back till he remembered that such offices were solemn for honours after all not rare; yet at the same time that he tasted the sweet staleness almost to intoxication he rejoiced in the fact that the animating presences, all the other figures involved, could still be fitted together. They were of an age so remote and yet of an imagery so near. None of the steps were missing and the backward journey took no turns. It wasn't for Ralph as if he had lost himself, as he might have done in a deeper abyss, but much rather as if in respect to what he most cared for he had never found himself till now. As the house was his house, so the time, as it sank into him, was his time. It sank into him as he sat in the handsome chairs, specimens surely of price, as he figured the fineness of inlaid tables, rejoicing in the form of panels and pilasters and pronouncing the whole scene inimitably "quiet." It had never been either overloaded or despoiled; everything was in place and answered and acted; the large clear rooms almost furnished themselves, moreover, thanks to pleasant proportion and surface, without the aid of redundancy. He gave himself with relief, with gratitude for their luck, to all they had escaped knowing, all that, in the vulgarest of ages, they had succeeded in not inheriting. There wasn't a chimney-piece, an arched recess, a glazed and columned cupboard, that hadn't for our young man the note of structural style, not a cornice nor a moulding that his eye didn't softly brush, not a sunk glass, above a shelf, unevenly bevelled and however tarnished, in which shadows didn't condense themselves into shapes, not an old hinge nor an old brass lock that he couldn't work with love of the act, not an echo on the great stairs--he had from the first classed the staircase as "great"--that he didn't each time pause to catch again. He drew himself along the banister like a schoolboy yearning for a slide; all the more that the banister of hammered iron, admirably flourished and scalloped and with a handrail of polished oak, vaguely commended itself to him as French and matchable in an old Paris _hôtel._ A museum the place on this occasion more than ever became, but a museum of held reverberations still more than of kept specimens. It contained more of these latter than his fondest dream had originally pleaded for, but he felt at moments that even had they all been absent the sense of the whole would have been scarce less saved or the composition less happy. The walls and windows and floors sufficiently produced the effect--the perfect "state" of everything sufficiently sounded the note.

There were questions--more even than he could meet--that came up for him in the act of absence; but these questions either practically answered themselves by contact, or, so far as they didn't, merged themselves in others to which the answers might wait. Had the array of appurtenances, such as it was, been there from of old, or were they objects got together with the modern motive and precisely for the sake of their suggestion? Did they in their elegant sparseness render the house technically "furnished," and could it in point of fact be lived in without additions and excrescences that would make it wrong? Were the things honest rarities such as collectors would jump at, or only a fortuitous handful that roughly and loosely harmonised? How came it that if they were really "good" they were not on everyone's tongue, and how above all that if they were poor they so convinced and beguiled? These would have been matters to clear up by putting them to the test, and Ralph knew of more ways than one in which, should he ask for an hour from an obliging expert, his eyes would probably open. But experts and tests were, as it happened, and as I have already signified, quite what he was as yet least moved to cultivate; his instinct, with so much more on his consciousness, from the first concussion, than he could fairly handle, having been all to postpone the social complication, the presentation of letters, the looking up of friends. It had struck him that, marked out by his odd fate for an hospitality so rare and so special, he might temporarily neglect any minor appeal. There was already before him, goodness knew, matter enough for response.

This evening at any rate, while the day darkened and the weather shrouded his vigil, he invoked convenient illusions with a tremour he had not yet felt; he arrived, between his fondness and his fear, at the easiest compromise with concentration. Unmistakeably, as the afternoon waned, he held off as much as he hovered. It was a natural effect of his restlessness that he didn't for the present see himself settled. It was positively as if, with the cup so held to his lips, the taste of 1710 might prove too stiff a dose. He would judge, as it were, when he came back--back, as who should say also, from everywhere else. He would go of course everywhere else; intellectually now he could so well afford to. This would make all the general initiation that, as a preliminary, was indispensable--the series of scattered dashes and superficial dips. Strange his divination, or whatever one might call it, that from such a plunge at Number Nine as would thoroughly penetrate he might possibly not emerge undamaged--or even, it was actually to be figured, not emerge at all. He might remain there below, remain in the quintessential depth that stood so ready for a real resident. He pulled up his patrol as it again came to him that for this privilege of real residence he had a candidate in hand. He loitered anew, looked and listened, strolled and stopped, paused at moments, with hands in pockets, to gaze all too gravely at a mere panel in a wainscot, a mere seam in a curtain, and repeat over vaguely the name of Mrs. Midmore of Drydown. She had gradually become for him less abstract, and he reflected with interest that she was the one historic figure he was as yet in position to introduce into the view. There were in fact moments of desultory thought when he felt as if she were already in it by her own act--so close a relation to it seemed asserted by her proved resolution. This proved resolution was, so far as his wondering mind could now place her before him, what was most the mark of her aspect, and there were literally for him flights of fancy through which, as she stood there, she looked out at him with a hard old face. Yes, she would be old, Mrs. Midmore of Drydown--in the sense at least that she wouldn't be new: she wouldn't without that have what he could only phrase as the connection; and she would not less assuredly be hard: she wouldn't without that have what he could only think of as the nerve. He dressed her, with unwitting confusion, in the old manner of the house--the manner of the two or three portraits of women (these, alas, plainly enough, not from illustrious or even from known hands) inserted in the woodwork of the reception rooms, he heard for an instant, hallucinated, the scrape of her stiff petticoat on the floor, and the tap of her shoes, if it weren't rather the click of her small crutch, on the stone stair. She wore a little black hood fastened under her chin by an ornament--_that_ old-time trinket would be priceless of a truth; and her pronunciation of certain words made her, as she talked, difficult to understand. Could she, he wistfully wondered, live in the house as it stood?--it being, as might have been made out, a puzzle to him to see her there so poorly convenienced, and yet not less a pain to equip her with a background of cosy corners or photographs framed in leather, of tailor-made ladies doing tricks with little dogs and gentlemen in tweed mixtures tilting back "good" chairs.