Chapter V: Part 5

However, she was herself an apparition of such force that the question of his own luck missed application and he but stared at her lost, and yet again lost, in that reflection that yes, absolutely yes, no approach to such a quality of tone as she dealt in had ever in his own country greeted his ear. Yes, again and yet again, it spoke of ten thousand things that he could guess at now in her presence, and that he had even dreamed of, beforehand, through faint echoes and in other stray lights; things he could see she didn't in the least think of at the moment either, all possessed as she was with the allowance she had in her hospitality already made for him. Every fact of her appearance contributed somehow to this grand and generous air, the something-or-other suggesting to him that he had never yet seen manner at home at that pitch, any more than he had veritably heard utterance. When or where, in any case, had his eye, alert as he might feel it naturally was, been caught by such happy pomp as that of the disposed dark veil or mantilla which, attached to her head, framed in hoodlike looseness this seat of her high character and, gathering about her shoulders, crossed itself as a pair of long ends that depended in lacelike fashion almost to her feet? He had apprehended after a few more seconds that here was "costume" beheld of him in the very fact and giving him by its effect all the joy of recognition--since he had hitherto had but to suppose and conceive it, though without being in the effort, as his own person might testify, too awkwardly far out. Yes, take him for what she would, she might see that he too was dressed--which tempered his barbarism perhaps only too much and referred itself back at all events, he might surely pretend, to a prime and after all not uncommendable intuition of the matter. If he had always been, as he would have allowed, overdressed for New York, where this was a distinct injury to character and credit, business credit at least, which he had none the less braved, so he had already found he was no more than quite right for London, and for Mansfield Square in especial; though at the same time he didn't aspire, and wouldn't for the world, to correspond with such hints as Mrs. Midmore threw off. She threw it off to a mere glance that she represented by the aid of dress the absolute value and use of presence as presence, apart from any other office--a pretension unencountered in that experience of his own which he had yet up to now tended to figure as lively. Absolutely again, as he could recover, he had never understood presence without use to play a recognised part; which would but come back indeed to the question of what use--great ambiguous question-begging term!--might on occasion consist of. He was not to go into that for some time yet, but even on the spot it none the less shone at him for the instant that he was apparently now to see ornament itself frankly recognised as use; and not only that, but boldly contented, unassailably satisfied, with a vagueness so portentous--which it somehow gave a promise to his very eyes of the moment that he should find convincingly asserted and extended. All this conspired toward offering him in this wondrous lady a figure that made ladies hitherto displayed to him, and among whom had been several beauties, though doubtless none so great as splendid Molly, lose at a stroke their lustre for memory, positively vitiated as they thus seemed by the obscurity, not to say the flat humility, of their employed and applied and their proportionately admired state.

We hasten to concede of course that Ralph entered in those few instants but into imperfect possession of the excited sense, the glimpse of more and more great things, provoked for him by his elder kinswoman's resonant arrival; yet it's no extravagance to say that the knowledge Molly had been teaching him he was already master of took a measureless bound with the act of his just kissing Mrs. Midmore's hand. She let him do this as a first sequel to her remark on her daughter's description of their commerce, but his own next consciousness was that of being kissed by her on both cheeks--he could scarce have said whether more freely or more nobly: the first sequel would have been poor without the second, she struck him as having at once admonished him, leaving on his hands his quick conception of how he should act with true elegance, the style of behaviour on which she would generally speaking most reckon. He had never before kissed a lady's hand, nor seen one kissed, save in a stage-play; also the way he did it would stamp him the barbarian she had disposed him, under the rush of his perceptions, to seek his best safety in proving himself: yet it was to become at the end of a minute a consequence of these things that he felt to the full how soundly Molly had answered for his freedom to fear nothing. This he so succeeded in achieving by the aid of the ladies conjoined that he could scarce have said when it was that his relation with the elder, now admirably sealed, had fitted him to distinctness with a fresh pair of wings and showed him there was no length to which they mightn't bear him. How had this fond presumption grown, he might afterwards have wondered, unless by just listening to her voice of voices?--her beautiful bold tone simply leading the way, as he subsequently made the matter out, and his ear, all but irrespective of its sense, holding and holding it, indifferent for the hour to what it meant, and yet withal informed, by its mere pitch and quality, of numberless things that were to guard him against possible mistakes, very much as he had been guarded during his passage with Molly. Numberless things, yes; so many that he was afterwards to see how he owed all those he could feel most at his ease about to this extraordinarily fortifying hour. He might afterwards make out that it had been fortifying, at least in part, because it had been so flattering: he soon ceased to care that he was after all apparently not able to pass for a barbarian--his connection with the secure world, that of manners and of every sort of cross-reference, that of the right tone and the clear tradition, had been settled at every point at which equivocation would otherwise have waited. If it wasn't flattering that two such women should have made him by a turn of the hand their very own and have opened out to him, without a shade of reserve that he could catch in the fact, every privilege thereunto attached, there was no sense in the great mystifying term, as he had always found it, which resembled the custom of hand-kissing in that he had hitherto known it but by name. To taste of the sweet was to feel sure he had gone to this hour without it, just as on his side he had never helped another to it--no, not in the least after the fashion according to which he had let his present companions, and Mrs. Midmore of course in especial, hand it forth as in a deep-bowled silver spoon.

What overtook him further withal, a few moments later, was that if he shouldn't be able to keep it down the measure of his new luxury might so keep itself up as to overstrain all their powers, his own stomach for it not least: the near danger of this topple seemed in fact presented to him as soon as a third member of the family had been admitted by the door of Mrs. Midmore's entrance--the servant who had waited on his own now passing in again as if to clear the approach and make another announcement. The footman in effect said nothing, or nothing at least was heard by Ralph, who was struck at once with this young man's almost wild sidelong stare at him, a positively droll departure from the strict servile propriety the fellow seemed otherwise formed to express, and with the way the gentleman so ushered in pulled up before a bolder approach and stood testifying, as might have seemed, to a form of apprehension scarce more happily controlled. The fresh apparition, it was easy to see, could be but a Midmore of Midmores; which was doubtless in great part why his arrest, his frightened bulging eyes, his immediate failure of assurance, where assurance, by Ralph's conception, would so have consorted, represented the honest tribute of a person hugely impressed. Our own young man's high accessibility to impressions on his side, and all, however quickly multiplied, kept separate in spite of their number, showed him during the minute that ensued quite half-a-dozen different things of the first importance--such as that Mrs. Midmore must promptly have spoken, must have said something like "Oh Perry dear, don't hang back; come and bid our great cousin welcome!" such as that, for all the pitch of her flattery, as the scene fairly flushed with it, she didn't like her son quite so artlessly to gape, preferring, for herself, more intention and thereby, as it were, more profit; such as that, at the same time, Perry Midmore, whose name of Peregrine our remarkable friend immediately fixed on him, had quite other signs than those of general, of easy or precipitate deference. Short and sturdy, stocky, as Ralph, reproducing the image, might have described him, he was so stout and direct an assertion of ready brute force that his air of misgiving, his confession of shyness, his discountenanced first looks at the possible adversary awaiting him might, on the ground of any comparison of matter with mind, quite have gone to that adversary's head. Tight in his clothes, especially in the buckskin breeches which his riding-boots surmounted almost to the knee and his stout legs exposed to a strain; tight in his vividly blue coat, which had a tail but no skirts, though indeed brass buttons galore, as if to make up for that, and which suggested at the wrists, under the arms and across the chest, that he might fairly have outgrown it through daily increase of strength; tight even in the redundant neckcloth that couldn't well have strangled him, and yet above which his young face and the large fold of his chin, in particular, declared themselves purple and congested--carrying out also, with the fine bright sheen of the skin, that betrayal as of a general tense surface and of the effect of breathing hard beneath it. Ralph was afterwards thoroughly to learn both how far the fortitude of this nominal young head of the house of Midmore could go and where and why it would fail; but the immediate exhibition was that of an extraordinary diffidence, almost a chill of fear, in face of the unusual. This let our friend see, out of hand, how new and how strange he must have struck his kinsman as being, in spite of such preparations as must already have worked for him; which fact it was--just the primitive candour of Perry's revelation--that most impressed on him his fine liability to loom large.

It wouldn't be a great affair, certainly, to loom large to Perry--that he at once grasped; for while he felt himself thus play on his sensibility he felt sure that all there might be of that article, absolutely all, was engaged, with nothing left over for any other use--though this apprehension, at the same time, clothed the odd figure with a richer interest perhaps than any yet stirring in his breast. Perry would be bold, Perry would be brave, would be even, and with the last unconsciousness, brutal; and withal for those lapsing moments Perry would have given anything not to have to deal with a presence that deprived him at a stroke of those of his advantages, as he knew these, that had accompanied him up to the very door. Ralph felt in the full measure of this perception the desire he should keep them, and for the very fullest exhibition; which he would be hanged if he didn't positively _make_ him do--so that to begin this effect on the spot he smiled and smiled, smiled verily as perhaps never in his life before, and alas but at first with the apparent consequence of inspiring more mistrust. It was probably at this instant that there fell upon our friend the first light sense of a predicament on his own part the gravity of which he was before long not to mistake--the faintest symptomatic hint, that is, of a dilemma so extraordinary that we shall scarcely be able to do it justice enough, consisting as it did in the prevision of his probable failure to keep himself unperturbed, in the right proportion, by the mistrust it was open to him, on a certain side, or at least in certain quarters, to inspire. Why should he, why should he? he was to be able to say to himself, though indeed after much else had happened, that he had then inwardly and rather sickishly begun to inquire; for in the least degree to determine wonderments that should be beyond answering was the last thing he had dreamed of, and we may in fact all but feel his heart even now stand still for half a second under that noted first breath of a fear. That he wanted but to please and soothe and satisfy him, that he was ready to sacrifice to so doing all but the blood of his veins, this came over him to the point of bringing out sweat-drops on his brow while he met his kinsman's bulging eyes with the grace of reassurance we have just imputed to his own. He understood, he understood--which was the challenging interest: Perry scented his cleverness, so to call it, scented his very act of understanding, as some creature of the woods might scent the bait of the trapper; whereby it was that to prosecute success by wiles more manifest yet and then but watch them brilliantly fail might well mean at last finding no issue in a case that depended on issues. Was this perfect example of whatever he should really prove--his absolute transparency making him preciously perfect--going to defeat by mere alarm the true, the extreme felicity of a right relation with him? that relation which would consist of seeing how he was shut up to his three or four parts as to the rooms of a house of three or four windows and only a bolted door, and attending him there with the due allowance for this. The point would be in the young man's dim perception and possible resentment of allowances--conceivably productive in him of positive unrest; thanks, no less conceivably, to his being probably as neat a case as one could desire of impenetrable density before the unfamiliar. The unknown, however presented to him, would remain for him the unknowable, and by just so much the detestable and the impossible, calling on quasi-brutish instincts of danger and self-defence. The danger would be to the element of pride in him, one of the three or four properties that a Midmore had easily at hand, and that could quite naturally make the embodiment of such a privilege recognise whatever might menace it, even though with no resource or comfort in the matter but a dull direct hate, a straight if unpolished arm.

To divine these things, however, was also, while one was about it, to divine the presence, lurking among them, of the question of calculable profit, the power, elementary enough, to compare inconveniences and choose the least--the greatest being of course the one that would most interfere with such a gentleman's material ease. It was solid, it had always been, to be a Midmore of Drydown--that pressed heavier upon Ralph each instant; but the virtue of the solid was exactly that you couldn't see through it, as you might, or as unmannerly people at least, looking hard at it, might, should financial inanition begin to make it at all thin. Horrid for the great--since, strangely enough, the young man, staring, lowering, vainly dissimulating, or at least ineffectually pretending, did in his way represent greatness--to have to feel less at home in the world, or certainly in Mansfield Square, let alone at Drydown itself, by the want of anything their quality had learned from such a good way back to take for granted. Our friend vibrated to the sense of still another tenth of a second during which the measure of the want he himself was to supply made him blink as by its intense flash, directly after which he knew that his gallantry of welcome to Perry, his smile of intelligence--he might fairly have damned the intelligence he couldn't keep down!--was practically a suggestion that his cousin should advance and receive his promise to pay. His cousin did advance, at the worst, more rapidly than any effective alarm of Ralph's on this score could supervene; and then the latter scarce knew what brave distance had been covered by the exchange between them of a fine old fraternal embrace over which Mrs. Midmore's authority, dominant really, after all, through everything, had somehow presided with elegance and yet without ceremony.

Was it the fact of the embrace, was it the common stout palpability, the very human homely odour, of his relative, that had at the end of a minute dispelled all difficulties and renewed the wonderful rush, as it could only be felt, of the current? Certain it was that if Perry was going to be curious, and this most perhaps by the repudiation in him of the very rudiments of curiosity, so at the same time he had become as a creature to play with--from the moment at least of one's having something to his advantage to dangle before him. His human simplicity would surely mark itself as unlike, as quite beyond, anything of the sort that had ever confronted Ralph with pretensions or assumptions; and how should that alone not prove tempting to one's taste for a game, exasperated as this taste might become by such particular stupidities of confidence and comfort as would inevitably await it? It might be indeed that one had never seen the straight force of stupidity so attested--that straight force being, when applied, nothing very much other than brutality; which, clearly, lurked here with supports and accessories and surrounding graces, the fair and delicate house, the full-voiced mannerly women, the ordered consideration of twenty kinds, that it was so far from being able to draw upon in a country where it was mainly known but by its going naked and unashamed. Ralph easily knew that the attempt to preserve itself there in whatever approach to the conditions now before him would have had overmuch to reckon with distraction and diversion. All of which wondrous interpretation, on his part, of the few trifles light as air that achieved in as few seconds such a brushing of his sense, left him momentarily with a tight hold of Perry's hand and an ear still reached by his hard breathing--this too though the return to their orbits of his silly scared eyes was more assured.

Ralph further knew a desire to mark the distinction between being satisfied of him and amused at him, and was aware above all of something sharper for the instant than aught else, the fixed and extreme attention of the others, the look of the two ladies at their son and brother as if under stress of what they might gain or lose by the sentiment he should provoke; their major care for _that_, in the connection, rather than for their visitor's own immediate action, enriching again in our young man the savour of success. It was as Molly's husband to be, who had just arrived from America to claim her hand, and who had in fact just claimed it and felt it brightly conferred, along with a fond mother's blessing, by the grand girl herself--it was under instruction to greet him in this character that he knew Perry to have been pushed into his arms; and what with the lapse of the next minute had come to hang in the balance was whether or no that youth, the head of the family but also the fool of it, and with some rude art of his own the will of it, would stand out for his right not to have been passed over by the offhand transaction. He was a gentleman to stand out for his rights up to any point at which he shouldn't get bewildered about them; for he was also a gentleman to get bewildered, that is easily to be determined in such a sense, on any ground not absolutely to be felt by the shuffle of his feet. In saying to him with fine gaiety "I want to commend myself all round, and quite understand that I must before the last word is said--so that you must give me time for it a bit, please:" in saying, in risking, he verily felt, as much as this he would have been conscious of more felicity had he not seen the very next instant that gaiety might well be too fine to please in the difficult relation; to which it would thus appear that his kinsman could only contribute in highest measure a mistrust of any semblance of manner, or at least of such manner as a glib adventurer from overseas might have brought with him. He was probably formed not to "like" manner, or to understand it, whether kept up or kept down, damn him; for if Ralph, with his own splendid sense for rising again to the surface after deep submersions, could take the quickest conceivable note of this, so there hung in his eye at the same time the lively truth, which fairly jerked out arms and legs like those of a toy harlequin worked by a string, that manner was essentially and by an extraordinary law to be his constant resort and weapon and of consistent application to every aspect of his case. It wouldn't of course always be the same, nor would he wish it to, since that would represent the really mad grimace; but the vision of it was precious in proportion as he felt how, so remarkably, in fact so unaccountably, he should need always to work from _behind_ something--something that, look as it would, he must object to Perry's staring at in return as if it were a counterfeit coin or a card from up his sleeve.

Let us frankly plead, for that matter, that he found himself affected before this passage lapsed as by the suddenest vision of a possibility of his having to appeal from the imputation, as who should say, of cheating, cheating in that sense which his above-mentioned love of the game, exactly, might expose him to suspicion of; this for all the world as if he were seated with the house of Midmore, not to speak of other company too, at a green table and between tall brave candlesticks which would at a given moment somehow perversely light the exchange of queer glances from partner to partner at his expense. So odd an apprehension could cast of course but the briefest shade: breath after breath and hint after hint--though whence directed who should say?--so spending themselves upon the surface of his sensibility that impressions, as we have already seen, were successively effaced and nothing persisted but the force of derived motion. As soon as he had heard his affianced bride, for instance, take up with infinite spirit the words of accommodation just addressed by him to her brother he seemed to see a shining clearance and to measure the span by which the three of them together, he and she and her mother, would be cleverer than any home criticism. "What puts it into your head, please, that if I'm quite content, and bold enough into the bargain to say as much to whomever it may concern, what puts it into your head that he may have a case against you that need give you the least trouble?" She spoke that out like her mother's daughter, whether like her brother's sister or no, blooming with still greater beauty and so attracting and holding Perry's eyes in consequence that when he turned them back again they reflected something of her pride.

"There's not a gentleman too grand for her anywhere," her brother observed to Ralph; "but I suppose you think yourself quite one of ourselves; which I don't say you're not," he added with due caution, "if you really please her and please my mother, to say nothing----"

"To say nothing of my pleasing you, of course"--Ralph took him up with the address that, however it might turn, he would so assuredly have to make the best of. "Yes, that's of course, but I won't pretend I don't draw a great confidence from their favour: I've felt them on the spot just as wise as they are kind. Just as kind as they are handsome too," he went on, looking at his kinsman ever so much harder and harder--which he somehow found that, though it wasn't at all what he wanted, he couldn't in the least help. It made him drive his address home, and this was, in the oddest way, as if he had his host by the body in a sort of intimate combat and were trying him and squeezing him for a fall. Perry would have to _take_ him, and to show that he had taken him--this was the tug; only the more he conveyed that, even if he wreathed it, so to say, in flowers and the more he thereby insisted on a relation, if not on the one, the more he seemed to give his man an opportunity the other aspect of which was that it was for himself a form of exposure. Why he should be exposed, and what, above all, exposed to, was more than he could have said--wondering as he did at this even while a passion urged and an instinct warned him. There it was, in any case: he couldn't help _sounding_ Perry, even in the presence of the women; which was what brought upon him, through concentration of the visual sense, the challenge he seemed positively to advance into the enemy's county in order to invite. It was the rate at which he drew intelligence out of the dull that made him uneasy when it ought to have made him, by every presumption, feel it as wind in his sails. Violating nature, as might fairly seem, in the face before him, what was such a glimmer intelligence _of?_--this he asked himself while he watched it grow and while, into the bargain, he might have marvelled at the oddity of one's wanting to be impressive without wanting to be understood. To be understood simply as impressive--it was this that would best consort; but what the devil wouldn't requiring such a creature to be more penetrable perhaps represent in the way of teaching it tricks it might use against one? In the act of impressing, Ralph felt, he encouraged familiarity--which was what people had been known to do at their cost and to the provocation of bad accident by putting primitive natures in a false position. False indeed would be the position when Perry should begin, say, to know more about Ralph Pendrel than this lover of life knew about himself. It may be added that if these considerations did lurk in the expression of countenance bent by Ralph upon his host with general ingenious intent, even a Midmore stuffed with a single prejudice might well have picked from the bunch some hint of a sinister menace to that monotony.

"You don't mean to say you're struck with _my_ appearance--I know it's not my strong point!" Perry said goodhumouredly enough, after all, and with a laugh which put that quantity at once in a better light. "But I like, as much as you please, to be praised for what I _am_" he added--"if you'll give me time to show that; for I suppose you've already noticed that in this country we _take_ time for our affairs, and perhaps no people among us all more than we of this family; which has gone on for ever so long, yon know, at its own pace and never allowed itself to be driven. We probably don't _look_ to you, however, as if you could lash us up--out of breath even as you may perhaps be with your errand; and that's all the appearance I pretend to make to anyone. What I leave to my mother I do leave to her," the young man further declared--more and more articulate, clearly, on finding himself so well listened to; "and of course she and Miss Midmore are as clever as they're handsome, if that's what you want." After achieving, with some unexpectedness for Ralph, this effort of propriety, he looked as in recovered self-possession from Mrs. Midmore to Molly, and then again very hard at his sister and back at his mother, so that it shouldn't be his fault, obviously, if they didn't trust his tact. He showed himself in short the man of sense and of consequence, though while speaking he had stared straight before him, not resting his eyes on Ralph, who, none the less, at once and cordially welcomed his remarks.

"I hear you with the greatest interest, but even if we don't always take time enough in America for what we do, I'm not going to grant you that I haven't thoroughly thought of what I'm about in coming to you. And if you care to know it," Ralph continued, "it has taken but four days of old England to convince me that you're the happiest people in the most convenient country. I've been since I landed more pleased and amused than I can tell you." With which our young man again smiled and smiled.

"Oh you've seen nothing as yet compared to what you will," Mrs. Midmore impatiently broke in--"and I know," she said, "that what Perry would like to say to you is that you'll have no idea of anything till you've seen and admired Drydown. That you shall do in good time--it's a place I shall make it _my_ care that you shall get to love, for that's where we're at home, where we're _what_ we are, if you understand; and where, as I see Perry desires to assure you, you shall have a horse of your own to ride, and the best home-grown victual that you'll anywhere find to eat, and a capital neighbourhood to receive civility from, to say nothing of one of the very finest views in England spread out before you."

"You shall have any horse that you can ride," Perry concurred, his clue to amiability now quite grasped, with this fine example of it given; "though it isn't when they're most to my taste, I grant, that they're apt to be most to other men's. That's what I say to my friends"--and he improved his theme, not to speak of his himself improving with it: "I tell 'em they're welcome to any mount that suits 'em, and I don't think I find it in general a freedom from which my animals suffer. Unless it be," he pursued, appealing again with his flushed but comparatively directed deliberation to his sister, "unless it be that I provide better still for Molly's liking--since I must make him understand, you know," he kept on, "how straight he has to follow if he's so bold as to allow you a lead."

"I'm sure I hope he'll be bold enough to ride with his wife!" the girl splendidly laughed--"or, if you think I put it too forwardly, with a young lady whom he has in half an hour inspired with such kindness that she wouldn't for the world do him a mite of harm." There was that in her free archness which struck again for Ralph the note of he could scarce have said what old-time breadth of the pleasant address and the frolic challenge; so that, sounded out in this way before the others, it made him pant a little as if he were in fact engaged in "following" and needed all his effort not to be left behind. He felt in comparison, before such a force of freshness, almost disembodied, and didn't know for a moment what he mightn't have said if she hadn't, still lighting the way for him with her great confident eyes, seemed to wish to give him all sorts of assurance in the single charge: "You're not to be afraid, you're not to be afraid----!"

"I hope to heaven I shan't let you see it if I am!" he interrupted. "And you and your brother must remember at any rate that though the natives of Mexico and Peru, when first discovered by the Spaniards, had never seen a horse and thought them very terrible, we have long ago got over that in our part of the country, and indeed, I think, are not much in fear of anything or anyone--unless it be perhaps of finer ladies than our simple society and our homely manners have yet taught us to deal with. I pray the powers," he went on to his kinsman, for whom once more, despite his desire to the contrary, he felt himself "figure" all too unavoidably and confoundingly, "I pray the powers I mayn't want either for wit or for any other sort of coolness when it's a question of your fine gentlemen--by which I mean of my enjoying their notice and letting them not doubt of mine. But of course my very errand shows you how marked I am for the full ravage of female loveliness and for the advantage that it gains from the perfect gentility waiting upon it among you here. It must clearly do what it will with me, you see, and if the best it can do is likely to be to kill me why I'll at least go merrily to my death."

Perry Midmore, listening to this, kept his face half averted, but his eye was now more judiciously watchful and he turned it askance in his attention. He would weigh things and be wise--they might help to make him so, when his visitor uttered them, if they couldn't always make him ready; all of which inward comment the visitor had again the vexed consciousness of not being able to keep him from suspecting. He had taught him within five minutes that there was, that there could be, such a thing, and its pointing itself at him, whatever its sense, was the new and the disquieting fact. Ralph laid a hand on his shoulder with a singular sudden impulse to prove that even if one's thought was at play, since this was on occasion of the perverse nature of thought, the letting it take its full course would really bring it round to a point, in fact to a succession of points, where another would recognise it as positively working for him; and the gesture did after an instant so far operate as that the other's queer little glare abated and he stood as stiffly passive as if, whatever this should mean, the least movement might perhaps precipitate some further complication.

Mrs. Midmore meanwhile, Ralph saw, had so completely measured his own bright promise that, quite at her ease about it, her anxiety was all for her son's somehow interfering with the prospect; which she at the same time mightn't be able to take him up upon by reason of something divinably new and strange, something perhaps even beyond his usual show of shyness and that provoked wonder at the cause of it. Ralph had in fact in this connection another of his sublime instants, as we may fairly call them, with this particular one possibly the most sublime--since her next motion, though but a momentary look at him, of the supremely searchingest, played straight out of her desire to side with him, as it were, against any hindrance to a right understanding and a convenient, an elegant smoothness that her boy should stupidly offer. Wasn't there in her face during the moment a dim glimmer of inquiry?--something like "What on earth _is_ it, yes, that you're doing to him, what was it, yes, a few minutes ago, when if I hadn't been watching him he would have shuddered like a frightened horse who sniffs in the air the nearness of some creature of a sort he has never seen?" The whole mother would have been in that, Ralph was afterwards to make out, the mother deeply engaged for her daughter's benefit and pleasure, as well as for anything to the advantage of the race in general that could be picked up by a sufficiently dignified long arm, and at the same time so rich in instincts that had for their centre the prior consequence of the head of the house, that she could almost know alarm in the midst of jubilation, and at any rate seemed to turn upon the hero of the occasion, for the five seconds, the chill of a special quite tremendous suggestion. She wanted right resolutely to like and to further him--it would be so good for them all, and if he was destined in any degree to counter this it wouldn't be by an effect upon her directly produced, but literally through her fond attention to Perry and even should that attention amount to impatience of Perry's attitude. He would but have to show personal fear, so to call it, or perhaps to do no more than show that he was afraid in advance of knowing it, for that question of what might be the matter with him to lead to the other and the finer. Such might be taken then as the way in which the last wonder about the American cousin would doubtless usher itself in. It was, however, so far from having yet won an inch of the ground, or having indeed really foreshadowed its power to do this, that all Ralph knew, to the effect of joy, within the minute, was that she was just putting Perry as right as possible again by the renewed wealth of her tone.

"Don't turn it upon us that we take you for a savage," she laughed to her visitor, "when you talk about killing and dying among us as if we were Red Men on the war-path! If we're going to kill and eat you at any rate--isn't that what your cannibals do?--we shall at least fatten you first for the table, and you needn't fear but that you'll enjoy that as much as you may suppose us to enjoy, as good judges, the next stage of the affair. I'm an excellent judge myself, please believe, and I shall decline to have you despatched before you're in perfect condition. Meanwhile therefore," she nobly continued, "we shall live upon you in _this_ pleasant way--and with Molly's good right to be helped to you first, always first, entirety understood by us. The only thing is that I'm not sure we're quite eager to share you at once with a hundred other people."

Perry it was, rather remarkably, who spoke in answer to these fine words before Ralph had time to meet them--obliged as the latter always was, after all, to select a little among the resources of his wit. "Shan't you have a good bit to share him with my sister Nan at least?--_you_, I mean," he said to his mother, his hands in his pockets now and with the effect from it of a hunch up of his shoulders which at once established somehow his air of more conscious intention. "I don't say it for Molly, of whom I shouldn't expect it, and who of course will tear her sister's eyes out if Nan takes too much for granted. But you're kinder to Nan than Molly is," he continued--"and it's I," he still went on, with a turn now to their visitor, "it's I, among the three of us, that she can look to most. Oh yes," he persisted as for the benefit of the ladies, "you want him to know all about it, so I'm just telling him, don't you see? And it's what you yourself want to know, I take it, cousin--though I don't doubt of you as one for finding out."

He had grown of a sudden extraordinarily more assured, and Ralph, quite directly faced by him with it, felt at once how the interest of him was quickened. Catching the air of their faces he could note as well that Mrs. Midmore and Molly were not differently affected; which perception--and the two women exchanged at the moment a pair of quite confirmatory glances--renewed his sense that something unprecedented had within the ten minutes happened to Perry, and was indeed continuing to happen, just as he himself continued to have to recognise that he was, no comfort of responsibility, the author of it. Not only was this there, moreover, to strain further than would have in advance seemed possible the all-engaging smile into which he kept falling back for refuge, but it was also salient in the scene that however one might interpret such an exhibited phenomenon the character showing it was himself getting used to it; so that what had in truth most acutely taken place was that the worthy in question had of a sudden almost jumped to a vision of not suffering, or at any rate of not losing, by it. Whatever it might be, in fine, there was something to be done with it--as for instance that he should thrust it straight at Ralph in this account of embarrassing matters. Wasn't the point that he would make them embarrassing, damn him, if he could, and that, detected by his mother and sister, he was at the very stroke of trying it on? If the ladies would help the embarrassment not to act, Ralph inwardly remarked, the case would still have more of amusement than anything else to give out; only--_there_ was the betrayal he seemed to catch--they might, for all one knew, presently find themselves not able to: which was perhaps exactly what had been meant by that tacit communication between them. "Nan is at Dry down, where I left her yesterday," Perry meanwhile went on to mention, "and would have liked beyond anything in life coming up to pay you her respects. But if you notice her delay in waiting on you my mother will explain with pleasure how many obligations she has at home--though I'll be hanged if I believe in them enough, ma'am, not to be sorry I didn't bring her to town, even if I had to put her up behind me on Rouser. She's not a girl who either mopes or rebels," he added for Ralph's benefit before his mother, taken by surprise, could meet these sudden freedoms; "but no more is she a household drudge or a mere milkmaid, and you're not to think that if she's kept at a distance it's because she's not fit to be seen. She's not a great toast like Molly, but she's much handsomer than I am, don't you think, ma'am?"--and with this he fairly advanced upon his mother, who still more markedly flushed at the style of his address. "If our cousin's to make our fortune," he wound up, "let him see as soon as possible how many he'll have to provide for."

"You've broken out into such cleverness, my lad, that you should certainly now be trusted to make your own!" Mrs. Midmore returned, the brightness of her dignity suffering a little, Ralph could see, yet being put to no great pains to carry itself off as untouched. "Should you wish to see poor Nan at once," she remarked to her visitor, "we can easily send for her by the coach, and then you can judge of what she costs me at least to keep!"

"Why don't you rather propose that he shall take the coach himself if it's such a cruelty to them to wait?" Molly asked of her mother, but rolling her fine eyes at Ralph in a manner that helped for the moment to make him feel more astray than any challenge to his perception had yet succeeded in doing. "So near a relation needn't fear any gossip, so that if you pay her a visit there it isn't I, sir," she laughed, "who shall feel a penny the worse. What in the world should my little sister be but his little sister too?--making it a new big brother, for herself, who may strike her indeed as a better fortune, not to call it even a better brother, than any she now can boast of. If you really want to go at once," she kept on to Ralph, and dropping him the smartest curtsey with it, "I'll trust you to come back to me in time--in time to marry me, I mean," she cried; "and I don't mind telling you that if you shouldn't I'd make no scruple of going to bring you. Nan is the nicest little body, and, with the gardener's wife to help, would make you, I think, comfortable enough."

On which extravagant dazzle of pleasantries she paused a moment, Ralph feeling the while that their being to such a tune mutually and, as he might have put it, crudely astare signified something that had not as yet come up between them. Oh they had been making and taking a prodigious amount of affectionate assurance, but didn't Ralph know on the spot, hadn't he in fact been advised for the last three minutes, that here was matter of intimacy beyond any token they had exchanged and a different sort of business altogether from even the sharpest need yet resting on him to patch up a sense? There had been none he didn't patch up with that effect as of a quick bright triumph over difficulty--so that we have repeatedly seen how the challenge to his awareness, when pressed, set that awareness on its feet in time, never failing after this fashion to save his confidence. What had now taken place was that unexpectedly his need seemed to betray instead of helping him: every blest reference save the present had in other words found him ready--and not just ready to show he knew, but ready quite to know; only this question of an identity thrust at him to which he couldn't rise and which didn't, like all the others, breathe on him after an instant the secret of the means of rising, only this one left him to direct at Molly (which came indeed to saying at their companions too) a smile which would turn really to sickness should it have to last but a moment longer. Stranger than anything yet for our young man was what now occurred: his getting as in the glimmer of a flash the measure of the wonders he had achieved, and getting it through this chill of the facility stayed. What made it a chill was the felt danger, drawn from her look, of Molly's speaking his case out at him before he could prevent her. "Why you don't know, truly you don't know, therefore what are you talking about?"--that was in her face or was on the point of being, and the great pang was that he minded it himself still more than she and the others certainly would if they should fairly detect it. He _didn't_ know, he hadn't known, and he wasn't going to or it would have come by this time: there wasn't in him the first faint possibility of an "Oh yes, your sister Nan of course, who is of such-and-such an age and such-and-such a figure and such-and-such a connection with the grand image of you that we've had at home!" There was no grand image, nor even any scantest, of a nice little body, as Molly had put it, lurking in the family background and as to whom, by the same magic of wanting to enough which had constantly served him, he could be sure he was passably provided. The possibility of sickness was in the fall from such a proved independence of the baseness, as who should say, of pretending. Two or three times, yes, it might have appeared he should have to pretend, some gap in his inspiration remaining too distinctly unbridged; but with that villainy _always_ averted--since positively it wore the villain's face--by its having become in the very nick the mere mistake of his fear. He had thus again and again escaped being too superficial, and with this gain of certitude of how little he was there to be so at all had come each time the sense of luxury in his renewals of recognition. That there would be no luxury in not recognising, his failure of vision in respect to a second daughter of the house instantly taught him, but even while it did so no repair of the lapse arrived.

What Molly saw, and what in ten seconds more she would make the others see, was the fact of the lapse unrelieved--the queerness of which for her was indeed already out with her asking him what was the matter and why in the world he looked at the mention of the dear thing at Drydown as if he were going to be ill. The extraordinary point of which withal was that she was herself ready the instant after to jump into detection verily, but detection of what wasn't--not at all of what was. His so helplessly hanging fire represented clearly, to her freshened perception, and thereby his own still sharper embarrassment, that he had been thinking more of poor Nan than of the rest of them put together; though of course when she brought her large irony to bear on this he could luckily snatch at his obvious retort and make his flushed laugh invite their companions to see how it righted him. "Did it strike you, my dear, that when I asked you a while since to take up with me for life I was really but expressing my interest in another person? If that was the case," he said to Mrs. Midmore and Perry, "I mean if I wasn't addressing her as an honest man--which she accuses me of--how could she guess it and yet at the same time make me such a blissfully happy one?" The question wasn't indeed in strictness for _them_ to answer, and Molly, whatever they might have said, met it to her own sufficiency by another of her wondrous freedoms. "I could love you for a wretch, cousin, I think, as well as I could love you for a saint!" she cried; and it gave him at once, he seemed to feel, the luckiest chance for putting in his most vital plea.

"I don't care what you love me for if it's only as your very truest--and don't you see that when you doubt of my being so you deny by the same stroke that I'm the honest man I pretend?"