Chapter VIII: Part 8

Yes, launched on his demonstration he saw and saw--since it was his extraordinary communion with the affrighted Perry that helped him. Wasn't he seeing something that Perry himself had seen, or learning at least something that Perry knew, just by this compulsion of feeding, as it were, on his young kinsman's terror--for it had frankly to be taken for nothing less--and drawing to himself the sense of it? "Sweet Nan, poor sweet Nan!" he next found himself exclaiming, for what had happened was that he had with the strangest celerity read a particular knowledge into Perry's expression, and read into it as well the consciousness that he was giving it up, though to one's self only, not to the others, and that nothing so strange had in all his life befallen the hapless youth as to feel thus under the pressure of such an intelligence, which did definitely at last show the man betraying it for different, quite dreadfully different, from other men. Perry knew, unmistakeably, something intensely relevant to what they had been speaking of, and had known it all along, had had it in the place with him there from the moment, whenever that had been, of his first coming in; and now what was our friend not capable of, as a climax for this certainty, but just the final twist of appropriation which gave him use of the truth? Something had happened at Drydown between the head of the house and his younger sister, something of the day before, or of the day before that, which he would have made no great matter of hadn't the thought going on before him, to his scant participation, pulled it into view, into Ralph's, that is, as Ralph mutely showed him--but as Ralph also now at once next gave him reassurance for. Yes, yes again, there was something to save the girl at Drydown from, and he himself, with the flagrancy of his happy guess at the usual position there of Sir Cantopher's grand gift, had just grazed the treachery of publishing it. To have apprehended the accident, to have caught Perry catching him aware of it, like that, from one moment to the other, was by the same stroke to feel himself close his bodily eyes to it, ever so tight, and with more intention, for the three seconds, than in any act of all his life; this too in the midst of their mutual glare and, by what he could tell, after Sir Cantopher's attention, as well as that of the two women, was back upon the queer proceeding, which Molly's indeed had not quitted.

The duration of the exchange was assuredly to have been measured but in seconds, though in no such number of them had so much happened up to now, by Ralph's private measure, which indeed had considerably grown; only he couldn't not keep looking at Perry--wish as he might to explain, to go on explaining, for the benefit of the others, whose three pair of eyes treated him with anxiety, with admiration, or to the effect again of the sinister estrangement, whichever of these things it might be. The great reality was that his words, as they came, had to mean most to Perry, and could only come thus also by the help of his horror. That horror, by the end of a couple of moments, was what he was afraid of for the others still more than of his own queer visionary pull-up, his invitation to them to see him in presence of the Drydown sideboard, or whatever the ambiguous object, and then see him, in the very act, both turn his back upon it and try to scatter gold-dust round his revulsion.

"I'm not a prophet or a soothsayer, and still less a charlatan, and don't pretend to the gift of second sight--I only confess to have cultivated my imagination, as one has to in a country where there is nothing to take that trouble off one's hands. Therefore perhaps it is that things glimmer upon me at moments from a distance, so that I find myself in the act of catching them, but am liable to lose them again, and to feel nervous, as if I had made a fool of myself, when an honest man like my cousin Perry looks at me as if he thought me a little mad. I'm _not_ mad, cousin Perry--I'm only a mite bewildered by the way I seem to affect you, since it might be catching for your mother and Molly and Sir Cantopher if I didn't convince you that I don't on the whole confess myself anything worse than rather a free talker."

"I like your free talk--I like it, I like it!" Molly broke in at this. "I wouldn't have it a bit different, though we have certainly never heard anything like it in all our lives. I'm not afraid of you now," the girl continued, "or else I'm no more so than I want to be--for I think I told you a while ago that I should miss your not sometimes putting me in fear. If you're doing that now--and I see you _are_ doing it to Perry, whom I declare I'm sorry for!--I'm enjoying it still more than I could have hoped, and wishing I could only have some of my friends about me to see my pride, which means perhaps to see what _they_ would make of you for a grand match. You'll understand that I'm in the greatest possible hurry to show you off," Miss Midmore wound up.

"Ah but I don't engage to perform by appointment," Ralph laughed--"at least in the sense of making our friends uneasy."

He rejoiced in Molly's reassurances, even if he couldn't yet let go of Perry either to acknowledge them properly or to be clear again as to the particular shade now of Sir Cantopher's curiosity. He somehow felt Sir Cantopher suspended, almost dangling in air, but ready to alight on one or the other side of a line that Ralph had himself the sense of actually tracing. As for Mrs. Midmore, it was as if she had just sunk down somehow or somewhere, looking very handsome on every contingency, but vague, certainly vague at present, and positively rather white. These things he took in while still resolute that he couldn't drop Perry till Perry had turned to safety for him or otherwise than by mere limpness. There was always the obvious chance that almost any far range of wit, which he never could have beheld such a stretch of as just now, would stir him to something of the same suspicion as a case of proved dementia. Moreover the young man was during these instants really plastic: he didn't want to back away--he but wanted again (and it recalled what he had seemed to want just after their making acquaintance) to have a perch held out to him across the fall-away of familiar ground, long enough to be grasped without his moving. "I do guess I figure rightly the features of Drydown," Ralph said, "and seem to see them, in perfect order, absolutely perfect order, thanks to you, sir, and the earnest young lady there, await my paying them a visit--which, however, you're to understand I shall only pay in your company, as master of the house and my proper first, introducer."

Molly had been herself launched by her speech of a moment before and her voice, as she did renewed justice to the pitch of her preference, fairly betrayed to Ralph's ear how finely she was agitated. "If you mean that to signify that you'd like to start for the country at once on a visit to my sister, I give you leave with all my heart to wait upon her there until you're tired of her. Because, you see, if I grant that you torment me by pretending you're already, after so little of me, tired of myself (of which, however, I don't believe a word!) the least I could do would be to torment you in return by the air of indifference under outrage. Of course, really, we're neither of us pretending, and you've more for all of us to be pleased with than we as yet understand. In that confidence of my own I think I should wait for you to come back to me from even further away than the breakfast-parlour at Drydown. You're to understand, please, that nothing you can do--so far as I rightly conceive what a gentleman may!--will break my confidence down."

"It's a poor reply to those beautiful things, isn't it, Perry? to say, if I haven't by now convinced her, that I'm not a gadabout, and that if your friends are so good as to want to see me it's they who have only to wait upon me here--it's a poor reply," Ralph went on, "but it must serve till I have it from yourself that you take me for accommodating and believe that I shall make you like me if you'll only help me a little to do it. Haven't I already as good as said to you that I'll do for you anything in life that you may be kind enough to mention, from the moment it's the least in my power? There it is, and I think you do already see that I absolutely want but to oblige you"--with which Ralph hung fire an instant as to drive it in by his very pleasantest intelligence, and then went on--"_am_ in fact obliging you, _have_ supremely obliged you. Good, good--and steady, steady:" he took it up in triumph, turning with it now to the others and inwardly sustained in his free attitude of inviting them to witness something that he didn't much care at that moment whether they understood or not, so long as he overrode them by a blinding assumption. It would be extraordinary to blind Sir Cantopher, but under that inward pressure he was ready to risk almost anything for it, as he had risked everything successfully, hadn't he? for the bedazement, the renewed conquest, or whatever he might call it, of Molly, of his action on whose nerves and senses and own pride of conquest he felt with each instant more certain. He smiled at them all again, carrying it off, carrying them on, and still but wanting Perry to take in that he impressed them. Molly in fact left her brother in as little doubt of that as if she had understood more than was supposable of the remarkable exchange, just concluded on his part, with their kinsman.

"You see we've never known any great wit, or any brilliant person at all except Sir Cantopher--and my brother, like the rest of us, has got used to _him._ Give him time, give my mother time, give even our friend here time," the girl pursued with a courage that was a match for his own--"though I ask you for no more myself: I don't know whether you've made me blind or made me see as never before, but what I really want is that you shall take me so for granted, in spite of all your odd ways, not one of which I'd now nevertheless have you fail of, that if I'm noticed at all when we begin to go out together, as we presently shall, I shall be noticed no more than your shadow and just according as you happen to cast it!"

This assuredly corresponded for Ralph to his own actual spirit of play, and even went beyond it for the great air it gave her, something akin to which he was hoping he had himself put forth. He met it to extravagance, wanting to know if he hadn't taken _her_ for granted with the very first stir of his response from the other side of the world, protesting he'd go out with her on the spot and cast his shadow in any light she should choose; which was at once reflected on, however, in the most anxious admonition that Mrs. Midmore had uttered.

"We'll have our friends here first, please, and it will be your mother. Miss, and not you, who will make our cousin and your relation to him known."

She had gathered herself up for this, though it was visible again to Ralph that if she uttered the proviso for Molly's control, not less than in a high degree for his own, she yet appeared to press it, restlessly and appealingly, upon her son and her other guest, who nevertheless, engaged for the time in considerations of their own, gave it no particular heed. Ralph, at sight and in suspicion of a certain effect produced in her which was the very opposite of what he intended--for this evasion of his aspect didn't come, did it? to his overriding her--blinked for an instant at a splendid impulse, and then fairly lost sight of its splendour in the straightest, friendliest, homeliest application of it; moving from his place straight across to her, laying a hand on each of her shoulders and, with the bravest, kindest face in the world, making as if she should look at him in spite of herself. He had entertained, during these extraordinary hours that he had been in the room (few or many, he couldn't have said which,) a hundred wondrous sentiments, but hadn't yet, to the clearest of his consciousness, been sorry for anyone--which was what he desired under that special stress to testify to his being for this great and distressed, though nobly resisting and now of a sudden coldly submissive lady. Was he going to be sorry for people on any such scale as this accepted prompting portended?--so he dimly wondered, as if it were the last thing that had been in the bargain, even while Mrs. Midmore closed her eyes under his touch and left him fairly to appeal to the others, to her son, to her daughter, to Sir Cantopher himself, whose lids indeed were not noticeably much less narrowed than those of their hostess, for attestation that he meant the very most charming things. If he only hadn't once more, all the same, to wince the while with awareness of that overdone grimace of his own!--he had effectively enough shaken it off some time previous, but his relative's pale rigour, while his action lasted, threatened to set it up afresh! Nothing, however, could have exceeded the respectful form of the freedom he now used. He had kissed her on either cheek, under encouragement offered, on first seeing her, and he at present repeated the homage in conditions that might well have suggested to him that ever so much time, days or weeks instead of mere mixed moments, had elapsed between the two transactions.

"I desire so to conform to your every wish and to renew every assurance. I get every now and then the impression that I'm not quite so much with you, or you not quite so much with me, as you would like me to be, and as I certainly should like to--and then I wonder what's really the matter. Nothing surely is the matter, with our perfect understanding--unless it be that I worry you somehow just from ignorance. Yes, I'm clever"--Ralph kept it up--"but I'm not so sure I'm wise; at the same time that I _am_ sure I shall be able to learn not to trouble you if you'll only name to me always at the moment just how I'm doing it."

Marked withal was her oddity of not really meeting his face; he was close to her, he had folded his hands as in supplication the most suggestive, but she looked straight down at his feet. "I wouldn't for the world, sir, take you up on anything. I like too much to listen to you, and you've only too many grand fancies. The great thing is that you like us--for if you like us you won't hurt us." She had a pause, but while he still waited she did at last look up at him. "There," she exhaled; "there!"--and she showed him, clearly wishing to do it, that she could smile a bit convulsively, and with the most excruciating dimness, as well as he; holding up her head, drawing in her lips, meeting his eyes and after an instant letting him see, as he thought, something in them like the strange long look, the questioning fear, that he had just been dealing with in her son. He hadn't hitherto caught in her face any such hint of resemblance, but here she was fairly overcoming something, even something akin to what he knew, or what he at least hoped, that he had just made Perry overcome. There was the pity, his having to think of being sorry; she talked of his "hurting", or rather of his not hurting them, and he'd be hanged if he'd hurt them in whatever disconcertment--he'd himself suffer in any way first; which he was on the point of making, gaily and familiarly, his answer, when it struck him that this would be openly to take account of danger, the idea he sought most to repudiate. So he uttered his cheer, which indeed truly, from the tone of it, might have been his compassion, in another form.

"Keep tight hold of me, don't let go of me for the tenth of a second--as you seem to do when you won't look at me. I'd rather you all stared me out of countenance at once than kept from me, either one of you, the light of your own. It mayn't strike you that I want more encouragement than I've already had, but I feel I can do with every scrap you'll give me, and that if you'll remember as much as that we shall still have a merry life."

"'Still, still'?" Molly caught this up; she had risen again to her highest pitch. "What on earth, pray, has happened that we shouldn't?--and what _can_, you wretch, unless it be that we all die for love of you at once? That's the only thing that may be the matter with us--isn't it, mamma?" the girl appealed; "that you're killing us, I mean, with the wonder of you, and that our mother is apparently the first to succumb. Don't change, nevertheless; don't waver by a hair's breadth from what you are at this moment. I want to show you off--I do, I do; and yet I seem at the same time to want you not to be touched--and don't know how that's to be managed!"

This figure, on her lips, determined in Sir Cantopher the play of comment that Ralph had felt to be gathering force; a remark which sufficiently told him, as it dropped, on which side of the line of confidence in him it had fallen. "You're very fine porcelain indeed, no doubt; but, for myself, I shall like, as you'll see, the sense of handling you with care."

It was after Sir Cantopher had spoken that our young man felt himself measure best the attention he had honoured him with, and how much achieved possession of him was noted in the tone of these words. They were even startling as a sequel to his wait for decision, as who should have said, and it was almost as if they quite supremely clinched for our friend in these few instants the irreconcilability of his various desires to oblige. More and more was it that he had come, that he only wanted and needed, to oblige all round; and while he now expressed, so far as any attitude might, whatever intelligence should be most in order, he had the quick idea of suggesting to the four together that they should try to understand and arrange with each other only, making somehow a common ground and not troubling him about the manner of it. He looked thus in the face the fear of being quarrelled about, and was on the point of breaking out with an "Oh there's plenty of me for you _all_ if you'd only believe it and let me see each of you enjoy it!" when Sir Cantopher practically blighted the impulse as by a positive queer revel in that idea of precautions.

"Molly may do what she likes and risk what she likes; she thinks you a wonder and wants to call others to admire, and I think you one too and prefer to be selfish about you--that is to handle you as wisely as wonders should only be handled: we should always know perfectly what we're doing with them. No, no, don't deny it," this eminent judge pursued--"I don't think I should care for you if I really understood you, though I'm at the same time quite willing to believe that when I do understand you, as I hope to on better opportunity, I shall not care for you less. I don't get tired of my treasures, you see--and that's the way to estimate real treasures. We get tired of the false, but see more and more, to the end of time, in the true. I shall nevertheless not interfere," he wound up, turning to Molly--"I shall be so far from wanting him to live only for me, and a monstrous pretension it would be certainly, that seeing how he supports your wear and tear will be half the interest of him, and you must therefore be prepared, my dear child, for my taking still more in yourself than I've perhaps ever yet made you feel."

Ralph broke at once into this with the most nervous of his laughs. "Lord have mercy on us then, how very attentive to each other we're all now going to be! But all I want is that you shan't differ about me--I want you so to agree for your own comfort. I don't want you to like me separately--and in fact don't think I should want you to dislike me in that way either, if you should have to come to it. I want you to like me together"--he talked himself more and more into ease; "I should feel either of you lonely, feel you in difficulties and be sad about you, if one of you, or even two of you, should be moved to any view of me that the others couldn't share. Now don't you call that kind?" he asked of Molly under this growth of assurance; "don't you call that providing for your liking me, and, upon my word, for your hating me still again, with the least trouble to yourselves, since I'm ready to shoulder almost anything?"

The question had the tenderest directness, but once more, for a minute, their common understanding of it, and Molly's own not least, seemed to lapse--his sense was touched by that strange convergent wait. He truly could thus, he should have felt, know at least by renewed experience what it was to feel them united in blankness, make free as he might with those other vanities. It was in the nature of these surprises of their collected wit to be blest in proportion as they were brief, however--and this even though they suggested to him while lasting the question of what would become of him, what would become of all of them, if they did last more than they should. The break was somehow better as coming, if possible, from one of themselves--and now he knew, probably indeed very soon, that it had come in the form of an inquiry of Mrs. Midmore's, made in all gentleness and elegance. "Why is it, please, that you provide so for our hating you? It sounds so dreadfully as if you knew something----!" She pulled up, her words expired, and it was for an instant as if the high and handsome lady, the pitch and sound of whose presence he had so begun with enjoying, had shrunken to a pale, pleading, pathetic person, a person engaged for a moment in the fantastic act of trying to buy him off by conciliation. He had a glimpse of something stranger than any conceivable expression of it--of the possibility, that is, of a fear in her of being frightened, with its instinct of gaining time before the danger increased. She smiled a bit convulsively again--she had done so some moments before; but good it was at once withal that the very delicacy of her dread or her desire could make him glow as with foreseeing pity, another throb of the same queer kindness that had stirred him a while back. Yes, yes, he himself shouldn't have cared to apprehend what she apprehended, however the particular point of it might show; and why accordingly _shouldn't_ one be in horror and in pity of contributing to an alarm so gratuitous or in fact, as they said, so false? It was true at the same time indeed that there was no answer to her last imputation which wouldn't leave him still rather more staring at it for himself than brushing it away for her: which was the sense in fact in which he promptly enough replied.

"I ask myself, when you tell me that I strike you as 'knowing' something, what it is I can know that wouldn't be a good deal more to your advantage than to mine if you were to find it out! I don't know anything that I _conceal_," he smiled and smiled; "no, no, no, I seem to myself to know so much more than anything else what I've learnt from yourselves in the last hour or two, that if you were to turn me inside out I can't imagine your coming on the least little scrap that would shock you!" So he spoke, though, carry it off as he would, this plea of his own didn't meet the fact that parts of his consciousness into which he didn't _want_ to peep, into which he could positively choose not to, appeared to beset him even while he thus reasoned. And somehow it contributed to this appearance that Molly had, at contact with her mother's peculiar earnestness, quickly rallied again to the defence of her apparently fond fancy.

"Ah I won't have _that_, sir, again--that you're not in possession of matters of your own which it may be our affair, say, to find out if we can, and yours to keep us from learning if we haven't the courage or the cleverness. I won't have it, as I told you long ago"--and she herself spoke, it oddly struck him, as if it had been a month--"that the character I marry should be a bigger simpleton than I, since of course a young lady bred as my mother has bred me really knows less about the world in many ways than even the most commonplace man, let alone such gentlemen as Mr. Pendrel and Sir Cantopher."

Sir Cantopher took this from her as if she really rendered him a service by associating her two gentlemen in that connection: it so supremely stuck out of him at last that he must desire but to refine, under a strong motive, upon the pleasant propriety of their being thrown together. "Every word you say"--he addressed himself to Ralph--"adds to the pleasure your company seems to promise, and I had best warn you at once perhaps that if you have some singular reason for wanting to appear commonplace you would do well to forswear it at once: your effort to act upon it makes you, you see, so remarkable!"

Still wound up to his amenity then, Ralph yielded to this plea--even if it seemed to breathe upon him afresh that chill of the inevitable, residing now in his so witnessed power to raise to the highest point the forces of attention he excited, the repetition of which, from one quarter and another, hadn't even yet taught him how to carry off the fact that he braved it. For he did brave it, he was braving it, braving it at that very moment in his grimaced understanding with Sir Cantopher, the understanding that his face invited the others also to see he didn't fear. What had been deep within him for weeks and weeks but exactly that measure of it now more and more heaped up and the interest of dealing with which had originally so inspired him? "I'm in your hands, as I've told you before"--he smiled and smiled; "I'm in your hands, I'm in your hands!"

"Ah but don't say it as if I were going to drag you to the assizes or the pillory!" Sir Cantopher gave way to that special shade of his amusement which was somehow all edges and points.

Ralph winced for a moment as one who feels in an offered love-pat the touch of a prickly glove--winced fairly to the extent of again dropping his presence of mind and once more snatching it up. "_Is_ that the way I say it?" he asked of Molly with such a flush of tender protest as to make her fix him an instant with the very widest eyes she had yet opened and then come at him straight. She didn't speak as she crossed to him, and it was wondrous to him to feel and to know a few seconds later that this was because the attempt for her would have been but formless sound. She answered him otherwise; her arms were round his neck and her face pressed there, while, with his own gratefully bent to it, he felt her hold him in a clasp of possession that was like a resistance to something unseen. He couldn't for that minute himself speak, though the sense of his clutch articulated would have been "Hold me, yes; hold me close, close, and let us stay this way!" They did stay in fact--or when he next measured time it was as if they had been wholly and incalculably absent: so absent, and for so long, that on his reckoning again with the conditions about him they struck him at once as different and as somehow mastered. Had he literally and in so extraordinary a manner slept in his mistress's arms? There was no one to ask it of but poor Perry--for Sir Cantopher apparently had in the interval departed, Mrs. Midmore attending him out of sight, and Molly, herself aware of that, was already at the door, her hand on it for the moment, holding it open, while her look at him recognised even to extravagance what they had "done"--as if she wanted him to know that she knew it, though with something in it for her too that drove her, as he might feel, before it.

This was not prolonged, and yet Ralph could note, for his bewilderment, that some time must already have elapsed, since there came in to him by the open door, from hall or staircase, no after-sound of Mrs. Midmore's retirement with her friend. That explained itself, however, with his quick apprehension that they would have passed out by the other door of the room, which was ajar, as it hadn't been before, and which communicated, as he was afterwards to know, with other parts of the ample house, including the secondary staircase and his kinswoman's boudoir--he was for the first time in his life really to conceive that last convenience. He was at any rate apparently to be left alone with Perry, not taking leave of the others, but suddenly quitted by them or with Molly, for the next thing, at the most, committing him a little portentously to her brother. For she had in a few seconds more turned her eyes to Perry, who spoke at once as if she had put him a mute question and as if he had caught some sound from below. This sound in fact, as more of it came by Molly's door, reached Ralph sufficiently to explain her brother's lively comment, the liveliest he had yet uttered on anything at all: "It's Nan, it's Nan!"

The words had on Molly a remarkable effect, making her listen hard for a moment where she stood, and then, without as yet meeting again her lover's attention, appear to understand what was happening. As soon as she had understood she sharply closed the door, while Perry repeated his elation, or whatever it was, of assurance.

"She has got here by herself--she has travelled by the coach! She has come up to see him, damn him!" he said to his sister quite as if Ralph hadn't been present.

"'Damn him'?" she echoed, now looking queerly at Ralph.

"Damn _her_ then!" Perry cried, but again with a happier frankness than he had hitherto used and as if now at last taking Ralph in on his own account.

"I beg your pardon, cousin--but when you wonder so you must damn somebody!"

"Oh _I'm_ quite willing to be damned--if it's at all better for sweet Nan!" And Ralph addressed this by his laugh to Molly as well, who at present, clearly astounded by her sister's act, if they rightly viewed it, hesitated as to the tone about it which should best conform to that understanding with her lover which she had just renewed. He felt in her as she hovered there a certain nobleness of doubt, and how supremely she was enhanced by all these latter signs of a new strain and stress. It was as if she measured as he lacked matter for doing the extravagance of the girl's step, of which she wished, however, to make neither too much nor too little. She ended after a minute by making nearly nothing, for if she simply said to him, as the rather unexpected issue of her thought, "Give her the right advice--she'd take it from _you!_" this presented the transaction as a brief and inconsiderable thing; almost indeed in the light of Nan's very own motive and with a proportionate readiness involved.

Ralph wreathed himself again in grace. "Why should she take it from me, whom she has never seen and knows nothing about, when she hasn't taken it from others who have so much more title?" So he spoke, but conscious as soon as he had done so that it wasn't really for him to have drawn out the question--it was much rather for him to have kept it as small as she preferred it. He had begun so, hours back, with the reign of felicity, and how the devil came it therefore that he now repeatedly missed that trick? The inquiry did in fact, to all appearance, somewhat disconcert his friend, who still waited long enough there before him to find her answer, which she brought out, as it struck him, with a quick perversity.

"Well then, frighten her straight away again, if you like that better!" With which she simply left him, passing out at once by the door opposite the one she had quitted and closing it sharply behind her.

Ralph turned to Perry in his flush of wonder. "Frighten her away? _Do_ I frighten----?"

Perry kept his great distance, but spoke after an instant in the sense of accommodation. "You don't frighten _me_--now. You can't, I wouldn't have it even if you wanted to--which I now guess you don't."

"But why in the name of my dearest interest _should_ I?" It was strange again to Ralph, his facing his young kinsman's so exposed, yet so inscrutable sensibility; yet this aspect of him somehow suggested withal that he mightn't at all prove the person from whom there was most to fear. Why, however, at the same time, did this question of fear, suddenly let loose by Molly in her retreat--for wasn't it a retreat?--seem to flutter about the room, itself a scared bird, and make as if for perching on Ralph's own shoulder? It might verily have been perching as our young man, staring about, plucked a fresh apprehension from Perry. "You don't mean that Molly and I frightened off your mother and Sir Cantopher?"

Perry, though always at his distance, was placed by this almost at his ease. "Molly must answer you for herself--but she doesn't really know much more what to make of you than I do."

Ralph's wide eyes stared his reply still more than his lips could form it. "You don't know what to make of me----?"

"Only she likes nevertheless what you do to her that way as her lover. She's not too afraid of you yet for _that!_" Perry explained with a new authority.

This was extraordinary to Ralph--his having gathered such things to tell from that lapse of their consciousness, Molly's and his own, of anything but their possession of each other. "Oh well, I'm glad I have still that advantage!"--and Ralph kept his laugh at least brave. "But was it because _they_ didn't know what to make of us----?" Perry had really arrived at an approach to clear suggestion. "We're lovers so accepted and blessed----!" He would puzzle it out, but appealed to his Companion for help.

"No, it isn't that they were shocked at your freedom"--Perry said--"though you _were_ free!"

"Then why did they make off?" our young man pressed.

"Well, you must get it from themselves."

"Then is there nothing I shall get from you--as my brother-that's-to-be?"

Perry considered of it, resisting confusion. "I'm not your brother yet."

"No"--Ralph also considered: "not in a single morning!" This exchange, none the less, seemed really to further him, and under the aid of it Ralph kept his stand. "But you like me so."

"_I_ like you----?" Perry rather growled it, but it was as if he wondered.

"I mean you all do, and you will, you'll see,--especially if you find you can assist me. It's there," Ralph explained, "that your goodnature will be touched."

"Oh but I thought it was yours we were so much to look to. Wasn't it you," Perry asked, "that was to come so prodigiously to _our_ assistance?"

"So I take it," Ralph irresistibly smiled; "and what else in the world is it then that I'm so ready for?"

Perry could still mind his steps. "I don't know that you've been striking me as quite so ready!"

"Not so ready as you expected?" It made Ralph's vision jump. "Do you mean that you want money?"

"Indeed I do, by God!"

Ralph stared in fair elation--such an oddity of relief. "Will you have some now?"

"'Now'----?" Something, at this, looked out of Perry's face as not before--a happier, easier Perry, though still embarrassed and divided and with an awkwardness of wonder that made his kinsman laugh out.

"I mean at this very moment"--and Ralph, with the happy thought, clapped his hand to the right pocket of his trousers. It was under the same sort of prompting with which in the earlier part of his talk there with Molly he had appealed to another pocket for that verified possession of his mistress's portrait which so beautifully hadn't failed him; and he consequently beamed all his renewal of support at Perry on feeling his fingers quite plunge into gold. Also he shone, after this fashion, he seemed to know, without undue surprise. The guineas, or whatever they were, literally chinked to his ear, and he saw, the next thing, that they chinked to his companion's as well--which circumstance somehow made them on the instant a perfect mine of wealth. "How much, how much will you have?" he was accordingly justified in gaily asking--and that even while it also played into his exquisite agitation that the Midmores in general had probably ever held the rattle of one's resources in any pocket a vulgar mode of allusion to them. He was so brightly in earnest with his offer, and so interesting it grew and grew each instant to himself, that he would have been willing they should take it for an American freedom caught in the fact. So if it was one it should be a great one, and Ralph kept this up. "You've only to say, you know!" Perry, his head half bent with his trouble, gazed with a bovine air as from over a fence and under his brows--while Ralph felt such surprise, after an instant, at the degree of his difficulty, which suggested positive physical pain, that superlative soothing seemed none too much. His personal confidence moreover had at the first fine touch of his fortune shot straight up, and he rose with it to an extraordinary height. "I want you to understand, you see, that there's really no sum you mayn't name----!" And he chinked and chinked.

Perry's breath, as it had more than once done before, came shorter and shorter, but he still stood off. "You carry all your fortune about you?"

"Not all--only a goodish handful, but a clutch can follow a clutch." And he so liked his clutch that he drew it forth and held it high, shaking it in the air and laughing. "Guess what this alone comes to."

Perry glared up at the hidden treasure--the effort of Ralph's hand completely contained it, but as our young man was about to say, "Mayn't I count it down to you?" the wondering eyes shifted, resting at once, Ralph saw, on another object. He heard nothing, and his back was to the door from the hall, which Perry would have seen noiselessly opened and with the effect of an appeal for admission. Ralph watched his face, but waited before turning, waited as if something hung on it, and only advised somehow by what he noted to lower his fist and restore it slowly to his pocket. And then Perry had spoken. "If you've come up for your share, my dear, he vows he's all ready to put it on the table, and you can be served first if you like."

The whole passage, however, was otherwise so soundless that Ralph listened a full minute for the answer to this remark before facing about.

IV

The girl was for the time stillness incarnate; she carried the burden of what she had done very much after the fashion of a glass filled to the brim, held out at arm's length and sure to overflow at the first jostle. What she had been mutely doing as she stood there must have been to beg her brother to refrain from any word that would make her position more awkward, and that she felt some confidence for this might have appeared, the next instant, in her large grave look at his companion, which struck Ralph as a sign of greeting the most intended, and yet at the same time the shyest, ever made him. She might scarce have expected recognition, but she seemed to take him in with so little felt restriction on staring that he measured at once the relief she enjoyed at finding him only with Perry. She had been wound up, he felt, for something more difficult, and now this was blest, was a reprieve, for he was quickly certain that with Perry she could easily deal--all the more that what he had just said to her wasn't the deprecated jog, inasmuch as it didn't at all reflect upon her, but reflected only on their cousin. Ralph had in her presence still a couple more of extraordinarily swift reflections--one of these perhaps the very most immediate, in its sweetness and clearness, that had visited his consciousness of these rich hours and bearing upon the fact exactly that he was her cousin, hers much more for instance than Molly's, in respect to whom the nature of the relative was swallowed up in the nature of the lover; bearing on it so happily that in the course of another moment he had brought out the beautiful sense in his own greeting, which had the effect of reading into hers everything either he or she could have desired. He didn't grin for this, as he had been doing for Perry--he breathed it softly, but ever so gravely: "Cousin, cousin, cousin!" though after it too, with the same gravity, which yet, as he felt even in uttering the words, was a perfect extravagance: "Isn't it great, _great?_"

"Great that we're cousins--'great'?" It had broken her stillness happily and, as he figured, without the jostle of her arm; for again it not only left her intrusion ideally unchallenged, but instantly gave it such importance of ground as could in no way whatever be taken from it.

"Well, what _I_ call great," he returned in the liveliest promptitude of explanation; well aware, on the second thought, that it was one of the wrong kinds of turns, one of those that had made the rest of the family exchange wonderments, but eager, within the moment, to be able to judge whether it hadn't perhaps even positively pleased her.

"He calls things in such ways as you've never heard," Perry declared to her as for further and possibly still more convenient information; which Ralph, rejoicing at the comparative sociability of it, straightway took up.

"Of course I do, I know it at once as soon as I've done it, know it by the sound after, _after_, don't you see?"--he addressed the earnest emphasis only to the girl. "Of course we have different expressions--but I'm going to make _you_ like them. I'm going to make you understand them," he explained in the most serious way.

The happiest thing was that though her appearance had determined in him this sudden earnestness, the confidence shown in her and so quickly heaped up made her break into a smile. "I'm not supposed to understand unless I very much want to. Therefore----!" She only smiled, but it gave Ralph an immediate chance.

"Therefore it's clear that you want to so far as I'm concerned; which it's a grand comfort to feel--for I'm not in the least afraid."

"What have you to be afraid of?" she asked with a readiness that made her brother break in before Ralph could reply.

"You understand between you then, damme, things that I don't!" Which comment, looking from one to the other, he at once and most surprisingly backed up. "You've smashed the great jar at Drydown, and he already knows it, and that you've come up to make your confession."

"Oh I don't in the least know _that!_" Ralph declared. "What I should like to believe," he said to the girl, "is that you've wanted so to see your new kinsman that you've risked the adventure." His rejoicing gravity was at such a pitch in it that she turned, under this address, from pale to red, and that something in the expression thus produced in her, which was like a rush of some purer intelligence than he had yet touched among them all, determined in him the strangest inward cry. "Why she's modern, _modern!_" he felt he was thinking--and it seemed to launch him with one push on an extraordinary sea. He in fact wouldn't have been sure the next moment whether he hadn't uttered the queer words, queer, in their sense, even to his own apprehension; though he was afterwards to take it that they had appeared to find no echo, even if he had himself kept on knowing for the moment more or less what he meant by them.

What he meant and what if the air _had_ vibrated to them they would vividly have signified was the very aspect and figure of this slight, fine, concentrated little person, who suffered this last measure mainly indeed as an offered contrast to her splendid sister, and whose appearance was of a fashion so different from any that either Molly or their mother might have set her that she affected him as linked to them but in the degree of one of those sacrificed creatures he had read of in records of the old Catholic world, the oblation made of the plainer and weaker and more thankless daughter to the cloistered life, the glory of God, and the muster in the house of means for no more than one nuptial outfit. All of which, glimmering before him in what was perhaps, if we may choose, his quite most quickened perception, would have married ill with the special intensity of his recognition and qualification had the girl not, by some light and exquisite influence, pleaded against the idea that she concurred in the law of her effacement. She was as sober-hued as any nun, and might well, so far as the material side of her presence went, have been trained to fasts and vigils; but wasn't she rather distinguishably aware of more things in all the world than they, and of different ones from theirs, upon his honour?--so that her longish, narrowish, almost colourless face (with the forehead, markedly high and clear, such as to recall a like feature of some mothering Virgin by Van Eyck or Memling who dimly haunted him, though he couldn't possibly have met her in New York) showed a sort of concentration of consciousness, a strain and degree of expression, which were all that could be referred to as in any way tricking it out.

He had been spending a long time, as it seemed to him, with persons--positively to the number of three--who were indicated to him now as having known, or at least as having been instructed by society, that they were pretty well clever enough for anything they might supposably be concerned with; whereas the light that hung during these moments about sweet Nan, since sweet Nan she at last, and not quite other than disconcertingly, was, appeared rather that of an intelligence rather at sea, or guessing free application to have been so perversely denied it that exactly this mild comfort was what it might have hovered and wavered there to appeal for. They hadn't denied her understanding and Sir Cantopher had in the most pointed manner expressed her possession of it, but if there might have been a sense in Ralph's private greeting to her imaginable energies, it could scarce have helped involving the certitude that the family friend at any rate had read her most wrongly when he had quite most wished to distinguish her. She had suffered from what was wrong, though indeed without being at all pointedly aware of what was right--and this even if it broke upon him as formidable that he should perhaps figure to her as a source of initiation. There were things in her world of imagination, it had taken him so few instants to surmise, which might verily have matched with some of those, the shyer, the stranger, the as yet least embodied, that confusedly peopled his own--though, again, how any such verification of identities, felicities, sublimities, or whatever they might be, could make her "modern" without by the same stroke making _him_ so, he naturally as yet failed of attention to discern. He hadn't, that he knew of, missed from the others any note of their direct command either of their future or of his own; he had only measured some disparities between his and their connection with the past, the effect of his sense of which was that they had the advantage of their perch upon accumulations and continuities more substantially and above all more locally determined. This placed them so little less in the forefront of time that he should by rights at least have appeared to himself comparatively backward in the race--whereby what would there have been in him to make in any special degree for fellowship with this young woman's originality? Never, let us hasten to add, could originality, or any other inspired, independent strain, have more renounced the benefit of a superficial show. The others, as he had seen, weren't proof against bewilderment--which, if she was so different she ought to have been; but the first thing he now next asked himself was how he could ever--let what would come of this precipitated meeting be what it would--press upon her to the least confusion of her at best so troubled fineness. "Modern" was she?--all the more reason then why he should be at once as explanatory as he could. Certain passages of his recent past were affecting him by this time as almost superlatively ancient, and wasn't there one of them that it would at once concern him, in common kindness, let alone common honesty, to make known to her?