Part 15

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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."