Part 16

"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.