Part 17

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?

"I wasn't aware of your existence," he at all events said to her on taking to himself this perception; "I mean I had never heard of you when I sailed--any more, naturally enough, than when I arrived. It has only been to-day. It came out unexpectedly. But now I'm sure," he went on to the relief of his conscience, of his reason, of his imagination, of he could scarce have said what; to the rectification in any case of something he now knew, the confession made, to have been hurting him like some limb kept in a posture adverse to its function. The gained ease was even too great for joking--he couldn't too plainly state it. "You see I knew all about _them_--or I felt as if I had done so as soon as I got here; which comes to the same thing, doesn't it?" There he was asking her _that_, by the way; as if she could tell him whether or no it came to the same thing. Would he have put such a question to her mother, to her sister, to her brother, or even to wondrous Sir Cantopher? It was the kind of question that tended to produce in them that arrest of intercourse; and, extraordinarily enough, it seemed now to hang but by a hair that it might under this new relation make everything easier. Was she going, sweet Nan, to be drawn to him just exactly by certain features of the play of freedom that he had felt warn the others off? Strange certainly that such a satisfaction should within so few moments have begun to breathe upon him--since as a satisfaction, and quite of the freshest, he should know it, that was beyond mistake; and there was nothing to light the anomaly to any degree in his impression that he should be able to make her conceive him better simply by treating her, that is by simply looking at her even, as if she naturally would. This act would be on his part a more conceiving, if withal a more wondering, thing than any yet--though what had, for that matter, ever been so strange as that the shyest, vaguest, least directly protesting pair of eyes ever raised to him should at the same time submit to search after a fashion that was in itself a sort of engagement? "Don't you think you can persuade your brother to accept an accommodation?" he finally asked.

She hadn't replied to his inquiry about its coming or not to the same thing as a proved case that he should have entertained the fancy of assurances--she had but left the appeal in the air. This, however, hadn't in the least stamped her to his vision as stupid; he had only felt at once how many still other things he could put to her. Here was one as to which he should really like her weight thrown if she would let it be and since Perry had named his occasion; as to which too the idea of the explanatory grew in attraction instant. Clearly she didn't yet understand, none the less, too many things at once awaiting her, and the accommodation to Perry, let alone to herself, not having had time to profit by what had at first been said. Here was something of a tangle, but she cut the knot, after another moment, by the light force of her own readiest pressure. "Do you like my mother and my sister now that you've seen them?"

Ralph stared, for beautifully important as this point had been she suddenly made it more so. "Why, cousin, I'm here as Molly's true lover--to marry her, you know, as soon as ever the banns can be published and her wedding-gown bought: so that what sort of a figure should I cut if she wasn't as dear to me as life? She is greater even than I dreamed."