Part 7

"I see I'm an impression to you--and of course an extraordinary one; but he wasn't one to me," Ralph pursued, "in any such sense as that--for the interest of our relation, as you justly term it, is so much more interesting, you see, than any with which, even at the best, I can hope to inspire you. He was a man as substantial for me as I am--or as I _was!_" Ralph pulled up a moment to smile--"for myself; and interesting most of all, I suppose, because so extraordinarily interested."

"Interested in _you?_" his host inquired as with the care to avoid alike too much or too little gravity.

"Well, yes--interested in me by his being so possessed of the kind of thing that interests us both. I've been ridden all my life, I think I should tell you"--for our young man thought it but fair to develop this--"by the desire to cultivate some better sense of the past than has mostly seemed sufficient even for those people who have gone in most for cultivating it, and who with most complacency," Ralph permitted himself to add, "have put forth their results. So you can fancy what a charm it was," he wound up, "to catch a person, and a beautifully intelligent one, in the very act of cultivating----"

The Ambassador was on his feet at this, with an effect of interruption, as by the very quickness of his apprehension. "His sense of the present!" he triumphantly smiled.

But his visitor's smile reduced that felicity. "His sense of the future, don't you see?--which had at last declined to let him rest, just as my corresponding expression had declined to let me. Only after his being worried," Ralph's scruple explained, "nearly a century longer."

"A century's a long time to be worried!" the Ambassador remarked through his smoke, but permitting himself this time a confession of amusement.

"Oh a terrible time of course--but all leading up, you see, to this tremendous relief I've brought him. I've brought him, I've given him, I've introduced him to, the Future. So there we are!" Ralph gloried.

His companion, though visibly impressed, appeared a little to wonder where indeed they were. Then this wonder found voice. "How could you bring him what you didn't have yourself?"

Ralph needed but a moment to consider. "Why, I _am_ the Future. The Future, that is, for _him_; which means the Present, don't you see----?"

"The Present, I see, for _me!_" his host, fairly flushed with divination, broke in.

"Yes," Ralph promptly returned, "nothing could do more beautifully than your Present, not to say, literally, your presence, for the Future he has waited so long, poor dear chap, to know about."

"What it comes to then," the Ambassador considered in all apparent sympathy--"what it comes to in fine," this functionary smoked, "is that I and my contemporaries _are_ his Future."

Ralph accepted the conclusion. "It would come to that if he could get into relation with you."

It might have been by reason of something conveyed in his visitor's tone that the Ambassador said: "With me in particular you mean?"

Ralph met it handsomely. "Ah I could wish nothing better for him than you!"

"And nothing better for me than him?"

Ralph kept his eyes kindly on his country's representative. "Yes, since I find you so remarkably good for myself."

The Ambassador acknowledged the tribute, yet couldn't but formulate after all a certain inward confusion. "I'm only puzzled by your not having spoken to me of your friend and yourself a moment ago as separate persons--but on the contrary of your having arrived, wasn't it? at some common identity or wonderful unity. You _are_ the other fellow, you said, didn't you?--and the other fellow, by the same stroke, is you. So that when I wonder where the other fellow is," he genially pursued, "it would seem that I've only to suppose him here in this room with me, in your interesting person."

These words might have struck us as insidious enough just to trip up our young man, but his lucidity was in fact perfectly proof. "I didn't say, kindly understand, that we have _merged_ personalities, but that we have definitely exchanged them--which is a different matter. Our duality is so far from diminished that it's only the greater--by our formulation, each to the other, of the so marked difference in our interest. The man ridden by his curiosity about the Past _can't_, you'll grasp, be one and the same with the man ridden by his curiosity about the Future. He has given me his chance for this, while I have given him mine for that. Recognise accordingly," said Ralph, "that we're at the opposite poles--or at least in quite different places."

It was wonderful more and more what the Ambassador _could_ recognise by the aid of his kind wise little intervals of thought and indulgences of contemplation. "Yes, yes--but if I of course see that you, as the distinct individual you are so fortunately able to claim to be, stand here delightfully before me, that doesn't in the least tell me where _he_ is located, as we say, in time and space."

"Why, he's down at the door in the cab," Ralph returned with splendid simplicity.

His host might have been lost for a moment in the sheer radiance of it--even to the point indeed of a gesture guarding against excess of impression or for that matter just gaining time. "Do you mean to say you're all this while keeping your hansom?"

"It's not a hansom--in this eternal rain: it's a four-wheeler with the glasses up. And he only wants," our young man explained, "to wait as long as I require. So at least I understand," he remarked as an afterthought.

"So that you'll find him--in his rather tried patience, it strikes me--when you go down? And I should have the pleasure of seeing him too," the Ambassador further ventured, "if I were to go down with you?"

This truly was the first of his Excellency's questions to induce in our friend a pause at all ominous. "Surely--if he has _not_, under the strain of my absence, as you suggest, gone off on his own account."

The Ambassador faced this contingency. "Where in that case will he have gone?"

"Why, as I've explained, into the Future. Say," Ralph threw off, "into Regent Street or Piccadilly." And then as his companion, at this, frankly laughed out: "They didn't exist, you see, at that time in any such form as they have to-day."

"I see, I see"--his Excellency again was prepared. "But fancy them," he clearly couldn't help at the same time exclaiming, "fancy _them_ the reward for him of so sublime a self-projection!"

"Well," Ralph readily reasoned, "my idea is that, with all they represent for him, they're not unlikely to prove as great a reward as any this extravagance of my own may come in for."

"It's wonderful for me," the Ambassador soon replied, "by which I mean it's quite out of my common routine, to allow myself--as you see I do!--such intimate strange participations. I understand you that I'm to regard myself as mixed in the concern of your friend down there no less than in your own."

Ralph considered of that, but with all equanimity and to the upshot of his saying very naturally: "You want to be sure, properly enough, of what you may at the worst be let in for; you want to be guaranteed against undue inconvenience. Well, I don't think I see you let in for anything worse than having thus heard me out and taken my name and address." With which our young man smiled. "May they lie light on your conscience!"

"They will lie there, I assure you, in a place quite of their own"--and the Ambassador took up the card brought in to him on his visitor's arrival and left close at hand. "This shall be carefully preserved, and I shall cherish, for the interest you inspire me with, the good hope of our some time meeting again."

Ralph didn't discourage this hope, though whatever support he offered it was but to be inferred from what was left for recognition of such connections in his more and more preoccupied face. That countenance, charged for a moment with further fair acknowledgments, seemed to turn away from them, before they were uttered, in the interest of something more urgent. "Of course I perfectly understand that you think me, that you must think me, more or less raving mad. I perfectly understand that you must want to keep me in view and be able as far as possible to track me and give some account of me in case of future inquiry. I appreciate that, and it was even exactly for it, I think, that I came. I really believe I ought to be tracked, to be subject to identification, to have an eye kept on me. I'm like one starting a perhaps perilous journey and wanting not to have neglected precautions in advance. I don't in the least mind your thinking me mad--I should be so, or should be at least idiotic, not to conceive my making the impression. At the same time I strike myself as of a sanity I've never enjoyed before. Don't be afraid of offending me, for what is it but your very protection against myself that I've thus invoked? Not that I fear I shall destroy myself--at least in any common way; I'm so far from intending or wishing to commit suicide that I'm proposing to push my affair all the way it will go, or in other words to live with an intensity unprecedented."

"Well, if you live with the intensity to which you help others I don't see what responsibility you're likely to be accused of shirking. _I_ can't keep still," the Ambassador then flatly declared, "till I've been down with you to verify that question of your friend in the cab."

Ralph offered so little objection to this--his looking for a moment intensely grave about it amounting to no real objection--that they had within a couple of minutes more descended together to the hall; where the servant in waiting, Ralph was afterwards to reflect, must at once have attested his conviction that his master was not simply seeing to the door a visitor of no inscribed importance. His Excellency would therefore be going further--under some exceptional stress; and to this end would have been placed without delay in possession of his hat, gloves and stick; equipped with which objects it verily was that the Ambassador presently stood with his guest on the outer pavement and in presence of the waiting vehicle, any further domestic attendance repressed and the door of the house closed behind them. There they remained a little, it may be mentioned--long enough at least for the exchange of a smile now rather strained on either side, strained even to breaking, possibly, before Ralph could decide to approach his cab near enough for an effective view of its inner state. He had before this checked the motion of the roused driver, dozing on the box, toward a heavy officious descent, and then had himself faced the consequences of another step and a sufficient thrust of his head through the window of his "growler" to assure himself of the degree of dissimulation under which a conceivable companion might lurk there. His renewed look at the Ambassador after this was a confession that nothing lurked, though without its being at all a confession of consequent defeat; so that, himself opening the door and inviting his distinguished friend to pass in, he signalled a perfect readiness to explain disappointment away. The Ambassador, it must be added, allowed him at once and ever so considerately the largest license of apology for the production of a groundless hope; the great man's words in fact represented a glance at grounds that had lived their little hour.

"His failure of patience through my having kept you so long--you did, I recognise, mention the possibility of that," was his Excellency's noble remark.

There came to Ralph's assistance on this a suddenly enlarged interest of vision; he had indeed within the house given utterance to that precautionary thought, but it was for all the world as if the same idea on the lips of his friend suggested something to go on with beyond even what his own intelligence had found. That was it!--nothing in the least discredited the report he had been occupied in making. That other party to the drive ending at the Embassy door was, with the most conceivable congruity, and thanks to a passion of curiosity that nothing could longer bridle, off on his own irresistible adventure: one had asked too much of him, at the point reached by their relation, in expecting so to choke off his own criticism. The interview upstairs had drawn itself out, and what had he had to do meanwhile, poor dear creature, but count the minutes that would lead to the striking of his hour? That the hour would strike for each of them as soon as the wise step now achieved had been taken--this had been their assumption on settling together that afternoon, so much more for the accommodation, when all was said, Ralph could see now, of the victim of the sense of the Past than for that of the victim of the sense of the Future. The latter, it came to our friend, taking no precaution and making no provision, none at least that one could one's self know anything about, brought the business a more hurrying passion: as would be perhaps of the very essence for a man so concerned as compared with a man concerned as he himself was. He was conscious of ten rather bedimmed seconds during which he had positively to see the appeal he had obeyed as a thing in itself inferior to the motive under the force of which his late companion, no longer able merely to oblige him, had doubtless begun to beat fine wings and test brave lungs in the fresh air of his experiment. He had the real start, so to speak, while the subject of the Ambassador's interest had doubtless only the advantage that might, on some contingency as yet of the vaguest, reside in that.

There thus breathed on our young man a momentary chill--which, however, didn't prevent the Ambassador's seating himself without further delay, nor his own perhaps slightly more contracted occupation of the second seat, nor their presently effective, their in fact rather confessedly contemplative, start for Mansfield Square. It was to appear to Ralph later on, at any rate, that they had at this stage been reduced to unembarrassed contemplation; which is perhaps indeed but a proof that while he gazed out of the cab window during this extraordinary progress what he looked at so fixedly as to take note of no interval of speech was neither the exhibition of successive streets, with their aspects and their varieties of identity, but the portentous truth of his being launched, since, so conclusively, his counterpart in the circumstance was, and of his fate's having thereby shut down on any backward step. Not that he wanted to take one, not that he wanted to take one----he kept repeating that as the vehicle rolled; to be as "in" for whatever awaited him as he now felt, as he now absolutely knew, himself, was a strong simplification--with which wasn't it positively a blest one too? which question had not been answered in the negative, at any rate, even by the time they pulled up at the address he had given. This was what had taken place during their transit, he afterwards knew; the minutes had been so wholly given, in their course, to his inwardly sealing the charter of accommodation, as he would have called it, to whatever might now confront him that after he had got out, on the stoppage of the cab, he addressed to his companion a "Will you keep it on?" which left things taken for granted between them without a scrap of a loose end dangling. _He_ at least suffered none such, though there might have been just the sign of a difference in his good friend's face while the latter stepped straight out by way of answer. "Oh my dear man, I'll walk," he seemed to be saying; "I don't in the least mind your knowing that you've given me the fidgets or that I shall extremely need to think you over: which indulgence the use of my legs will healthily stimulate."

Something of that sort Ralph was much later on, as I say, to recover the appearance of his having found words for; just as he was to piece together the presumption that, the cabman paid, magnificently paid, and getting again into motion, he and his protector--for hadn't they after all rather exquisitely agreed to leave it at this?--stood face to face a little, under the prolongation of a handclasp; followed then by the mutual release that left his Excellency standing there on the pavement with the graver face of the two, _he_ at least little doubted. Our young man was after that aware of a position of such eminence on the upper doorstep as made him, his fine rat-tat-tat-ah of the knocker achieved, see the whole world, the waiting, the wondering, the shrunkenly staring representative of his country included, far, far, in fact at last quite abysmally below him. Whether these had been rapid or rather retarded stages he was really never to make out. Everything had come to him through an increasingly thick _other_ medium; the medium to which the opening door of the house gave at once an extension that was like an extraordinarily strong odour inhaled--an inward and inward warm reach that his bewildered judge would literally have seen swallow him up; though perhaps with the supreme pause of the determined diver about to plunge just marked in him before the closing of the door again placed him on the right side and the whole world as he had known it on the wrong.

BOOK FOURTH

I

He was so far prepared as that, on the footman's saying, after he had asked who was at home, "I think Miss Midmore is, sir," he had not been unduly agitated; though the effect was of making him at the same time wonder if he oughtn't, more decently, to have had his approach heralded in the course of the morning by the bearer of a note. Such questions as these, from the arrival of his ship at Plymouth, had repeatedly come up for him, and he had not lacked leisure, since the evening before, when the west country mail had set him down in Piccadilly amid a great bustle of general recognition, to advise his cousins of his immediate intention to wait on them. The sense had grown within him during the last three days that mistakes of one sort and another would easily be open to a young man just alighted from New York; he had made several already between Devonshire and London, even if without paying for them in heavier coin than a handful of new observations. His observations multiplied at such a rate that fifty to the minute would have been a short account of them; but there was one in particular that had from the first kept repeating itself and that might certainty have done as much to point his address as some of the others had done to remind him of danger. The danger was flagrant and consisted of the number of things to be known and reckoned with in England as compared to the few that had so sufficiently served him at home. He but wanted to know, though he would rather have liked to learn secretly; which for that matter he _was_ now, he conceived, catching a little the trick of--and this in spite of his wonted way, from far back, on receipt of a new impression or apprehension of a new fact, and under correction, in particular, of a wrong premise; which was to lose himself quite candidly and flagrantly in the world of meaning so conveyed. That disclosed quantity was apt fairly to make him stand still for wonder--whereby it might well have happened that whosoever took note of him would scarce have known whether to conclude most on his simplicity or on his wit. If it was strange to have had so to wait for familiar appearances--familiar, that is, all round him, seemingly, to everyone but himself--it was perhaps more remarkable yet not to succeed in concealing how much one was on the spot ready to make of them by the working of some inward machinery.

The great reassurance just mentioned at any rate, and which ministered still more to surprise than to confidence, came from his somehow making out that Ralph Pendrel enjoyed an advantage beyond any he missed; had a manner, a look or a tone, some natural brightness, some undesigned but conciliatory art, which perceptibly paved his way and which perhaps, should he incline to presume upon it, might really gain him favour. This inference he had had, and without gross vanity, time to make--though arriving doubtless for the moment at no finer conclusion on it than that his spirits were all the while, beneath however small a bent to swagger or bluster, undiscourageably high, and that youth and good proportions, a clear face, a free hand and a brave errand, all borne on that tide, were capable of casting a spell of a sort that he should find occasion either to measure or to press. It had been odd assuredly to come thus soon to a thought of spells--especially in the midst of a consciousness of blunders; but it possibly reinforced a little even this degree of presumption that the very blunders, which might have been all to his confusion save that various other persons had promptly and obligingly, as it were, taken them over, appeared grandly imputable to the same spring of freshness. He couldn't deny to himself his eagerness--extraordinarily strong and which people made way for, to the extent even of a large margin, as if they liked to see it and to wait for what it might further show. It was an eagerness certainly to enjoy, yet not at any one's cost, any one's in particular; and this might to those dealing with him have seemed rare, or in other words have seemed charming, the sticking out of an impulse not as a pike on a charge but after the fashion of a beggar's hat presented for the receipt of alms. That was the figure, that the case--the pennies had hour after hour veritably rained in; and what but a perfect rattle of them, by that token, accompanied him at the footman's heels upstairs to where it could only be that Molly Midmore awaited--though perhaps but just in a general way--his presenting himself as a suitor for her hand?