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?
He had been touched in the hall and on the staircase as by the faint odd
brush of a suggestion that what was before his eyes during certain
seconds had already been before them and was playing upon his attention,
was quite _seeking_ to, even though in the lightest, softest tug at it,
by the recall of a similar case or similar conditions. Just so when the
door above was opened to him and he heard himself announced the first
flush of his impression was that of stepping straight into some chapter
of some other story--other than his own of that moment, since he was by
the evidence of every felt pulse up to his eyes in a situation, which
glimmered upon him in the light, the bright strong light, of an aspect
recognised; before failing of that effect indeed under his next full
rush of perception. Wasn't it a place known, the great square
wainscotted room, like several perhaps in which he had seen a sort of
life led at home, only fairer and finer than those; with handsome
objects and four or five portraits rather largely interspaced, and a
daylight freshness in possession, the air at once of an outer clearness,
of an emptier world looking in, and of windows unembarrassed to match,
multiplied panes, one would say, but withal a prim spare drapery? It
wouldn't have been that the world was emptier than he had known it
beyond the sea, but that the scene itself, as it appeared for the ten
seconds that challenged memory and comparison, would have worn its other
face with a difference, confessing somehow to thicker shadows and
heavier presences, the submission to a longer assault. Such matter of
record, even on the part of a young man of the highest sensibility, is
at the best elusive enough, however, and Ralph's general awareness was
at once swallowed up in the particular positive certainty that nobody in
all his experience in the least answered to the young lady seated near
one of the windows before a piece of fine tense canvas framed and
mounted on slim wooden legs, through which she was in the act of drawing
a long filament of silk with the finest arm in the world raised as high
as her head. He himself so far answered to something in her own
intelligence that at sight and sound of him she slowly got up from
before her work, with never a hint of interruption or confusion, and
smiled across at him as if knowing all about him. She kept in this
movement her arm still aloft--she might have been just balancing herself
or wishing not to loosen her stitch; he was to remember afterwards how
the crook of her little finger, in the raised hand, caught his eye at
the distance, and how this helped him in a manner at once to take in
that the arm itself, its sleeve shortened to very near the shoulder, was
of the most beautiful rounded shape. That light of her knowing all about
him doubtless helped to flood his own mind with the assurance
immediately needed: he felt at this stage, in the most wonderful way,
that things came to him, everything a right carriage required for the
closer personal relation, in the very nick of being wanted, and wore
thus, even under the gasp of a slight danger escaped, a certain charm
and cheer of suddenness. That he was to make love, by every propriety,
to Molly Midmore, and that he had in fact reached his goal on the very
wings of that intention, this foretaste as of something rare had for
days and days past hung about him like the scent of a flower persisting
in life; but the sweetness of his going straight up to her with an
offered embrace hadn't really been disclosed till her recognition, as we
have said, breathed upon it with force and filled him at once with an
extraordinary wealth of confidence.
He had stepped straight into that with his stepping into the room, and
while he stood but long enough to know himself lifted and carried the
taking in of what she was through all his senses completed the splendid
rightness. Nothing might have been stranger than so repeated a jump, so
flying a leap, to firm ground which hadn't been there before in any
measurable manner but which his feet just felt beneath them at the
crisis of need. Was it going to be enough simply to do the thing,
whatever it might be, for it to "come" right, as they said, and for him
above all to like it, as who should also say, after the fact? Surprising
perhaps that questions of so comparatively general a kind should press
with their air of particular business into an active apprehension
unconditioned and absolute enough to forestall any conceivable lapse;
yet nothing could well be pleasanter than such a quickening, and this
even under the possibility that he might after a little get used to it.
The young woman there in her capacious corner was admirably, radiantly
handsome, and all the while still kept the posture she had at once risen
to--kept it as for fear of his loss of the pleasure by her breaking it
ever so little. The case was of course really that a mere moment
sufficed for these enormities of attestation; the air roundabout them
was prodigiously clean and clear, and so favoured happy certitude that
by the time he had advanced a trifle further he was, in addition to
everything else we have indicated, aware that, modest as she would
indubitably prove, she was neither awkward nor shy, and was in fact
quite as inspired and inflamed as himself. She came out from behind her
frame, to which she had given a light push, and then it was that her
splendid fairness, a complexion white and pink, and that her friendly
laughing eyes and full parted lips and thickness of loose brown hair,
helped the dress of sprigged muslin which kept as clear of her neck as
it did of her elbows to tell him about her, from head to foot--and she
was more than middling tall--everything that most pressingly concerned
him. There played round him before he took her to his arms the glimmer
of a comment kindled at some other flame than that of desire, the wonder
of her being rather more imaged for him, and ever so typically, than
likely to be, whatever fulness of reality awaited them, possessed by
him; which pair of contradictions, however, melted together in the tide
of happy intelligence that next flooded and seemed verily almost to
drown them. That he should thus on the instant have clasped to his heart
and his lips a young woman with whom in all his life he had never yet
exchanged a word settled the relation for each alike as soon as it had
been so nobly and freely sketched; which was again a case of that felt
security after the fact already noted by him, as we have seen, and
scarce open, of a truth, to more vivid illustration. The security was
felt just as much by herself: this made the harmony full, this acted to
keep it still quite possible for him that the comparatively superficial
commerce, the inquiry and explanation that might have figured as
preliminary, should follow at a lower level what had just taken place,
and do so without either casting absurdity back on the passage or their
themselves incurring ridicule.
"I reached London but last night--so you see I haven't lost much time.
Perhaps I should first have asked your mother's leave," Ralph said; but
she had already at the word taken him up.
"Oh she would certainly have given it!" And he at once saw from the tone
of this that what she referred to as so licensed was the plunge into
intimacy just enacted. It put him a trifle out of tune that the most he
himself had meant was that he might have inquired of his cousin's
convenience as to presenting himself; and to feel his deference to that
propriety--or to almost any, it might seem--so swept away reminded him
afresh that he couldn't, by every appearance, be too bold, since he
plainly created in others, straight off and by his presence, the
liveliest dispositions and allowances. If it was true that Mrs. Midmore,
as he had figured her, would have smiled upon his silent rush at her
daughter from their very threshold, what could this signify but that the
house and the whole circle contained a treasure of welcome on which he
was infinitely to draw? Well, it was still then in the highest degree
agreeable to find everyone so understanding him as to help him to
understand himself; no example of which felicity could be greater than
such a promise of ease with the lady of Drydown, given the forms of
deference he had tried to prepare himself to pay her. "You mustn't speak
as if we have been thinking of you in the least as a stranger; for how
can that be," Molly asked, "when everything was so made up between us
all by your father's writing in that way to mamma so shortly before he
died, wasn't it?" Her fine expressive eyes, he at once recognised, were
charged with an appeal to him on the ground of this interesting history;
and once more, after the merest repeated brush of the wing of that
bewilderment by which he was thus effectually admonished and aided to
escape, he knew the flood of consciousness within him to raise its
level. His father, dear man, had died, his father had written, and even
while they looked at each other under allusions so abounding it came and
came and came that there had been an estrangement among those of their
name on the two sides of the sea, and then, through a fortunate chance,
a great healing of the breach, a renewal of good relations as to which
his character of acclaimed wooer left no doubt. He was in actual free
use of the whole succession of events, and only wanted these pages, page
after page, turned for him: much as if he had been seated at the
harpsichord and following out a score while the girl beside him stirred
the air to his very cheek as she guided him leaf by leaf. She seemed
verily after that fashion to hold out to his eyes the solemn scroll of
history, on which they rested an instant to such a further effect of
danger dissipated that before either she or he knew it they were once
more in each other's arms. It was as if this repetition, this
prolongation had been potently determined, and for each alike, by her
free knowledge of what had gone before--he lagging a little behind, it
was true, in the rapid review of reasons, but suddenly confident and
quite abreast of her after they had thus irrepressibly and for the
second time exchanged their vows. He had for the next thing even the
sense of being, and in the gallantest way, beforehand with her when he
heard himself strike out as from the push of multiplied forces behind
him: there was all the notoriety--for what had it been _but_
notoriety?--of the loyalism of the American Pendrels during the
Revolution, in the rigour of which they had emigrated, restoring
themselves to England for a ten years' stay and not a little indebted
under that stress to the countenance and even the charity of their
English kindred. A freshness of interest in this adventure surged
through our young man's blood and sought expression, without the least
difficulty, in an attitude about it to his young hostess as competent as
if he had by some extraordinary turn become able to inform her
ignorance.
"My grandfather--yes," he said, "must of course, thirty years ago have
been rather a wild sort of character and anything but a credit to us.
But he was terribly handsome, you know," Ralph smiled, "and if your
great-aunt, while we hung on here, had cause to complain of his
fickleness, I think we're all now aware that she fell quite madly in
love with him and paid him attentions of an extravagance that he
couldn't after all ignore--not in common civility." He liked to go back
to that--since it was all indeed, under growing freedom of reference, so
much more behind him than before; it was truly brave matter for talk,
warming his blood, as we say, while it flowed; and he had at the end of
another minute so mastered it that he would have liked to catch her
mistaken in order to put her right. Her face, for that matter, glowed
with the pleasure, wasn't it? of his assurance thus made positive;
assurances, roundabout them, couldn't, she showed, too much multiply,
and it wasn't to be till considerably after that the sense of this
moment marked her for him as really rather listening, though in all
delight, to his recital of a learnt lesson, than as herself taking from
him an inspiration she might have lacked. He was amused--even if why so
amused?--at the vividness of the image of the too susceptible or too
adventurous daughter of their earlier house with whose affections, the
acknowledged kinship of the two families offering approved occasion, his
unscrupulous ancestor had atrociously trifled. The story had anything
but grace, thanks to the facts of its hero's situation, his
responsibility to a patient young wife and three children--these kept
indeed at a distance, quartered, by his care, in a small French town,
during most of the term of his extravagance; the climax of which last
had been the brutal indifference, as it at least appeared, of his return
to New York with nothing done for mitigation of the exposure awaiting
the partner, as the phrase was, of his guilt. It didn't make the scandal
less--since a different face might somehow or other have been put upon
it--that he prospered in America against every presumption attaching to
the compromised civil state of the family; that he succeeded in carrying
their name again almost insolently high, in recovering and enlarging
their ancient credit, in retrieving their wasted, their forfeited
resources, in putting them at last back into such a posture that after
his death and with the lapse of the condoning years they could perfectly
pass for people, had in fact conspicuously become people, incapable not
only of gross infractions but of the least lapse from good manners. The
defunct worthy, with whatever discomfort of conscience, had had a high
hand for affairs of profit and had flourished as the undoer of virtue or
confidence or whatever other shaky equilibrium is often observed to
flourish. The proofs of his mastery were naturally, however, much more
evident to the followers in his line than any ground for imputations
less flattering; with which it seemed further unmistakeable that a
posterity in such good humour with itself and its traditions might have
even enough of that grace to spare for cases of the minor felicity. How
at any rate had it come about that the minor felicity, of all things in
the world, could be a distinguishable mark of the English Pendrels, the
legend of any awkward accident or any foregone advantage in whose annals
would so scantly have emerged as matter for free reference? This was a
question that might with the extraordinary swell of our young man's
present vision find itself as answerable as the next before or the next
after. Every question became answerable, in its turn, the moment it was
touched; so that when his companion, as she had so bravely become,
mentioned the repair of the family breach he jumped at the occasion for
a full illustration of the subject.
"You see how little difference your mother's marriage made to us, with
the extinction of our name here involved in it; since if Pendrels had at
last failed us, for the pleasure over there of thinking of them, we
could make Midmores answer almost as well at the worst--take _them_ up
even with a resignation which, now that I know you, cousin," Ralph went
on, "seems to put our acquaintance in a light that couldn't possibly be
bettered."
"Certainly the Midmores are as good as anybody," the young lady bearing
their name flared out in the charmingest way to reply; "for we're not
forgetting, are we? that it was a Pendrel after all, one of yours,
though of mamma's own recognised blood too, who came out as if on
purpose to make the trouble among us; the trouble we doubtless needn't
go into again now, even if it seems to have been thought as ill as
possible of at the time."
"No, we needn't go into that of course," Ralph smiled--smiled verily
through his exhilarated sense that whereas the best of reasons for their
not doing so would have dwelt a few moments before in his imperfect
grasp of that affair, he now enjoyed the superior view of it as well
before him and only a bit embarrassing to handle. "You didn't like us
then, and we must have been brought up not greatly to like you--all the
more even, no doubt, if we were in the wrong," he cleverly put it; "so
that things got worse, and we thought still more evil, on both sides,
than there _was_ to think; which perhaps didn't matter, nevertheless,"
he added, "when once all commerce was quite broken off. Nothing can have
passed between us, I make out, for at least twenty years; during
which"--for that also came to him--"we lost every remnant of the credit
originally enjoyed with you all by the stiffness of our stand on your
side during the dreadful War."
She took this from him with a clear competence that yet didn't belittle
his own--though his own, it might be added, was to indulge, the very
next thing, in a throb of finer complacency. She stared a moment before
saying, as she did with much point, that she hadn't heard of any
American who when their capital fell before the British arms had given
_them_ any credit for anything; on which remark he commented in turn,
smiling at what she appeared to have meant. "Don't you happen to have
heard, my dear, of the great revolutionary struggle with your poor mad
old king, now at his last gasp as they tell me, through which my country
won the independence it enjoys?"
He thought he had never in life seen anything handsomer than the way
Miss Midmore had of tossing her head with a spirit and an air that might
have been partly a fruit of breeding and partly an extravagance of
humour. It made him note even at the moment that he had really in New
York never seen a head prescriptively tossed, or never at least with
that high grace; in spite of its being withal supposed there that the
young American ladies were unsurpassed in their frank pretension to
consequence. "We haven't forgotten how dreadfully ill you all behaved
long ago," were the words with which she met this reflection on her
intelligence; "but it's lucky for you that you had made overtures--to
ourselves here I mean--before we came to blows with you again a few
years since."
"I see, I see--friendly assurances had passed; so friendly that when the
public breach was healed there was very little of the private left to be
patched up with it." He rendered this justice to her not having gone so
astray. "But I think the great thing must have been that I myself, such
as you see me, don't remember the time when I didn't fairly languish for
the sight of you. I mean," he explained, "for a view of London and of
the dear old country--which my grandparents, you understand, when here
in 1806 and lay it on as they would, I know, couldn't write home to us
flattering enough accounts of."
"It was in 1807, if you please," Molly Midmore said, "and it was that
visit of theirs, in which they showed such a desire to be civil, that
began the great difference of which you and I enjoy at last the full
advantage. They must have done very well," she next declared, "seeing
the small cause we had to make much of you. They showed how they wished
to change that and did their utmost for it. It was afterwards remembered
among us that they had taken great pains."
"Yes indeed, they _would_ have wanted to smooth down any awkwardness,"
Ralph gaily returned; while the mere saying it made him within the
moment see much beyond that supposititious truth, see everything exactly
as it had happened. So very much thus emerged to distinctness, so much
more than he could have gone into just then even hadn't she, in her way,
apparently wished to produce a signal fact before he might, as he would
perhaps have said, get in. He got in none the less now with another
assured hit. "The notion of our coming together in this way was the best
of what they had left behind them when they went off again: _that_ was
the real beginning, as you say, of your and my happiness that's to be."
She made less and less scruple of showing him how he charmed and amused.
"The only thing is that they could scarce have plotted that out before
either of us was born. I don't exaggerate my youth," said Molly, "since
I've waited for you till now. But I'm not so old as that they could have
told by the sight of me that you were going to grow up so certain to
like me."
"I think _I_ could have told it, my dear, even at the hour of my birth.
At any rate," Ralph laughed, "it was a fancy I took to as soon as it was
ever mentioned to me----!"
"Which it can't have been," she broke in, "before a little more was
known about your servant, sir, than you would seem to allow for, even
granting she's the wonder you behold!"
"I beheld the wonder, and I took it completely in," Ralph instantly
answered, "the minute I clapped eyes on the elegant portrait that
reached us in New York some time back, of course--yet so lately as to
show you all in your present bloom." On his reference to which valuable
object there befell him something he might have noted as more remarkable
than whatever else had most seemed so, save that each improvisation, as
he might fairly have called them all, gave way without fear to the
brightening of further lights. Had he expressed at the very moment what
hovered there before him he would have called it the gleam of an
uncertainty on his young woman's part as to whether, or at least as to
when, she had sat for the picture the truth of which was so present to
him. He might have caught her in the act of not acknowledging his
reference--which it was somehow fortunate for her, wasn't it? that she
nevertheless didn't repudiate before he had carried his hand to the
inner left pocket of his coat and drawn out in its red morocco case the
miniature that was to confirm his words. He had looked at her hard, as
to hold her while he made sure of this, and the eyes that met his own,
for the space of five seconds, wondered, not obscurely, if he were going
to; after which, at the mere feel of the thing in his hand, his lips
couldn't help closing an instant as for giddiness, the positive swing of
the excitement that declined so to fail. It was at each stroke as if he
were treating himself to a wanton degree of it without the least menace
of a penalty. Aren't we perhaps able to guess that he felt himself for
the ten elapsing seconds the most prodigious professor of legerdemain
likely ever to have existed?--and even though an artist gasping in the
act of success. The consciousness of that force took a fresh flight on
the spot--it meant so the revelation of successes still to come. This
particular one triumphed over the ambiguity in the girl's face which had
not immediately yielded to his gesture--but which did yield, he
beautifully found, on his handing her the morocco case open and without
his having himself so much as dropped his eyes on it. The intoxication
of mere happy tact might really have paralysed in him for the moment any
other sense. Yes, he extraordinarily felt, it was happy tact that made
the object in his pocket respond to the fingers suddenly seeking it--and
this, all so wonderfully, before they had either given it notice or
received notice from it. It wasn't exactly success, no doubt, that he
next imputed to his friend--since success with _her_, the success under
which recognition, on her first glance at the offered picture, played
straight out of her, would clearly have had to represent a triumph over
truth, a pretence of recollection, instead of, as in this case, the very
finest coincidence with it. "Oh yes, _that_ picture!" Molly at once
exclaimed, much as if her beauty had been often portrayed, and with the
addition, the next instant, that they hadn't at home held the artist,
for whom she quite remembered sitting, to have done her much justice; so
that indeed, as she now made out, her mother must have sent the thing
off without her being herself in the secret. "It's well enough," she
went on, her handsome head just tipping to consider; "but if your mamma
had sent us such a bungle as a likeness of _you_, my dear, I should have
been in less hurry, I think, to make your precious acquaintance. It
wasn't very gallant," she further splendidly observed, "that you should
have needed a trumpery proof of what's thought of me while I on my side
was ready to take you on trust!"
Nothing could have exceeded for him meanwhile the luxury of increase for
what he might have called the filling-in of his fortune; odd enough
though it still might be to hang with her thus over a gage which at the
end of a minute she handed back to him, the case closed, under her light
thumb, with a snap, and which he restored to his bosom with an air that
perhaps carried off but imperfectly his not having desired to refresh
his own eyes with the painter's presentation. Not till afterwards had
he, for all his confirmed elation, high spirits enough to ask himself
why he would so singularly have hated to put the content of the neat
pair of covers to any ocular test. A content bravely attested after all
by his companion they indubitably had; which inscrutable fact still so
sufficed him, even at the later hour we mention, that his thumb ignored
any itch to press the small clasp again. By that time he might have
recalled how little he had been aware of the miniature against his
breast before its being there was in so odd a fashion disclosed; with
its coming back to him as well that his unawareness might have struck
the girl herself, and not less, at any rate, that he had noted their
flushing together under the force of something tacit, something that
wasn't quite, that wasn't verily at all, in their speech. He was
nevertheless for the present not to review any one of the felicities
that more and more assured his steps, and that still made him, in living
them over, catch his breath a little, he was not to recur to them
without a finer and finer joy, without a positive pride, in the growth
of his wit. It had broken out quite brilliantly, this wit, in that
production of the morocco case, and what had it done less with his
finding the very rightest terms for putting it, while Molly listened,
that if he hadn't been able to repay in kind the compliment of her
beautiful offering this was because the kind, the article worth her
acceptance, was alas not produced in America? He was later on to
remember indeed how she had answered with a frankness scarce failing of
provocation that since he himself had been produced the country didn't
at least lack fine material; with which too she had carried it off quite
on his own level by making the point that the real repair of his neglect
would be to sit as soon as possible to one of the great London hands.
There were plenty to choose from, he would see, as he would see many
other things that might be new to him; and wasn't it certain moreover
that the fancy would then be--from the moment he humoured it, that
is--not for a trifle to be carried about in a pocket, but for something
of a style and size to hang there roundabout them, where it would have
for company as many Pendrels as Midmores? These lively impressions were,
as we say, inevitably to renew their edge, even if the sense of living
to the increase of danger, or in other words to the increase of
interest, rather swept away in its pulses any occasion to brood. It is
nevertheless not with his eventual commentary on this course that we are
concerned, so much as with the freshness of those first moments. It
belonged on the spot to still another of them that he found occasion to
take her up somehow, in all good faith and good humour, on that oddity
she had appeared to let fall, the matter of Mrs. Midmore's being so in
fear of her as to have had to make a secret of despatching the morocco
case.
"We rather suppose over there, you know," he mentioned, "that in England
at least the children are bred to such submission that the parents
haven't to conspire for freedom behind their backs. And, to tell you
all," he further explained, "we have thought of your mother as such a
very high lady that to make our image fit the facts we must apparently
think of _you_ as a higher."
"Do you consider," the girl asked at this, "that you've met me with such
extraordinary signs of awe? I won't pretend indeed I'm a bleating
lamb--but you'll see for yourself that, though we're remarkably alike, I
think, and have both plenty of decision, or call it even temper, there's
between us an affection stronger even than our force of will on either
side and which has always kept difficulties down. She happens to like
what I like, just as I want to like, being so fond of her, what she
does--though I don't say that if that were different there wouldn't be a
touch of strife. If we've the same spirit therefore we've luckily for
the most part the same tastes--which I dare say I wouldn't tell you,
however, if I thought you'd be afraid of me for 'em. For all my
boldness, at the same time, and which I come as honestly by as you will,
I'd never look at a man of whom I shouldn't myself once in a while be
afraid. Unless you're prepared, sir, properly to make me so," she
laughed, "we may therefore perhaps have gone too far--for mamma herself,
in this, I think, would be as disappointed as I am."
"I don't care a bit how far we've gone," Ralph answered with the richest
resolution, "since the more of you all I please, no doubt, and putting
any fierceness quite aside, the better it will be for our union. You
don't expect me to agree to terrorise you, I suppose," he pursued with
ease, "and I shall defy you to prove to me that if I suit you it won't
be because I'm amiable." With which he stood ever so masterfully smiling
at her.
"Oh indeed I can see you're amiable!" she cried with joy.
"I'll be hanged," he declared, quite keeping up his tone, "if I'll take
the trouble ever to be anything else! I've the assurance to say that you
must take me exactly as I am."
"Why what in the world do I want of you but that you should show
assurance? Isn't it what I just said?--and if people don't find you
ready for them, when I love you for your readiness," she cried, "I think
I shall box their ears."
"Oh I shall take care for them, poor wretches," he laughed, "that they
shan't be caught doubting me; since you must remember, you see, that
what I've most of all come over for is peace all round." He held her so
perfectly now, he seemed to know, beyond any possible slip, that putting
his hands again on her shoulders scarce made it the surer. She was
nevertheless in them, under their particular pressure, more and more
deeply, and it made for his gravely going on, while he kept her at the
distance that seemed to leave them each space and sense for a
consideration all but unspeakable: "Let us once more therefore, dearest,
exchange the kiss of peace."
She closed her eyes upon him, and it was as if that consenting motion
were one with the spring of his closer possession. This sweetness,
renewed, held them together for a time he couldn't have measured, and
which might have lasted longer but that he of a sudden knew, by the very
beat of her heart, that something more had happened for him and that she
was again in charge of it, as she had been at first. But it didn't make
her let him go--which was the greatest of the wonders, and it hung there
behind him, and without his wanting at once to turn, that another person
had joined them who divided now Molly's attention and whom she bravely
addressed. "Mr. Pendrel, you see, has come, and is giving us the kiss of
peace."