The Sense of the Past

by Henry James

"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.