The Sense of the Past

by Henry James

What Molly saw, and what in ten seconds more she would make the others see, was the fact of the lapse unrelieved—the queerness of which for her was indeed already out with her asking him what was the matter and why in the world he looked at the mention of the dear thing at Drydown as if he were going to be ill. The extraordinary point of which withal was that she was herself ready the instant after to jump into detection verily, but detection of what wasn't—not at all of what was. His so helplessly hanging fire represented clearly, to her freshened perception, and thereby his own still sharper embarrassment, that he had been thinking more of poor Nan than of the rest of them put together; though of course when she brought her large irony to bear on this he could luckily snatch at his obvious retort and make his flushed laugh invite their companions to see how it righted him. "Did it strike you, my dear, that when I asked you a while since to take up with me for life I was really but expressing my interest in another person? If that was the case," he said to Mrs. Midmore and Perry, "I mean if I wasn't addressing her as an honest man—which she accuses me of—how could she guess it and yet at the same time make me such a blissfully happy one?" The question wasn't indeed in strictness for them to answer, and Molly, whatever they might have said, met it to her own sufficiency by another of her wondrous freedoms. "I could love you for a wretch, cousin, I think, as well as I could love you for a saint!" she cried; and it gave him at once, he seemed to feel, the luckiest chance for putting in his most vital plea.

"I don't care what you love me for if it's only as your very truest—and don't you see that when you doubt of my being so you deny by the same stroke that I'm the honest man I pretend?"

"Just listen to him, mother—was there ever anything grander than such a speech and such an air?" Her appeal was of the promptest, and if she addressed her parent her eyes took note but of her lover, whom, with her head inclined to one side, she might almost have been regarding in the light of a splendid picture. "I don't care, I don't care—it sets you off so to let me torment you. It's when I doubt of you," she said, "that you'll find me most adoring; and if you should ever dream I'm cold just draw me on to abuse you." She gave him at this moment and for the first time the oddest impression of studying him—she had only hugged him before, with sentiment and sense there had been no pondering; and he could have wished now she would straighten her head, her carriage of which had an effect on his nerves. It didn't matter that he believed her not really to intend this when she wound up with a repetition of her idea that they must have his portrait, that they must make sure of it before that first bloom of his expression, as she curiously called it, should have died down; a particular need of his own came to a head under her scrutiny quite as much as if he feared probing. "I'm an honest man, I'm an honest man!"—he said it twice over, strongly and simply, conscious of a sudden that he enormously wanted to, wanted to with an inward sharpness of which he had not yet felt the touch. It was a pressure from within that thus spoke, a pressure quite other than the driving force that had carried him so far and that he had known but by its effects, so rapidly multiplied, and somehow as dissociated from their starting-point or first producing cause as if that origin had been a spring pressed in somebody else. It was in himself, deep down somewhere, that his motion of protest had begun, and it really eased him to give it repeated voice—even if when he had made the point, that of his honesty, four times over, he had come rather to resemble the lady in the play of whom it was remarked there that she protested too much. He felt himself verily colour with his emphasis, and that was not at once corrected by his having to face the question straightway put by Perry, who on his side repeated the word once more. "'Honest'? Pray who in the world, here, cousin, has rudely said you're not?"—that was what he should have had in consequence decently to answer weren't it that his wish to clear himself to himself helped him to laugh, with whatever small flurry, at the challenge.

"It isn't your rudeness, it's your extravagant flattery, you dear people, that makes me want to warn you that you may find me, on seeing more of me, less possessed of every virtue than you're so good as to insist." He looked with his becoming blush from one of them to the other—becoming we call it because his act of difficulty and thereby of caution appeared to provoke in each of the women after all but a new, quite a brighter and fresher shade of interest. Were they going to like him uncertain better still than they had liked him certain, and if so to what should he look, besmothered as that must surely make him feel, for the comfort of knowing where he was for himself? Where he was for Molly, and by the same token for her mother, was told him by this pleasure they took in seeing how he had found, to his slight embarrassment, that there was something to explain. That it was that seemed to set him off in their eyes, which were so agreeably, if so oddly, affected by almost any trustful touch of nature or unexpectedness of truth in him. If he had hoped to please by intention, so he might perhaps have liked even better to please in spite of himself; notwithstanding which this last liability did to a degree contribute ease, or even, it might be, rather compromise dignity. He might for all the world have been growing, growing hard, growing fast; it had begun with the minute of his entering the house, and especially that room—so that without knowing what at such a rate one might really grow to, one should not yield to the imputation of being finally measured. There was a singular space of time during which, while this consideration on the part of the two women so approved him, approved him verily as against himself, approved him almost as if their soft hands had stroked him for their pleasure, there hovered before him the wonder of what they would have done had he been ugly, what they would in fact do should he become so, in any manner or form—this idea of his full free range suddenly indulging in a glance at that mode of reaction. What it all represented was doubtless but his need to express himself over the felt shock of his ignorance, since if it amounted to a shock the last way to treat it was to pretend he didn't mind it. He minded it, he found, very much, and if he couldn't pretend to himself he wouldn't pretend to the ladies, however they might want him confused for the enjoyment of smoothing it away. "You have then another daughter whom I hear of for the first time?" he asked of Mrs. Midmore—and indeed wellnigh in the tone of defying her to smooth that.

"I'm not in the least ashamed of her or aware of having at any time tried to conceal her existence!" his hostess said with spirit, yet with no show of resentment. "And I don't see really what it signifies if you have simply forgotten her yourself."

Ralph lifted a pair of finger-tips and, with thoughtful eyes on her, applied them for a moment—in no mere humorous fashion withal—as to a helpful rubbing of his head. There was something he so wished to make sure of. "No, I don't think I forget. I remember—when once I know. If I don't remember I haven't known. So there it is," he said for himself even more than for his relatives. "Somehow it does signify!"—after which, however, he threw the matter off with a laugh. "Better late than never, at any rate."

"I'm glad you grant us that," Mrs. Midmore returned, "for you mustn't have the appearance, you know, of wanting to cut us down. We're not after all such a big handful."

He gave a pacifying stroke to his disturbed crop. "No, I mustn't have any appearance that doesn't fit my understanding. But suppose I should understand," he put to her the next instant, "something or other that doesn't fit my appearance?"

"Lord, mother," Molly laughed out on this, "what on earth does the clever creature mean?"

Mrs. Midmore looked at him harder, as if she herself would have liked to know, but Perry had intervened before she could make that remark, addressing his observation, however, to herself. "I'll be hanged if I see how, if he didn't hear of sweet Nan, he could have learnt so much about the rest of us."