They saw it at once, they rallied, as he felt, altogether, and Sir Cantopher's presence crowned all their confidence without at all impairing his own. Ralph had been having from them this and that about him, but to see him there was to understand him as the supremely valid family friend, with certain of whose aspects liberties of remark might be taken behind his back, but with whose judgment and whose taste they would ever, and most particularly, wish their appearance as a family to consort. Our young man, with the divinatory gift that so unfailingly flared up in him under stress, was quickly mastering the truth that, for that matter, criticism of his friends would enjoy a range on this visitor's part which it could scarce hope to achieve in any conditions on Molly's or her mother's, affirm their claim to the luxury as they might. It was wonderful, it was already inspiring, that Sir Cantopher, by the mere action of a sign or two of the simplest, seemed to blow on the perceptive flame as if he had directly applied his breath. He recognised, he recognised—Ralph took that almost exultingly in for the quickening of interest it surely promised. What he recognised was that the American cousin appeared to justify himself to sight; which was perhaps no great showing, especially as an effect of but two or three glances—yet it offered that pilgrim an inviting extension, one he only asked to make the most of.
"I know how they've looked out for you, sir—and don't mind telling you that I've myself looked out with them; so that I perfectly conceive their present satisfaction. We've landed our prize—the expression seems peculiarly just, and you of course are assuring yourself with the last conviction that your own is at least equal to anything you could have imagined." Of these words Sir Cantopher delivered himself in a voice of such an odd high nasality as again threw Ralph back on the question of voices and caused him to note that he had never before heard a like tone applied with such confidence. It was with confidence and to the happiest effect that Mrs. Midmore applied hers, but hers was a charm and a rich comfort, whereas Sir Cantopher's excited surprise, or was exciting Ralph's at least, in proportion as it developed. There again accordingly was our friend learning at a leap, learning that here was a scene where the safe retention of properties and honours didn't in the least depend on a gentleman's either denying a single mark of his ease or attempting to please in violation of it. He himself had been acquainted, hadn't he? with the reign of the nasal, but when and where had it flourished to his ear as this gentleman, and doubtless quite unconsciously, made it flourish? People were supposed at home to enjoy in that particular an unresented license—which he had, however, never heard taken as he now heard it without its having somehow seemed to pull the speaker down. Sir Cantopher was up, up, up—yes, as he went on, up at the topmost note of his queer fine squeak, which was clearly not less an element of felt assurance in him than the most settled of his other titles. This didn't withal diminish the fact that if you had caught the sound the first time without sight of its source, you might have turned to expect some rather ancient lady, of the highest fashion indeed, but playing her part, presumably to her disadvantage, upon an organ cracked beyond repair.
It was furthermore of moment that not a shade of disadvantage, even while the impression was suddenest and sharpest, appeared attachable by Ralph's fancy to Sir Cantopher's similar exercise, for how could one in that case have been so moved more and more to advance in proportion as it was suggested that one was awaited? It took no great number of more words to represent to him that he was now in presence, and might ever so fortunately continue to be, of more cleverness even than his cousins had engaged for on behalf of their patron—his pulses telling him in this remarkable way that the finest parts of it would probably come out to him, and that, yes, positively, they were already wanting to come out. He, Ralph Pendrel, should enjoy them even were that ambiguity of the oral medium a condition involved. Mightn't he too grow with association prolific enough fairly to like the ambiguity?—even as it couldn't but be that the company Sir Cantopher kept had either to like it or, as the phrase might be, lump it. Ralph had really not to wait longer than this for the first glint of a truth that was soon to gather more force, the virtual perception that the only way not to find one's self rather afraid of such a companion might well be the device of getting and keeping so near him that his power to alarm should by positive human pressure be deprived of range and action. Not this calculation indeed do we impute to our partaker of impressions during the first stages of the relation that had begun so quickly to move him; it was quite enough that a surrender to it—though to have only just to surrender was a most extraordinary turn—looked for all the world like the door of a society, of knowledge, of pleasure in a rich sense in which he hadn't yet encountered pleasure, standing ajar before him and asking but for a push of his young hand.
"You'll understand, please, sir," Sir Cantopher had at any rate soon said, "that I'm here this morning to pay you in particular my respects and to offer you any service in my power. I've only to meet your eye, haven't I? to judge that our manners and customs will be an open book to you almost at once, so far as a quick understanding is concerned; but there may be a page here and there that I can help you to turn over—even if your cousin Perry, who is also my good friend, may be a much better guide for you to the sights of the town, as they are called, let alone too most of the humours of the country. There are things Perry could show me, I'm sure, that I've never seen in my life—but that must be because he has never thought me worthy of 'em: isn't it, you great keeper of your own counsel?" the family friend asked again of the family hope, who now stood with his thumbs in his waistcoat armholes and his eyes anywhere but on Sir Cantopher's. He had no answer for the question addressed to him, which flowered out of the speaker's urbanity with a special effect for that vivacity of observation in our own young man of which Sir Cantopher, to his high credit, had lost so remarkably little time in making sure.
What even he, however, in spite of that sharpness, couldn't have guessed, and this by Ralph's private and immediate certainty, was what the latter was at these instants most thinking of: which was neither more nor less than that whereas their companions, not many minutes before, had visibly not known what to make of various odd matters drawn by the rare force of the situation from their kinsman's candour, so no felt want of ease whatever could possibly greet on the score of its ambiguity even the boldest push of this quite other and very much greater cleverness. Yes, very much greater, Ralph at once owned, for nothing yet had perhaps brushed his perception with such a wing as the absolute interest of that light on the fact that Sir Cantopher, with superior resources to his of every kind (if the facial were excepted, though perhaps indeed the facial but worked in their own way,) might irritate, might exasperate, might really, to put it at the worst, humiliate, his present auditors, but would never produce in them that odd consequence, recently noted, of their finding themselves disconcertedly at sea. Should Ralph again by any accident so leave them? He hoped not, he had somehow felt the warning, we know, as the chill of a misadventure. Still, amid the wondrous things that so positively promised to happen, that, even that, had its suspended possibility; which in fact cast a shadow just appreciably the larger and the darker by reason of this appearance that he was in danger of expressing least, to any practical end, just when desiring to express most, and that there was on the other hand nothing his fellow-guest might treat them to, for that gentleman's special amusement, that wouldn't be intelligible, and quite cruelly so if need be, exactly in proportion to the fine taste of it.
That was the point to which our adventurer reached out, the attraction of such fine taste as he had heard of, as he had dreamed of, as he knew existed in the world, without his having come even within remotest hail of it, but which he now by the mere act of a step or two might positively feel his hand touch. Of this he had for the instant so intent an awareness that the precious quantity in question and its curious master might, by the measure of the recognition, have seemed to supersede his appointed mistress and her bloom and her beauty as the main and original reading of his lesson and object of his aim. Wasn't he afterwards quite to allow to himself that he had during certain moments just then fairly invited the girl herself, so far as laughing toward her as if he desired it went, to be glad with him for his so liking what was thus promised them together, as might be—there having begun in him too, under the very sense we commemorate, who should have been able to say what instinct of the rightness of his making no sort of surrender to which he shouldn't be able to introduce her as well? Was he to pretend there, however, after but five minutes of their visitor's company, to be ready himself with services in any such particular?—services from which he might easily, if he didn't look out, borrow the air of an officious ass. It quickened everything, it somehow, with a kind of still and not absolutely harsh violence, jostled all things together, that she didn't, no, didn't at all glow responsive to this evidence that he could show eagerness, and eagerness so gapingly flagrant, for a cause with which her concern would be but what she chose to let it. How long had it been before he noted, and then almost with a start, that during the establishment of his good relation with their fine friend, which clearly was proceeding by Sir Cantopher's action still more than by his own, she hadn't so much as once taken visual account of that worthy's presence, had in fact turned an eye upon him as little as Perry himself was doing? This would have been perhaps made up by her leaving of her lover to grin demonstrative if she hadn't markedly appeared to fail of coming to his help in it. They didn't help people with Sir Cantopher, Perry and she; which fact might possibly be already a guiding influence, unless it was a mere mark of the momentary case. On the former supposition it involved more matters than required present attention, though throwing so much light on the latter as might spring from one's guessing—what one after all had by this time independently guessed!—that the girl wouldn't love without jealousy and that here was a juncture for her at which, through some occult cause, the sharp passion stood in front of the soft. Her brother's incalculable attitude had become under the shift of the general pressure just her brother's affair, but Ralph hadn't to wait to see how Molly's discrimination against his own extravagance of sociability corrected as much as he could possibly have wished that quick fancy in him of her having through the sudden strange stress of a short time before held off from him altogether. That had been an alarm, and this even at the very worst wasn't, for that she didn't hold off in ignoring the author of their actual complication, that she much rather held on, held as she had at no moment held, could only be the true sense of her manner. She had reasons, and what were they? for not caring that he should want to see so supremely much of what other people, and this one in particular should it come to that, could do for him. These reasons of course essentially counted, even while she kept the expression of them back, for a renewed assurance of all she felt she could herself do; a truth contributing not a little to our hero's sense of himself as more bedevilled at this moment perhaps than at any yet, ridden since he was by the wish to lose nothing that he could on any terms whatever grasp.
He faced at that moment, to all appearance, the signal inference that he had come out, as who should say, for nothing singly and solely, not even for bestowing his heart and plighting his troth; he had come out for the whole, the finest integrity of the thing—the insistence of which now flashed upon him with the hard cold light of a flourished steel blade. In that light the whole was promised and figured ever so much more by Sir Cantopher than by Molly and her mother and her brother—in whatever separate harmony these three should move or act together. He gave it out as they couldn't possibly give it, and as their attitude, in very truth—for wasn't there a telltale shade even in Mrs. Midmore's too?—showed they didn't so much as want to. Sir Cantopher cut across them as with the edge of his fineness, waving them back a little and keeping them in place by one free and practised hand while by the other he sketched a hundred like possibilities upon the stretched expanse of Ralph's vision, which might have been an artist's uppermost fair sheet. Absolutely he drew things, their companions turning away their heads (and poor Ralph needing indeed to keep his own,) in recognition that as they of course could flourish no such pencil, so might they not either prudently snatch it from him; it not being in every house, even of the best traditions, that such a master was content to perform—it having in fact been to all probability quite noted that all impatience of his time or disposition to finish worked infallibly against the challenger.
"Yes, I've collections, treasures, and all as pretty things of their kind as you can hope anywhere to see"—this, Ralph knew at the end of three minutes, was one of the points he had most promptly made, and had then dropped for some other, though only next to retouch it with a neatness of caprice, repeating it as in provision of interest for himself and at once adding that there was nothing he either so loved or so hated as to play showman—it all depended on the case. "I've things I'd as soon smash with a hammer as invite people to admire who haven't some struggling germ of a natural taste. I don't care a fig, you see, for what's called an acquired one, which is sure to have been begged or borrowed or stolen, sure not to have been grown. I don't know where you've picked up yours, sir," he was so good as to remark to Ralph with his sharpest civility—"for I can scarce imagine where you should. It must grow therefore in the soil of your mind—in fact, upon my word, I seem to see it grow in your very face while I speak to you: which is as becoming to you as possible and as promising, mayn't I say? for my own opportunity."
Sir Cantopher was struck—and Ralph was at once struck, as well, with his being so: he had put his fine finger so straight upon the spot where our young man's consciousness then most throbbed. Ralph did, as we know, grow many of his perceptions and possibilities from moment to moment and as they were wanted, but his sense of this had been up to that instant that he grew them deep down within and then served them up in the outer light only all prepared and garnished and denying their improvised state. Here was Sir Cantopher catching them crude, and as good as saying that he did; this at least with a confidence betrayed neither by Molly nor by Perry, symptoms of something like their friend's confounding note though they might have confusedly given. Ralph flushed under the effect of the liveliest observation he had had to meet, and we have already seen that flushing rather inevitably counted for him as blushing—and not the less either for the fact that when he blushed he took a perfect oddity of alarm, as if the telltale suffusion threatened him by a nasty little law of its own with loss or defeat or exposure; though exposure of what, in the name of goodness? These awarenesses during the moment or two, so pressed upon him and upon each other, that it was as if a recognition of what Sir Cantopher might mean fairly surged up, under the squeeze, from his conscience to his countenance, where it could thus only give such increased signs as made his critic the more frankly appreciate them.
"Don't you see what I mean and what a treat it is to seize in the fact such a candour of intelligence, a play of apprehension so full and yet so fresh?—as if born but three minutes ago and yet already stepping out as straight as you like!" So he pursued, the terrible man, inviting the others fairly to admire their kinsman's expression, embarrassed or no, and thereby, as we feel, making that expression almost glare about for a refuge, some dart to cover, some snatch of a tag of disguise, from its own very heat. "The next thing I shall cry!" Ralph reflected in a central gasp; but if he felt the tears rise he couldn't for his life rightly have apportioned the weight of shame in them against the joy of emotion just as emotion. The joy was for the very tribute itself of Sir Cantopher's advance upon him, whereas the shame was ever so much more vague, attaching as it did at the most to its being rather ridiculous to be so held up for transparent. They had seemed to him transparent, even with dim spots—he had been fairly on his way, hadn't he? to reduce Sir Cantopher to it; so he panted a little, after his fashion, while the Midmores, and just exactly as through some blur of tears, affected him as rallying to their friend's invitation to see him in the light of that damning charm. He was what he was of course, and with the full right to be; but hadn't he half-seconds as of a push against dead walls, a sense of the dash at them in the dark?—so that they were attested as closely near without the fruit of it, since for one to call people reachable they had really to be penetrable. He said things—that is he was a little afterwards sure he must have said them, laughing, interrupting, deprecating, though he hoped not too literally—for he wouldn't as yet have it that he didn't on the whole and at the pinch carry almost any trouble off and see at the given moment more in the given matter than the others did. He was seeing even now surely more than Sir Cantopher was—which in fact however was exactly his complication, face to face as it placed him of a truth with his need to betray that he saw only what would save him; the idea of things that would lose him thus making its discriminations.