- Chapter VIII. Tête-à-Tête.
Seeing Wade lie there motionless, the lady —
Took off her spectacles, blew her great red nose, and stiffly drew near.
Spectacles! Nose! No, — the latter feature of hers had never become acquainted with the former; and there was as little stiffness as nasal redness about her.
A fresh start, then, — and this time accuracy!
Appalled by the loud thump of the stranger’s skull upon the chief river of the State of New York, the lady — it was a young lady whom Wade had tumbled to avoid — turned, saw a human being lying motionless, and swept gracefully toward him, like a Good Samaritan, on the outer edge. It was not her fault, but her destiny, that she had to be graceful even under these tragic circumstances.
“Dead!” she thought. “Is he dead?” The appalling thump had cracked the ice, and she could not know how well the skull was cushioned inside with brains to resist a blow.
She shuddered, as she swooped about toward this possible corpse. It might be that he was killed, and half the fault hers. No wonder her fine color, shining in the right parts of an admirably drawn face, all disappeared instantly.
But she evidently was not frightened. She halted, kneeled, looked curiously at the stranger, and then proceeded, in a perfectly cool and self-possessed way, to pick him up.
A solid fellow, heavy to lift in his present lumpish condition of dead-weight! She had to tug mightily to get him up into a sitting position. When he was raised, all the backbone seemed gone from his spine, and it took the whole force of her vigorous arms to sustain him.
The effort was enough to account for the return of her color. It came rushing back splendidly. Cheeks, forehead, everything but nose, blushed. The hard work of lifting so much avoirdupois, and possibly, also, the novelty of supporting so much handsome fellow, intensified all her hues. Her eyes — blue, or that shade even more faithful than blue — deepened; and her pale golden hair grew several carats — not carrots — brighter.
She was repaid for her active sympathy at once by discovering that this big, awkward thing was not a dead, but only a stunned body. It had an ugly bump and a bleeding cut on its manly skull, but otherwise was quite an agreeable object to contemplate, and plainly on its “unembarrassed brow Nature had written ‘Gentleman.’”
As this young lady had never had a fair, steady stare at a stunned hero before, she seized her advantage. She had hitherto been distant with the other sex. She had no brother. Not one of her male cousins had ever ventured near enough to get those cousinly privileges that timid cousins sigh for and plucky cousins take, if they are worth taking.
Wade’s impressive face, though for the moment blind as a statue’s, also seized its advantage and stared at her intently, with a pained and pleading look, new to those resolute features.
Wade was entirely unconscious of the great hit he had made by his tumble: plump into the arms of this heroine! There were fellows extant who would have suffered any imaginable amputation, any conceivable mauling, any fling from the apex of anything into the lowest deeps of anywhere, for the honor he was now enjoying.
But all he knew was that his skull was a beehive in an uproar, and that one lobe of his brain was struggling to swarm off. His legs and arms felt as if they belonged to another man, and a very limp one at that. A ton of cast-iron seemed to be pressing his eyelids down, and a trickle of red-hot metal flowed from his cut forehead.
“I shall have to scream,” thought the lady, after an instant of anxious waiting, “if he does not revive. I cannot leave him to go for help.”
Not a prude, you see. A prude would have had cheap scruples about compromising herself by taking a man in her arms. Not a vulgar person, who would have required the stranger to be properly recommended by somebody who came over in the Mayflower, before she helped him. Not a feeble-minded damsel, who, if she had not fainted, would have fled away, gasping and in tears. No timidity or prudery or underbred doubts about this thorough creature. She knew she was in her right womanly place, and she meant to stay there.
But she began to need help, possibly a lancet, possibly a pocket-pistol, possibly hot blankets, possibly somebody to knead these lifeless lungs and pommel this flaccid body, until circulation was restored.
Just as she was making up her mind to scream, Wade stirred. He began to tingle as if a familiar of the Inquisition were slapping him all over with fine-toothed currycombs. He became half conscious of a woman supporting him. In a stammering and intoxicated voice he murmured, —
- “Who ran to catch me when I fell,
- And kissed the place to make it well?
- My —”
He opened his eyes. It was not his mother; for she was long since deceased. Nor was this non-mother kissing the place.
In fact, abashed at the blind eyes suddenly unclosing so near her, she was on the point of letting her burden drop. When dead men come to life in such a position, and begin to talk about “kissing the place,” young ladies, however independent of conventions, may well grow uneasy.
But the stranger, though alive, was evidently in a molluscous, invertebrate condition. He could not sustain himself. She still held him up, a little more at arm’s-length, and all at once the reaction from extreme anxiety brought a gush of tears to her eyes.
“Don’t cry,” says Wade, vaguely, and still only half conscious. “I promise never to do so again.”
At this, said with a childlike earnestness, the lady smiled.
“Don’t scalp me,” Wade continued, in the same tone. “Squaws never scalp.”
He raised his hand to his bleeding forehead.
She laughed outright at his queer plaintive tone and the new class he had placed her in.
Her laugh and his own movement brought Wade fully to himself. She perceived that his look was transferring her from the order of scalping squaws to her proper place as a beautiful young woman of the highest civilization, not smeared with vermilion, but blushing celestial rosy.
“Thank you,” said Wade. “I can sit up now without assistance.” And he regretted profoundly that good breeding obliged him to say so.
She withdrew her arms. He rested on the ice, — posture of the Dying Gladiator. She made an effort to be cool and distant as usual; but it would not do. This weak mighty man still interested her. It was still her business to be strength to him.
He made a feeble attempt to wipe away the drops of blood from his forehead with his handkerchief.
“Let me be your surgeon!” said she.
She produced her own folded handkerchief, — M. D. were the initials in the corner, — and neatly and tenderly turbaned him.
Wade submitted with delight to this treatment. A tumble with such trimmings was luxury indeed.
“Who would not break his head,” he thought, “to have these delicate fingers plying about him, and this pure, noble face so close to his? What a queenly indifferent manner she has! What a calm brow! What honest eyes! What a firm nose! What equable cheeks! What a grand indignant mouth! Not a bit afraid of me! She feels that I am a gentleman and will not presume.”
“There!” said she, drawing back. “Is that comfortable?”
“Luxury!” he ejaculated with fervor.
“I am afraid I am to blame for your terrible fall.”
“No,— my own clumsiness and that oar-blade are in fault.”
“If you feel well enough to be left alone, I will skate off and call my friends.”
“Please do not leave me quite yet!” says Wade, entirely satisfied with the tête-à-tête.
“Ah! here comes Mr. Skerrett round the Point!” she said, — and sprang up, looking a little guilty.