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, —