Part 24 (1/2)

In his heart Staniford had often thought that he could have done very much less than jump overboard after Hicks, and could very properly have left him to the ordinary life-saving apparatus of the s.h.i.+p. But if he had been putting the matter to some lady in society who was aggressively praising him for his action, he would have said just what Lydia had said for him,--that he could not have done anything less. He might have said it, however, in such a way that the lady would have pursued his retreat from her praises with still fonder applause; whereas this girl seemed to think there was nothing else to be said. He began to stand in awe of her heroic simplicity. If she drew every-day breath in that lofty air, what could she really think of him, who preferred on principle the atmosphere of the valley? ”Do you know, Miss Blood,” he said gravely, ”that you pay me a very high compliment?”

”How?” she asked.

”You rate my maximum as my mean temperature.” He felt that she listened inquiringly. ”I don't think I'm habitually up to a thing of that kind,”

he explained.

”Oh, no,” she a.s.sented, quietly; ”but when he struck at you so, you had to do everything.”

”Ah, you have the pitiless Puritan conscience that takes the life out of us all!” cried Staniford, with sudden bitterness. Lydia seemed startled, shocked, and her hand trembled on his arm, as if she had a mind to take it away. ”I was a long time laboring up to that point. I suppose you are always there!”

”I don't understand,” she said, turning her head round with the slow motion of her beauty, and looking him full in the face.

”I can't explain now. I will, by and by,--when we get to Venice,” he added, with quick lightness.

”You put off everything till we get to Venice,” she said, doubtfully.

”I beg your pardon. It was you who did it the last time.”

”Was it?” She laughed. ”So it was! I was thinking it was you.”

It consoled him a little that she should have confused them in her thought, in this way. ”What was it you were to tell me in Venice?” he asked.

”I can't think, now.”

”Very likely something of yourself--or myself. A third person might say our conversational range was limited.”

”Do you think it is very egotistical?” she asked, in the gay tone which gave him relief from the sense of oppressive elevation of mind in her.

”It is in me,--not in you.”

”But I don't see the difference.”

”I will explain sometime.”

”When we get to Venice?”

They both laughed. It was very nonsensical; but nonsense is sometimes enough.

When they were serious again, ”Tell me,” he said, ”what you thought of that lady in Messina, the other day.”

She did not affect not to know whom he meant. She merely said, ”I only saw her a moment.”

”But you thought something. If we only see people a second we form some opinion of them.”

”She is very fine-appearing,” said Lydia.

Staniford smiled at the countrified phrase; he had observed that when she spoke her mind she used an instinctive good language; when she would not speak it, she fell into the phraseology of the people with whom she had lived. ”I see you don't wish to say, because you think she is a friend of mine. But you can speak out freely. We were not friends; we were enemies, if anything.”

Staniford's meaning was clear enough to himself; but Lydia paused, as if in doubt whether he was jesting or not, before she asked, ”Why were you riding with her then?”