"And then? What did you do next?"

"As soon as I could get near enough, I got my fingers into his hair, and pulled--just a little, then slipped my hand under his shoulder. He got his face above water then, and he began to paddle with his hands."

"And were you not afraid?"

"Well, just a little bit, perhaps, at first. I dreaded his clutching at me. That would have made a finish of us both."

"And did he not? And how could you have prevented it, if he had tried?"

"He did not once attempt to clutch--seemed most careful, indeed, to keep his hands away. Lettie! He is a perfect gentleman, that man!--and brave, I am sure, He thanked me so politely--by-and-by, when he got his face clear of the water for a bit--as politely as if we had both been on dry land--for attempting to a.s.sist him; but said he thought I had better let go, as I could not possibly swim ash.o.r.e with him, and he could do nothing for himself, owing to cramp in his legs. Then Sefton joined us, and together we got him on his back. You cannot imagine how cheerful and composed he was, all through. He actually smiled when our eyes met. Not a struggle did he make, or an attempt to lay hold, which made it far more possible for us to deal with him. If he _had_ struggled, you know, we should certainly have been drowned, all three."

"Don't talk of it, Rose. It is just splendid the way you managed it all, and I am glad to think the man must be a pretty good sort; for you will have to know him, I suppose, after saving his life, and you will be introducing him to mother and me and f.a.n.n.y. Pity he is so old.

Thirty or forty, is he not, mother?"

"More'n forty, I reckon. Rising forty-five, if he wears well. But even fifty ain't old for a marrying man--if he's well off, that is. My senator was not much younger when we made it up between us. I don't hold with very young men myself. They're real hard to break in for runnin' in double harness, and the money's still to make, ginnerally speakin'. And after the girl has slaved and pinched all through her best years, helping to make the fortune, she finds herself too old when it's made to get much good out of it. Don't you be a fool, Lettie, like my sister Barbara. She vowed she'd have a man to please her eye, even if he should vex her heart.... _And_ she got him! And she never had a day's peace from the week their honeymoon ended. She died a brokenhearted woman, with nary bit of life or good looks left in five years' time."

"Pshaw, mother! If you've told that story once, you've told it fifty times. The fellow I agree to take will have to be well off, as well as young and good-looking. See if he isn't!"

"You'll have to look sharp then, Lettie. After twenty-five, a girl has to take what offers, or go without."

"You shut, Fan! School-girls are growing real forward, it seems to me."

CHAPTER VI.

WITH THE SMOKERS.

Joseph Naylor found himself a notoriety for that day, as much as the heroine who had saved his life. It was notoriety, however, with a difference, as compared with hers--less incense-like and intoxicating, though perhaps more tonic.

The Hebrew prophetess makes it the culmination of Sisera's overthrow that he, a warrior, should have been done to death by a woman; and even for the non-combatant there is something ungrateful to manly pride in owing life to a member of the weaker s.e.x. The debt is too heavy to be repaid; and it is conventionally settled that obligation between the s.e.xes should lie the other way. It could scarcely be agreeable to his self-love to feel himself pointed out among his fellows as the man who had gone in swimming that morning, and who would have drowned himself, if a brave young lady had not gone to his rescue and fished him out.

Mrs Carraway surveyed him through her gla.s.ses in the interval between her omelet and the robin-on-toast which const.i.tuted her breakfast. The sight of a should-have-been drowned gentleman communicated a marine flavour to the little bird, suggestive of oyster-sauce with boiled turkey,--a dish which was not on the bill of fare, and therefore the more delicious. She sent her colonel, after breakfast, to make friends with the interesting creature, and get exact particulars of how it had occurred, at first hand,--rather to the botheration of that tranquil warrior, who, since he had made his home in the Colonies, had for the most part practised an affable silence. If natives who approached him were to his liking, he accepted their advances, and graciously permitted himself to be courted; if they were not, he kept stolidly oblivious of their existence, no matter how pressing their overtures of friendship might be.

It is by no means a bad way of getting easily through life, provided you can persuade people that you are worth courting. That is the difficulty. People worth knowing can generally find better sport than cultivating your Worship; but even if they do attempt it, the game will grow monotonous ere long, on the one side as well as the other.

One can fancy that Royalty itself must yawn behind a fan at times, in weariness of uninterrupted adulation.

It was a bore to so reserved a gentleman as Colonel Carraway to break through his own ice; however, he lighted a cigar and strolled away to the gallery facing the north, and always shady, where inmates addicted to tobacco were wont to smoke. Naylor had arrived there before him, and stood the centre of a group in which Judge Petty and Vice-Chancellor Chickenpip vied with each other in displaying their forensic gift of unwearied question-asking--a talent which they made it manifest had not grown rusty from disuse since their elevation to the bench.

"I never experienced the sensation of drowning," the Judge was observing. "Being unable to swim, I never was in danger of it."

"And yet," said the Vice-Chancellor, with a shrug at the little paradox, and eyeing the perpetrator with condescending superiority through his spectacles, as the self-const.i.tuted wit is apt to do when his neighbour attempts a sally, "we teach our boys to swim in order to prepare them against such dangers."

"And they rashly tempt them in consequence, and so, not unfrequently, get drowned. For myself, I have all my life had a cat's antipathy to water--always excepting, of course, my morning tub."

"So your lordship's detractors of the blue-ribbon sect have sometimes insinuated," chuckled the other, delighted to be disagreeable by way of jest, however threadbare in form the jest might be. The Vice-Chancellor owed his reputation for smartness to his talent for ill-nature. The dullest can appreciate malice, while wit which is merely sportive requires a sense of humour to understand it.

The Judge was familiar with the idiosyncrasy of his learned brother.

"What need one expect from a pig but a grunt!" was his inward exclamation; but he was wise enough not to give it utterance. He merely moved nearer to Naylor, thereby half turning his back upon the other.

"I have always felt curious," he said, "to know what drowning, or, indeed, dying in any form, could be like--without personal experiment, that is. How did it feel, Mr Naylor? What were your sensations?"

"It did not get the length of drowning with me this time. I was a deal too busy struggling for my life, I can tell you, to take much heed of sensations. When at last I got my nose above water, and felt the young lady's fingers twisted in my hair, she was behaving in such splendid style that I could think of nothing but her efforts to help me. If she had not kept cool, you know, instead of drawing me up she would have been drawn down herself; and, crippled and sinking as I was, I could have done nothing to save her. My mind was completely absorbed in watching her efforts, admiring her nerve, and wondering if she would really succeed in keeping afloat. As for saving me, I did not think it possible; for, all the time, that racking cramp kept dragging my leg together, in spite of my straining efforts to stretch it, and drawing me to the bottom like tons of lead. Those cramps are hideous things; and then, after she and Mr Sefton had taken me in tow, and the anxiety for her safety grew less absorbing, the drowning man's instinct of clutching came upon me, and it was all I could do to keep still, and let myself be saved. You are perfectly right, Judge, to keep clear of the possibility of such an experience; but still, this experience was quite different from the feeling of drowning--the helpless struggling and sinking down and away, the yielding of what sustains you on every side, till the idea of up and down is lost in dizziness, while the held-in breath seems bursting you asunder. You bear it for hardly a minute, but that minute lasts an age; and then--and then--no one can describe what follows. You are confused, and benumbed, and melting into nothing. I have gone through it.

"A ship I sailed in, when I was a young man, was run down one foggy night off the coast of Cuba. It was my watch on deck, and that is how I am here to tell the tale. The look-out gave no warning till we were close under the bow of a Spanish man-of-war bearing straight down on us. I shouted to port the helm. It was too late. The Spaniard was into us with a crash. He stove in our quarter, and sent us to the bottom. I was knocked down by the falling rigging, and found myself in the water, entangled among cordage, and drowning as I have described. I know nothing more--nothing till I found myself coming to, on board that foreign ship. The deathly sickness! The longing to sink back into unconsciousness! The dim dull misery and tingling in every limb! as the stagnant blood began once more to circulate. I hope you will never know them. It is bad to drown, but it is far, far worse to be brought to. It was days before I was myself again; but I had plenty of time to recruit. The ship was bound for the Philippines, and it was not till she reached Manilla that I was set ash.o.r.e."

"Ah! then you have travelled, sir," said the Vice-Chancellor, scrutinising him with the condescension of a superior person recognising an interesting trait in an ordinary mortal. "Yet you have had time to make your fortune at home, and now you are embarking in politics, I hear. You deserve credit for the comprehensiveness of your energy, and will no doubt bring unusual information to bear on public affairs; but politics is as stormy a sea, and one more difficult to navigate than the one you know. It would be a pity, after weathering so many dangers, to make shipwreck there. We want good men in Parliament, but we want them on the right side."

"Is that the side of the patriots, Chancellor?--the men who went into office to save the country, and who made their own fortunes instead?

The tide has turned, and left them high and dry on the bank, or in the offices they appointed themselves to fill."

It was a young man who spoke--fair-haired and broad-shouldered, with a complexion burnt to the colour of bricks by the exposure of outdoor life. His clothes were not new, but they fitted him, and there was that look of rest and balance in his limbs which leisure and exercise alone can give,--so different from the smug constraint with which life in chambers and offices stamps the man of affairs.

The Vice-Chancellor turned with the haughty stare of a schoolmaster on the urchin who has spoken out of turn. Colonel Carraway looked disgusted at the bad taste which could drag politics into social intercourse; and politics flavoured with personality as well, to judge by the thrill in the speaker's voice. Senator Deane rolled his cigar round to the other cheek, and--never mind, it is a dirty habit.

"Those Canadians," he observed to his neighbour, "get as hot over their politics as we do. 'What can there be to quarrel about in _their_ small concerns?' say you? The same as in our big affairs--place and plunder, you may be sure. That's about all."

Joseph Naylor turned round to see who it was whose remark had brought the Chickenpip oration to a halt. "What! Walter Blount! You here!

Where have you dropped from? The very last man I expected to see. And yet no one but you would have let his political zeal break out on so slight provocation. That comes of not being a native. You take the fever of politics the hotter for being new to it."

"But _you_ are contesting our Riding just now."

"The more need to let alone for the present moment, so as to come fresh to the conflict. Party bickerings grow stale to the mind if one is always harping on them. Time enough to let out when I get back there. This is the seaside. But what brings _you_ here?" resting his eyes admiringly on the other's st.u.r.dy limbs. "I see no sign of the relaxed system which is said to need bracing sea-air."

The young man did not change colour. The dusky vermilion of his sunburnt skin was incapable of a heightened tint; but he looked confused under the twinkling laughter of the other's eye. "I shall be selling out this Fall, so I thought I might run down here to the sea before moving West."

"West? Are you dreaming of making a fortune on the prairies?--turning farmer in earnest. Have you killed all the bears in your present neighbourhood, and exterminated the deer?"

"There will be neither bear nor deer within twenty miles before two years are over. The new railway runs right across my farm, and the speculators are prospecting all over the neighbourhood. I am offered a good price for my land. I shall sell, and go West somewhere, where settlers are fewer and game more abundant. No! prairie farming would not suit me. Even an improved farm in a good part of Ontario would be better than that; but I prefer the woods."

The circle round Naylor had now broken into groups occupied with their own talk, leaving him free to pursue his private gossip with his friend. He settled himself on a bench, buried his hands in his pockets, pushed out his feet in front, and blew a mighty cloud of smoke from his German pipe. "I declare I'm tired, Walter, with so much talking this morning. Now for a good old smoke! Where's your pipe?"

Walter sat down beside him and filled his pipe slowly and absently, as if his thoughts were on other things. Then he cleared his voice, lighted the pipe, and with as much off-handness as he could a.s.sume observed between the whiffs--

"Your family are with you, Mr Naylor?"

"My family is always with me. I carry the whole of it under my hat,"

he answered, looking his questioner straight in the eye, with a twinkle which plainly said, "Speak out if you have anything to say. I do not intend to help you."

The young man coughed. The smoke of his pipe had lost its way, and seemed trying for an outlet down his throat. "Mrs Naylor and her daughters are here, I understand?" he said at last.

"Yes."

There was a lengthened silence. "Yes" is not an answer to which the next observation can readily be attached. The questioner removed his pipe, and began nervously to examine what could be making it draw so badly; while the other watched him in silent amus.e.m.e.nt, tempered with a touch of good-natured pity.

"I wonder," Blount said at last, digging the charge carefully out of his pipe, and so making it unnecessary to raise his eyes to the other's face,--"I wonder what they will say to see me here?"