The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 52, February, 1862

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 curry-combs. 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.

CHAPTER IX

LOVE IN THE FIRST DEGREE

Peter Skerrett came sailing round the purple rocks of his Point, skating like a man who has been in the South of Europe for two winters.

He was decidedly Anglicized in his whiskers, coat, and shoes. Otherwise he in all respects repeated his well-known ancestor, Skerrett of the Revolution; whose two portraits—1. A ruddy hero in regimentals, in Gilbert Stuart's early brandy-and-water manner; 2. A rosy sage in senatorials, in Stuart's later claret-and-water manner—hang in his descendant's dining-room.

Peter's first look was a provokingly significant one at the confused and blushing young lady. Secondly he inspected the Dying Gladiator on the ice.

"Have you been tilting at this gentleman, Mary?" he asked, in the voice of a cheerful, friendly fellow. "Why! Hullo. Hooray! It's Wade, Richard Wade, Dick Wade! Don't look, Miss Mary, while I give him the grips of all the secret societies we belonged to in College."

Mary, however, did look on, pleased and amused, while Peter plumped down on the ice, shook his friend's hand, and examined him as if he were fine crockery, spilt and perhaps shattered.

"It's not a case of trepanning, Dick, my boy?" said he.

"No," said the other. "I tumbled in trying to dodge this lady. The ice thought my face ought to be scratched, because I had been scratching its face without mercy. My wits were knocked out of me; but they are tired of secession, and pleading to be let in again."

"Keep some of them out for our sake! We must have you at our commonplace level. Well, Miss Mary, I suppose this is the first time you have had the sensation of breaking a man's head. You generally hit lower." Peter tapped his heart.

"I'm all right now, thanks to my surgeon," says Wade. "Give me a lift, Peter." He pulled up and clung to his friend.

"You're the vine and I'm the lamppost," Skerrett said. "Mary, do you know what a pocket-pistol is?"

"I have seen such weapons concealed about the persons of modern warriors."

"There's one in my overcoat-pocket, with a cup at the butt and a cork at the muzzle. Skate off now, like an angel, and get it. Bring Fanny, too. She is restorative."

"Are you alive enough to admire that, Dick?" he continued, as she skimmed away.

"It would pat a soul under the ribs of Death."

"I venerate that young woman," says Peter. "You see what a beauty she is, and just as unspoiled as this ice. Unspoiled beauties are rarer than rocs' eggs.

"She has a singularly true face," Wade replied, "and that is the main thing,—the most excellent thing in man or woman."

"Yes, truth makes that nuisance, beauty, tolerable."

"You did not do me the honor to present me."

"I saw you had gone a great way beyond that, my boy. Have you not her initials in cambric on your brow? Not M. T., which wouldn't apply; but M. D."

"Mary–?"

"Damer."

"I like the name," says Wade, repeating it. "It sounds simple and thoroughbred."

"Just what she is. One of the nine simple-hearted and thorough-bred girls on this continent."

"Nine?"

"Is that too many? Three, then. That's one in ten millions. The exact proportion of Poets, Painters, Oratory, Statesmen, and all other Great Artists. Well,—three or nine,—Mary Damer is one of them. She never saw fear or jealousy, or knowingly allowed an ignoble thought or an ungentle word or an ungraceful act in herself. Her atmosphere does not tolerate flirtation. You must find out for yourself how much genius she has and has not. But I will say this,—that I think of puns two a minute faster when I'm with her. Therefore she must be magnetic, and that is the first charm in a woman."

Wade laughed.

"You have not lost your powers of analysis, Peter. But talking of this heroine, you have not told me anything about yourself, except apropos of punning."

"Come up and dine, and we'll fire away personal histories, broadside for broadside! I've been looking in vain for a worthy hero to set vis-à-vis to my fair kinswoman. But stop! perhaps you have a Christmas turkey at home, with a wife opposite, and a brace of boys waiting for drumsticks."

"No,—my boys, like cherubs, await their own drumsticks. They're not born, and I'm not married."

"I thought you looked incomplete and abnormal. Well, I will show you a model wife,—and here she comes!"

Here they came, the two ladies, gliding round the Point, with draperies floating as artlessly artful as the robes of Raphael's Hours, or a Pompeian Bacchante. For want of classic vase or patera, Miss Damer brandished Peter Skerrett's pocket-pistol.

Fanny Skerrett gave her hand cordially to Wade, and looked a little anxiously at his pale face.

"Now, M.D.," says Peter, "you have been surgeon, you shall be doctor and dose our patient. Now, then,—

       "'Hebe, pour free!  Quicken his eyes with mountain-dew,  That Styx, the detested,  No more he may view.'"

"Thanks, Hebe!"

Wade said, continuing the quotation,—

       "I quaff it!  Io Paean, I cry!  The whiskey of the Immortals  Forbids me to die."

"We effeminate women of the nineteenth century are afraid of broken heads," said Fanny. "But Mary Damer seems quite to enjoy your accident, Mr. Wade, as an adventure."

Miss Damer certainly did seem gay and exhilarated.

"I enjoy it," said Wade. "I perceive that I fell on my feet, when I fell on my crown. I tumbled among old friends, and I hope among new ones."

"I have been waiting to claim my place among your old friends," Mrs.

Skerrett said, "ever since Peter told me you were one of his models."

She delivered this little speech with a caressing manner which totally fascinated Wade.

Nothing was ever so absolutely pretty as Mrs. Peter Skerrett. Her complete prettiness left nothing to be desired.

"Never," thought Wade, "did I see such a compact little casket of perfections. Every feature is thoroughly well done and none intrusively superior. Her little nose is a combination of all the amiabilities. Her black eyes sparkle with fun and mischief and wit, all playing over deep tenderness below. Her hair ripples itself full of gleams and shadows. The same coquetry of Nature that rippled her hair has dinted her cheeks with shifting dimples. Every time she smiles—and she smiles as if sixty an hour were not half allowance—a dimple slides into view and vanishes like a dot in a flow of sunny water. And, O Peter Skerrett! if you were not the best fellow in the world, I should envy you that latent kiss of a mouth."

"You need not say it, Wade,—your broken head exempts you from the business of compliments," said Peter; "but I see you think my wife perfection. You'll think so the more, the more you know her."

"Stop, Peter," said she, "or I shall have to hide behind the superior charms of Mary Damer."

Miss Damer certainly was a woman of a grander order. You might pull at the bells or knock at the knockers and be introduced into the boudoirs of all the houses, villas, seats, chateaus, and palaces in Christendom without seeing such another. She belonged distinctly to the Northern races,—the "brave and true and tender" women. There was, indeed, a trace of hauteur and imperiousness in her look and manner; but it did not ill become her distinguished figure and face. Wade, however, remembered her sweet earnestness when she was playing leech to his wound, and chose to take that mood as her dominant one.

"She must have been desperately annoyed with bores and boobies," he thought. "I do not wonder she protects herself by distance. I am afraid I shall never get within her lines again,—not even if I should try slow and regular approaches, and bombard her with bouquets for a twelvemonth."

"But, Wade," says Peter, "all this time you have not told us what good luck sends you here to be wrecked on the hospitable shores of my Point."

"I live here. I am chief cook and confectioner where you see the smoking top of that tall chimney up-stream."

"Why, of course! What a dolt I was, not to think of you, when Churm told us an Athlete, a Brave, a Sage, and a Gentleman was the Superintendent of Dunderbunk; but said we must find his name out for ourselves. You remember, Mary. Miss Damer is Mr. Churm's ward."

She acknowledged with a cool bow that she did remember her guardian's character of Wade.

"You do not say, Peter," says Mrs. Skerrett, with a bright little look at the other lady, "why Mr. Churm was so mysterious about Mr. Wade."

"Miss Damer shall tell us," Peter rejoined, repeating his wife's look of merry significance.

She looked somewhat teased. Wade could divine easily the meaning of this little mischievous talk. His friend Churm had no doubt puffed him furiously.

"All this time," said Miss Darner, evading a reply, "we are neglecting our skating privileges."

"Peter and I have a few grains of humanity in our souls," Fanny said. "We should blush to sail away from Mr. Wade, while he carries the quarantine flag at his pale cheeks."

"I am almost ruddy again," says Wade. "Your potion, Miss Damer, has completed the work of your surgery. I can afford to dismiss my lamp-post."

"Whereupon the post changes to a tee-totum," Peter said, and spun off in an eccentric, ending in a tumble.

"I must have a share in your restoration, Mr. Wade," Fanny claimed. "I see you need a second dose of medicine. Hand me the flask, Mary. What shall I pour from this magic bottle? juice of Rhine, blood of Burgundy, fire of Spain, bubble of Rheims, beeswing of Oporto, honey of Cyprus, nectar, or whiskey? Whiskey is vulgar, but the proper thing, on the whole, for these occasions. I prescribe it." And she gave him another little draught to imbibe.

He took it kindly, for her sake,—and not alone for that, but for its own respectable sake. His recovery was complete. His head, to be sure, sang a little still, and ached not a little. Some fellows would have gone on the sick list with such a wound. Perhaps he would, if he had had a trouble to dodge. But here instead was a pleasure to follow. So he began to move about slowly, watching the ladies.

Fanny was a novice in the Art, and this was her first day this winter. She skated timidly, holding Peter very tightly. She went into the dearest little panics for fear of tumbles, and uttered the most musical screams and laughs. And if she succeeded in taking a few brave strokes and finished with a neat slide, she pleaded for a verdict of "Well done!" with such an appealing smile and such a fine show of dimples that every one was fascinated and applauded heartily.

Miss Damer skated as became her free and vigorous character. She had passed her Little Go as a scholar, and was now steadily winning her way through the list of achievements, before given, toward the Great Go. To-day she was at work at small circles backward. Presently she wound off a series of perfectly neat ones, and, looking up, pleased with her prowess, caught Wade's admiring eye. At this she smiled and gave an arch little womanly nod of self-approval, which also demanded masculine sympathy before it was quite a perfect emotion.

With this charming gesture, the alert feather in her Amazonian hat nodded, too, as if it admired its lovely mistress.

Wade was thrilled. "Brava!" he cried, in answer to the part of her look which asked sympathy; and then, in reply to the implied challenge, he forgot his hurt and his shock, and struck into the same figure.

He tried not to surpass his fair exemplar too cruelly. But he did his peripheries well enough to get a repetition of the captivating nod and a Bravo! from the lady.

"Bravo!" said she. "But do not tax your strength too soon."

She began to feel that she was expressing too much interest in the stranger. It was a new sensation for her to care whether men fell or got up. A new sensation. She rather liked it. She was a trifle ashamed of it. In either case, she did not wish to show that it was in her heart. The consciousness of concealment flushed her damask check.

It was a damask cheek. All her hues were cool and pearly; while Wade, Saxon too, had hot golden tints in his hair and moustache, and his color, now returning, was good strong red with plenty of bronze in it.

"Thank you," he replied. "My force has all come back. You have electrified me."

A civil nothing; but meaning managed to get into his tone and look, whether he would or not.

Which he perceiving, on his part began to feel guilty.

Of what crime?

Of the very same crime as hers,—the most ancient and most pardonable crime of youth and maiden,—that sweet and guiltless crime of love in the first degree.

So, without troubling themselves to analyze their feelings, they found a piquant pleasure in skating together,—she in admiring his tours de force, and he in instructing her.

"Look, Peter!" said Mrs. Skerrett, pointing to the other pair skating, he on the backward roll, she on the forward, with hands crossed and locked;—such contacts are permitted in skating, as in dancing. "Your hero and my heroine have dropped into an intimacy."

"None but the Plucky deserve the Pretty," says Peter.

"But he seems to be such a fine fellow,—suppose she shouldn't"– The pretty face looked anxious.

"Suppose he shouldn't," Peter on the masculine behalf returned.

"He cannot help it: Mary is so noble,—and so charming, when she does not disdain to be."

"I do not believe she can help it. She cannot disdain Wade. He carries too many guns for that. He is just as fine as she is. He was a hero when I first knew him. His face does not show an atom of change; and you know what Mr. Churm told us of his chivalric deeds elsewhere, and how he tamed and reformed Dunderbunk. He is crystal grit, as crystalline and gritty as he can be."

"Grit seems to be your symbol of the highest qualities. It certainly is a better thing in man than in ice-cream. But, Peter, suppose this should be a true love and should not run smooth?"

"What consequence is the smooth running, so long as there is strong running and a final getting in neck and neck at the winning-post?"

"But," still pleaded the anxious soul,—having no anxieties of her own, she was always suffering for others,—"he seems to be such a fine fellow! and she is so hard to win!"

"Am I a fine fellow?"

"No,—horrid!"

"The truth,—or I let you tumble."

"Well, upon compulsion, I admit that you are."

"Then being a fine fellow does not diminish the said fellow's chances of being blessed with a wife quite superfine."

"If I thought you were personal, Peter, I should object to the mercantile adjective. 'Superfine,' indeed!"

"I am personal. I withdraw the obnoxious phrase, and substitute transcendent. No, Fanny dear, I read Wade's experience in my own. I do not feel very much concerned about him. He is big enough to take care of himself. A man who is sincere, self-possessed, and steady does not get into miseries with beautiful Amazons like our friend. He knows too much to try to make his love run up hill; but let it once get started, rough running gives it vim. Wade will love like a deluge, when he sees that he may, and I'd advise obstacles to stand off."

"It was pretty, Peter, to see cold Mary Damer so gentle and almost tender."

"I always have loved to see the first beginnings of what looks like love, since I saw ours."

"Ours," she said,—"it seems like yesterday."

And then together they recalled that fair picture against its dark ground of sorrow, and so went on refreshing the emotions of that time until Fanny smiling said,—

"There must be something magical in skates, for here we are talking sentimentally like a pair of young lovers."

"Health and love are cause and effect," says Peter, sententiously.

Meanwhile Wade had been fast skating into the good graces of his companion. Perhaps the rap on his head had deranged him. He certainly tossed himself about in a reckless and insane way. Still he justified his conduct by never tumbling again, and by inventing new devices with bewildering rapidity.

This pair were not at all sentimental. Indeed, their talk was quite technical: all about rings and edges, and heel and toe,—what skates are best, and who best use them. There is an immense amount of sympathy to be exchanged on such topics, and it was somewhat significant that they avoided other themes where they might not sympathize so thoroughly. The negative part of a conversation is often as important as its positive.

So the four entertained themselves finely, sometimes as a quartette, sometimes as two duos with proper changes of partners, until the clear west began to grow golden and the clear east pink with sunset.

"It is a pity to go," said Peter Skerrett. "Everything here is perfection and Fine Art; but we must not be unfaithful to dinner. Dinner would have a right to punish us, if we did not encourage its efforts to be Fine Art also."

"Now, Mr. Wade," Fanny commanded, "your most heroic series of exploits, to close this heroic day."

He nimbly dashed through his list. The ice was traced with a labyrinth of involuted convolutions.

Wade's last turn brought him to the very spot of his tumble.

"Ah!" said he. "Here is the oar that tripped me, with 'Wade, his mark,' gashed into it. If I had not this"—he touched Miss Damer's handkerchief—"for a souvenir, I think I would dig up the oar and carry it home."

"Let it melt out and float away in the spring," Mary said. "It may be a perch for a sea-gull or a buoy for a drowning man."

Here, if this were a long story instead of a short one, might be given a description of Peter Skerrett's house and the menu of Mrs. Skerrett's dinner. Peter and his wife had both been to great pillory dinners, ad nauseam, and learnt what to avoid. How not to be bored is the object of all civilization, and the Skerretts had discovered the methods. I must dismiss the dinner and the evening, stamped with the general epithet, Perfection.

"You will join us again to-morrow on the river," said Mrs. Skerrett, as Wade rose to go.