Agatha's Husband. Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
help. They all slid back, except Nathanael Harper.
Agatha felt his sudden gripe. “Hold my hand firm. Keep me in my balance,” he whispered, and throwing himself over to the whole extent of his body, and long right arm, managed to catch hold of James, who struggled violently.
“Hold me tight—tighter still, or we are lost,” said he, trying to writhe back again; his hand—such a little delicate hand it seemed for a man—quivering with the weight of the child.
She grasped him frantically—his wrist—his shoulder—nay—stretching over, linked her arms round his neck. Something in her touch seemed to impart strength to him. He whispered, half gasping—
“Hold me firm, and I'll do it yet, Agatha.” She did not then notice, or recollect till long afterwards, how he had called her by her Christian name, nor the tone in which he had said it.
The moment afterwards, he had lifted the child out of the den, and poor Jemmie was screaming out his now harmless terror safe in the maternal arms.
Then, and not till then, Agatha burst into tears. Tears which no one saw, for the mother, hugging her baby, was the very centre of a sympathising crowd. Mr. Harper, paler than ordinary, leaned against the stone-work of the den.
“Oh, from what have you saved me?” cried Agatha, as after her thankfulness for the rescued life, came another thought, personal yet excusable. “Had Emma lost the child, I should have felt like a murderess to the day of my death.”
Nathanael shook his head, trying to smile; but seemed unable to speak.
“You have not hurt yourself?”
“Oh no. Very little. Only a strain,” said he as he removed his hand from his side. “Go to your friend: I will come presently.”
He did come—though not for a good while; and Miss Bowen fancied from his looks that he had been more injured than he acknowledged; but she did not like to inquire. Nevertheless he rose greatly in her estimation, less for his courage than for the presence of mind and common sense which made it Valuable, and for the self-restraint and indifference which caused him afterwards to treat the whole adventure as such a trifling thing.
It was, after all, nothing very romantic or extraordinary, and happened in such a brief space of time, that probably the circumstance is not noted in the traditionary chronicles of the Zoological Gardens, which contain the frightful legend carefully related that day by several keepers to Mrs. Thornycroft—how a bear had actually eaten up a child, falling in the same manner into the same den.
But the adventure, slight as it may appear, made a very great and sudden difference in the slender tie of acquaintanceship, hitherto subsisting between Agatha and Major Harper's brother. She began to treat Nathanael more like a friend, and ceased to think of him exactly as a “boy.”
Master James's mamma, when she at last turned her attention from his beloved small self, was full of thanks to his preserver. Mr. Harper assured her that his feat was merely a little exertion of muscular strength, and at last grew evidently uncomfortable at being made so much of. Returning home with them, he would fain have crept away from the scene of his honours; but the good-natured, motherly-hearted Emma implored him to stay.
“We will nurse you if you are hurt, which I am afraid you must be—it was such a dreadful strain! Oh, Jemmie, Jemmie!” and the poor mother shuddered.
“Indeed you must come in,” added Miss Bowen kindly, seeing that Emma's thoughts were floating away, as appeared this time natural enough, to her own concerns. “You shall rest all the evening, and we will talk to you, and be very, very agreeable. Pray yield!”
Nathanael argued no more, but went in “quite lamb-like,” as Mrs. Thornycroft afterwards declared.
This acquiescence in him was little rewarded, Agatha thought—for the evening happened to be duller even than evenings usually passed at the Thornycrofts'. The head of the household, being detained in the City, did not appear; and Mrs. Thornycroft's tongue, unchecked by her husband's presence, and excited by the event of the afternoon, galloped on at a fearful rapidity. She poured out upon the luckless young man all the baby biography of her family, from Missy's christening down to the infant Selina's cutting of her first tooth. To all of which he listened with a praiseworthy attention, giving at least silence, which was doubtless all the answer Emma required.
But Agatha, whose sympathy in these things was, as before said, at present small, grew half ashamed, half vexed, and finally rather angry—especially when she saw the pale weariness that gradually overspread Mr. Harper's face. More than once she hinted that he should have the armchair, or lie down, or rest in some way; but he took not the least notice; sitting immovably in his place, which happened to be next herself, and vaguely looking across the table towards Mrs. Thornycroft.
At nine o'clock, becoming paler than ever, he bestirred himself, and talked of leaving.
“I ought to be going too. It is not far, and as our roads agree, I will walk with you,” said Agatha, simply.
He seemed surprised—so much so, that she almost blushed, and would have retracted, save for the consciousness of her own frank and kindly purpose. She had watched him closely, and felt convinced that he had been more injured than he confessed; so in her generous straightforward fashion, she wanted to “take care of him,” until he was safe at his brother's door, which she could see from her own. And her solitary education had been conducted on such unworldly principles, that she never thought there was anything remarkable or improper in her proposing to walk home with a young man, whom she knew she could trust in every way, and who was besides Major Harper's brother.
Nor did even the matronly Mrs. Thornycroft object to the plan—save that it took her visitors away so early. “Surely,” she added, “you can't be tired out already.”
Agatha had an ironical answer on the very tip of her tongue: but something in the clear, “good” eye of Nathanael repressed her little wickedness. So she only whispered to Emma that for various reasons she had wished to return early.
“Very well, dear, since you must go, I am sure Mr. Harper will be most happy to escort you.”
“If not, I hope he will just say so,” added Agatha, very plainly.
He smiled; and his full, soft grey eye, fixed on hers, had an earnestness which haunted her for many a day. She began heartily to like Major Harper's brother, though only as his brother, with a sort of reflected regard, springing from that she felt for her guardian and friend.
This consciousness made her manner perfectly easy, cheerful, and kind, even though they were in the perilously sentimental position of two young people strolling home together in the soft twilight of a Midsummer evening: likewise occasionally stopping to look westward at a new moon, which peered at them round street-corners and through the open spaces of darkening squares. But nothing could make these two at all romantic or interesting; their talk on the road was on the most ordinary topics—chiefly bears.
“You seem quite familiar with wild beast life,” Agatha observed. “Were you a very great hunter?”
“Not exactly, for I never could muster up the courage, or the cowardice, wantonly to take away life. I don't remember ever shooting anything, except in self-defence, which was occasionally necessary during the journeys that I used to make from Montreal to the Indian settlements with Uncle Brian.”
“Uncle Brian,” repeated Agatha, wondering whether Major Harper had ever mentioned such a personage, during the two years of their acquaintance. She thought not, since her memory had always kept tenacious record of what he said about his relatives—which was at best but little. It was one of the few things in him which jarred upon Agatha's feelings—Agatha, to whose isolation the idea of a family and a home was so pathetically sweet—his seeming so totally indifferent to his own. All she knew of Major Harper's kith and kin was, that he was the eldest brother of a large family, settled somewhere down in Dorsetshire.
These thoughts swept through her mind, as Agatha, repeated interrogatively