The Post-Girl. Edward Charles Booth
interminable distance, falling faintly afar like the unreal voice that wanders aimlessly about the slopes of slumber. "And oh, please—will you give me a glass of water?"
With that, and a residuary shaky sigh of her little store of breath left over, her head fell limply forward. There was no mistaking this last tell-tale token of physical extremity; and he was by her side in a moment.
"Hello!" he called on the way, encouraging her by voice to resolution, till he reached her, "what a great iron-shod beast I am, jumping out and scaring you in this fashion. Hold up a little. You 're not going to give up the ghost on my account, surely!"
She made a futile effort to move her lips for reply, and lifted her head in the supreme spurt of conscious endeavor, but it tumbled straightway across the other shoulder uncontrolled, and swung a helpless semi-circle before her breast. She would have been down after that, all the length of her, but that his arms were quick to intercept the fall. The shock of sudden succor checked her in her collapse.
"Thank you," she panted, in a voice that stifled its words, and striving, in a half-unconscious and wholly incompetent fashion, to free him of the necessity of her further support. "... I 'm better now."
Words came no more easily to her under recovery than under the original discovery, though he knew well enough that it was because her lips were overburdened with them, and through no poverty of desire.
"Better?" he echoed, transplanting her own convictionless admission into the pleasantest prospect possible. "Come, come! That 's gladdening. There! ... Do you think you can stand all right?"
He loosened the clasp of his arms for a moment, and she swayed out impotently in their widening circle.
"I think so," she said, giving desperate lie to proof positive under the strenuousness of desire.
He laughed indulgently, and caught her in again.
"Capital!" he said, "if only you were trying to sit down. But you must n't sit down here. See." He took a tighter hold of her. "... If I help you—so.... Do you think you can manage to the door? It 's only a step."
He urged her into motion with a gentle insistence of arm, and set her the example of a leisurely foot forward. For the first time he felt the exercise of her power in resistance.
"Oh, no, no!" she told him, turning off the two little panting negatives in their sudden hot breath of shame, and stiffening at the suggestion of advance.
"No?" he queried, in audible surprise. "You 're not equal to that? But you must n't stay out here. You need to sit down and have something to pull you up." He brought the other arm about her in a twinkling. "Here, let me lift you," he said. "I 've helped drunken men up three flights of stairs before to-day, fighting every bit of the way. I ought to be able to tackle you as far as the door!"
Before she could absorb the intention through his words he had got her begirt for the raising. The consciousness, coming upon her at such short notice, in company with the action itself, found her without preparation other than a gasp of blank amaze. Then her hand went out to stay him.
"Oh, let me!" she said, with a horrified desire to avert this fresh imposition upon his credulity or good-nature. "I can walk—very well...."
She finished the petition in mid-air, and the sound of his amused, wilful laughter just beneath her ears, as he waded with her through that odious short sea of lamp-light to the black porch.
"There!" he said, to another note of laughter, lowering her carefully till her feet found the square slab of scoured stone, with the scraper set in it, and strove hastily to reassert themselves. "That 's better than bartering in yes's and no's. Thank you for keeping so beautifully still and not kicking me; you could if you 'd tried. So!"
He steered her down the narrow darkness of the porch, with his hands protectively upon her elbows from behind, through a rustle of leaves and the springing of flexible branches. She went before him, without any words. Only when his arm slid past her to throw open wide the door did she seem about to offer any furtherance of demur. But the dreadful publicity of burning wicks lay forward, and the still more dreadful publicity of his face lay behind against retreat, and she went dumbly round the door, and so into the room. He could feel the sudden shrinkage of her being as the full force of the episode surged back upon her in a vivid hot wave out of the lamp-light, and was sorry. She would have dropped down, in the penitential meekness of submission, upon the triangle of chair that showed itself from beneath a litter of the Spawer's music immediately by the door as they entered, but his arm resisted the tell-tale bend of her body.
"No, no," he said, realising her desire for the penance of discomfort rather than the comfort of repose, and jerking the chair out of consideration, "... not there." He thrust the table far out into the room with a quick scream of its castors at being so rudely awakened, and pushed her gently to the sofa.
"That's better," he said, with a great evidence of content, as she sank back upon it before solicitous pressure. "The cushions are hard, but the passengers are earnestly requested to place their feet upon them." He drew in the table again, so that she might have its rest for her arm or her elbow, and deferring the moment for their eyes to make their first official meeting, bustled off to the sideboard. "Please excuse the grim formality of everything you find here," he continued, in light-hearted purpose, and commingling his words with an urgent jingling of glass, "but I 'm a musical sort of man, and like the rest of them, a lover of law and order. A time and place for everything, that 's our motto, and everything in its place. It 's a little weakness of ours.... Therefore"—his voice suddenly went cavernous in the recesses of the big cupboard—"... where on earth 's the brandy? Ah!" he emerged again on the interjection smiling, as on a triumphal car. "Here it is. Now I 'm going to give you a little of this ... it 's better than any amount of bad drinking water, and does n't taste half so nasty. Oh, no, no, no"—in answer to the intuition of a quick protesting turn of head from the sofa—"... not much. I won't let you have much, so it 's no use asking. Only as much as is good for you. Just a lit—tle drop and no more." He measured out the drop to the exact length of the accented syllable, and the stopper clinked home under a soft, satisfied "So-o-o!" The syphon took up the word, seething it vigorously into the glass, and next moment his arm had spanned the table to an encouraging: "Here we are! Take a good pull of this while it fizzes."
A soft, tremulous hand, nut-brown to the wrist, stole out in timid obedience over the table, and the Spawer perceived his visitor for the first time.
If the mere sound of her voice had aroused his wonder, the sight of the girl's face added doubly to his surprise. A face as little to be looked for in this place and at this time, and under these conditions, as to make quest for orchids down some pitmouth with pick and Davy lamp. He could not maintain the look long, for before satisfying his own inquiry he sought to establish the girl's confidence, but he noted the wide generous forehead, the big consuming eyes, burning deep in sorrowing self-reproach and giving him a moment's gaze over the uplifted tumbler; the dispassionate narrow nose, sprinkled about its bridge and between the brows with a pepper-castor helping of freckled candor; the small lips, parted submissively to the glass rim over two slips of milky teeth; the long, sleek cheeks; the slender, pear-shaped chin; the soft, supple neck of russet tan, spliced on to a gleaming shaft of ivory, where it dipped through her dress-collar to her bosom; the quick throbbing throat, and the burning lobes of red, like live cinders, in her hair.
As to the girl herself, her whence and where and whither, the Spawer could make no guess. She wore a shabby pale blue Tam-o'-Shanter, faded under innumerable suns, and washed out to many a shower, but on her head it appeared perfectly reputable and self-supporting, and identified itself with the girl's face so instantly and so completely that its weather-stain counted for preciousness, like the oaten tint of her skin. A storm-tried mackintosh-cape, looped over her arms and falling loosely down her back from the shoulders, and the print blouse, evidenced by her bust above the table and her sleeves, and the serviceable skirt of blue serge that the Spawer had caught sight of in the cleft between the table and sofa, completed the girl as revealed through her dress. Everything about her was for hard wear and tear, and had stood to the task. There was not a single button's worth of pretension in the whole of her attire; not a brooch at her throat, nor a bangle on either