Маргарет Олифант - Old Mr. Tredgold

And the Stanley girls who were her audience agreed with her, with a strong sense that to be the heroine of such an adventure was, after all, when it was over, one of the most delightful things in the world. Her father also agreed with her, who came stumping with his stick up the stairs, his own room being below, and took no greater delight than to sit by her bedside and hear her go over the story again and again.

“I’ll sell that little beast of a boat. I’ll have her broken up for firewood. To think I should have paid such a lot of money for her, and her nearly to drown my little girl!”

“Oh, don’t do that, papa,” said Stella; “when it’s quite safe and there is no wind I should like perhaps to go out in her again, just to see. But to be sure there was no wind when we went out—just a very little, just enough to fill the sail, they said; but you can never trust to a wind. I said I shouldn’t go, only just for ten minutes to try how I liked it; and then that horrid gale came on to blow, and they began to tack, as they call it. Such nonsense that tacking, papa! when they began it I said, ‘Why, we’re going further off than ever; what I want is to get home.’”

“They paid no attention, I suppose—they thought they knew better,” said Mr. Tredgold.

“They always think they know better,” cried Stella, with indignation. “And oh, when it came on to be dark, and the wind always rising, and the water coming in, in buckets full! Were you ever at sea in a storm, papa?”

“Never, my pet,” said Mr. Tredgold, “trust me for that. I never let myself go off firm land, except sometimes in a penny steamboat, that’s dangerous enough. Sometimes the boilers blow up, or you run into some other boat; but on the sea, not if I know it, Stella.”

“But I have,” said the girl. “A steamboat! within the two banks of a river! You know nothing, nothing about it, neither does Katherine. Some sailors, I believe, might go voyages for years and never see anything so bad as that night. Why, the waves were mountains high, and then you seemed to slide down to the bottom as if you were going—oh! hold me, hold me, papa, or I shall feel as if I were going again.”

“Poor little Stella,” said Mr. Tredgold, “poor little girl! What a thing for her to go through, so early in life! But I’d like to do something to those men. I’d like to punish them for taking advantage of a child like that, all to get hold of my new boat, and show how clever they were with their tacking and all that. Confound their tacking! If it hadn’t been for their tacking she might have got back to dinner and saved us such a miserable night.”

“What was your miserable night in comparison to mine?” cried Stella, scornfully. “I believe you both think it was as bad as being out at sea, only because you did not get your dinner at the proper time and were kept longer than usual out of bed.”

“We must not forget,” said Katherine, “that after all, though they might be to blame in going out, these gentlemen saved her life.”

“I don’t know about that,” said the old man. “I believe it was my tug that saved her life. It was they that put her life in danger, if you please. I’d like just to break them in the army, or sell them up, or something; idle fellows doing nothing, strolling about to see what mischief they can find to do.”

“Oh, they are very nice,” said Stella. “You shan’t do anything to them, papa. I am great chums with Charlie and Algy; they are such nice boys, really, when you come to know them; they took off their coats to keep me warm. I should have had inflammation of the lungs or something if I had not had their coats. I was shivering so.”

“And do you know,” said Katherine, “one of them is ill, as Stella perhaps might have been if he had not taken off his coat.”

“Oh, which is that?” cried Stella; “oh, do find out which is that? It must be Algy, I think. Algy is the delicate one. He never is good for much—he gives in, you know, so soon. He is so weedy, long, and thin, and no stamina, that is what the others say.”

“And is that all the pity you have for him, Stella? when it was to save you–”

“It was not to save me,” cried Stella, raising herself in her bed with flushed cheeks, “it was to save himself! If I hadn’t been saved where would they have been? They would have gone to the bottom too. Oh, I can’t see that I’m so much obliged to them as all that! What they did they did for themselves far more than for me. We were all in the same boat, and if I had been drowned they would have been drowned too. I hope, though,” she said, more amiably, “that Algy will get better if it’s he that is ill. And it must be he. Charlie is as strong as a horse. He never feels anything. Papa, I hope you will send him grapes and things. I shall go and see him as soon as I am well.”

“You go and see a young fellow—in his room! You shall do nothing of the sort, Stella. Things may be changed from my time, and I suppose they are, but for a girl to go and visit a young fellow—in his–”

Stella smiled a disdainful and amused smile as she lay back on her pillow. “You may be sure, papa,” she said, “that I certainly shall. I will go and nurse him, unless he has someone already. I ought to nurse the man who helped to save my life.”

“You are a little self-willed, wrong-headed– Katherine, you had better take care. I will make you answer for it if she does anything so silly—a chit of a girl! I’ll speak to Dr. Dobson. I’ll send to—to the War Office. I’ll have him carted away.”

“Is poor Algy here, Kate? Where is he—at the hotel? Oh, you dreadful hard-hearted people to let him go to the hotel when you knew he had saved my life. Papa, go away, and let me get dressed. I must find out how he is. I must go to him, poor fellow. Perhaps the sight of me and to see that I am better will do him good. Go away, please, papa.”

“I’ll not budge a step,” cried the old gentleman. “Katie, Katie, she’ll work herself into a fever. She’ll make herself ill, and then what shall we do?”

“I’m very ill already,” said Stella, with a cough. “I am being thrust into my grave. Let them bring us together—poor, poor Algy and me. Oh, if we are both to be victims, let it be so! We will take each other’s hands and go down—go down together to the–”

“Oh, Katie, can’t you stop her?” cried the father.

Stella was sobbing with delicious despair over the thought of the two delightful, dreadful funerals, and all the world weeping over her untimely fate.

Stella recovered rapidly when her father was put to the door. She said with a pretty childish reverberation of her sob: “For you know, Kate, it never was he—that would be the poignant thing, wouldn’t it?—it was not he that I ever would have chosen. But to be united in—in a common fate, with two graves together, don’t you know, and an inscription, and people saying, ‘Both so young!’” She paused to dry her eyes, and then she laughed. “There is nothing in him, don’t you know; it was Charlie that did all the work. He was nearly as frightened as I was. Oh, I don’t think anything much of Algy, but I shall go to see him all the same—if it were only to shock papa.”

“You had better get well yourself in the meantime,” said Katherine.

“Oh, you cold, cold—toad! What do you care? It would have been better for you if I had been drowned, Kate. Then you would have been the only daughter and the first in the house, but now, you know, it’s Stella again—always Stella. Papa is an unjust old man and makes favourites; but you need not think, however bad I am, and however good you are, that you will ever cure him of that.”

When Stella was first able to appear out of the shelter of her father’s grounds for a walk, she was the object of a sort of ovation—as much of an ovation as it is possible to make in such a place. She was leaning on her sister’s arm and was supported on the other side by a stick, as it was only right a girl should be who had gone through so much. And she was very prettily pale, and looked more interesting than words could say, leaning heavily (if anything about Stella could be called heavy) upon Katherine, and wielding her stick with a charming air of finding it too much for her, yet at the same time finding it indispensable. There was nobody in the place who did not feel the attraction of sympathy, and the charm of the young creature who had been rescued from the very jaws of death and restored to the family that adored her. To think what might have been!—the old man broken-hearted and Katherine in deep mourning going and coming all alone, and perhaps not even a grave for the unfortunate Stella—lost at sea! Some of the ladies who thronged about her, stopping her to kiss her and express the depths of sympathetic anguish through which they had gone, declared that to think of it made them shudder. Thank Heaven that everything had ended so well! Stella took all these expressions of sympathy very sweetly. She liked to be the chief person, to awaken so much emotion, to be surrounded by so many flatteries. She felt, indeed, that she, always an interesting person, had advanced greatly in the scale of human consideration. She was more important by far since she had “gone through” that experience. They had been so near to losing her; everybody felt now fully what it was to have her. The rector had returned thanks publicly in church, and every common person about the streets curtsied or touched his hat with a deeper sentiment. To think that perhaps she might have been drowned—she, so young, so fair, so largely endowed with everything that heart could desire! If her neighbours were moved by this sentiment, Stella herself was still more deeply moved by it. She felt to the depths of her heart what a thing it was for all these people that she should have been saved from the sea.