Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/465

1885.] and limb; and had it not been for her, I don't think I should have troubled about you. If Jack had gone alone upon his madcap expedition, I don't say. But I thought that Ralph there had him in leading-strings, and would be sure to bring him back safe."

"I don't know about his holding me in leading-strings," broke in Mr Yenables, impetuously. "I fear you overrate his influence on my foolhardiness. But I can tell you this, that had it not been for his pluck and presence of mind – for his deliberately exposing himself to almost inevitable destruction – I should never have come back except upon a stretcher, and I doubt greatly whether even Donald would have dared to go down and pick up the pieces. It was an ugly place" – as he spoke, he shuddered – "and it will be long before I forgive myself for risking such a life as Ralph's by my own absurd and pigheaded folly."

Leslie, embarrassed for once, was blushing like a girl, as Moray got up to slap him on the shoulder, with a blow that expressed the strength of his feelings. Grace sat behind the tea-urn with flushed face and swimming eyes, looking from one to the other of the young men with infinite kindness and admiration. Venables for one moment would have given a good deal if the exciting story could have been told the other way, and if he had been figuring there in the rôle of saviour. But he hastened to dismiss the unworthy thought; if it did flit across his mind, the story gained in the telling thereby. He had the gifts of a raconteur: he put the situations dramatically; he painted his own feelings of self-abandonment and despair; he did nor, even spare himself the imputations of cowardice as the earth was swimming before his eyes and his thoughts went whirling wildly towards Eternity. Then he imagined Leslie's chivalrous resolution of self-sacrifice with the quick intuition that belonged to him, and described the courage he had himself drawn in his extremity from contact with the stronger and more heroic temperament.

"Coming over the cliff was comparatively nothing," he concluded. "It was the sort of thing any fellow was bound to do, rather than go back alone and admit that he had not tried it; but having done so much, I believe ninety-nine out of a hundred would have only thought of how they were to get back again, and they, with the hundredth, would have been puzzled to manage it. I daresay Leslie loves his life as much as another, and yet he never gave a thought to it while mine was in peril. He was cooler when making a balustrade of himself between me and the abyss, and trying to scrape a foothold for the pair of us with his nailed shooting-boots, than he is as he sits behind his teacup, wishing himself anywhere else."

A peroration which gave Leslie the longed-for pretext for proposing an adjournment for a pipe at the kennels. Nor was Miss Moray very sorry to be left alone, in a state between smiling and crying. Seriously inclining her pretty ear, like Desdemona, she had been strongly moved by Jack's animated tale, sympathising almost less with his hairbreadth escape than with his generous manner of narrating it. And on the other hand, like Rebecca in 'Ivanhoe,' Venables had been "painting a hero," and the hero had been sitting modestly beside her. She could hardly say which of her cousins had interested her most; she only knew that she felt herself strongly attracted towards both of them.