The Woman in White Page #2

								

us distinguished, as a nation, by our love of athletic exercises, the
little man, in the innocence of his heart, devoted himself impromptu to
all our English sports and pastimes whenever he had the opportunity of
joining them; firmly persuaded that he could adopt our national
amusements of the field by an effort of will precisely as he had
adopted our national gaiters and our national white hat.

I had seen him risk his limbs blindly at a fox-hunt and in a
cricket-field; and soon afterwards I saw him risk his life, just as
blindly, in the sea at Brighton.

We had met there accidentally, and were bathing together.  If we had
been engaged in any exercise peculiar to my own nation I should, of
course, have looked after Pesca carefully; but as foreigners are
generally quite as well able to take care of themselves in the water as
Englishmen, it never occurred to me that the art of swimming might
merely add one more to the list of manly exercises which the Professor
believed that he could learn impromptu.  Soon after we had both struck
out from shore, I stopped, finding my friend did not gain on me, and
turned round to look for him.  To my horror and amazement, I saw
nothing between me and the beach but two little white arms which
struggled for an instant above the surface of the water, and then
disappeared from view.  When I dived for him, the poor little man was
lying quietly coiled up at the bottom, in a hollow of shingle, looking
by many degrees smaller than I had ever seen him look before.  During
the few minutes that elapsed while I was taking him in, the air revived
him, and he ascended the steps of the machine with my assistance.  With
the partial recovery of his animation came the return of his wonderful
delusion on the subject of swimming.  As soon as his chattering teeth
would let him speak, he smiled vacantly, and said he thought it must
have been the Cramp.

When he had thoroughly recovered himself, and had joined me on the
beach, his warm Southern nature broke through all artificial English
restraints in a moment.  He overwhelmed me with the wildest expressions
of affection--exclaimed passionately, in his exaggerated Italian way,
that he would hold his life henceforth at my disposal--and declared
that he should never be happy again until he had found an opportunity
of proving his gratitude by rendering me some service which I might
remember, on my side, to the end of my days.

I did my best to stop the torrent of his tears and protestations by
persisting in treating the whole adventure as a good subject for a
joke; and succeeded at last, as I imagined, in lessening Pesca's
overwhelming sense of obligation to me.  Little did I think
then--little did I think afterwards when our pleasant holiday had drawn
to an end--that the opportunity of serving me for which my grateful
companion so ardently longed was soon to come; that he was eagerly to
seize it on the instant; and that by so doing he was to turn the whole
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