“No, no, Claudia,” said the captain, shaking his head, “they are clean, they are clean—clean as floods of pure water can make them. Every town is on a rock-bound water-course, finest, freshest, freest streams in the world, and every Indian, big and little, goes under as a religious duty every day. No, they are clean.”
“Dear heart!” exclaimed the lady, without either contention or acquiescence.
“And they wear ample clothes, too. The buck-skin hunting-shirt and leggings of our frontiersmen are copied from the attire of the Indians. If you saw savages who were scantily clothed they must have been very poor, or on the war-path against other Indians—for they wear clothes, as they construe them, on ordinary occasions.”
“How nice of them,” commented Mrs. Annandale. “Shows their goodness of heart.”
Once more Raymond bent the gaze of an inquiring scrutiny upon the lady—simple as she was, he had not yet classified her. She had begun to exert a sort of morbid fascination upon him. He did not understand her, and the enigma held him relentlessly.
He had not observed a motion which Arabella had made once or twice to quit the tête-à-tête beside the window, and he was taken by surprise when she suddenly approached the fire. Standing, tall and slender and smiling, between him and her father, with her hand on the commandant’s chair, she addressed the coterie at large:—
“What a jovial time you seem to be having!”
Raymond’s heart plunged, and Mervyn reddened slightly with an annoyance otherwise sedulously repressed. She spoke with a naïve suggestion as of an enforced exclusion from the fun. “What is all this talk about?”
“Mr. Raymond has been admiring the Indians’ taste in dress,” said Mrs. Annandale, titteringly,—“he says they wear the hides of beasts,—their own hides.”
Captain Howard frowned. It did not enter into his scheme of things to question the discretion of a professed duenna. He was confused for a moment, and it seemed to him that the fault lay in Raymond’s bad taste in the remark rather than in its repetition. It did not occur to him that it was made for the first time.