“I did not mean that; I assure you, I didn’t. I would climb the Andes or the Himalayas, only to win one smile from you.”
“I fear that I should smile many times,” said Alice, now smiling, wickedly; “if I could only have a telescope—still, I should be so sorry for you. They are much worse than the Southdown hills.”
“There, you are laughing at me again! You are so clever, Miss Lorraine; you give me no chance to say anything.”
“I am not clever; I am very stupid. And you always say more than I do.”
“Well, of course—of course I do; until you come to know me. After that, I always listen; because the ladies have more to say. And they say it so much better.”
“Is that so?” said Alice, thinking, while the Captain showed his waist, as he arose and shook himself, “it may be so: he may be right; he seems to have some very good ideas.” He saw that she thought more kindly of him; and that his proper course with her was to play humility. He had never known what pure love was; he had lessened his small capacity for it, by his loose and wicked life; but in spite of all that, for the first time Alice began to inspire him with it. This is a grand revolution in the mind, or the heart, of a “man of pleasure;” the result may save him even yet (if a purer nature master him) from that deadliest foe, himself. And the best (or the worst of it) is, that if a kind, and fresh, and warm, and lofty-minded girl believes herself to have gained any power of doing good in the body of some low reprobate, sweet interest, Christian hankerings, and the feminine love of paradoxes, succeed the legitimate disgust. Alice, however, was not of a weak, impulsive, and slavish nature. And she wholly disdained this Stephen Chapman.
“Now, I hope that you will not hurry yourself,” she said to the pensive captain; “the real hill begins as soon as we are round the corner. I must walk fast, because my father will be looking out for me. Perhaps, if you kindly are coming to our house, you would like to come more at your leisure, sir.”
Stephen Chapman looked at her—not as he used to look, as if she were only a pretty girl to him—but with some new feeling, quite as if he were afraid to answer her. His dull, besotted, and dissolute manner of regarding women lay for the moment under a shock; and he wondered what he was about. And none of his stock speeches came to help him—or to hurt him—until Alice was round the corner.
“Holloa, Chapman! what are you about? Why, you look like one of Bottler’s pigs, when they run about with their throats cut! Where is my niece? What have you been doing?” The Rector drew up his pony sharply; and was ready to seize poor Stephen by the throat.
“You need not be in such a hurry, parson,” said Captain Chapman, recovering himself. “Miss Lorraine is going up the hill a great deal faster than I can go.”