The Second House. V. J. Banis

But something brushed against me and then curled about me, and in my fright I struggled against it, trying to free myself. Then suddenly my head was above water. That first gasp of air and the flash of sunlight in my eyes, so shocking after the murky greenness, was like a slap in the face to an hysterical person. I realized at once that what had encircled me was the arm of a man, and that he was trying to save me. I was being pulled toward the shore.

      “Don’t fight,” someone said, “I’m not much of a swimmer myself.”

      I stopped struggling then and clung weakly to him. In a moment he said breathlessly, “It’s shallow here, try to stand down.” I did so. I had enough sense still to realize that my poor rescuer was only slightly less breathless than I was. Together we managed to stumble the rest of the way through the shallow water, to the grassy bank. I still held the fateful sack in my hands. I let it fall gently into the grass and then I myself fell down. My ears still seemed filled with that ominous roaring that I thought signaled my death. I tried to fill my burning lungs with air.

      “Are you all right?” My unknown friend asked after a long moment, putting a hand on my shoulder.

      I managed to nod my head weakly. “Yes, I think so. The kittens...?”

      I tried to get up but he restrained me. “I’ll look at them; you try to get your breath back.”

      By the time he returned I was able to breathe a little more evenly. He held in his hand the tiniest ball of wet, matted fur. At first I thought it could hardly be alive, but when I touched it I felt the gentlest stirring of its breath.

      “The others were already gone,” he said, putting the kitten tenderly into my hands. “And this poor devil’s more dead than alive right now.”

      I stared down into a diminutive face and felt a wave of affection sweep over me, the intense pleasurable pain of caring. “But it is alive,” I said.

      “Thanks to you.”

      I looked up and for the first time really looked at my companion. He was smiling, and perhaps it was that he had just saved my life in the water, but with the blue sky behind him he looked quite like I had always imagined angels to look. He had what is described in romantic novels as a sensitive face, framed with dark curls. His complexion was tawny, and his wide dark eyes and his deeply colored lips made me think he was Italian. He could not in fairness have been called handsome; pretty, despite its false suggestion of effemininity, described him better.

      “And I’m alive, thanks to you,” I said, warming to his smile. “Where did you come from anyway?”

      He nodded toward the road—we had come out on that side of the river—and when I looked I saw a bright red sports car, the door open on the driver’s side, informing me that he had left it very much in a hurry.

      “I came along just in time to see you jumping into the river with all your clothes on. That didn’t suggest to me that you were merely going for a swim. Then I saw you were after that burlap bag, but by that time I had come to the conclusion that you couldn’t swim and you were having a bad time of it. So, I came after you as quick as I could. That’s all there was to it.”

      “I owe you my life.”

      My gratitude embarrassed him a little. “It was beginning to look like all I was going to accomplish was drowning two of us instead of just one. I’m not much of a swimmer, actually, but I am taller than you, so I could keep on the bottom the whole way.”

      “I suppose you must think I’m a very foolish girl to have jumped in like that after a sack of kittens.”

      “I think you’re a very brave girl,” he said, looking at me soberly.

      Something happened to him in that moment. I not only sensed it, I could actually see it in his eyes. They seemed to grow darker. I had a sensation that he had suddenly come to a conclusion about something, that the answer to some long worrisome problem had finally occurred to him in that moment that he studied me.

      He said, in a lower voice, “You’re very beautiful.”

      I was too astonished to think of anything to say, and could only stare dumbly at him.

      “Has no one ever told you that before?” He looked surprised by my surprise. I shook my head solemnly. No one had. It was not the sort of thing a doctor was likely to say to his patient, or that a nurse would remark upon, and physical beauty was not a matter upon which Aunt Gwyneth put much importance.

      “Then you’ve certainly spent your time with the grandest bunch of dolts in the world.”

      I suddenly had a vision of myself as I must look just then—my hair hanging in wet strands about my face, my clothes clinging wetly to me, one shoe lost somewhere in my swim. It struck me as extremely funny that anyone should choose that particular moment of my life to call me beautiful. I couldn’t help myself, I began to giggle, and then to laugh aloud.

      At first he looked at me curiously, but after a moment he realized the joke and began to laugh with me. I held my dear wet kitten to my breast and thought what idiots we must look, wet and bedraggled, sitting in the grass by the river, heads thrown back, laughing ourselves silly. And that thought only made me laugh harder.

      The laughing spell passed finally, but it had served to dispel the tension lingering from our escapade. We might have been long-time acquaintances, we were so at ease with one another. The kitten stirred in my hands and I held it up to look at it more closely.

      “Heavens, you look starved as well as drowned,” I said. “I think it would be a good idea if I got you home quickly and got some food into you.”

      He helped me to my feet. “I think you’d better let me drive you home. You’re already courting pneumonia, without pressing your luck.”

      “Yes, I suppose I’d better,” I agreed. Aunt Gwyneth’s house wasn’t far, but it was on the opposite side of the river, and I didn’t think I was up to another crossing.

      “I’m Liza Durant,” I said, offering him my free hand.

      He smiled and took it warmly. “Good grief, I forgot we hadn’t met; it seems like we’ve known each other forever. I’m Jeffrey Forrest.”

      So he had felt it too, that sense of intimacy. In myself I had been willing to shrug it off as the result of not having had friends; that makes one eager to seize upon them when they do appear. But it was something more than that; I didn’t know just what. I felt that my young rescuer had shared many of my own experiences. I had a certainty that he too was very lonely, and very unhappy. I could see from looking at him that he was not an awfully strong person, and it occurred to me that perhaps he too had been ill. In any case, we certainly shared a rapport that was astonishing in its spontaneity.

      “Forrest,” I repeated as we walked up the bank to the road. “I rather thought you were Italian.”

      “It’s the eyes, I got them from my grandmother. She was Italian, a Countess. But I’m afraid the rest is just ordinary upper state New York.”

      I smiled to myself. Upper state New York he might be, but I very much doubted if Jeffrey Forrest could be called ordinary.

      Nor was his car. “Lamborghini,” he said in answer to my question. The name meant nothing to me, but the low-slung silhouette and the gleaming wire wheels did. It looked like money.

      I gave him directions to Aunt Gwyneth’s house. “You’re not a local resident,” I said, more as a statement than a question. I knew most of the people who lived nearby.

      “No, I’m in the area on some business.”

      “If it brought you along this road, it must have to do with farming. I’m afraid that’s about all there is here.” I raised an eyebrow. He did not look like a farmer to me.

      He laughed. “To tell the truth, I suppose someone else should have come in my place; I haven’t much of a business head. Today, for instance, I was just playing hooky. It was such a beautiful day, and the countryside