The season was like the placid hour before the world wakes to its daily comedy and tragedy; and yet, with all its superficial serenity, this summer carried certain undercurrents of emotion that hardly rose to the dignity of discontent, but which, nevertheless, troubled the still waters of the soul. At first Madeline half resented the continual presence of Norris at these sacred conclaves. He seemed so much an outsider. Dick she had known all her life and she could talk to him with perfect freedom, but his friend often sat silent during their chatter, as though he were an onlooker before whom spontaneity was impossible. Yet as Sunday after Sunday the two young men strode up together, she grew to accept Ellery. First he became inoffensive; then she became aware that his eyes spoke when his lips were dumb; and finally, when words did come, they were the words of a friend who understood moods and tenses. In some ways it was a comfort to have this buffer between her and Dick. It helped to prolong the period of uncertain certainty.
Dick never spoke of love, but the way was pointed not only by the easy restfulness of their comradeship, but in the very atmosphere that surrounded them. She read it half-consciously in the looks of father and mother as they met and accepted Dick’s intimacy in the house, in the warmth of Mrs. Percival’s motherly affection when Madeline ran in for one of her frequent calls. Life was full of it, like the gentle half-warmth that comes before the sun has quite peeped over the horizon on a summer morning; and it was well that this dawn to their day should be a long one. Madeline had been away the greater part of four years, and she was now in no hurry to cut short her reunion with the old home life. Dick, too, had his beginnings to make, man-fashion, and they ought to be made before he took on himself the full life of a man. So she was happily content to drift, conscious in a vague dreamy way that the drift was in the right direction, feeling the situation without analyzing it. It was a condition of affairs like Madeline herself, gently affectionate, but not passionate or deeply emotional. She was not of the type of women who rise up and control destiny.
Norris, for all his passive exterior, had undercurrents that were fervid and powerful, and this first summer in the West, unruffled on its surface, stirred them and sent his life whirling along their irresistible streams. He never lost the sense that he was an outsider, admitted on sufferance to see the happiness of others and allowed to pick up their crumbs. If hard work, oblivion and lovelessness were to be his lot, the hardest of these was lovelessness. Much as he loved Dick he continually resented that young man’s careless acceptance of the good things of life, and most of all did his irritation grow at Percival’s way of taking Madeline for granted, enjoying her beauty, her sympathy, the grace that she threw over everything, and yet, thought Ellery, never half appreciating them. He himself bowed before them with an adoration that was framed in anguish because these things were, and were not for him. More and more cruel grew the knowledge that the currents of his life were gall and wormwood, flowing through wastes of bitterness.
Yet, along with the new grief came a new awakening, at first dimly felt by Madeline alone, then read with greater and greater clearness.
But of all undercurrents, Dick, prime mover and chief talker, remained unconscious, absorbed in his own dawning career, delighting in his two friends chiefly as hearers and sympathizers with his multitudinous ideas.
So it happened that one August afternoon, when it was late enough for the sun to have lost its fury, a not too strenuous breeze drove their tiny yacht through a channel which stretched enticingly between a wooded island and the jutting mainland.
“Let’s land there,” Madeline exclaimed suddenly. “It looks like a jolly place.”
She pointed toward a stretch of beach caught between the arms of trees that came to the very water’s edge, and enshrined in a great wild grape-vine that had climbed from branch to branch until it made a tangled canopy.
Dick turned sharply inward and ran their prow into the twittering sand.
“Thou speakest and it is thy servant’s place to obey,” he said.