It wasn't the excitement of getting ready to go away and trying on all my new clothes that restored me to my former cheerfulness, although Barby thinks so. It was just two little words that Richard said the last day he was with us, before going back to school. I wouldn't have believed that a mere exclamation could have brought about such an amazing change in my feelings, and I still wonder how it did. Next year I'm going to study psychology just to find out about such queer happenings in our brains.
We were out in the boat, he and Captain Kidd and I, taking a farewell row. He hadn't mentioned Esther's name since the day she left, but Judith told me he never went back to the house after he found out the double game she had been playing. Remembering how infatuated he'd been I knew he must have felt almost as broken up as Babe says John Wynne was. I kept hoping he'd bring up the subject. I thought it would make it easier for him if he would confide in one who had known the same adoration and disappointment. Besides I brooded over it all the time. It was all I thought about.
So on the way back I sat in pensive silence, trailing my hand languidly over the side of the boat through the water. Richard talked now and then, but of trivial things that could not possibly interest one communing with a secret sorrow, so I said nothing in reply. When we were almost at the pier he rested on the oars and let the boat drift, while we sat and listened to the waves tumbling up against the breakwater.
As we paused thus in the gathering dusk, a verse came to me that seemed a fitting expression of the sad twilight time as well as both my mood and his. For his face looked sad as he sat there gazing out to sea, sad and almost stern. So I repeated it softly and so feelingly that the tears sprang to my eyes, and there was a little catch in my voice at the last line:
"Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O sea,
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me."
I had expected some sort of sympathetic response, at least an eloquent silence, for he knew I meant Esther, and it was like a dash of cold water to hear him exclaim in an exasperated sort of way, "Oh rats!"
Captain Kidd took the exclamation to himself, and barked till he nearly fell out of the boat. And Richard laughed and rolled him over on the seat and asked him what he meant by making such a fuss about nothing. That was no way for a good sport to do. Then he began pulling for the landing with all his might.
Considering that I had just bared to him one of the most sacred emotions of my heart, his answer seemed as unfeeling as it was rude and inappropriate, something I could never forgive nor forget. He couldn't help seeing that I was hurt and indignant, for I ran up the beach ahead of him and only answered in monosyllables when he called after me, pretending nothing had happened.
But later when I was upstairs brushing my hair, I heard him down in the dining-room, teasing Tippy and telling her what he wanted for his farewell supper, in that jolly, audacious way of his that makes a joke of everything. I knew perfectly well that he felt blue about going back to school and that he was all broken up over the affair with Esther, but he was too good a sport to show it.
And that's what he meant by saying "Oh rats," in such an exasperated way! He had expected me to measure up to his idea of a good sport and I hadn't done it! My brooding over "a day that is dead" till it spoiled our enjoyment of the present one, seemed silly and sentimental to him. As he told the dog, "that was no way to do." From away back in our pirate-playing days the thought that Richard expected a thing of me, always spurred me on to do it, from walking the ridgepole to swinging down the well rope. He expected me to be as game and cheerful a chum as he is, and here I had spoiled our last boat-ride together by relapsing into that moody silence.