“Yes—yes. Why, bless me,” Judge Rittenhouse went on, getting up to look at Horace: “you’re the image of your poor father at your age. A very brilliant man, sir, a very able man. I did not see much of him after we left college—I was a Pennsylvanian, and he was from this State—but I have always remembered your father with respect and regard, sir,—a very able man. I think I heard of his death some years ago.”
“Three years ago,” said Horace. His voice fell somewhat. How little to this old man of success was the poor, unnoticed death of failure!
“Three years only!” repeated the judge, half apologetically; “ah, people slip away from each other in this world—slip away. But I’m glad to have met you, sir—very much pleased indeed. Rosamond!”
For an hour the subdued creaking of a rocking-chair by the window had been playing a monotonously pleasant melody in Horace’s ears. Now and then a coy wisp of bright hair, or the reflected ghost of it, had flashed into view in the extreme lower left-hand corner of a mirror opposite him. Once he had seen a bit of white brow under it, and from time to time the low flutter of turning magazine leaves had put in a brief second to the rocking-chair.
All this time Horace’s brains had been among the papers on the table; but something else within him had been swaying to and fro with the rocking-chair, and giving a leap when the wisp of hair bobbed into sight.
Now the rocking-chair accompaniment ceased, and the curtained corner by the window yielded up its treasure, and Miss Rittenhouse came forward, with one hand brushing the wisp of hair back into place, as if she were on easy and familiar terms with it. Horace envied it.
“Rosamond,” said the judge: “This is Mr. Walpole, the son of my old friend Walpole. You have heard me speak of Mr. Walpole’s father.”
“Yes, papa,” said the young lady, all but the corners of her mouth. And, oddly enough, Horace did not think of being saddened because this young woman had never heard of his father. Life was going on a new key, all of a sudden, with a hint of a melody to be unfolded that ran in very different cadences from the poor old tune of memory.
My heroine, over whose head some twenty summers had passed, was now in the luxuriant prime of her youthful beauty. Over a brow whiter than the driven snow fell clustering ringlets, whose hue—
That is the way the good old novelists and story-tellers of the Neville and Beverley days would have set out to describe Miss Rittenhouse, had they known her. Fools and blind! As if anyone could describe—as if a poet, even, could more than hint at what a man sees in a woman’s face when, seeing, he loves.