There is a great difference, too, between the flirtations of the grandfatherless and the flirtations of the grandfathered. I wish you to understand that Mr. Walpole and Miss Rittenhouse did not sprawl through their flirtation, nor fall into that slipshod familiarity which takes all the delicate beauty of dignity and mutual respect out of such a friendship. Horace did not bow to the horizontal, and Miss Rittenhouse did not make a cheese-cake with her skirts when he held open the door for her to pass through; but the bond of courtesy between them was no less sweetly gracious on her side, no less finely reverential on his, than the taste of their grandparents’ day would have exacted,—no less earnest, I think, that it was a little easier than puff and periwig might have made it.
Yet I also think, whatever was the reason that made the dragons let them alone, that a simple mother of the plain, old-fashioned style is better for a girl of Miss Rosamond Rittenhouse’s age than any such precarious immunity from annoyance.
Ah, the holiday was short! The summons soon came for Horace. They went to the old church together for the second and last time, and he stood beside her, and they held the hymn-book between them.
Horace could not rid himself of the idea that they had stood thus through every Sunday of a glorious summer. The week before he had sung with her. He had a boyish baritone in him, one of those which may be somewhat extravagantly characterized as consisting wholly of middle register. It was a good voice for the campus, and, combined with that startling clearness of utterance which young collegians acquire, had been very effective in the little church. But to-day he had no heart to sing “Byefield” and “Pleyel”; he would rather stand beside her and feel his heart vibrate to the deep lower notes of her tender contralto, and his soul rise with the higher tones that soared upward from her pure young breast. And all the while he was making that act of devotion which—“uttered or unexpressed”—is, indeed, all the worship earth has ever known.
Once she looked up at him as if she asked, “Why don’t you sing?” But her eyes fell quickly, he thought with a shade of displeasure in them at something they had seen in his. Yet as he watched her bent head, the cheek near him warmed with a slow, soft blush. He may only have fancied that her clear voice quivered a little with a tremolo not written in the notes at the top of the page.
And now the last day came. When the work-a-day world thrust its rough shoulder into Arcadia, and the hours of the idyll were numbered, they set to talking of it as though the two weeks that they had known each other were some sort of epitomized summer. Of course they were to meet again, in New York or in Philadelphia; and of course there were many days of summer in store for Miss Rittenhouse at Sand Hills, at Newport, and at Mount Desert; but Horace’s brief season was closed, and somehow she seemed to fall readily into his way of looking upon it as a golden period of special and important value, their joint and exclusive property—something set apart from all the rest of her holiday, where there would be other men and other good times and no Horace.
It was done with much banter and merriment; but through it all Horace listened for delicate undertones that should echo to his ear the earnestness which sometimes rang irrepressibly in his own speech. In that marvellous instrument, a woman’s voice, there are strange and fine possibilities of sound that may be the messengers of the subtlest intelligence or the sweet falterings of imperfect control. So Horace, with love to construe for him, did not suffer too cruelly from disappointment.
On the afternoon of that last day they sat upon the beach and saw the smoke of Dido’s funeral pile go up, and they closed the dog’s-eared Virgil, and, looking seaward, watched the black cloud from a coaling steamer mar the blinding blue where sea and sky blent at the horizon; watched it grow dull and faint, and fade away, and the illumined turquoise reassert itself.
Then he was for a farewell walk, and she, with that bright acquiescence with which a young girl can make companionship almost perfect, if she will, accepted it as an inspiration, and they set out. They visited together the fishermen’s houses, where Horace bade good-bye to mighty-fisted friends, who stuck their thumbs inside their waistbands and hitched their trousers half way up to their blue-shirted arms, and said to him, “You come up here in Orgust, Mr. Walpole—say ’bout the fus’ t’ the third week ’n Orgust, ’n’ we’ll give yer some bloo-fishin’ ’t y’ won’t need t’ lie about, neither.” They all liked him, and heartily.
Old Rufe, the gruff hermit of the fishers, who lived a half-mile beyond the settlement, flicked his shuttle through the net he was mending, and did not look up as Horace spoke to him.