Still they floated on with the receding tide, its low washing against the sides of their boat filling up the pauses of the music. The burning red and gold of the sky cooled into the mellower tints of twilight, and the pale curve of the young moon shone with increasing lustre. Jeannie fell asleep, her head upon her sister's lap; the dumb boy sat motionless as stone, his dark eyes fixed on the moon; there seemed some spell upon the little party. Boat after boat passed them, almost noiselessly, for far into the clear evening went the tones of the singer's voice, and the dullest hearer could not withhold the tribute of admiring silence until beyond its reach.
And Sarah, happy in the strange, restful languor that locked her senses to all except the blessed present, dreamed on, the music but a part of her ideal world, this new and beautiful life. Into it stole presently a theme of sadness, a strain of grief, a heart-cry, that, ere she was aware, wrung her own heart-strings with anguish.
"The long, long weary day
Is passed in tears away,
And still at evening I am weeping.
When from my window's height
I look out on the night,
I am still weeping,
My lone watch keeping.
"When I, his truth to prove,
Would trifle with my love,
He'd say, 'For me thou wilt be weeping,
When, at some future day,
I shall be far away;
Thou wilt be weeping,
Thy lone watch keeping.'
"Alas! if land or sea
Had parted him from me,
I would not these sad tears be weeping;
But hope he'd come once more,
And love me as before;
And say, 'Cease weeping,
Thy lone watch keeping.'
"But he is dead and gone,
Whose heart was mine alone,
And now for him I'm sadly weeping.
His face I ne'er shall see,
And naught is left to me
But bitter weeping,
My lone watch keeping."
If ever a pierced and utterly hopeless soul poured forth its plaint in musical measure, it was in the wondrously simple and unspeakably plaintive air to which these words are set. There breathes in it a spirit wail so mournfully sincere that one recognizes its sob in the very chords of the accompaniment. The mere murmur of the melody, were no words uttered, tells the story of grieving desolation.
Sarah did not move or speak, yet upon her enchanted ground a cloud had fallen. She saw the high casement and its tearful gazer into the night, a night not of music, and moonlight, and love, but chill, and wet, and dreary. Rain dripped from eaves and trees; stone steps and pavements caught a ghastly gleam from street lamps; save that sorrowful watcher, there was no living creature abroad or awake. She grew cold and sick with looking into those despairing eyes; the gloom, the loneliness, the woe of that vigil became her own, and her heart sank swooning beneath the burden.
As he ceased the song, Philip looked up for some comment or request. To his surprise, she only clasped her hands in a gesture that might have been either relief from or abandonment to woe, and bowed her head upon them. Puzzled, yet flattered by her emotion, he refrained from interrupting her; and, resuming his oars, lent the impetus of their stroke to that of the tide. Nothing was said until the keel grated upon the shelly beach opposite the farmhouse. Then, as Philip stooped to lift the unconscious Jeannie, he imagined that he discerned the gleam of the sinking moon upon Sarah's dripping eyelashes.
The fancy pursued him after he had gone up to his room. Seated at his window, looking out upon the now starlit sky, he smoked more than one cigar before his musing fit was ended. It was not the love-reverie of a smitten boy. He believed that he had passed that stage of sentimentalism ten years before. That Southerner of the male gender who has not been consumed by the fires and risen as good as new from the ashes of half a dozen never-dying passions before he is eighteen, who has not offered the heart and hand, which as often as otherwise constitute his chiefest earthly possessions, to some elect fair one by the time he is one-and-twenty, is voted "slow" invulnerable. If these susceptible sons of a fervid clime did not take to love-making as naturally as does a duckling to the pond by the time the eggshell is fairly off its head, they would certainly be initiated while in the callow state by the rules and customs of society. Courtship is at first a pastime, then an art, then when the earnestness of a real attachment takes hold of their impassioned natures, it is the one all-absorbing, eager pursuit of existence, until rewarded by the acquisition of its object or thwarted by the decided refusal of the hard-hearted Dulcinea.