They strolled on down to the little jetty where the boat was moored, and helping his companion to the cushioned seat in the stern, Ansley pushed the little craft out and rowed lazily up in midstream.
From the river the groves and gardens showed up most distinctly, and over and beyond them the house was discernible under the huge trees that stood at the sides and back of it. The moonlight softened and silvered everything, and the scent of the orange-blossoms gave a dreamy, exquisite, impalpable finish to the night.
Pausing in midstream, Ansley asked his companion if she knew the song “Carissima,” adding, “You know, I think it must have been on such a night as this that he serenaded her in his boat. ‘The moonlight trembling on the sea,’ and ‘the breath of flowers,’ that he sings of are here, and ‘the orange-groves so dark and dim’—now all we want is the dreamy, distant sound of the ‘Vesper Hymn.’ Will you sing the song itself Miss Hardy? That will be better than any ‘Vesper Hymn.’”
She sang, as he asked, in a sweet, low voice suited to the song and the time and the surroundings; and as the last call of “Carissima,” so appealingly gentle, so soft and clear, floated away, he rested on his oars and watched her. Presently he said:
“There is, I think, no power so far-reaching, so universally felt, as the power of music. There is none—excepting, of course, the magnetic power of individuals over each other—which can so stir a man’s better nature. It seems—and especially at night—to elevate one’s thoughts and hopes, to strike a higher chord in human nature.”
“Yes, it is so. It raises a feeling of devotion. To me, it is the poetry of religion.”
And so they talked as the boat glided along; talked of the “little things we care about,” which are of no interest to anyone else, but which help us greatly to know one another. And the time slipped quietly by, like the silent water moving to the eternal sea. Now and then there were scraps of conversation, but more often the long silences of content. The girl lay back in the cushioned stern trailing one hand in the water, barely cool after the long summer day; the man dipped his oars now and again for the slowest, laziest of strokes, and watched the blades glisten in the moonlight and the diamond drops plash back on the shining surface of the water.
Once or twice in the long silences Ansley had roused himself, and half bent forward, as though about to say something, but, changing his mind, had taken a few lazy pulls at the oars and sent the boat gliding along again. But when they turned to drift down-stream again he shipped the oars, and, after a little pause, said:
“If you do not mind, I should like to tell you something of the business that has brought me here. I want help for a friend, and I want advice—your advice! But, even apart from that, I should like you to know.”
She answered promptly and truthfully: “I should like to know, and oh! I would give anything to help you!”