“What are your plans?” asked Tommy. “You will stay with us a week, or a month, or five years?”
“I have no plans except to buy the black colt to-morrow. I expect pretty soon an English friend, and have promised to look up the lions with him. Apropos, perhaps you can put him in the way of seeing your Boston dons. He is an accomplished fellow, naturalist, man of science, charming companion, and brave soldier.”
“He will find the Boston dons rather slow,” said Tommy; “there is nothing soldierly about them. A respectably studious and rather dyspeptic set. Quite conventional and conscious of European influence. But here’s to the midnight moon!” he added, as that gibbous deity cleft the clouds and seemed sailing upward through their stationary masses. “One can see almost heaven and the angels!”
“But why do you look up yonder for them?” queried Waddy, when the toast was drunk. “Your life seems to me a revelation of earthly heaven, with one abiding angelic presence. You think my rhapsodies mere Oriental absurdities, perhaps, Mrs. Cecilia—but it seems to me that my friend, with you, has attained to happiness. You were always a hopeful man, Tommy; now you seem by hopes achieved to have learnt what they call Faith. Well, you deserve it. For me, whatever I have deserved, there is only a poor refuge of such careless stoicism as I affect,” and he uttered in some strange tongue an expression savage and stern as the growl of a lion.
“No!” said he again, after a silence, during which his friends had been, perhaps, seeking vainly for the right word; “my dear Mrs. Cecilia, my first evening at your lovely house shall not end sulkily on my part. Tommy, unsheathe your jocund flute and draw thenceforth soul-animating strains.”
Tommy was not one of those non-performing humbugs, noticed by Socrates as existing in his time, who are uniformly out of practice or have left their notes at home, so he got out his flute immediately, and accompanied Cecilia in a delicious echo song, the silver sounds threading themselves among the fine moonbeams that floated through the network of vines over the piazza where they sat. With the last fading echo, drifted away every thought of bitterness, and the calm midnight silence fell around them peacefully. So they separated.
Mr. Waddy stood at the window of his bedroom, looking out upon the night. Was it to the spirit of the night that he stretched forth his arms and murmured words of yearning tenderness? His hand was feeling, as if unconsciously, in his bosom. He missed something.
“My Testament!” he exclaimed. “Ah, now I remember—the wreck.”
He lighted a cigar, but after a puff or two, threw it away and turned in. His health was excellent, despite the memories which troubled him from time to time, and after the long day diversified with incidents of collision and shindy, he slept solidly, not far from the scenes of old happiness, lost long ago.