of moral degradation, when she uttered the little word, “No.”
“Then I would not write on any account. I feel sure your love for Dick is only sentiment.”
“Do you know anything about love or sentiment, Yanna? You did not care whether Harry admired you or not. Harry felt your coldness; he thinks nice women ought to be sentimental, and I can tell you, he is accustomed to being thoroughly appreciated.”
By this time it was growing dusk, and the three men were seen coming together towards the house. They were walking slowly and talking earnestly, and Yanna said:
“I wonder what subject interests them so much?”
“Politics or religion, I suppose; but whichever it is, they will utter nonsense as soon as we are within hearing. Here comes Harry with a laugh and a platitude!”
“Pardon us, Miss Van Hoosen; we quite forgot that time moved. Have you been very impatient, Rose?”
“We have both felt hurt. If you had been talking to Yanna and me, you would have been worrying about the horses, and about the steep roads, and the night miasma, and lots of other things; in fact, you would have had a bad, bad cough, by this time, Harry.”
“I know it, Rose; and I beg you a thousand pardons. You must blame my hosts. I never enjoyed talking so much before.” Then he gave his hand to Antony with a frankness that had something very confiding in it. “Shall I call for you to-morrow?” he asked. “We can get a good boat at the river side.”
47
“Thank you,” answered Antony, “I will go.”
“Cannot we go also?” enquired Rose.
Then Harry hesitated. He wanted Yanna to say something, and she said nothing. That decided the question. “It is quite impossible, Rose,” he answered. “We are going on the river to fish—a little dirty boat, and the blazing sun beating on the river—what pleasure could you have?”
“What pleasure can you have? I do not believe you are going a-fishing at all. You are going a-talking, and we could help you;” then, turning to Yanna, she asked: “When are you coming to Filmer again? Not for a week? That will never do. I shall go against your brother if he parts us for so long.”
The last words were lost in the clatter of the horse’s hoofs; and then there was a sudden silence. For the mere idea of departing stops the gayest conversation, makes the quietest person fidgety, the slowest, in a hurry; and introduces something of melancholy, whether we will or not. Perhaps, indeed, there is in every parting some dim foreshadowing of the Great Parting, and the involuntary sigh, with which we turn inward from a departing guest, is a sign from that language below the threshold we so seldom try to understand.
The acquaintance thus pleasantly begun grew rapidly to something more personal and familiar. Harry and Antony were constantly together; and the young man from the west exercised that peculiar influence over the city-bred man that a radical change in circumstances might have done. Antony was a new kind of experience. Out on the river, or wandering over the hills together, they had such confidences as drew them closer than brothers. And this intimacy 48 naturally strengthened those tenderer intimacies from which, indeed, their own friendship received its charm and crown.
For Harry soon fell into the habit of calling at Peter Van Hoosen’s house for Antony; and in such visits he saw Adriana constantly, under the most charming and variable household aspects. It was early morning, and she was training the vines, or dusting the room, or creaming butter for a cake; but he thought her in every occupation more beautiful than in the last one. Or the young men were returning at night-fall from a day’s outing, weary and hungry; and she made them tea, and cut their bread and butter and cold beef; and such occasions—no matter how frequently they occurred—were all separate and distinct in Harry’s memory.
This familiarity also on her father’s hearth invested Adriana with an atmosphere that a wrong or a trifling thought could not enter. Walking with her in the moonshine on the Filmer piazzas, he had ventured to say, and to look more love than was possible in the sanctity of her home and in the presence of her adoring father and brother. In fact, confidence in his own position left him; he began to have all the despondencies, and doubts, and sweet uncertainties, that lovers must endure, if they would not miss the complementary joys of dawning hopes, of looks and half-understood words, and of that happy “perhaps” that lifts a man from despairing into the seventh heaven of love’s possible blessedness. This, indeed, is the best heart education a man can possibly receive. In it, if he be a man, he gets that straightness of soul in which he loses “I” and then finds it again in that other one for whom his soul longs.
49
Unconsciously as a tree grows, Harry grew in the school of love; and Adriana was also much benefited by this change of base in Harry’s wooing. She had been learning too fast. It takes but a moment to drop the flower-seed into the ground; and it takes but a glance of the eye for love’s wondrous prepossession to be accomplished; but seed and passion alike, if they would reach a noble fruition, must germinate; must put forth the tender little leaves that lie asleep at the root and the heart; must spread upward to the sunshine, before they blossom like the rose in beauty and in perfume. And for these processes time is absolutely necessary.
An experience similar in kind was in progress between Antony and Rose, but the elements were more diverse. Rose had had many admirers; and she had permitted herself a sentimental affection for Dick Duval, the most unworthy of them all. She knew that she was morally weak, and that the only way to prevent herself from committing imprudences was to keep to the roadway of conventional proprieties; and in the main she was wise enough to follow this course. Her feelings about Antony were conflicting; she did not consider him a conventionally proper lover. He was the son of a working man; he lived a life beyond social restraints; she supposed him to be rather poor than rich; he did not dress as the men she knew dressed; his conversation was provocative of discussion, it compelled a person to think, or to answer like a fool—a startling vulgarity in itself—and he was so obtrusively truthful.
In a lover, as yet unaccepted, she felt this last quality to be embarrassing. It made him incapable of comprehending those fine shades of flirtation by which 50 a clever woman indicates “she will, and she will not,” by which she hesitates a liking, and provokes the admiration she can either refuse or accept. If she looked at Antony, with a sweet, long gaze, and then sighed, and cast her eyes down, Antony was moved to the depths of his soul, and he would frankly tell her so; which at that stage of proceedings was very inconvenient. If she permitted him to hold her hand, and walk with her in silent bliss under the stars, she was compelled at their next meeting to set him back with a cruel determination he could neither gainsay nor complain of. He was happy, and he was wretched. Often he determined to return westward forever, and then in some of the occult ways known to womanhood, Rose tied him to her side by another knot, more invisible and more invincible than the rest.
She loved him. She was resolved to marry him—sometime. “But I want one more season in society,” she said to herself, one day, as she reviewed the position in her luxurious solitude—“though for the matter of that, it is the young married women now who have all the beaux, and all the fun. And if I were married, I should be safe from Dick; and I am afraid of Dick. Dick isn’t good; on the contrary, he is very bad. I like good men. I like Antony Van Hoosen. I will let him propose to me. If I were engaged, or supposed to be engaged, all the young men would immediately fancy I was the only girl in the universe—but I never can find another lover like Antony Van Hoosen! The man would die for me.”
She talked of him continually to Adriana, and hoped that Adriana would say to Antony the things she did not herself wish to say. She gave Adriana hopes that Adriana might give them to Antony. And then 51 Adriana was so provokingly honorable as to regard the confidence as inviolable. And, indeed, Antony was that kind of a lover who thinks it a kind of sacrilege to babble about his mistress, or to speculate concerning her feelings, even with his sister. His love, with all of joy and sorrow it caused him, was a subject sacred as his own soul to him.
Of course, Mrs. Filmer was not blind to events so closely