He had forgiven his old enemies and forgotten his old grievances, and seemed every way reconciled to a world in which he was going to count as an active force.He was inexhaustibly loquacious and fantastic, and as Cecilia said, he had suddenly become so good that it was only to be feared he was going to start not for Europe but for heaven.
He took long walks with Rowland, who felt more and more the fascination of what he would have called his giftedness.Rowland returned several times to Mrs.Hudson's, and found the two ladies doing their best to be happy in their companion's happiness.Miss Garland, he thought, was succeeding better than her demeanor on his first visit had promised.
He tried to have some especial talk with her, but her extreme reserve forced him to content himself with such response to his rather urgent overtures as might be extracted from a keenly attentive smile.
It must be confessed, however, that if the response was vague, the satisfaction was great, and that Rowland, after his second visit, kept seeing a lurking reflection of this smile in the most unexpected places.
It seemed strange that she should please him so well at so slender a cost, but please him she did, prodigiously, and his pleasure had a quality altogether new to him.It made him restless, and a trifle melancholy; he walked about absently, wondering and wishing.
He wondered, among other things, why fate should have condemned him to make the acquaintance of a girl whom he would make a sacrifice to know better, just as he was leaving the country for years.
It seemed to him that he was turning his back on a chance of happiness--happiness of a sort of which the slenderest germ should be cultivated.
He asked himself whether, feeling as he did, if he had only himself to please, he would give up his journey and--wait.He had Roderick to please now, for whom disappointment would be cruel; but he said to himself that certainly, if there were no Roderick in the case, the ship should sail without him.He asked Hudson several questions about his cousin, but Roderick, confidential on most points, seemed to have reasons of his own for being reticent on this one.
His measured answers quickened Rowland's curiosity, for Miss Garland, with her own irritating half-suggestions, had only to be a subject of guarded allusion in others to become intolerably interesting.
He learned from Roderick that she was the daughter of a country minister, a far-away cousin of his mother, settled in another part of the State;that she was one of a half-a-dozen daughters, that the family was very poor, and that she had come a couple of months before to pay his mother a long visit."It is to be a very long one now," he said, "for it is settled that she is to remain while I am away."The fermentation of contentment in Roderick's soul reached its climax a few days before the young men were to make their farewells.
He had been sitting with his friends on Cecilia's veranda, but for half an hour past he had said nothing.Lounging back against a vine-wreathed column and gazing idly at the stars, he kept caroling softly to himself with that indifference to ceremony for which he always found allowance, and which in him had a sort of pleading grace.
At last, springing up: "I want to strike out, hard!" he exclaimed.
"I want to do something violent, to let off steam!""I 'll tell you what to do, this lovely weather," said Cecilia.
"Give a picnic.It can be as violent as you please, and it will have the merit of leading off our emotion into a safe channel, as well as yours."Roderick laughed uproariously at Cecilia's very practical remedy for his sentimental need, but a couple of days later, nevertheless, the picnic was given.It was to be a family party, but Roderick, in his magnanimous geniality, insisted on inviting Mr.Striker, a decision which Rowland mentally applauded.
"And we 'll have Mrs.Striker, too," he said, "if she 'll come, to keep my mother in countenance; and at any rate we 'll have Miss Striker--the divine Petronilla!" The young lady thus denominated formed, with Mrs.Hudson, Miss Garland, and Cecilia, the feminine half of the company.Mr.Striker presented himself, sacrificing a morning's work, with a magnanimity greater even than Roderick's, and foreign support was further secured in the person of Mr.Whitefoot, the young Orthodox minister.
Roderick had chosen the feasting-place; he knew it well and had passed many a summer afternoon there, lying at his length on the grass and gazing at the blue undulations of the horizon.
It was a meadow on the edge of a wood, with mossy rocks protruding through the grass and a little lake on the other side.
It was a cloudless August day; Rowland always remembered it, and the scene, and everything that was said and done, with extraordinary distinctness.Roderick surpassed himself in friendly jollity, and at one moment, when exhilaration was at the highest, was seen in Mr.Striker's high white hat, drinking champagne from a broken tea-cup to Mr.Striker's health.
Miss Striker had her father's pale blue eye; she was dressed as if she were going to sit for her photograph, and remained for a long time with Roderick on a little promontory overhanging the lake.
Mrs.Hudson sat all day with a little meek, apprehensive smile.
She was afraid of an "accident," though unless Miss Striker (who indeed was a little of a romp) should push Roderick into the lake, it was hard to see what accident could occur.
Mrs.Hudson was as neat and crisp and uncrumpled at the end of the festival as at the beginning.Mr.Whitefoot, who but a twelvemonth later became a convert to episcopacy and was already cultivating a certain conversational sonority, devoted himself to Cecilia.He had a little book in his pocket, out of which he read to her at intervals, lying stretched at her feet, and it was a lasting joke with Cecilia, afterwards, that she would never tell what Mr.Whitefoot's little book had been.
