Colonel Everard sat at the head of his dinner table. A little dinner for
twelve was well under way at the Birches. Mrs. Everard was confined to
her tower suite to-night with one of the sudden headaches which unkind
critics held were likely to come when the Colonel entertained. Randolph
Sebastian, his secretary, had superintended the arrangements for the
dinner.
Pink roses, rather too many of them, were massed on the big, round
table. Rather too much polished silver was to be seen on it; the most
ornate candlesticks in the Everard collection, and a too complete array
of small, scattered objects, each with a possible but not an essential
function, littering a cloth already complicated by elaborate inserts of
lace. But the brilliantly lighted, over-decorated table was effective
enough in the big, darkly wainscoted room, a little island of light and
colour.
The room was characterless, but finely and generously proportioned, and
not so blatantly new as the rest of the colonel's house still looked.
Against the dark walls the pale-coloured gowns around the table were
charming. Indeed, most of the gowns were designed for this setting.
For there were no outsiders among the Colonel's guests to-night.
Sometimes there were distinguished outsiders, politicians and other big
men, diverted from triumphant tours through larger centres by the
Colonel's influence, and by his courtesy exhibited to Green River after
they had dined, or bigger men still, whose comings and goings the public
press was not permitted to chronicle. Sometimes, too, there were
outsiders on probation, the outer fringe of Green River society,
admitted to formal functions, and hoping in vain to penetrate to
intimate ones; ladies flustered and flattered, gentlemen sulky but
flattered, conscious that each appearance here might be their last, and
trying to seem indifferent to the fact.
But this was the Colonel's inner circle, gathered by telephone at
twenty-four hours' notice, as they so often were. No course that the
chef had contributed to the rather too elaborate menu was new to them.
The Pol Roger which the big English butler was just starting on his
second round was of the vintage year usually to be found on the
Colonel's wine list, and on most intelligently supervised wine lists. A
dinner for twelve, like plenty of little dinners elsewhere, no more
correct and no less, but it had this to distinguish it; it was being
served in Green River.
Served complete from hors-d'oeuvres to liqueurs, in a New England town
where high tea had been the fashion not ten years ago, and church
suppers were still important occasions--where you were rich on five
thousand a year, and there were not a dozen capitalists secure of so
much, where a second maid was an object of pride, and there was no
butler except the Colonel's. And he had imported this butler and his
chef and his wines, but not his guests; they were quite as impressive,
quite able to appreciate his hospitality, if not to return it in kind,
and they were all but one native products of Green River.
The youngest guest was eating mushrooms _sous cloche_ in contented
silence at the Colonel's left. The scene was not new to her. She could
not remember her first party here; she was probably the only person in
Green River who could pass over that momentous occasion so lightly. She
had grown up as the only child in the inner circle. She had been
privileged to excuse herself, when the formal succession of courses at
some holiday function was too much for her, and read fairy tales on a
cushion by the library fire, out of the fat, purple edition de luxe of
the "Arabian Nights" that was always waiting for her there. Though her
white ruffled skirts had grown long now, and her silvery gold braids
were pinned up, and she was allowed to fill an empty place at the
Colonel's table whenever he asked her, if not quite on his regular
dinner list yet, Judith was not much changed from that wide-eyed child,
and to-night her eyes looked sleepy and soft, as if she had serious
thoughts of the cushion by the fire and the fairy book still.
The scene was not new, but it kept a fascination for her, like a
transformation scene in a pantomime. Mr. J. Cleveland Kent, the manager
of the shoe factory, who had taken her in to dinner, had been leaning
out of a factory window in his shirt-sleeves, his black hair tumbled,
and badly in need of a shave, when she passed on her way home from
school. He looked mysterious and interesting in a dinner coat, like her
idea of an Italian nobleman.
When Judith knocked at the kitchen door to deliver a note, Mrs. Theodore
Burr, in a pink cooking apron, corsetless, and with her beautiful yellow
hair in patent curlers, had been blackening the kitchen stove, and
quarrelling with the furnace man about an overcharge of fifty cents on
his monthly bill. The Burrs had no maid. Theodore Burr had been
assisting Judge Saxon ever since he passed his bar examinations, but he
was not admitted to partnership yet. This was beginning to make gossip,
for he worked hard. He had broken his dinner engagement to-night, as he
often did, to stay at home and work. Randolph Sebastian, the secretary,
with the queer, hybrid foreign name, and thin face and ingratiating
brown eyes, had his place at the table.
Mrs. Burr, stately and slender now in jetted black, the lowest cut gown
in the room, her yellow hair fluffing and flaring into an unbelievable
number of well-filled-out puffs, was chattering to the Colonel in a low
voice, so that Judith could not understand, and breaking into French at
intervals--Green River High School French, but she spoke it with an air,
narrowing her blue-gray eyes after an alluring fashion she had and
laughing her full-toned laugh. She was a full-blown, emphatic creature,
though she had been married only three years, and was Lil Gaynor still
to half the town.
Auburn-haired little Mrs. Kent had been lying down all the afternoon, as
her disapproving domestic had informed any one who inquired at the door
in a shrill voice that did not promote repose. She was very piquant and
enticing now, with her bright, slanting hazel eyes, and a contagious
laugh, but her dinner partner, Judith's father, was tired and hard to
amuse. He looked very boyish when he was tired; his blue eyes looked
large and pathetic.
The other two young women and Judith's mother, whose dark, low-browed
Madonna beauty was gracious and fresh to-night, set off by her
clear-blue gown, with a gardenia caught in her sheer, white scarf,
deserved the Honourable Joseph Grant's flowery name for them, the Three
Graces.
Before the Colonel's time and Judith's the Honourable Joe had been the
most important man in Green River, and in evening things, and after a
properly concocted cocktail he still looked it, florid and portly and
well set-up, with a big voice that could still sound hearty though it
rang rather empty and hollow sometimes. He looked ten years younger than
his old friend, Judge Saxon. The Judge's coat was getting shiny at the
seams, and--this appeared even more unfortunate to Judith--he was in the
habit of pointing out that it was shiny, and without embarrassment. Mrs.
Saxon's pearl-gray satin was of excellent quality, but of last year's
cut, and the modest neck was filled in with the net guimpe which she
affected at informal dinners. The Saxons were not quite in the picture,
but they were always very kind to Judith.
And if they were not in the picture, Mrs. Joseph Grant, certainly not
the youngest woman in the room, though she was not the oldest, occupied
the centre of it.
She was like the picture of the beautiful princess on the hill of glass,
in a book of Judith's, and besides, she had once been a real debutante,
of the kind that Judith liked to read about in novels, before the
Honourable Joe brought her from Boston to Green River. Judith liked to
look at her better than any one here except Colonel Everard.
"Cosmopolitan--ten years ahead of Wells, or any town in your state; real
give and take in the table talk; really pretty women; the same little
group of people rubbing wits against each other day after day and
getting them sharpened instead of dulled by it; a concentrated, pocket
edition of a social life, but complete--nothing provincial about it," a
very distinguished outsider had said after his last week-end with the
Colonel.
But he was fresh from a visit to the state capital, the most provincial
city in the state when the legislature was not in session; also he had a
known weakness for pretty women. Green River did not admire the
Colonel's circle so unreservedly, but Green River was jealous. Whatever
you thought of it, it was made of fixed and unpromising material, and
making it was no mean achievement, and the man at the head of the table
looked capable of it, and of bigger things.
The Colonel was a big man and a public character, and as with many
bigger men, you could divide the facts of his life into two classes:
what everybody knew and what nobody knew. If the known facts were not
the most dramatic ones, they were dramatic enough. He was sixty now. At
fifteen he had been a student in a small theological seminary, working
for his board on his uncle's farm, and engaged to the teacher of the
district school, who helped him with his Greek at night. He gave up the
ministry for the law, used his law practice as a stepping-stone into
state politics, climbed gradually into national politics, built up a
fortune somehow--these were the days of big graft--married for money and
got an assured position in Washington society thrown in, and soon after
his marriage chose Green River as a basis of operations, spending a
winter month in Washington which later lengthened to three, ostensibly
for the sake of his wife's health. The title of Colonel came from
serving on the Governor's staff in an uneventful year. He had held no
very important office, but his importance to his party in state and
national politics was not to be measured by that.
White haired, slightly built, managing with perfectly apparent tricks
of carriage and dress to look taller than he was, he was the effective
figure in this rather unusually good-looking group of people. Just now
he was lighting a fresh cigarette for Mrs. Burr so gracefully that even
Judge Saxon must enjoy watching, so Judith thought, though there was a
tradition that he did not like women to smoke. Shocking the Judge was
one of their favourite games here. It was only a game. Of course they
could never shock anybody. They were quite harmless people, too grown up
to be very interesting, but almost always kind, and always gay.
The Colonel's profile was really beautiful through the curling, bluish
smoke, and Judith liked his quick, flashing smile. He turned now and
smiled at Judith. Her own smile was charming, a faint, half smile, that
never knew whether to turn into a real smile or to go away and not come
again, but was always just on the point of deciding.
"Is our debutante bored?"
"Oh, no; I was just thinking. No."
"She's blushing. Look at her."
"Yes, look at a real one. Do you good, Lil," agreed the Judge, and Mrs.
Burr rubbed a pink cheek with her table napkin, exhibited it daintily,
and laughed.
"Rose-white youth! But she doth protest too much." The Honourable Joe
was fond of quotations, and often tried to make his remarks sound like
them, when he could not recall appropriate ones, raising a solemn fat
finger to emphasize them: "The thoughts of youth are long, long
thoughts."
"Wrong, wrong thoughts," supplied Randolph Sebastian, so gravely that
the Honourable Joe accepted the amendment, and looked worried, as only
the thought of losing his grip on Bartlett's "Familiar Quotations" could
worry him at the end of a perfect meal.
"Wrong thought?" he repeated, in a puzzled voice.
"Thinking's barred here. What's the penalty, Judge?"
"You aren't likely to get it inflicted on you, so I won't tell you,
Lil."
"No, I don't think; I act," Mrs. Burr admitted cheerfully. She always
became a shade more cheerful just when you expected her to lose her
temper.
"How true that is," observed Mr. Sebastian gently.
"Ranny!"
"Didn't you play auction with me last night? We're out just----"
"Don't tell me. I can't think in anything beyond three figures. Ted's
doing higher mathematics over it. That's why he's home, really. I'll
play with you again to-night, for your sins."
"For my sins!" He made melancholy eyes, as if he were really confessing
them. Mr. Sebastian always pretended a deep devotion to Mrs. Burr.
Judith thought it was one of the silliest of their games.
"But what was Judy thinking about?" demanded Mrs. Grant, in the sweet,
indifferent voice that always made itself heard.
"She met a fairy prince at the ball last night. They are still to be
met--at balls."
"You'd meet one anywhere he made a date, wouldn't you, Edith Kent?" said
the Judge rudely. "Give Miss Judy a penny for her thoughts, if you want
them, Everard. You've got to pay sometimes, you know--even you."
"Don't commercialize her too young," said Mr. Sebastian smoothly.
"Though, on the whole--can you commercialize them too young?"
"Judith, what were you thinking about?" the Colonel interrupted, rather
quickly, turning every one's eyes upon her at once, as he could with a
word.
Judith met them confidently--amused, curious eyes, but all friendly and
gay. They talked a great deal of nonsense here, but it did not irritate
her, as it did her friend Judge Saxon, though she was not always amused,
and could not always understand. They never tried to shock her. She was
sorry for the Judge. He was not at home with these gay and good-natured
people, and it was so easy to be.
She tipped her head backward in deliberate imitation of Edith Kent, whom
she admired, half closed her eyes, like Lillian Burr, whom she admired
still more, gazed up at the Colonel, and said, in her clear little
voice:
"I was thinking about you."
"That's the answer," said Mr. Kent, and rewarded it with a lump of sugar
dipped in his apricot brandy.
"For an ingenue?" said Mrs. Burr, very sweetly indeed.
"'She's getting older every day,'" hummed Mrs. Kent, in her charming,
throaty contralto.
But Judge Saxon pushed back his chair and rose abruptly.
"I've had dinner enough," he said, "and so have you, Miss Judy."
"We all have, Hugh," said the Colonel quickly, and rose, too, and
slipped an intimate hand through his arm. "Run along, children! Hugh,
about that Brady matter----"
Judge Saxon submitted sulkily, but was laughing companionably with the
Colonel by the time they all reached the library.
Judith never admired the Colonel more than when he was managing Judge
Saxon in a sulky mood. And she never admired the Colonel and his friends
more than she did in the lazy intimate hour here before the cards began.
The room was long and high, and too narrow; unfriendly, as only a room
that is both badly proportioned and unusually large can be, but you
forgot this in the softening glow of candles and rose-shaded lights. You
forgot, too, that you were an exile from your own generation, among
elders who bored you, though you were subtly flattered to be among them.
Safe on a high window-bench in the most remote window, entirely your
own, since the architect had not designed it to be sat on, and nobody
else took the trouble to climb up, it was so much pleasanter to watch
these people than to talk to them; they had such pretty clothes, and
wore them so well, and made such effective, changing pictures of
themselves in the big room.
Sometimes they amused themselves with the parlour tricks that they had
so many of, and sometimes they drifted in and out in groups of two and
three, to more intimate parts of the house: the smoking-room, or Mrs.
Everard's suite, if she was well, or out through the French windows,
across the broad, glassed-in veranda that ran the length of the room and
darkened it unpleasantly by day, into the Colonel's rose garden. It was
warm enough for that to-night, and a yellow, September moon showed
invitingly through the windows. Mrs. Grant, who liked to be alone, as
Judith could quite understand, since she had to listen to the Honourable
Joe's big voice so much of the time, was slipping out through a window
now, taking the coat that Mr. Sebastian brought her, but refusing to let
him go with her.
He went to the piano, ran his thin, flexible brown fingers over the
keys, struck into a Spanish serenade, and sang a verse of it in his
brilliant but tricky tenor, with his languishing eyes upon Mrs. Burr.
"Ranny, do you want to tell the whole world of our love? You terrify
me," she said, and took refuge on one arm of the Colonel's chair.
Judith's mother, protesting that she needed a chaperon, promptly took
possession of the other arm, disposing her blue, trailing skirts
demurely, and looking more Madonna-like than ever through the cloudy
smoke of a belated cigarette. The others made themselves equally
comfortable, all but Judge Saxon, who had ceased to advertise the fact
that he was not.
"Smile at me," Mrs. Kent begged, hovering over his chair; "I'm going to
sing by and by, and I need it. Do smile! If you don't, I'm going to kiss
you, Judge."
"Go as far as you like, but be sure how far you like to go, Edith," said
the Judge quietly. She flushed, and turned away abruptly, playing with a
pile of songs.
"I'm looking for a lullaby. Our youngest seems to need it."
"Not in your line, are they?" said Sebastian, and began to improvise
one, while Judith, in her corner, closed her eyes contentedly. Whether
there was any truth or not in the report that he had been playing a
ramshackle piano in an East Side restaurant in New York when the Colonel
picked him up, Sebastian could do charming things with quite simple
little tunes, if you did not inquire into problems of harmony and
counterpoint too closely. He was doing them now, weaving odds and ends
of familiar tunes, rather scapegrace and thin, into a lovely, reassuring
whole, that made you feel rested and safe. Judith, making herself
comfortable against a stiff and unwieldy Arts and Crafts sort of
cushion, as long experience had taught her to, listened, smiling.
She had no idea what a unique position she was occupying there. Judge
Saxon grumbled and scolded, but he was part of the group in the room.
He had grown into it, and belonged to them, as he might have belonged to
an uncongenial family. The Colonel's distinguished guests saw them only
on their best behaviour. Their local critics never penetrated here at
all. Judith was the only outsider who did, and she had besides the
irrevocable right of youth to pronounce judgment upon those who have
prepared the world for it to occupy. She was their only licensed critic.
What did she think of them? Her blond head drooped sleepily. She did not
look disposed to say.
Sebastian played on, drifting into something sophisticated, with a
suggestion of waltz rhythms running through it. There was a stir of
movement in the room, and the sound of windows opening and shutting,
once, and then again. Judith did not turn her head to see who had gone
out. She was too comfortable. It was strange that he could make you so
comfortable with his music, when he made you so uncomfortable if you
talked to him, watching you so closely with his queer, bright eyes.
He stopped abruptly, with a big, crashing discord, and Judith rubbed her
eyes and sat up. Mrs. Kent was going to sing now. She tossed some music
to him.
"That's over your head," she said; "over all your heads; better put me
up there, too, Cleve. Besides, I want to dance. That table will do."
She cleared it unceremoniously, with her husband's help, and established
herself there, poised motionless, through the introductory bars of the
song, her sleepy eyes wide awake now, and a red rose from a bowl on the
table caught between her teeth.
Quietly, always careful to avoid the reputation of being shocked, like
the Judge, Judith slipped down from her perch, and across the room, and
out through the window.
"Please keep my folks from kickin';
Grab me while I'm a chicken,
I'm getting older every day."
Mrs. Kent's fresh voice was urging, as Judith tiptoed across the
veranda.
The rowdy words of her little songs and the demure plaintiveness of Mrs.
Kent's voice made an effective contrast. It amused Judith as much as any
one, and she liked to laugh, but she liked better to cry, and if you
could not hear the words, Mrs. Kent's voice made you cry; big, luxurious
tears, that stood in your eyes and did not fall. As she found her way
across the lawn, among the elaborate flower-beds, the voice followed
her, mellow and sweet. It had never sounded so sweet before. Everything
sweet in the world was sweeter to-night.
At the edge of the lawn Judith paused. Ahead of her three marble steps,
flanked by urns filled with ivy, glaring things in the daytime but
glimmering shadowy white and alluring now, led up the terrace to the
rose garden; a fairy place, far from the world, so hedged in and
shadowed by trees that it was dark even by moonlight, entered through an
old-fashioned trellised arbour, that was so mysterious and dark, she
liked it almost as well now when the rambler roses were not in flower.
When she left the room her mother had been sitting in Colonel Everard's
chair, she seemed to remember, and the Colonel and Mrs. Burr were
nowhere to be seen. The whole room looked emptier, though she did not
know who else was missing. But there were two people now in the rose
arbour. She could just hear their voices, low, with long silences
between.
She wanted the place to herself. She stood still, hoping that they would
go. There was a path into the woods on the other side of the little
garden: the Colonel's bare, semicultivated woods, combed clean of
underbrush, but you did not miss it at night. The woods were full of
adventure, but the garden was better to dream in, and Judith had a great
deal to dream about.
The lighted house looked quite small and far away across the wide,
moonlit lawn. They had stopped singing, and the laughter that followed
the song did not sound so clear as the music; you could just hear it.
Presently you could hear nothing, and it was quiet in the rose arbour,
too. She waited until she was sure, standing quite still at the edge of
the dark enclosure, not a ruffle of her white dress fluttering, very
slender and small against the dark of the leaves. Then she slipped into
the arbour.
Through a fringe of drooping vine that half hid the picture, she could
see the garden, empty and dimly moonlit, with the marble benches faintly
white. She hurried through, pushed a trailing vine aside, then dropped
it and shrank back under the trellis.
The garden was empty. But across it, just at the entrance of the wood
path, she saw a man and a woman. At first she took the two figures for
one, they were standing so closely embraced. She could not see their
faces, only the two dark figures standing there like one. They stood
still a long time. They might have been lovers in a picture, only you
could not paint pictures of darkly clothed, ungraceful, shapeless
people. Finally they moved, the man turning suddenly, slipping an arm
higher around the woman's shoulders, and putting his face down to hers.
Then he drew her into the wood path, and they passed down it out of
sight. Judith did not know who the woman was, but the man was Colonel
Everard. And they had kissed each other.
Now they were gone. Judith drew a deep breath of relief and stepped out
into the enclosure, pacing across it with slow steps, possessing it for
her own and dismissing alien presences. There was a high-backed marble
erection between the benches, which looked like a memorial to the dear
departed, but was designed for a chair. She seated herself there
deliberately, leaning back, at ease somehow in the unfriendly depths of
it, a slender, uncompromising creature, like a young princess sitting in
judgment on her throne.
They had kissed each other. She knew they did things like this, but now
she had seen it, which was different, and not very pleasant. But they
were all so old. Did it really matter whether they kissed each other or
not?
"Stupid old things," said Colonel Everard's only authorized critic, "I
don't care what they do."
Here in the quiet of the garden you were free to think about more
interesting things than the Everards or even fairy princes.
"Stupid," repeated Judith absently, and forgot the Everards. The moon,
far away but very clear, shone down at her in an unwinking,
concentrated way, as if it were shining into the Colonel's garden and
nowhere else, and at nobody but Judith. She did not look disconcerted by
the attention, but stared back at it with eyes that were not sleepy now,
but very big and bright--wondering, but not afraid.
On still nights like this you could just hear the church clock strike
from the garden, but you could not count all the strokes. Judith
listened for the sound. It was early, and out here, in the cool, still
air, it felt early, though the time had passed so slowly in the
Colonel's sleepy rooms. She could hear no music from the house. They
would soon begin to put out the bridge tables. There was always a chance
that they would need her to complete a table, but if they did not, the
Colonel's car was to take her home at nine.
And the Colonel's youngest guest had further plans for the evening.