"That will be all, Miss?"
"Yes," said Judith, with unnecessary emphasis. "Oh, yes, indeed!"
The Everards' car turned and flashed out of the drive and up the street.
Judith stood still on the steps and watched it, if a young lady with her
breath coming fast and her eyes shining bright in the dark, and her
heart beating unaccountably hard can be said to be standing still. One
light burned forlornly over the entrance of the inn. Light was Judge
Saxon's one extravagance, and plenty of it was waiting for him in the
house next door, though it would be two before any one left the
Everards' but Judith.
The house before her was dark, and the dimly lighted street was
profoundly still, with the heavy and brooding stillness that comes upon
village streets after nine and is to be found nowhere else in the world.
Judith did not seem depressed by it. Somewhere on a side street solitary
footsteps echoed hollow through the silence, and she listened intently,
but they came no nearer, and presently died away. She fumbled excitedly
with her key, threw open the door, and groped her way across the
unlighted hall. She encountered the telephone table prematurely,
clutched it, and laughed a high-keyed, strange little laugh.
"Who's there?" demanded a voice from the stairs, disconcertingly close.
The lights, switched suddenly on, flashed into Judith's eyes, and Norah
confronted her, peculiarly forbidding in a discarded cape of Judith's
and her own beflowered best hat.
"Oh, it's you," she said.
"Who did you expect? Anybody else? Did--anybody come?"
"I expected you a half hour ago."
"What made you wait for me?"
"Didn't you want me to?"
"Nana, of course, but if your sister is sick and needs you----"
Norah listened to this irreproachable sentiment suspiciously. "It's late
to go," she said.
"I'll walk up with you if you're frightened."
"You! Can you unhook that dress?"
"Yes. I'm going to bed pretty soon. I'm awfully sleepy."
"There's some ginger ale on the ice."
"I can get it open myself. Did anybody come?"
"A boy you know."
"Who?"
"You're too anxious to know, and too anxious to get rid of me.
And you're acting nervous."
"I'm not. I'm just sleepy."
Norah, her grimmest self, as she always was just before relenting, began
to fumble with her hat-pins.
"Let me help, if you really want to take off your hat. You'll spoil your
beautiful roses. Darling, you look like your niece, the lovely Miss
Maggie Brady, in that hat. Don't take it off. You're cross because you
know where I've been. Well, they didn't eat me. I'm all here. It was
Willard who came, and I don't care whether you tell me or not. And I
don't want to get rid of you. And I love you and you love me, and you're
not cross now."
"If I love you, you've got need of it, then." Norah struggled
perfunctorily, and permitted herself to be kissed. "Alone here till all
hours of the night, and Mollie at the dance at the Falls, and your own
mother----"
"But you won't worry about me? And you'll go? And you'll go now, before
it gets later, so you won't be frightened. You'll go this minute?
And--oh, Nana----"
Norah, departing by the front door because the back one was secured by
an elaborate system of locks of her own invention, and operated only by
herself, turned to give Judith a farewell glance of grim adoration.
"Nana, was it Willard that came?"
"Yes."
"And not--anybody else?"
"No."
Norah, winding herself tightly into the cape in a way that converted
that traditionally graceful garment into a kind of armour, disappeared
up the street. When she was out of sight, and not until then, Judith
slammed the door shut, laughing her tense, excited laugh again.
Then, for a sleepy young woman, she began to display surprising
activity. First she turned off all the lights in the hall but one, in an
opalescent globe, over the front door, looked at the faintly lighted
vestibule with a calculating eye, and turned that out also. She looked
critically in at the library, close curtained for the night, and dimly
lit by the embers of the wood fire, raked apart, but not dead. She
pushed them together expertly, and added a stick, a little one, which
would soon burn down to picturesque embers, like the rest. She pulled an
armchair closer to the fire, pushed it away again, and dropped two
cushions on the hearth with a discreet space between.
The remains of Willard's last half-dozen carnations and a box of the
eighty-cent-a-pound candy which only Mr. Edward Ward was extravagant
enough to prefer to the generally popular fifty-cent Belle Isle, were
conspicuous on the table, and Judith carried them into the next room,
out of sight. Just then the telephone rang.
Judith started, dropped the candy, ran into the hall, and stood looking
down at the small instrument resentfully, as if it were personally to
blame because she could not see who was calling her without answering
and committing herself. Once she picked it up doubtfully, but finally
put it down, still ringing intermittently, and hurried into the kitchen.
She put a second bottle of ginger ale on the ice, brought a hammered
brass tray and two glasses from the butler's pantry, then substituted a
less ostentatious bamboo tray, hesitated, and then put them all away
again.
Now she went to her own room, turned on an unbecoming but searchingly
clear toplight, and frowned at herself in the mirror, jerked out her
hairpins, shook out her soft hair, and brushed and pulled at it with
unsteady hands. In spite of them, the pale gold braids, rearranged,
looked almost as well as before, if no better, and the heightened colour
in her cheeks was charming. From a corner of her glove-case she produced
the two cosmetics then in favour with the younger set in Green River,
burnt matches, and a bit of scarlet ribbon, which made an excellent
substitute for rouge if you moistened it. The ribbon was an unhealthy
red, and looked peculiarly so to-night. Judith dropped it impulsively
into her wastebasket, but experimented with the matches.
She made both her delicately shaded eyebrows an even splotchy black,
admired the result, then suddenly rubbed it off, turned away from the
mirror without a backward glance, and ran down into the hall. The clock
was just striking ten.
Judith paused for one breathless minute at the library door, pressing
both hands against her heart, then she went into the firelit room and
made the last and most important of her preparations. She switched on
the lights, toplights and sidelights and reading-lamp, all of them, went
to the middle one of the three front windows, crushed the curtains back,
and raised both shades high to the top, so that the light in the room
looked out at the street from this window from sill to ceiling. Judith
slipped quickly out of range of the window, dropped down on one of the
cushions by the fire, and waited.
She had fluttered through her little hurry of preparation excitedly, but
now there was evidence of deeper excitement about the tense quiet of
her, huddled on her cushion, small hands clasping silken knees, and
brooding eyes on the fire. There was a dignity about her, too, in spite
of her childish pose and a drooping grace that was almost a woman's.
What she was waiting for was slow to come, but she did not seem
disturbed by that. The hands of the clock above her seemed to move with
the unbelievable quickness characteristic of clock hands when there is
no other activity in the room, and she observed them calmly. Soon they
pointed to the quarter hour, they passed it. She looked faintly worried
then. The telephone rang again; she pressed her hands over her ears and
shut her eyes tight, and did not answer. The stick on the fire burned
low and she did not replace it. It parted and fell from the andirons
with a dull noise that echoed loudly through the empty room. Judith
started and jumped up, her eyes hard and bright, her hands tightly
clenched.
She eyed the clock threateningly, as if it were personally responsible
for whatever disappointment she might be feeling, and she were daring it
not to strike. It struck half-past ten in spite of her. Judith's mouth
trembled childishly, and tears started to her eyes. They did not fall.
Footsteps sounded outside. They turned into the drive. Judith stood on
tiptoe and peeped at herself in the mantel mirror--her flushed cheeks,
tumbled hair, and sparkling eyes. The steps crossed the porch, and she
ran to the door and threw it open--the length of the chain, and no
wider. She did not unbar the chain. On the threshold, with a substantial
box of Belle Isle under his arm, stood Mr. Willard Nash.
Judith regarded Mr. Nash and his Belle Isle with disfavour.
"You can't come in," she said.
Mr. Nash, who had been stooping to flick some dust from his boots,
straightened guiltily. "Why?"
"It's too late."
"I've got to see you."
"You do see me." A white dress, a face almost as white, and big, dark
eyes were all he could see, but it seemed to be enough. He inserted a
square-toed boot cautiously in the opening of the door.
"I want to see you _about_ something."
"What?"
"A new comic song for the quartette. They won't let us do 'Amos Moss' at
the Lyceum concert. That part about the red shirt is vulgar. The new
one's close harmony. It will show off Murph's voice."
"It's too late now. Go home, Willard."
"But I brought you this."
"Go home and eat it," suggested Judith.
Willard turned scarlet, swung round, then changed his mind and inserted
his foot in the crack of the door again, this time with a purposeful
air. He was to develop into the type of man to whom an unpropitious time
and place are an irresistible temptation to demand a show-down. It is a
type that goes far, though it is not essentially popular. Judith sighed,
then resigned herself.
"Judy, I don't make you out."
"You don't have to."
"I do." Willard's voice was impressive, as even a fat boy's can be when
he is in the grip of fate and conscious of it. "I do."
"I'm sorry, Willard, dear," murmured Judith, with disarming sweetness,
but he was not to be turned from his purpose.
"Judy, are you going with me or not?"
"Going with you?"
"Don't be a snob. What else can I call it but going with me? I don't
know any other way to say it."
"Then don't say it."
"You've got my class pin and I've got yours. I know there isn't anybody
else. You let me call and take you places, but you won't let me----"
"What?"
Willard looked sheepishly down at his boots, then bravely up at Judith.
"Put my arm round you at picnics. Kiss you good-night."
Judith cut short this catalogue crisply.
"Spoon?"
This word was forbidden in the upper circles of the Green River younger
set, and Willard looked pained, but collected himself.
"We are the same as engaged," he insisted sturdily.
He had forced an issue at last, but Judith evaded it, laughing softly in
the dark.
"Oh, are we?"
"Aren't we?"
"How do you know there isn't anybody else?"
"Well, you won't look at Ed, and Murph don't count." Willard made this
pronouncement lightly, though the adamantine rules and impassable
barriers of a whole social order were embodied in it. "Murph that you're
so thick with, all of a sudden. He's a bully fellow, all right, next
captain of the team, probably. Good thing he's broken into the crowd a
little way. Too bad he's Irish. Murph don't count."
"No--no!" A sudden and poignant sweetness thrilled in Judith's voice.
The tenor of the Green River High School quartette, not ordinarily
sensitive to variations of tone in the voices of others, could not
ignore it. The change had disturbed him vaguely. It seemed to call for
some comment.
"Judy, you look great to-night.... I'd do anything for you."
"Then go home, Willard."
"You haven't answered my question."
"What question?"
"Don't tease."
"I honestly don't know."
"You don't hear one word I'm saying to you."