"They won't like it, Judith," said Mrs. Randall for the last time, as
she slipped into her evening coat.
"They? If you mean the Colonel----"
"I do."
Judith, looking up at her mother from the chaise-longue, could not have
seen the radiant vision that she had adored as a child, when the spring
and the Everards and the habit of evening dress all returned at once to
Green River. Mrs. Randall's blue gown was the creation of a Wells
dressmaker, but lacked the charm of earlier evening frocks, anxiously
contrived with the help of a local seamstress, when the clear blue that
was still her favourite colour had been her best colour, when there was
a touch more pink in the warm white of her complexion, and before the
tiny, worried line in her broad, low forehead was there to stay. But
there was no reflection of these changes in her daughter's big, watching
eyes.
"It will do him good not to like it," said Judith sweetly.
"What do you mean?"
"Oh, nothing, Mamma. Is that the carriage? Don't be
late."
Minna Randall looked down at her daughter in puzzled silence a moment,
with the little line in her forehead deepening, then slipped to her
knees beside her with a disregard for her new gown which was unusual,
and put a caressing hand on her forehead, a demonstration which was more
unusual still.
"Your head does feel hot," she said, "but to stay away from a dance at
your age, just for a headache----"
"I went to one last night."
"A high school dance!"
"There won't be any more of them. You needn't grudge it to me." Judith
buried her face in the cushions, and lay very still.
"But the Colonel really arranged this for you. Dancing bores him. He
said you ought to be amused."
"He didn't say so to me."
"Are you laughing? I thought you were crying a minute ago." Judith gave
no further signs of either laughing or crying. "Judith, what does he say
to you? When you went with him to look at that night-blooming flower
with the queer name, last week, and were gone so long, what did he talk
to you about? You heard me. Please answer."
"He's a stupid old thing."
"What did he talk about?"
"I don't remember."
"Judith," Judith's mother stood plucking ineffectively at her long
gloves, and looking at the motionless white figure, very slender and
childish against the chintz of the cushions, soft, tumbled hair, and
hidden face, with a growing trouble in her eyes, "I ought to talk to
you--I ought to tell you--you're old enough now--old enough----"
Judith turned with a soft, nestling movement, and opened her eyes again,
deep, watchful eyes that asked endless questions, and made it impossible
to answer them, eyes that knew no language but their own, the secret and
alien language of youth. Her mother sighed.
"You're the strangest child. Sometimes you seem a hundred years old, and
sometimes--you don't feel too badly to stay alone? Mollie would have
stayed in with you, or Norah."
"No. I would have gone, if I'd known you cared so much, but it won't do
any good to make yourself late, Mamma. Father's calling," said Judith
gravely. Still grave and unrelaxed, she returned her mother's rare
good-night kiss, and watched her sweep out of the room, turning the
rose-shaded night lamp low as she passed.
There was a hurry of preparation downstairs, her mother's low, fretful
voice and her father's high and strained one joined in a heated
argument, and they started still deep in it, for her father did not call
a good-night to Judith. The street door shut, and she was alone in the
house. Carriage wheels creaked out of the yard and there was no
returning sound of them in search of some forgotten thing; a long enough
interval passed so that it was safe to infer that there would not be,
but Judith lay as her mother had left her, as still as if her headache
were really authentic, her questioning eyes on the rose-shaded light.
There was much that might have increased her mother's concern for her in
her face, if you could interpret it fully; sometimes the eyes suggested
a fair proportion of the hundred years her mother had credited her with,
sometimes there was dawning fear in them, and sometimes an inconsequent,
gipsy light; sometimes her soft lips trembled pitifully, and sometimes
they smiled. Always it was a lovely face, rose flushed and eager in the
rosy light, and always something was evident which was enough to account
for her mother's concern and for more concern than her mother was
capable of feeling; Miss Judith Devereux Randall was growing up.
Whatever questions occupied her answered themselves in a satisfactory
way at last, even an amusing way, for her smile had come to stay and
her eyes were dancing, when she jumped up from the chaise-longue at
last, turned on more lights, opened closets and bureau drawers all at
once, dropped various hastily chosen and ill-assorted articles on the
immaculate counterpane of her bed, and began to dress.
She dressed without a glance into the mirror, and without need of it, it
appeared, when she stood before it at last, pulling a left-over winter
tam over rebellious curls which she had made no attempt to subdue. She
had buttoned herself hastily into the dress she had taken off last, a
tumbled organdy, and thrown a disreputable polo coat over it, white like
the cap, but of more prehistoric date, but on her slender person these
incongruous garments had acquired a harmony of their own, and become a
costume somehow. It might not have withstood a long or critical
inspection, but it was not subjected to one. Youth, in its divinely
suited garb of white, regarded itself with grave eyes for one breathless
minute, flushed and coquetted with itself for another, and then was gone
from the mirror. Judith turned off the lights and stole out of the room,
and downstairs.
There was nothing in the dark and empty house to frighten her. It must
have been fear of whatever was before her that made her slip so softly
across the hall, and tremble and stand still when the door chain
rattled. The door was open at last. With a soft, inarticulate gasp of
excitement, she stepped out into the May night.
Colonel Everard had an ideal night for the little dance in his garden,
warm, but with a quiver of new life in the air. The May moon was in its
last quarter, but lanterns were to supplement it. But the Colonel's
guest of honour, pausing at the corner of Main Street and looking
sharply to left and right, and then turning quickly off it, found very
little light on the narrow and tree-fringed cross-street through which
she was hurrying now but the moon.
It hung slender and pale and low above the ragged row of little houses,
and seemed to go with her through the dark, but she took no notice of
its companionship. The street was deserted, and the tap of her little
heels sounded disconcertingly loud in the emptiness of it as she hurried
on, turning from the narrow street into a narrower one.
This street had only one real end; pending the appropriation needed to
carry it straight through, witheld by agencies which could only be
connected by guess with Colonel Everard, it led feebly past a few houses
which were nearly all untenanted and looked peculiarly so to-night, to a
clump of alders at the edge of an unpenetrated wood lot, where it had
paused. Just in front of it the girl paused, too.
Her small, white-coated figure was only dimly to be seen in the dark of
the street; the group in the shadow of the trees was harder to see, but
it moved; a horse pawed the ground impatiently, the boy in the buggy
leaned forward and spoke to him. Then Judith started uncertainly toward
him, and spoke softly, in the arrogant phrasing of lovers, to whom there
is only one "you" in the world:
"Is that you?"
"Is it you?" the boy's voice came hoarse through the dark. "I thought
you weren't coming. I waited an hour for you yesterday on the Rock."
"I couldn't help it. I oughn't to be here now, and I almost didn't come,
but I thought we'd have to-night. Neil, you hurt my hand. Be nice to
me."
She was standing close beside him now, and they could see each other's
faces, white and strange in the dark, but the boy's looked whiter, and
his breath came oddly, in irregular gasps. He held both her hands in
his, but he did not bend down to her, nor kiss her.
"What makes you look so queer? I don't like you. Be nice to me." There
was something terribly wrong with the smug little phrases, or with any
words at all just then, there in the heart of the silent dark, and
facing the strangeness of the boy's eyes; words failed her suddenly, and
she pulled her hands away, and hid her face in them. "I won't go with
you--I'll go home, if you aren't nice to me--if----"
"You can't go home now." There was something in the boy's voice that was
like the fierce clasp of his hands, something from which it was not so
easy to escape. "It might be better if you hadn't come, better for both
of us, but you can't go back now. It's too late. Yes, we'll have
to-night. Get in, Judith."