"Get in, Judith."
"I won't go. You can't make me."
The boy did not answer or move. Boy and buggy and horse--Charlie Brady's
ancient chestnut mare, not such a dignified creature by daylight, but
high shouldered and mysterious now against the dark of the grove--might
all have been part of the surrounding dark, they were so still, and
Judith's little white figure was motionless, too.
Judith stood looking up at the boy for one long, silent minute. Such
minutes are really longer than other minutes, if you measure them by
heartbeats, and how else are you to measure them? Strange, breathless
minutes, that settle grave questions irrevocably by the mere fact of
their passing, whether you watch them pass with open eyes or are
helpless and young and vaguely afraid before them; helpless, but full of
the untaught strength of youth, which works miracles without knowing how
or why.
"Get in," said the boy, very softly this time, so that his voice just
made itself heard through the dark; it was like part of the dark,
caressing and hushed and secret, and not to be denied. With a soft
little laugh that was attuned to it, Judith yielded suddenly, and
slipped into the carriage beside him, drawing the robe tight round her,
and settling into her corner, all with one quick, nestling motion, like
a bird perching.
"Where are we going?" she said rather breathlessly, "Hurry. Let's go a
long, long way."
"All right. Don't be frightened, Judith."
"Frightened?"
He did not answer. Charlie's horse, debarred from its destined career by
bad driving, that broke its wind in its first race, but of sporting
ancestry and unable to forget it, especially when Charlie's adventures
in the Green River under-world cheated it of exercise too long, was
remembering it now, and bolting down the hilly little street, settled at
last into a jerky and tentative gait with the air of accepting their
guidance until it could arrange further plans, but remembering its
ancestry still.
"Splendid," Judith breathed. "Keep off Main Street."
"Yes."
The ancient vehicle, well oiled, but rattling faintly still, swung
alarmingly close to one street corner lamp-post and then another. Judith
nestled almost out of sight in her corner. Neil leaned forward,
gripping the reins with an ungloved hand that whitened at the knuckles,
his dark eyes looking straight ahead. His brooding eyes and quiet mouth,
and even the whiteness of his face had something unfamiliar about them,
something that did not all come from the unhealthy light of the street
lamps, something strange but unaccountably charming, too. Judith had no
eyes for it just then.
"This is silly. I ought not to have come. Who's that?"
"Nobody. Just a tree. Sit still. We'll go under the railroad bridge and
out over Grant's Hill. There won't be any more lights."
"It looked like some one."
"What do you care?"
"It looked like your cousin Maggie."
"She's at home in bed. She was tired to-night."
"Oh. Well, it looked like her. It was silly to come. I never shall come
again."
As if this were not a new threat, or had for some reason lost it terrors
to-night, the boy did not contradict her. They had left track and
railroad bridge behind now, darker blots against the surrounding dark,
with the lights of the station showing faintly far down the track. They
were passing the last of the houses that straggled along the
unfashionable quarter above the railroad track. Most of the houses here
were dark now. In the Nashs' windows the last light puffed suddenly out
as they went by.
Down in the town behind them other sleepy little lights were burning
faintly, or going out, but ahead of them the faintly moonlit road looked
wide-awake. It was an alluring road. It dipped into wooded hollows, it
broke suddenly into arbitrary curves and windings but found its way out
again, and kept on somehow, and gradually lifted itself higher and
higher toward the crest of the hill five miles away that you reached
without ever seeming to climb it, to be confronted all at once with the
only real view between Wells and Green River.
"I used to think Grant's Hill was the end of the world," said Judith
softly. "Maybe it is. It's funny I can say things like that to you, when
you only laugh and won't answer. Listen. Isn't it still, so still it
almost makes a noise."
It was very still. You could feel the pulse of the night here. There was
a whisper and stir of life in the rustling trees when the road crossed
some belt of woods; there was a look of blind, creeping life about the
clustering shadows in stretches of moonlight, and the low-hanging moon
above the dark fields they passed was a living thing, too, the most
alive of all. Judith stirred in her corner, and turned and looked at
it.
"It's sweet," she said. "And it's ours. It's still May. But we can't
wish on the moon now; it's too late. And I don't want to wish, I'm so
comfortable. Aren't you? Well, you needn't answer, then, and you needn't
hold my hand." She had felt for a hand that avoided hers. With a sleepy,
satisfied laugh, like a petted kitten purring, she settled herself
again, with her head against an unresponsive shoulder, and pulled an
unresponsive arm round her waist.
"You aren't as soft as the cushions--not nearly. You're pretty hard, but
I like you. I was afraid to come, but now----"
"Now what?"
"There's nothing to be afraid of. I'm so happy. There's nobody in the
world but you and me. Neil, I'm going to sleep."
"All right. Shut your eyes, then, and don't keep staring at me. What
makes your eyes so bright?"
[Illustration: "'_Shut your eyes_'"]
"You."
"Shut your eyes."
"All right. Nobody but you and me."
They were really alone in the world now, alone in the heart of the
night. Their little murmur of talk, so low that they could just hear it
themselves, had been such a tiny trickle of sound that it did not quite
break the silence, and now it had died away. Asleep or awake, the
girl was quite still, with her cheek pressed against the boy's shoulder,
and her long-lashed eyes tight shut. The horse carried them over the
moonlit road at a rate of speed that did not seem possible from its
strange, loping gait. The effect of it was uncanny.
Boy and girl and queer, high-shouldered horse, darkly silhouetted in the
moonlight, lost to sight in the shadows of tall trees that looked taller
in the dark, and then coming silently into view again, were like dim,
flitting shadows in the night; like peculiarly helpless and
insignificant shadows, restless and purposeless. The moon, soft and far
away and still, seemed more alive than they did, and more competent to
adjust their affairs.
They required adjusting. That was in the watching brightness of the
girl's eyes, fluttering open once or twice, only to close quickly again,
in the tenseness of the boy's arm around her, in the set of his
shoulders and lift of his stubborn young chin, in the very air that he
breathed uneasily, the soft, disturbing air of the May night. It was not
a boy and girl quarrel that was before them: it was something more. It
was the strangest hour that had come to them in their secret treasury of
strange hours that were touched with the glamour of black magic and
swayed by laws they did not know. It might be the darkest hour. It was
the test hour.
There is no sure and easy way through such hours. If they faced theirs
unprepared and afraid, so must the rest of the world, the part that is
older and counted wiser. But this could have been no comfort just then
to the boy and girl in the antiquated buggy, under the untroubled gaze
of the wishing moon.
They were almost on the crest of the hill now. One long, upward slant of
road led straight to it, bare of trees, and silvery in the moonlight. At
the foot, and just at the edge of a thick belt of woods, the boy pulled
up as if to rest his horse for the gradual ascent. At his left, hardly
visible at all to-night unless you stopped your horse to look for it, a
narrow and overgrown road led off through the trees. Tightening the arm
that held her cautiously, the boy looked down at the face against his
shoulder, the faint, half-smile on the lips, and the lightly closed
eyes.
The girl did not move. Her cap had slipped off, and one small, bare hand
clutched the fuzzy white thing tight, as a sleeping child's hand might
have closed on some favourite toy. Her hair showed silvery blond and
soft against his dark coat. With a quick, hungry motion, the boy dropped
his head and kissed it lightly. Then, gripping the reins with a
firmness that no present activity of the animal called for, he left
Green River's only noteworthy view without a backward glance, and turned
his horse into the road through the woods.
For the next few minutes he had no attention to spare for Judith,
suspiciously quiet in his arms. He could not see her face. It was black
dark under the trees, dark as if it had never been light. The track was
wider than it looked, but also rougher. The trees grew close. Branches
that he brushed aside sprinkled dew into his face. The buggy creaked out
vain protests and useless warnings. Finally moonlight showed at the end
of the black tunnel, and the horse, which had been encountering its
difficulties in resourceful silence, made a faint, snorting comment
which sounded relieved, and presently, with unexpected jauntiness, swung
into the road again.
It was technically a road, and it was the wreck of a very good road, but
it was not in much better shape than the track they had reached it by.
Aspiring amateurs had sketched it and camera fiends haunted it in their
day. It was Colonel Everard's favourite bridle path, which naturally
prevented repairs upon it. But before the railroad went through it had
been Green River's only link with a wider world. Now a better built but
more circuitous road had replaced it, designed for motoring. No motors
ever penetrated here, and few carriages. It was left to the ghosts of
ancient traffic, if they ventured here. The glancing moonlight under the
close-growing trees might have been full of them to-night.
But the boy was not looking for ghosts or interested in the history of
the road or its charm, as he hurried his high-shouldered horse along it,
still responding jauntily. He squared his chin more stubbornly than
ever, and muttered encouragingly to the horse, and reached for his
battered whip. Round this corner, beyond this milestone, the stage
drivers used to make up time when the mail was late. A generous mile of
almost level road curved ahead of Neil into the moonlight, a fairly
clean bit of going even now. Judith and Neil were on the old coaching
road to Wells.
Neil reached for his whip, but did not take it out of the socket. A
small hand closed over his. The head on his shoulder did not move, but
dark eyes, watchful and deliberate, opened and looked up at him quietly.
"Now," said a cool little voice, "you can take me home."
"You're awake?"
"Of course."
"Then why----"
"I waited to see where you were going, and what you were going to do,"
explained Judith simply. They were covering the banner stretch of road
at a rate the old stage drivers had never emulated. Judith pushed Neil's
arm away, and sat straight and looked at him. Her cheeks were gloriously
flushed with the quick motion, and her soft, tumbled hair had broken
into baby curls round her forehead, but her eyes were a woman's dark,
unforgiving eyes. Neil gave her one furtive glance, and looked away.
"I told you to take me home," she said.
He made a muttered reply, inarticulate, so that it would have been hard
to tell whether it was really addressed to Judith or the horse, and bent
forward over the reins.
The colour deepened in Judith's cheeks, her soft lips tightened into a
straight line that was like her mother's mouth. Her cool, unhurried
voice was like her mother's, too: "I knew when we started out I'd have
trouble with you. Now I don't intend to have any more. I don't want to
have to tell you again. Take me home."
She had adopted the tone which Green River's self-made gentlewomen like
Mrs. Theodore Burr mistakenly believed to be effective with servants.
The boy beside her gave no sign that it was effective with him. He spoke
softly to the horse again, and flicked at it coaxingly with the whip.
"Neil, I am sorry for you," Judith stated presently, with no sympathy
whatever in her judicial young voice. "I have been awfully good to you."
"Good!"
"Yes, good. I--had to be. Because I knew we didn't have much time. I
knew--this--would have to stop some day. I knew it and you knew it, too.
You always knew it. Well, I've been trying to tell you for a long time
that it had got to stop. I tried, but you wouldn't let me. We're both
getting older, too old for this, and I'm going away next year. And some
things have happened to me, just lately--last week--that made me think.
I've got to be careful. I've got to take care of myself. This has got to
stop now--to-night. I wanted to tell you so. That's why I came;
because----"
"I know why you came."
"Don't be cross. Be good, and turn round now, and take me home. Neil,
I'm not sorry, you know, for--anything. Ever since that first night at
the dance you've been so sweet to me. I'm not sorry. Are you?"
"No."
"How funny your voice sounds. Why don't you turn round?"
He had no explanation to offer. The buggy plunged faster through the
dark, and Judith braced herself in her corner.
"Neil, turn round. Don't you hear me?"
He gave no sign of hearing. The horse swung gallantly into a bit of road
where the stage drivers had never been in the habit of hurrying, a
tricky bit of road, with overhanging rocks jutting out just where you
might graze them at sudden turns, and with abrupt dips into precipitous
hollows. One stretched dark ahead of them now. Judith caught her breath
as they plunged into it, and clutched Neil's arm. He laughed shortly,
and did not shake off her hand. She pulled at his wrist and shook it.
"Upset us if you want to. We'd go together," he urged, with a logic not
to be questioned. "Together, and that suits me, Judy."
"Neil, turn round. Neil!" Judith's voice was shrill with sudden terror
repressed too long, but she struggled to make it steady and cold again,
in one last effort at control.
"Who do you think you are, Neil Donovan? I tell you to take me home."
He did not even turn to look at her. He was getting the horse down the
rocky slant of dimly lit road with a patience and concentration which
there was nobody to appreciate just then. Judith collapsed into her
corner. There was a faint sound of helpless crying from her, then
silence as she choked back the tears; silence, and an erect, stubborn
figure showing oppressively big and dark between Judith and the moon.
"Neil, I'm sorry.... Neil, I can't stand this," came a muffled voice.
"Please speak to me."
They were on level ground again, and the horse was disposed to make the
most of it. The boy pulled her into a jolting walk which was not the
most successful of her gaits, but represented a triumph for him just
now, and then he turned abruptly to Judith, gathering both her hands
into his free hand and gripping them tight.
"I'll talk to you now," he said. "It's time I told you. Judith, you and
I are not going back."