Colonel Everard's little party was quite successful enough without the
guest of honour. At least, it would have seemed so to Judith, if she
could have looked in upon it just before midnight. A distinguished guest
of the Colonel's had made an ungrateful criticism of the inner circle,
on parade for his benefit only the week before at Camp Hiawatha, which
was elaborately rebuilt now, and rechristened Camp Everard. He
complained that the Colonel's parties were too successful.
"Too many pretty women," he said, "or they work too hard at it--dress
too well, or talk too well--don't dare to let down. You need more
background, more men like Grant. You need to be bored. You can't have
cream without milk. You can't take the essentials of a society and make
a whole society out of them without adulterating them. It won't last.
That's why Adam and Eve didn't stay in the garden. They couldn't--too
much tension there. They needed casual acquaintances, and you need
background. You can't get on without it."
"We do," said his host.
The distinguished critic was far away from the Colonel's town to-night,
but the Colonel's party was all that he had complained of; the thing he
had felt and tried to account for and explain was here, as it was at all
the Colonel's parties, though a discreet selection of outsiders had been
admitted to-night; the same sense of effort and tension, of working too
hard, of a gayety brilliant but forced--artificial, but justifying the
elaborate processes that created it by its charm, like some rare
hothouse flower.
You saw it in quick glimpses of passing faces thrown into strong relief
by the light of the swinging lanterns, and then dancing out of sight;
you heard it in strained, sweet laughter, and felt it in the beat of the
music, and in the whole picture the party made of itself in the garden,
the restless, changing picture, but this was not all--it was in the air.
You could close your eyes and breathe it and feel it. It was unusually
keen to-night, real, like a thing you could actually touch and see.
You lost the keen sense of it if you looked too closely for signs of it.
If you overheard bits of talk, they were not always clever at all, or
even entirely gay. Worried lines showed under elaborate makeup in the
women's faces, as if Cinderella had put on white gloves to hide smutty
fingers; indeed, though they were trained to forget it and make you
forget it, they were only so many Cinderellas, after all. Seen too
closely, there was a look of strain about some of the men's faces.
There was a reason for this look to-night, besides the set of reasons
which the gentlemen of the Colonel's circle always had for looking
worried; living beyond their incomes, living in uncertainty of any
income at all, and other private reasons, different in each case, but
all quite compelling; there was a reason, and the Colonel's guest of the
week before was connected with it. Others would follow him soon, secret
conferences would take place unrecorded, the Colonel's private telephone
wire would be busy, and the telegrams he received would be
frequent and not intelligible to the casual reader. These were the
months before election, when the things that were going to happen began
to happen. Their beginnings were obscure. The man in the street talked
politics, but the man with his hands in the game kept still. Even when
they slipped away to the smoking-room, or gathered at the edge of the
lawn in groups of two and three that scattered as their host approached,
the Colonel's guests were not discussing politics to-night.
No tired lines were permitted to show in Mrs. Randall's face. Her fresh,
cool prettiness was of the valuable kind that shows off best at the
height of the evening, when other women look tired. If she was aware of
the fact and made the most of it, overworking her charming smile and
wide-open, tranquil eyes, you could not blame her. It was not the time
or place to overlook any weapons you might have. Whatever duties or
privileges belonged to the Colonel's inner circle, you had to take care
of yourself if you were part of it, and you learned to; that was evident
from her manner. It seemed easy for her to-night. Just now she was
sharing a bench and an evening cloak with Mrs. Burr, smooth, dark head
close to her fluffy, blond one, and smiling into her face confidingly,
as if all that lady's purring, disconnected remarks were equally
agreeable to her.
"We miss Judy so much," she said sweetly.
"I can see just how much, dear," said Judith's mother more sweetly
still.
"And it's so long since she's been here."
"She has her school work to do. She's just a child. She's not well
to-night."
"But I got the idea he meant this to be her evening."
"He did."
"There he is." The third person singular, unqualified, could mean only
one gentleman to the ladies of the Colonel's circle, and that gentleman
was passing close to them now, though he seemed unconscious of the
fact. He was guiding Mrs. Kent through an old-fashioned waltz with
elaborate precision. His concentration upon the performance increased as
he passed them, and he did not look away from his partner's face, though
it was not absorbingly attractive just now. The piquant profile had a
blurred look, and the cheeks were flushed under the daintily calculated
touch of rouge. Mrs. Burr turned to her friend with a faint but
relentless light of amusement in her narrowed eyes.
"Edie's had just one cocktail too many."
"Yes." They ignored the more obvious fact that the Colonel had. The
evening had reached the stage when he always had.
"He hasn't danced with you many times, Minna dear."
"I'm tired of dancing, but don't let me keep you here, Lil."
"I haven't seen him dance with you at all."
"He hasn't yet."
"No?" said Mrs. Burr, very casually.
"No. Lil, I think Ranny wants you. He's wandering about, looking vague."
"Don't you want me, dear? Well, Ranny always wants me."
Mr. Randolph Sebastian, discovering her suddenly, gave exaggerated proof
of this as he carried her off. If the Colonel's secretary had really
been recruited from a dance hall, he had profited by what he saw there,
and showed it in every quick, graceful turn he made. His partner was the
type of woman that dancing might have been invented to show off; it gave
her lazy, graciously built body a reason for being, and put a flicker of
meaning into her shallow eyes so that she was not floridly pretty any
longer, but beautiful. This was peculiarly apparent when she danced with
Mr. Sebastian. She seemed to have been created for the purpose of
dancing with him; it could not have been more apparent if their
elaborate game of devotion to each other had been real, and they were
really lovers.
Mrs. Clifford Kent, suddenly appearing alone, slipped into Mrs. Burr's
empty place. Her dance with the Colonel was over. "My Lord's in fine
form to-night," she confided without preliminary. "We're going to play
blind-man's buff after the duchess goes home." The duchess was Mrs.
Grant, the Honourable Joe's wife, still the first lady of Green River,
but the younger women were beginning to make fun of her discreetly
behind her back. "He told me the tiger story." This represented a
triumph. Getting the Colonel's smoking-room stories at first hand
instead of second hand, from their husbands, was the only form of
rivalry about which these ladies were frank with each other. "I got it
out of Cliff first, anyway. He said he couldn't tell me, but he did. I
made him. Where was Harry last night?"
"What do you mean?"
"Cliff had a crowd of men locked into his den until two, talking. Didn't
Harry know about it?"
"What were they doing?"
"Just talking. The Colonel and I don't know who else. I heard two
strange voices, and I didn't hear Harry's voice. Didn't Harry know?"
"I suppose so. What did they talk about?"
"Campaign stuff--prohibition or something. Cliff wouldn't tell me."
"Was Teddy Burr there?"
"I didn't hear him. What do you care?"
"I don't care."
"If Harry didn't know, I ought not to have told you, but I can't help it
now."
"Edith, don't go. Wait."
"I can't. I have this next with my Lord, too. I'm going to sit it out in
the library and meet him inside. The duchess is getting jealous.
Besides, there comes the dragon." Judge Saxon, looking shabby and old
and tired, was making a circuitous way toward them. "Let me go. Oh,
darling--" she put her small, flushed face suddenly close to her
friend's to ask the question, and after it, fluttered away without
waiting for the answer, leaving the echo of her pretty, empty laugh
behind--"why didn't Judith come? What's the real reason? Has anybody
been making trouble for her here? Never mind. You needn't tell me.
Good-bye."
Mrs. Randall closed her eyes and pressed two fingers against her temples
for a moment, and then looked up with almost her usual welcoming smile
at Judge Saxon, who had come close to her, and stood looking down at her
keenly with his kind, near-sighted, blue eyes.
"Hiding?" he said. "Tired?"
"Not hiding from you. Take care of me."
"Minna," he decided, "you little girls aren't so nice to me unless
you're in wrong somehow and feel sorry for yourselves. What's the
matter? Where's Harry?"
"Inside somewhere. Don't ask me any more questions. I've answered all I
can to-night."
"All right. I'll just sit here and enjoy the view and keep the other
boys away."
The view was hardly one to promote unmixed enjoyment. The two settled
into a friendly silence in their corner, broken by an occasional quiet
word in the Judge's intimate, drawling voice. Around them the temper of
the party was changing, and a series of little signs marked the general
change. More men crowded into the smoking-room between dances, and they
stayed longer. Mrs. Grant left first according to her established
privilege, and a scattering of other guests followed her. Nobody seemed
to miss them or to be conspicuously happier without them. There was a
heavy, dull look about the passing faces, a heaviness and staleness now
about the whole atmosphere of the party, and this, like the unnatural
excitement which it followed, and like the light, endless fire of
inconsequent, malicious chatter, always the same, whether it meant
nothing or meant real trouble brewing, was an essential part of all the
Colonel's parties, too.
The Judge regarded the change with faraway eyes, as he talked on in the
wistful voice that goes with talking your own private language openly to
people who cannot answer you in it.
"Don't need the moon, do we, with those lanterns? But it was here first,
and will be a long time after, and it's a good moon, too; quite
decorative for a moon."
"I hate it," said Mrs. Randall, with a personal vindictiveness not
usually directed against natural phenomena. The Judge took no immediate
notice of it. More guests had gone. In a cleared circle in the heart of
the lanternlight Mrs. Kent was performing one of the more expurgated
and perfunctory of her dances for the benefit of the select audience
that remained, to scattered, perfunctory applause. The motif of it was
faintly Spanish.
"Paper doll," commented the Judge, "that's all that girl is. You and
Harry are the best of them, Minna. They're a faky lot, all of
them--about as real as a house of cards. It looks big, but it will all
tumble down if you pull one card out--only one card. The devil of it is
to know which card to take hold of, and who's to pull it out if you
haven't got the nerve? I haven't. I'm too old. But it's a comfort to
think of it. Don't you agree with me?"
"I didn't really hear you."
"Minna, I've known you since you were two. Can't you tell me what's the
matter? You're frightened."
She looked at him for a minute as if she could, turning a paling face to
him, with the mask off and the eyes miserable, then she tried to laugh.
"Nothing's the matter. Nothing new."
"Well, there's enough wrong here without anything new," said the Judge,
rebuffed but still gentle. "I won't trouble you any longer, my dear.
There comes Harry."
Mrs. Randall's husband, an unmistakable figure even with the garden and
the broad, unlighted lawn between, stood in the rectangle of light that
one of the veranda windows made, slender and boyish still in spite of
the slight stoop of his shoulders, and then started across the lawn
toward the garden.
His wife got rather stiffly to her feet and waited, looking away from
the lighted enclosure, over the low hedge, at the lawn. Her eyes were
dizzy from the flickering lights. She could not see him clearly, and the
figure that followed him across the lawn was harder to see.
It was a man's figure, slightly taller than her husband's. The man had
not come from the veranda windows, or from the house at all, he had
slipped round one corner of the house, stood still in the shelter of it,
seeming to hesitate there, and then plunged suddenly across the lawn at
a queer little staggering run. Twice she saw him stand still, so still
that she lost sight of him under the trees, as if he had slipped away
through the dark.
In the garden Mrs. Kent's performance was over, and the game of
blind-man's buff was beginning. It was a novelty, and acclaimed even at
this stage of the evening. Lillian Burr's shrill laugh and Edith Kent's
pretty, childish one could be heard through the other sounds. They were
trying to blindfold the Colonel, who struggled but laughed, too, looking
somehow vacuous and old, with his longish, white hair straggling across
his forehead. No one in the garden but Minna Randall had attention to
spare for an arriving guest, expected or unexpected.
Which was he? He was out of sight again, but this time she had seen him
reach the edge of the lighted enclosure. Was he gone, or waiting
outside, or had he stepped under the trellis of the rose arbour, to
appear suddenly at the end of it and among them? Instinctively she kept
her eyes upon it, though her husband had already passed through. She was
watching for the figure that it might frame next.
"Harry," she said to her husband, who had seen her and elbowed his way
to her, and stood beside her, looking pale and tired like herself in the
lanternlight and not boyish at all, "who was that man? Who was it
following you?"
He paid no attention to her question. He did not seem to hear it. He put
a hand on her arm, and she could feel that it trembled.
"Oh, Harry, what is it?" she said. "I've had such a horrible evening.
I'm so afraid."
"Don't be afraid, Minna," he said very gently, "but you must come to the
telephone. Norah's calling you. She's just come home. She wants to tell
you something about Judith."