On an afternoon in June a year later than the interrupted party at the
Everards' a young man sat at Mr. Theodore Burr's desk in Judge Saxon's
outer office. It was still technically Mr. Burr's desk, but the young
man looked entirely at home there. A litter of papers which that
fastidious gentleman would never have permitted himself now covered it,
and the air was faintly scented with the smoke of a cigarette widely
popular in Green River, but not with devotees of twenty-five-cent
cigars, like Mr. Burr. The bulky volume open on the desk was thumbed and
used as Mr. Burr had never used any book that looked or was so heavy.
The book was Thayer on Constitutional Law, and the young man dividing
his attention between it and Main Street under his window flooded with
June sunshine was Neil Donovan.
He divided his attention unequally, as Main Street late on that sunny
afternoon might persuade the most studious of young men to do. The
square was crowded--crowded, it is true, much as a busy street on the
stage is crowded, where the same overworked set of supers pass and
repass. The group of bareheaded girls now pacing slowly by arm in arm
under the window were returning from what was approximately their fourth
visit that afternoon to the post-office, the ice-cream parlours, the new
gift shop and tea-room, or some kindred attraction. The Nashes' new
touring car, driven by the prettiest girl in Willard's June house party,
under the devoted instruction of Willard himself, was whirling through
the shopping district for at least the third time.
However, it was an imposing pageant enough, though the boy at the window
did not appear to find it so, regarding it with approving but grave
eyes, and returning Mr. Nash's flourishing salute unsmilingly--a brave
pageant of gay and flimsy gowns, of youth returning to the town, and
movement and colour, and June fairly begun.
June so far was like other Junes in Green River. Colonel Everard and the
season of social and political intrigues were here. Rallies in the town
hall would soon begin. Men with big names in state politics would make
speeches there, while the Colonel presided with his usual self-effacing
charm, which did not advertise the known fact that he was a bigger power
in the state than any of them. The good old question of prohibition was
the chief issue, as usual; discreet representatives of the people
would, according to a catch phrase at the capital, vote for prohibition,
and then go round to the best hotel and get drunk; and discreet
politicians, like the Colonel, would make money out of both these facts
in their own way.
Behind the closed door of Judge Saxon's office low-keyed, monotonous
voices were talking, and a secret conference was going on. Troubled
times were here again for those deep in the Colonel's councils. They
were never sure of a permanent place there, but always on the watch for
one of his sudden changes of front, which threatened not only his
enemies but his friends. But he had recovered and held their confidence
before, and he could this year.
All scandals of the year before were decently hidden. Maggie Brady was
missing and continued to be missing. By this time it was the general
verdict that she had always been bound to come to a bad end, and Charlie
Brady to drink himself to death. Nobody interrupted his attempts to do
so. His drunken outburst of speech had echoed a growing sentiment in the
town, but it grew slowly, for under its thin veneer of sophistication
Green River was only a New England town still, conservative and slow to
change.
Green River had not changed much in a year, but Neil Donovan's fortunes
had. Nobody knew the full history of the change except Neil, but others
could have thrown sidelights upon it, among them Mrs. Randall's second
maid, Mollie. On the morning after that same party of the Colonel's,
which Mr. Brady attended so unexpectedly, and Judith did not attend,
Mollie opened the Randalls' door to an early caller.
Even in curl papers, she was usually too much for the young man now on
the doorstep. He was in the habit of looking at his boots and addressing
them instead of her, and Mollie quite understood that, for they were
shabby boots. They looked shabbier than ever to-day, and so did his
shiny coat, but his eyes were steady and clear, and there was clear
colour in his cheeks, as if he had had the only restful and well-earned
sleep in Green River.
"Miss Judith," he said.
"Not at home," said Mollie, in a manner successfully copied from French
maids in the ten, twenty, thirties.
"Nonsense. Her curtains aren't up," replied the young man who was
usually made speechless by it.
"She's asleep," conceded Mollie, in a manner more colloquial but also
more forbidding. "She don't want to see you."
Mollie was incapable of interpreting Judith's wishes, but the young man
was not; his smile conveyed this, though it was friendly enough. "When
Miss Judith gets up, tell her----"
"I tell you she don't want to see you," snapped Mollie in a tone any
French maid would have deplored. "She don't want to see anybody."
"Tell her that I'll call again at three this afternoon," directed the
young man calmly, and completed his disturbing effect upon Mollie by
turning and walking briskly away without a backward glance, and without
his usual air of self-consciousness when her eyes were upon him. He
carried his shabby coat with an air, and held his head high, and swung
out of sight down the sleepy little street as if he were the only
wide-awake thing in the whole sunny, sleepy town.
It was a disconcerting moment for Mollie or any lady properly conscious
of her power, and sorry to see a sign of it disappear, even the humblest
of signs. It would still have been disconcerting, if she could have
foreseen that Judith would not receive this young man alone, either at
three that afternoon, or for many afternoons. The young man was not
overawed by Mollie. That was established once and for all. He would
never be overawed by her again. She slammed the door rather viciously.
"Keep quiet there," said Norah, appearing inopportunely, as her habit
was, with a heavily laden breakfast tray. "She needs her rest. But
she's awake. She rang. You can take this up and leave it outside her
door. Who was talking to you?"
"Well, I don't know what's come to him," Mollie complained. "Who does he
think he is? Did anybody leave him a fortune over night? It was the
Donovan boy."
A few minutes after Neil's encounter with Mollie, when Mr. Theodore Burr
admitted him listlessly after his third knock at Judge Saxon's door, he
could see no evidence that any one had left the Donovan boy a fortune
over night, but did note a change in him. There was something
appealingly grave and sedate about his face, as if a part of its youth,
the freakish, unconquerable laughter of it, that had defied and
antagonized Mr. Burr, were gone forever, burned away, somehow, in a
night. It was a look Mr. Burr was to grow well used to in the next few
months. Perhaps the unaccountable affection he was to feel for the boy
in the course of them was born then and there.
Neil emerged from the Judge's private office after a briefer talk than
usual, and the Judge did not escort him to the door in his accustomed,
friendly fashion. Mr. Burr did, and made him clumsy and unwonted
confidences there.
"The old man's not quite fit to-day," he said. "I ought to have told
you. It's a poor time to get anything out of him. Been shut up there by
himself doping out something. Won't say two words to me."
"Then he must be in a bad way, Theodore," said the boy, with the ghost
of his old, mocking smile, which Mr. Burr somehow did not find annoying
at all.
"Look here, Neil," he surprised himself by saying, "I like you. I always
did. You deserve a square deal. You're too good for the Brady gang.
You're too good for the town. If there was anything I could do for
you----"
"Maybe there is, Theodore," the boy turned in the corridor to say.
"Cheer up. You'll have a chance to see. I'm coming to work for the
Judge, I start in next week."
"But the Judge turned you down." Mr. Burr's brain struggled with the
problem, thinking out loud for the sake of greater clearness, but too
evidently not achieving it. "The Judge likes you, too, but he couldn't
take you in if he wanted to. He talked of it, but gave it up. He'd be
afraid to. Everard----"
"I start in next week," repeated Mr. Donovan.
"But what did you say to him?" demanded Mr. Burr. "What did he say to
you? How did you dare to ask him again?"
"I didn't ask him. Don't worry, Theodore. I haven't been trying any
black magic on the Judge. I don't know any. Maybe I'll learn some. I'm
going to learn a good deal. I've got to. Nobody knows how much. Even the
Judge don't know. I'm coming to work for the Judge, that's all, but I
didn't ask him." Mr. Burr, listening incredulously, did not know that
this was a faithful if condensed account of his talk with the Judge and
more, the key to much that was to happen to this pale and determined
young man, the secret of all his success. He gave it away openly, and
without pride:
"I just told him so."
Neil started in the next week. If Mr. Burr watched his young associate
somewhat jealously at first in the natural belief that a boy who had
changed the course of his life in a five-minute interview would do
something equally spectacular next, and if the Judge, who had said to
him at last, "Well, it's my bad morning, son, and your good morning, so
you get your way, but you're climbing on a sinking ship, and remember I
told you so. And I'll tell you something else. It will be poor pickings
here for all of us, and I'm sorry, but I'm the sorriest for you," was
inclined to follow him furtively over the top of his spectacles with a
look that held all the pathetic apology of age to youth in his kind,
near-sighted eyes, this was only at first.
Colonel Everard, returning a few weeks later from one of his sudden,
unexplained absences from town, and making an early morning visit to his
attorney, was admitted by a young man whom he recognized, but pretended
not to.
"Who are you?" he inquired, "the office boy?"
"Just about that, sir," the young man admitted, as if he had no higher
ambition, but the Judge, entering the room with more evidence of
beginning the day with the strength that the day required, than he had
been showing lately in his carriage and look, put a casual hand on the
boy's shoulder, and kept it there.
"The last time we discussed enlarging my office force, you didn't
advocate it, Everard," he said rather formally.
"So you aren't discussing it with me now?"
"Do you think you'd better discuss it?"
"Do you?"
"I think you are in no position to discuss it. You've been recently
furnished with much more important material to discuss. I haven't seen
you since your garden party, have I?"
"No." Both men seemed to have forgotten the boy's existence, but now the
Colonel recalled it, and apparently without annoyance, and flashed a
disarming smile at him, giving up gracefully, as he always did if he was
forced to give up at all. "Well, you're right, Hugh. You're always
right. Do as you please. But this boy's got a temper of his own
and--quite a flow of speech. Runs in his family, evidently. Properly
handled, these are assets, but----"
"I'm sorry, sir," Neil found himself stammering. "I shouldn't have
spoken to you as I did that day. I'm sorry."
"Next time be sure of your facts." The voice was friendly, almost
paternal, but it held an insidious challenge, too, and for one betraying
moment all the native antagonism that was really there flashed in the
Colonel's eyes. Few enemies of his had been permitted to see it so
clearly. It was a triumph for Neil, if a barren one. "Be very sure."
"I will, sir," said Neil deliberately, but very courteously. Then the
Colonel disappeared into the private office with his arm about his
trusted attorney's shoulders, and the young man for whose sake his
attorney had openly defied him for the first time in years began to
empty the office waste-baskets.
The winter weeks in the Judge's office passed without even moments of
repressed drama like this. There was little to prove that they were the
most important weeks of his life to Neil. At first they were lonely
weeks. Mr. Burr, unusually prompt, reached the office one crisp
September morning in time to find him staring out of the window at a
straggling procession passing on its way up the hill to the schoolhouse,
hurrying on foot in excited groups, or crowded into equipages of varying
sizes and degrees of elegance, properly theirs or pressed into service.
"First day of school," said Neil, and did not need to explain further,
even to Mr. Burr. From to-day on new faces would look out of the
many-paned windows of the old, white-painted building. New voices would
sing in the night on their way home from barge rides and dances. There
were to be new occupants of the seats of the mighty; a new crowd would
own the town. The door of the country of the young was shut in this
boy's face from to-day, and that is always a hard day, but it was
peculiarly hard in Green River, where the country of the young was the
only unspoiled and safe place to live. And there were signs of a private
and more personal hurt in the boy's faraway eyes.
"What's that letter?" said Mr. Burr.
"Seed catalogue."
"Don't she write to you every day?"
"Who?"
"Is she too proud, or did she forget all about you? She'll have
time to, away half the summer, and not coming home for vacations. She
won't see you till next June."
"If you mean Judith Randall," her late class-mate replied in a carefully
expressionless voice, "why should she write to me, and why shouldn't she
forget all about me?" There was a faint, reminiscent light in his eyes,
as if he were not seriously threatened with the prospect, but it died
away quickly, and his face grew very grave.
"I'm a business man now, Theodore."
"You are," said his newest friend, "and we couldn't keep house without
you now. You're in a class by yourself."
This was true. Neil did not take his big chance at life as other boys
equally in need of it would have done. He did not lose his head. He
showed no pride in it. Green River, soon seeing this, rewarded him in
various ways, each significant in its own fashion. Nondescript groups
round the stove in his uncle's little store ceased to look for signs
that he felt superior to them, and welcomed him as before, restoring to
him his privilege of listening to talk that was more important than it
seemed, public sentiment uncoloured and without reserve, the real voice
of the town. Mrs. Saxon, of the old aristocracy of the town, with
inborn social prejudices stronger than any acquired from the Everards,
broke all her rules and invited him to Sunday-night supper.
"The boy's not spoiled," his old friend Luther Ward said to the Judge
approvingly. "He knows his place."
"That's the surest way to climb out of it," said Judge Saxon, advisedly,
for it was the Judge who had the closest and most discerning eyes upon
Neil Donovan's career. Listlessly at first, because he had looked on at
too many uphill and losing fights against the world, but later with
interest, forced from him almost against his will, he watched it grow.
To a casual observer the boy would have seemed to be fitting himself not
for an ornament to the legal profession, but for the office boy Colonel
Everard had called him, but he would have seemed a willing office boy.
He spent hours uncomplainingly looking up obscure points of law for some
purpose nobody explained to him. He devoted long, sunny afternoons to
looking up titles connected with some mortgage loan which nobody gave
him the details of, and he seemed satisfied with his occupation, and
equally satisfied to devote a morning to plodding through new-fallen
snow delivering invitations to some party of Mrs. Saxon's.
When he was actually studying, he lost himself in the Judge's
out-of-date reference books, as if they contained some secret as vital
as the elixir of youth, and might yield it at any moment. Mr. Burr, at
first ridiculing pupil and course of instruction alike, and with some
show of reason, began shamefacedly and afterward openly to give him what
benefit he could from the more modern education which had been wasted
upon him. Between his two teachers the boy arrived at conclusions of his
own. Neil was studying law by the old method which evolved so many
different men of letters and keen-witted lawyers, a method obsolete as
the Judge's clothes, but Neil gave allegiance to it ardently, as if it
had been invented for him.
"What do you get out of this?" the Judge demanded, coming upon Neil late
one afternoon, poring over the uninspired pages of Mr. Thayer by the
fading light. "What do you hope to get?"
"All there is in it," said the boy simply, and without oratorical
intent.
"Suppose you do pass your bar examinations. What then? What will you do
with it?"
"I'll wait and see then. I had to begin somewhere."
"Why?" said the Judge, and as he asked the question, the answer to it,
which he had once known so well and forgotten, looked at him in the
boy's pale face and glowing eyes, the great answer not to be silenced,
youth, and the wonderful, wasteful urge of youth. "Don't you know this
town's sick?" he demanded abruptly. "It's dirty. You can't clean it up.
Don't you ever try. Don't you stir things up. Don't you dig in too deep.
I suppose you know the town's got no room for you?"
"Yes, sir, I know."
"Where do you expect to end?" the Judge began irritably, "in the
poorhouse? You're so damn young," he grumbled. "It's a good thing I
didn't know you when I was young. I'd have listened to you then."
"You will now, sir," said the boy, and the Judge did not contradict him,
but instead, under shy pretence of groping for the switch of the desk
lamp, found the boy's hand and gripped it.
"You're a good boy," he remarked irrelevantly. "Mind what I said, and
don't dig in too deep."
The Judge did not explain whose secrets he hoped to protect by this
vague warning. Probably he could not have explained. It was one of those
instinctive pronouncements which shape themselves in rare moments when
two people are close and mean more than either of them know. Certainly
if the key to any secret was to be found within the Judge's dingily
decorated walls or in his battered safe, or learned from his partner,
the boy had exceptional opportunities to unearth it. Theodore Burr's
intimacy with Neil developed rapidly. He stuck to it obstinately, in
spite of his wife, showing more independence about it than he had in
years. The two had tramped and snow-shoed together through long winter
hours of intimate talk and more intimate silence, and they found the
first Mayflowers of the year together. Only the week before he had
committed the crowning indiscretion of giving up a poker game at the
Everards' to go shooting with Neil.
The Judge, in the strenuous days of Colonel Everard's summer campaign,
had no time to observe the growth of this intimacy or to think much
about Neil, but he might have been interested in a snatch of talk in the
Brady kitchen one evening, if he could have overheard it, more
interested than Mrs. Donovan, who did not remember it long.
Her son was an hour late for supper, but she was used to that, for now
that he was on his feet the house revolved around him. She served him,
and then sat watching him with her hands folded, and the new dignity
that had come with his first bit of success straightening her tired
shoulders, and the look of age and pain that had been growing there
since Maggie disappeared widening her soft, deep eyes. He had dropped
wearily into his chair, and he ate almost in silence, but she was used
to that, too.
Outside the short, June twilight was over, and a pattering summer rain
had begun to fall. Neil's dark hair was damp with it and clung to his
forehead in close curls. Once, passing his chair, she smoothed it with a
hand that was work hardened but finely made and could touch him lightly
and shyly still. Her son pulled her suddenly close, and hid his face
against her.
"What is it?" she asked, softly and not too soon as she stood still and
held him. "What's wrong, then? Where have you been?"
"Nothing's wrong. Nothing new. I went round to Theodore Burr's, but I
left there at five. I didn't mean to be late home or make work. But I
had a hunch to look in at Halloran's. I thought I'd find Charlie there.
I did, and I had to get him home."
"Taking your strength," said Mr. Brady's aunt, unfeelingly but
truthfully, "a good-for-nothing----"
"That's not the worst thing he does."
"What is, then?"
"Talking."
"He don't mean anything by that."
"Sometimes he does. Sometimes he tells you things that you never
suspected and you don't believe him at first, but you find they're true;
things that have been locked up in his addled brain so long that they're
out of date, and you don't know how to profit by them or handle them,
but they're true--all true."
"Neil, you don't half know what you're saying. You're tired."
Mrs. Donovan released herself abruptly to get the tea-pot from the
stove. Her son, who had been talking in a low, monotonous voice, more to
himself than her, watched her with dazed eyes that slowly cleared.
"I guess you're right," he said. "I didn't mean to frighten you. Charlie
was no more loose mouthed to-day than he always is. I got hold of
nothing new, but I have hold of more than I can handle, and I'm tired
and I'm scared, and there's only one of me."
But Mrs. Donovan preferred her own interpretation of the situation, as
most ladies would have. She made it tactfully, keeping her eyes away
from him, busy with the tea-pot. "You're young, and it's June. Neil, the
children walked round with the Sullivan girl to take home the wash to
the Randalls'. They had some talk with Norah there. Judith will be home
this week."
She had mentioned the much-debated name in a voice which she kept
indifferent, but she flashed a quick, apprehensive glance at him. She
was quite unprepared for its effect upon him. He only laughed, and then
his face sobered quickly, and his eyes grew lonely and tired again.
"Judith," he said, "you think that's my trouble, mother. Well, I'm not
so young as I was last June." Then he began with considerable relish to
drink his tea.
"You're contrary and close mouthed, but you're only a boy like all other
boys," said Mrs. Donovan, sticking to her point, "and you're a good son
to me."
The boy who had made this rare and abortive attempt at confidences only
the night before showed no need of repeating it as he gazed out of the
Judge's window. He looked quite competent to bear all his own troubles
alone, and a generous share of other people's, though somewhat saddened
by them. Perhaps his mother's diagnosis of him was correct. He leaned
his chin on his hands and stared out of the window like any dreaming
boy, as if it was. But the winter that had passed so lightly over Green
River had left traces of its own upon him. His profile had a clearer,
more sharply outlined look. The lines at the corners of his mouth were
firmer though they were no deeper, and the mouth was still a boy's
mouth, red-lipped and lightly closed. But the dreaming eyes were a
man's, dreaming still, but alert, and ready to banish dreams.
The afternoon light was fading fast. It was not so easy now to read the
fine print of Mr. Thayer's notes, and the boy made no further pretence
of trying to. He let Mr. Thayer slip to the floor, and stretched himself
in his chair with a sigh of relief. The sounds of talk in the Judge's
room had grown fainter and more intermittent and finally ceased. The
Judge, still deep in conference with them, had left with his guests by
the private door. The boy was alone in the office.
Gradually, as he sat there, the bright pageant of the busy little street
had dimmed. It made a softer and mellower picture, a blend of delicate
colours in the slant mellow light, and it was not so busy now. There
were fewer passers-by, and they hurried and did not loiter past. It was
almost supper-time. Willard Nash, not joy riding now, but dispatched
reluctantly alone on some emergency errand, flashed by in his car, and
disappeared up Main Street.
Beyond the double row of shops the upper section of the street was
empty. The maples, in full leaf now and delicately green, shadowed the
upward slant of smooth road alluringly. Touched with golden afternoon
light, and half hidden by the spreading green, the old, solidly built
houses planted so heavily in the midst of their well-kept lawns had new
and unguessed possibilities. Any one of them just then might have
sheltered a fairy princess. The one that did was just within range of
the boy's grave, patient eyes, a protruding porch, disproportionately
enlarged and ugly, a sweep of vividly green lawn stripped bare of the
graceful, dishevelled growth of lilac and syringa bushes that had graced
it before Mrs. Randall's day.
Not from that house, but from somewhere beyond it, a car flashed into
view and cut smoothly and quickly down through the street, almost
deserted now. The boy followed it idly with his eyes. The low-built,
graceful lines of it held them. It approached, and slowed down directly
under the windows, and the boy leaned forward and looked.
It was stopping there. It was one of the Everard cars, as the trim lines
and perfection of detail would have shown without the English
chauffeur's familiar, supercilious face. The car had only one occupant,
a slender young person in white. She slipped quickly out, and
disappeared into the dingy entrance hall below.
She had not seen the boy at the window. He stood still now in his
corner, and waited. The tap of her feet was light even on the old
creaking stairs, but he heard. She knocked once and a second time, and
then threw open the door impatiently, saw who was there, and stopped
just inside the door, and looked at him.
Her white dress and big, beflowered hat looked as cool and as new as
June itself. They did not make the dingy room look dingier, they made
you forget it was dingy. Her soft, befrilled skirts fluffed and flared
in the brave and bewildering mode of the moment. Skirts, small shoes
that were built to dance, not to walk, the futuristic blend of flowers
in her hat, and the girdle, unrelentingly high and futuristic of colour,
too, that gave her waist an unbelievably slender look, were all in the
dainty and sophisticated taste of a sophisticated young lady, and under
the elaborate hat there was a sophisticated young face. It looked
smaller and more faintly pink. The small chin was more prominent. But
she still had the wide, reproachful eyes of a child. They regarded the
boy unwinkingly. One hand went behind her, found the knob of the door,
and closed it mechanically, but the eyes did not leave his face.
He stepped uncertainly forward, and stopped.
"Well, Judith," he said, in a voice that held all the authority Judge
Saxon's assistant had acquired in the long year of his service and more,
"Well?" and then, in a voice that held no authority at all, but was
suddenly husky and small: "Oh, Judith, won't you speak to me?"