"Judith," Neil said.
Neil's visitor flashed a quick glance round the dim office, empty except
for the lean young figure that confronted her. It was a hunted glance,
as if she really meant to turn without speaking and pick up her
beruffled skirts, and run away down the dusty stairs, but she did not
run away. Suddenly quite herself, recovering by tapping some emergency
reserve of strength as only ladies can, but as most of them can, even
the most amateurish and beruffled of ladies, she crossed the room to
him.
She came deliberately, with an impressive flutter of hidden silk. She
was smiling a faint half-smile, sweet but indefinably teasing, and
holding out a daintily gloved hand. It touched Neil's lightly and
impersonally, not like a girl's warm hand at all, but like the hand of a
society forever beyond his reach, held out patronizingly to this boy
beyond its pale, only to emphasize the distance between them.
"How do you do?" she murmured, formally but sweetly.
"How do you do?" the boy stammered. "Judith, oh, Judith, I----"
He broke off, staring helplessly into her eyes. They were dark and
accusing and grave, and a heartache shadowed the depths of them, the
lonely and infinite heartache of youth, when you cannot measure your
pain or argue it away, but must suffer and suffer instead. But the boy
was too miserable just then to read it there.
"Judith," he began, "don't you care any more? Why wouldn't you read my
letters? Why wouldn't you let me explain? Won't you let me now? I can,
Judith."
Still smiling, not taking the trouble to interrupt him, she waited for
him to finish, and as she waited and smiled, he had suddenly nothing
more to say. Judith was so slender and white and still as she stood
there. All the outraged dignity of an offended schoolgirl was helping to
make this overwhelming little effect of hers, and every trick of poise
and carriage that she had acquired in a year, and something else,
something that shamed and silenced the boy as no tricks could have done,
and made her pathetic little show of injured dignity real. A woman's shy
soul was reaching out for every defence it had to protect itself; a
woman's new-born, bewildered soul looked out of Judith's beautiful,
grieved eyes.
It was very still in the office. Outside an automobile horn sounded
aggressively, once and again, and Judith gave the boy an amused,
apologetic glance.
"Parks is in a hurry," she said. "He ought not to do that. The Colonel
wouldn't like it. But I won't keep him waiting. I'm going out to the
Camp for supper. Father and mother are there already. I stopped for the
Judge, but he doesn't seem to be here. He is walking out to the Camp, I
suppose. I'm--glad to have seen you." Her voice choked perilously over
this irreproachable sentiment, then steadied and modulated itself
according to the instructions of the highly accredited elocution teacher
of which she had enjoyed the benefit for a year. "Good-night."
Again she put out her cool little hand, but this time the boy's hand
closed on it tight.
"Judith," he began, his words coming fast, the contact seeming to
release all that had been storing itself up in his lonely heart for a
year. Once released, it came tumbling out incoherently, with the lilting
brogue of the ragged little boy that he used to be singing through it,
and the breathless catch in his voice that is the supremest eloquence
for the kind of words that he had to say. But Judith gave no sign of
being moved by it, and while she listened, a hard look, too unrelenting
for any eloquence to reach, was growing in her eyes.
"Judith, you're so sweet, so sweet; sweeter than you were last
year--sweeter than you ever were before. I didn't know anybody could be
sweeter, even you. I was so lonely. I wanted you so, and now you've
come. Everything will be all right, now you've come. And you came
straight here. You knew I was here, and you came because you knew. You
came straight to me."
"I came for the Judge," she corrected him gravely.
"But you knew I was here."
"I knew you were working for the Judge, but I didn't think you'd be here
so late in the afternoon. I didn't come to see you. I didn't want to.
Why should I? But I'm glad you are doing so well. Good-night, Neil."
"Good-night," he muttered mechanically, checked once more in spite of
himself.
But as he spoke, he felt her hands, both in his now, and held tight,
tremble and try softly at first, and then in sudden panic, to pull
themselves away. Her voice, that had been so grave and cool, with no
echo of the excitement that was in his, failed her now, though she kept
her wide-open eyes bravely upon him. She was afraid of him, this young
lady who was making such elaborate attempts to hide it, this young lady
not of his world, and so anxious to prove it to him, this calm stranger
with Judith's eyes. She was very much afraid, and she could not hide it
any longer.
"Let me go," she tried to say.
"Judith," he dropped her hands obediently, but his arms reached out for
her and caught her and held her close, "you didn't come for the Judge.
You came to see me."
"No. No."
Her face was hidden against his shoulder. Her voice came muffled and
soft. Neil paid no further attention to it. "No," it insisted faintly.
"Let me go." Then it insisted no more, and the boy laughed a soft,
triumphant little laugh.
"You did come to see me, and you love me. You love me and I love you.
You were angry, of course. Of course you sent back my letters. But
you're going to listen to me now. You're going to let me explain. I
couldn't that night. I couldn't talk any more. I didn't dare. I had to
keep hold of myself. I had to get you home. And I did, dear. I turned
round and took you home, and I got you home--safe. You're going to
listen? And not be angry any more? You won't, will you? You
won't--dear?"
Her face was still out of sight, and her white figure was motionless in
his arms. She did not relax there, but she did not struggle. She looked
very slender and helpless so. Her futuristic hat had slipped from its
daring and effective adjustment, and fallen to the Judge's dusty floor,
where it lay unregarded. The silvery blond head against his shoulder was
changed like the rest of her, a mass of delicately adjusted puffs and
curls, but in the fast-fading light he saw only the soft, pale colour of
her hair and the tender curve of her throat. He kissed it reverently and
lightly, once only, and then his arms let her go.
"You're so sweet," he whispered; "too sweet for me. But you're mine,
aren't you? Tell me you are. And you forgive me for--everything? Tell
me, Judith."
She seemed in no hurry to tell him. She faced him silently, her white
dress whiter than ever in the fading light, and her face big eyed and
expressionless. He waited reverently for her answer, and quite
confidently, picking up the elaborate hat mechanically, and then
smoothing the ribbons tenderly, and pulling at the flowers, as he
realized what he held.
"Poor little hat," he said softly, with the brogue coaxing insinuatingly
in his voice. "Poor little girl. I didn't mean to frighten you. And I
didn't mean to--that night.... Judith!"
It was undoubtedly Judith who confronted him, and no strange lady now.
It was as if she had been waiting for some cue from him, and heard it,
and sprung into life again, not the strange lady, not even the girl of
the year before, but a long-ago Judith, the child who had come to his
rescue on a forgotten May night, the child of the moonlit woods, with
her shrill voice and flashing eyes. She was that Judith again, but grown
to a woman, and now she was not his ally, but his enemy. She snatched
the beflowered hat away, and swung it upon her head with the same
reckless hand that had swept the lantern to the ground in her childish
defence of him. Her eyes defied him.
"That night," she stormed, "that night. Don't you ever speak of that
night to me again. I never want to hear you speak again. I never want to
see you again. I'll never forgive you as long as I live. I hate you!"
"Judith, listen to me," begged the boy. "Listen. You must."
But the girl who swept past him and turned to confront him at the door
was past listening to him. Words that she hardly heard herself, and
would not remember, came to her, and she flung them at him in a
breathless little burst of speech that hurt and was meant to hurt. The
boy took it silently, not trying to interrupt, slow colour reddening his
cheeks, his eyes growing angry then sullen. The words that Judith used
hardly mattered. They were futile and childish words, but because of the
blaze of anger behind them, that had been gathering long and would go on
after they were forgotten, they were splendid, too.
"I hate you! I don't belong to you. I don't belong to anybody. I'm not
like anybody else. Nobody cares what I do, and I don't care. I don't
care. Nobody ever takes care of me or knows when I need it. Well, I can
take care of myself. I'm going to now. I never want to belong to
anybody. If I did, it wouldn't be you."
"Judith, stop! You'll be sorry for this."
"If I am, it's no business of yours. It's nobody's business but mine."
"You'll be sorry," the boy muttered again, and this time the girl did
not contradict him or answer. Her shrill little burst of defiance was
over, and with it the sullen resentment that had crimsoned the boy's
face as he listened began to die away. He was rebuffed and thrown back
upon himself. His heart would not open so easily again. It would be a
long time before it opened at all. But he did not resent this. He only
looked baffled and puzzled and miserable, and the girl staring mutely at
him from the doorway with big, starved eyes, looked miserable, too. She
would be angry again. All the hurt pride and anger that had been
gathering in her heart for a year was not to be relieved by an
unrehearsed burst of speech. It had been sleeping in her heart. It was
all awake now, and she would be angrier with the boy and the world than
ever before, angrier and more reckless. But just now her anger was
blotted out and she was only miserable. In the gloom of the office there
was something curiously alike about the two tragic young faces.
The two were alone together there, but they had never been farther
apart. There was a whole world between them, a lonely world, where
people all speak different languages, and understand each other only by
a miracle, and most of them are so used to being alone that they forget
they once had a moment of first realizing it. But when it was upon them,
it was a bitter moment. These two young creatures were both living
through it now. They looked at each other blankly, all antagonism gone.
"You won't listen?" said the boy wonderingly, admitting defeat. "You
won't forgive me?"
"No," said Judith pitifully. "I can't."
Neil looked at her forlornly, but did not contest this. He came meekly
forward, not trying to touch her again, and opened the door for her.
"Well, good-night," he said. "Good-night, dear."
"Good-bye," Judith said. "Good-bye, Neil."
Then, jerking her flaunting hat into adjustment with trembling fingers,
and shaking out her befrilled skirts with a poor little imitation of her
earlier airs and graces, she slipped out into the corridor, groped for
the dusty stair rail, and clutched at it with a new disregard for her
immaculate whiteness, and disappeared down the stairs.
In the street below the last of the afternoon light still lingered,
reflected from the polished windows of the bank building, and faintly
illuminating the half-deserted square, but the sun was just going down
behind the court-house roof, a big, crimson ball of vanishing light.
Judith, appearing below in the doorway, stood regarding it deliberately
for a minute, ignoring the chauffeur's discreet manifestations of
impatience, and then made herself comfortable deliberately in the
Colonel's car.
She sat there proudly erect, a dainty, aloof little lady. She seemed to
have recovered her high estate upon entering it, and become a princess
beyond Neil's reach once more. Watching her gravely from the Judge's
window, he could not see the angry tears in her eyes or the reckless
light in them.
Little preliminary pants and puffs came from the car, discreetly
impatient, as if they voiced all the feelings that the correct Parks
repressed. He relieved them with one blatant flourish of sound from the
horn, and swung the car grandly across the square, round the corner, and
out of sight. Judith was gone, and she had not once looked up at the boy
in the window.
She had not even seen another cavalier, who dashed out of a shop and
tried to intercept and speak to her, but was just too late; Mr. Willard
Nash, thrilled by his first sight of her, ready to return to his old
allegiance at a word, and advertising the fact in every line of his
forlorn fat figure as he stood alone on the sidewalk gazing wistfully
after the vanished car.
The boy at the window did not waste his time in this way. Judith was
gone, and with her the spell that had held him mute and helpless, and he
was a man of affairs once more. He was not a very cheerful man of
affairs to-night. He was not singing or whistling to himself, as he
usually did, but he moved competently enough about the room, entering
the Judge's private office with its smell of stale tobacco smoke and
group of chairs, so confidentially close that they looked capable of
carrying on the conference their late occupants had begun without help
from them. He rearranged this room, giving just the straightening
touches to the jumble of papers on the desk that the Judge permitted,
and no more, and putting the outer office in order, too.
By his own desk he paused, fingering Mr. Thayer's thumbed pages
absently. He had no attention to spare for them just then, or for the
graver questions that had absorbed him just before Judith came. They
would soon claim him again. They awaited him now, but out in the
gathering dark that he watched from the darkening office something else
waited, too.
His heart ached with it, but it beat harder and stronger for it, and new
strength to meet old issues came pulsing from it, as if he were awake
again after a year of sleep. He was grieved and miserable, but he was
awake. For his mother was right: he was only a boy like other boys; he
was young and it was June, and whether she was kind or unkind, Judith
Randall was back in Green River.
* * * * *
Judith, whirled along the fast-darkening road between close-growing
pines, dulling from green to black, and birches, silver against them,
looked for the welcoming lights of Camp Everard through a mist of angry
tears.
She shed them decorously, even under cover of the dark; she was still a
dainty and proud little lady, with nothing about her to advertise
conspicuously that she was crying, or why. But her little gloved hands
were closing and unclosing themselves, her lips were trembling in spite
of her, and there was a hunted look in her eyes as she turned them
toward the dark woods, as if her quarrel with Neil were not her only
trouble. The tears that she controlled so gallantly were a protest
against a world only half understood and full of enemies whose alien
presence she was just beginning to feel.
But Neil, as she had just seen him, was enough to occupy the mind of
such a young lady, or a much older one. The look in his eyes as he stood
holding open the Judge's door for her was a highly irritating one for
any lady to meet. He was older and wiser than she was, no matter what
she could say or do to hurt him; he was stronger than she was, and
patiently waiting to prove it to her; that was what Neil's eyes were
saying.
They said it first when he left her at her own door without a good-night
on that strange May night a year ago; when she stood looking up at him
changed and alien and silent, with the May moon behind him, that had
brought her bad fortune instead of good, still dim and alluring with
false promises above the shadowy elms in the little street, and they
looked down at her just so--Neil's grave, unforgettable, conquering
eyes. They were eyes that followed you to-night, when you tried to
forget them and look at the dark woods and fields; eyes that looked at
you still when you closed your own.
But Judith would not look at them. The eyes were lying to her. Neil was
not really wise or kind. He was cruel. He had hurt her and slighted her,
and she was through with him.
"Parks, can't you go faster?" she said suddenly, in her clear little
voice. "It's so late, and I'm hungry and cold."
"It's bad going through here, Miss," the chauffeur said.
They were turning into a narrow mile or so of road that sloped gradually
down through a series of arbitrary curves and bends to the lake and the
camp, a changed and elaborate structure now, overweighted with verandas
and uncompromisingly lit with new electric lights. But the road was one
of the things that the Colonel did not improve when he changed the
public camp into a private one. It was unchanged and unspoiled, a
mysterious wood road still, alluring now in the gloom.
Judith's own people were waiting for her there at the end of that road.
They were all the people she had. Willard and schooltime and playtime
were more than a year behind her; they were behind her forever. She
could never go back to them. She had never really been part of them. She
had forced herself into a place there, but she had lost it now, and it
could never be hers again.
These were her people. They were strange to her still, but she had grown
up breathing the feverish air that they breathed, and with little
whispers of hidden scandal about her. Judith was alone between two
worlds: one was closed to her, and she was before the door of another,
where she did not know her way. She was really alone, as she had told
Neil, more alone than she knew; a lonely and tragic figure, white and
small in the corner of the big car.
But she was not crying now. She dabbed expertly at her eyes with an
overscented scrap of handkerchief and sat up, looking eagerly down the
dark road. She could catch far echoes of a song through the still night
air, faint echoes only, but it was a song that she knew, a gay little
song, and it came from a place where people were always kind and gay. It
was like a hand stretched out to her through the dark, a warm hand, to
beckon her nearer, and then draw her close. She leaned forward and
listened and looked.
There was the camp, the first glimpse of it, though soon a dip of the
road would hide it again. It was an enchanting glimpse, a far,
low-lying flicker of light. And there, just by the big, upstanding
boulder where the road turned abruptly, she saw something else. She saw
it before Parks did, as if she had been watching for it. It was a man's
figure that started forward, came to the edge of the road, and waited.
The man looked more than his slender height in the shadow, but his
light, quick walk was unmistakable. It was Colonel Everard.
"Stop, Parks," Judith said, with new authority in her voice.
He stood waiting for her silently, without any greeting at all, and she
slipped her hand into his and stepped out and stood beside him.
"Go on," he said to the chauffeur. "It's too rough here for the car.
It's easier on foot. Miss Randall will walk with me."
The car, skilfully manipulated along the steep, zigzag road, but a
clumsy thing at best here in the woods, and an artificial and ugly
thing, lumbered away, breaking through outreaching branches. Judith
watched it out of sight. Then and not till then she turned to her host.
"Aren't you going to speak to me?" the great man inquired respectfully,
as if her intentions deserved the most serious consideration.
"Yes," said Judith serenely, unflattered by it.
"What are you going to say?"
"What do you want me to say?"
"I want you to shake hands with me."
A hand touched his lightly. It drew quickly away, but it was a confiding
little hand.
"You don't seem surprised to see me."
"I'm not," said Judith.
"But you're glad to see me?"
"Yes."
"It's stuffy inside, and they've got a fire in the billiard room and
won't leave it. I wanted----"
Judith laughed and let him draw her hand through his arm as they began
to grope their way down the road. "You wanted to meet me."
She made the correction triumphantly and confidently, as she would have
made it to Willard. All this was coquetry, as she and Willard understood
it, and it was an old game to her, and a childish game, but there was
something strangely exciting about the fact that the Colonel understood
it, too, and condescended to play at it. It was more exciting than usual
to-night.
"Why should I want to meet you?" he said.
"I don't know."
"Why weren't you downstairs last night when I came to see your father?"
"I was tired."
"You weren't running away from me?"
"No."
"And you won't ever run away from me?"
"I don't know."
"You're afraid of me."
"Am I?"
"Aren't you?"
"I don't know," said Judith. "Look, there's the moon."
It was low above the trees, rising solemn and round and slow. It looked
reproachful and grave, like Neil's eyes. It was looking straight at
Judith. Judith turned her eyes sternly away. What was the Colonel
saying? Something that did not sound like Willard at all, or like the
Colonel, either. Nobody had ever spoken to her in just that voice
before. It was a choked, queer voice. But Judith smiled up at him and
listened, tightening the clasp of her hand on his arm.
"Don't be afraid of me. Don't ever be afraid.... You're so sweet
to-night."
"No, I won't," said Judith defiantly, straight to the round, accusing
moon. "I won't be afraid."