On the Doorstone
Behind them the play was resumed in the lighted room; the whining of the
fiddle, the thud and stamp of many feet, came to them softened and
refined by a little distance. They were suddenly drawn together in that
intimacy of two who leave the company and the lights on a special
expedition. Judith made an impatient mental effort to release the
incident of Huldah and the kiss, which had so unreasonably irritated
her.
"If we was to go acrosst fields hit would be a heap better," she advised
softly, and they moved through the odorous, myriad-voiced darkness of the
midsummer night, side by side, without speech, for a time. Then as Creed
halted at a dim, straggling barrier which crossed their course and laid
down a rail fence partially that she might the more easily get over in
her white frock, she returned to the tormenting subject once more,
opening obliquely:
"You and Huldy Spiller is old friends I reckon. Don't you think she's a
powerful pretty girl?"
"Mighty pretty," echoed Creed absently. All girls were of an even
prettiness to him, and Huldah Spiller was a pleasant little thing. He was
wondering what he had done back there in the play-room that had set them
all against him.
"Her and Wade is goin' to be wedded come September," put in Judith
jealously.
"Yo' cousin will be getting a mighty fine wife."
The mountain man is apt to make his comments on the marriages of his
friends with dignified formality, and Creed uttered the accustomed phrase
without heat or enthusiasm; but it seemed to Judith that he might have
said less--or more.
"Well, I never did like red hair," the girl managed to get out finally;
"but I reckon hit's better than old black stuff like mine."
"My mother's hair was sorter sandy," Creed answered in his gentle,
tolerant fashion. "Mine favours it." And he had not the wit to add that
dark hair, however, pleased him best.
Judith stepped beside him for some moments in mortified silence.
Evidently he was green wood and could by none of her old methods be
kindled. Then, their eyes becoming accustomed to the darkness, they came
out into a modified twilight in the clearing about the Bonbright house.
"You better unlock the door and go in first," suggested Judith, in a
depressed tone.
"Why, I ain't got the key," Creed reminded her. "I left it with
you--didn't you bring it?"
They drew unconsciously close together in the dark with something of the
guilty consternation of childish culprits. A mishap of the sort ripens an
acquaintance swiftly.
"What a gump I was!" Judith breathed with sudden low laughter. He could
see her eyes shining in the gloom, and the dim outline of her figure. "I
knowed well an' good you didn't have the key--hit's in the blue bowl on
the fire-board at home."
"I ought to have thought of it," asserted Creed shouldering the blame.
"And I'm sorry; I wanted to show you my mother's picture."
"An' _I'm_ sorry," echoed Judith, remembering fleetingly the swept and
garnished rooms, the wreath of red roses; "I had something to show you,
too."
Nothing was said of the dishes for the merrymakers at Judith's house.
Another interest was obtruding itself into the simple, practical
expedition, crowding aside its original purpose. The girl looked around
the dim, weed-grown garden, its bushes blots of deeper shadow upon the
darkness, its blossoms vaguely conjectured by their odour.
"There used to be a bubby bush--a sweet-scented shrub--over in that
corner," Creed hesitated. "I'd like to get you some of the bubbies. My
mother used to pick 'em and put 'em in the bureau drawers I remember, and
they made everything smell nice."
He had taken her hand and led her with him, advancing uncertainly toward
the flowers. He felt her shiver, and halted instantly.
"Yo' cold!" he said. "Let me take my coat off and put it around ye--I
don't need it. You got overheated playing back there, and now you'll
catch a cold."
"Oh, no," disclaimed Judith, whose little shudder had been as much from
excitement as from the sharp chill of the night air after the heated
play-room. "I reckon somebody jest walked over my grave--I ain't cold."
But he had pulled off the coat while he spoke, and now he turned to put
it about her, and drew her back to the doorstep. Judith was full of a
strange ecstasy as she slipped her arms into the sleeves. The lover's
earliest and favourite artifice--the primitive kindness of wrapping her
in his own garment! Even Creed, unready and unschooled as he was, felt
stir within him its intimate appeal.
A nebulous lightening which had been making itself felt behind the
eastern line of mountains now came plainly in view, late moon, melancholy
and significant, as the waning moon always is. By its dim illumination
Creed saw Judith Barrier standing at the door of his own house, smiling
at him tremulously, with the immemorial challenge in her dark eyes. To
that challenge the native man in him--the lover--so long usurped by the
zealot, the would-be philanthropist, rose thrilling, yet still bewildered
and uncertain, to respond. Something heady and ancient and eternally
young seemed to pass into his soul out of the night and the moonlight and
the shining of her eyes. He was all alive to her nearness, her
loveliness, to the sweet sense that she was a young woman, he a young
man, and the loveliness and the dearness of her were his for the
trying--for the winning. His breath caught in his throat.
"Wait a minute," he whispered hurriedly, though she had not moved. With
eager hands he wrapped the coat close about her. "Let's sit here on the
doorstep and talk awhile. There are a heap of things I want to ask you
about--that I want to tell you."
Young beauty and belle that she was, Judith had been sought and courted,
in that most primitive society, since she was fourteen. She was love's
votary by birthright, and her wit and her emotions were schooled in
love's game: to lure, to please, to exploit, to defend, evade, deny; in
each postulant seeking, testing, trying for the right man to whom should
be made love's final surrender. But Creed, always absorbed in vague
altruistic dreams, had no boyish sweethearting behind him to have taught
him the ways of courtship.
Fire-flies sparkled everywhere, thickest over the marshy places. A mole
cricket was chirring in the grass by the old doorstone. Sharp on the soft
dark air came the call of that woodland night bird which the mountain
people say cries "chip-out-o'-white-oak," and which others translate
"chuck-wills-widow."
"I--" he began, hesitated momentarily, then daunted, grasped at the
familiar things of his life--"I don't get on very well up here. I'm
afraid I've made a failure of it; but"--he turned to her in a curious,
groping entreaty, his hat in his hands, the dim moonlight full on his
fair head and in his eager eyes--"but if you would help me--with you--I
think I ought to----"
"I say made a failure!" cooed Judith in her rich, low tones. "You ax me
whatever you want to know. You tell me what it is that you're aimin' to
do--I say made a failure!"
Her trust was so hearty, so wholesale, she filled so instantly the
position not only of sweetheart but of mother to a small boy with an
unsatisfactory toy--that would always be Judith Barrier--that Creed's
heart--the man's heart--a lonely one, and beginning to feel itself
misunderstood and barred out from its kind--melted in his bosom. There
was silence between them, a silence vibrant with the coming utterance.
But even as the dark, fond, inviting eyes and the troubled, kindling blue
ones encountered, as Creed lifted the girl's hand timidly, and essayed
speech, the voice of that one who had stepped on her grave harshly
aroused them both.
"I vow--I thort it was thieves, an' I was a-goin' to see could I pick off
you-all," drawled Blatchley Turrentine's level tones from the shadow of
the garden. Mutely, with a sense of chill and disappointment that was
like the shock of a physical blow to each, the two young creatures got to
their feet and turned to leave the place, preparing to go by the high
road, without consultation. As they passed him near the gate, Blatch
Turrentine fell in on the other side of the girl and walked with them
silently for a time.
"Iley sont me over," he said finally. "She was skeered you-all wouldn't
bring any plates."
Neither Judith nor Creed offered any explanation. Instead:
"Well, I don't see how you're goin' to help anything," said the girl
bitterly--any presence must have been hateful to her which interrupted or
forestalled what Creed would certainly have said, that for which her
whole twenty years had waited.
"Oh, I've got the plates," chuckled Blatch, jingling a bulky package
under his arm.
"Why, how did you----" began Judith in amazement.
"Uh-huh, I've got my own little trick of gittin' in whar I choose to go,"
declared Turrentine. He leaned around and looked meaningly at the man on
her other side, then questioned, "How long do you-all reckon I'd been
thar?" and examined them keenly in the shadowy half light.
But neither hastened to disclaim or explain, neither seemed in any degree
embarrassed, though to both his bearing was plainly almost intolerable.
Thereafter they walked in silence which was scarcely broken till they
reached the gate and Iley came shrilling out to meet them demanding,
"Did you get them thar plates from Miz. Lusk's, you Blatch Turrentine?"
Judith looked at him with angry scorn. It was the old tyrannical trick
which she had known from her childhood up, the attempt to maintain an
ascendency over her by appearing to know everything and be
everywhere--"like he was the Lord-a'mighty Hisself," she muttered
indignantly, as Creed joined a group of young men, and she passed in to
her necessary activities as hostess.
Judith Barrier's play-party won to its close with light hearts and light
feet, with heavy hearts which the weary body would fain have denied, with
love and laughter, with jealousy and chagrin, with the slanted look of
envy, of furtive admiration, or of disparagement, from feminine eyes at
the costumes of other women, just as any ball does.
The two who had trembled upon the brink of some personal revelation, a
closer communion, were not again alone together that evening. Amid the
moving figures of the others, now to his eyes as painted automatons,
Creed Bonbright watched with strong fascination in which there was a
tincture that was almost terror, the beautiful girl who had suddenly
emerged from her class and become for him the one woman.
So adequate, so competent, Judith dominated the situation; passing among
her guests, the thick dark lashes continually lowered toward her crimson
cheeks. Some subtle sense told her that the spell was working. Smiles
from this sweet inner satisfaction curved her red lips. No need to
look--she knew how his eyes were following her. The exultant knowledge of
it sang all through her being. Gone were her perturbations, her chilling
uncertainties. She was at once stimulated and quieted.
Their good-byes were said in the most public manner, yet one glance
flashed between them which asked and promised an early meeting.