It was a clumsy, old-fashioned little weapon. Brady's thin hand grasped it firmly, as if some stronger hand than his own were steadying his. He laughed an ineffective laugh, like a boastful boy's, but there was a threat in it, too.
"What have you got to say for yourself? I'll give you a chance to say it," he stated magnanimously, "but you shan't say a word against her. She was always a good girl. She is a good girl. What have you done with her? Where is she?"
"You don't make yourself altogether clear, Brady," said the Colonel smoothly.
"Where's Maggie?"
"Maggie?" The Colonel's eyes swept the circleof his guests deliberately, as if to assure himself that no lady of that name was among them.
"Maggie. You know the name well enough." The sound of it seemed to give the lady's champion new courage; it flamed in his eyes, hot, and quick to burn itself out, but while it lasted, even a gentleman who had learned to face drawn revolvers as indifferently as the Colonel might do well to be afraid of him. "Maggie's missing. I'm going to find her. That's all I want of you. I won't ask you who's worked on her and made a fool of her. I won't ask you how far she's been going. But I want her back before the whole town knows. I want to find her and find her quick. She's a good girl and a decent girl. She's going to keep her good name. She's coming home."
"Commendable," said the Colonel, not quite smoothly enough. His guest was past listening to him.
"Maggie. That's all I want. You're getting off easy. Luck's with you. I've stood a lot from you, the same as the town has. It will stand a lot more, and I will. Get Maggie back. Get her back and give her to me and leave her alone, and I'll eat out of your hand and starve when you don't feed me, the same as the rest"—he came two wavering steps nearer, and dropped his voice to a dry quaver meant to be confidential, a grotesqueand sinister parody of a confidence—"the rest, that don't know what I know."
"What do you mean?"
"I won't tell. Don't be afraid. A gentleman don't tell, and there's nobody that can but me. Young Neil don't know. The luck's with you, sir, just the same as it always was."
"I've had enough of this. Get home, Brady," cried the Colonel, in a voice that was suddenly wavering and high, like an old man's, but his guest only smiled and nodded wisely, beginning to sway as he stood, but still gripping the clumsy revolver tight.
"Just the same as it was when old Neil Donovan died."
"Get home," shrilled the Colonel again, but his guest pursued the tenor of his thoughts untroubled, still with the look of an amiably disposed fellow-conspirator on his weak face, a maddening look, even if his words conveyed no sting of their own.
"Neil Donovan," he crooned, "my father's own half-brother, and a good uncle to me, and a gentleman, too. He sold rum over a counter, but he was a gentleman, for he didn't talk too much. A gentleman don't tell."
But the catalogue of his uncle's perfections, whether in place here or not, was to proceed no further. The audience pressed closer, as eager tolook on at a fight as it was to keep out of one. There was a new and surprising development in this one. The two men had closed with each other, and it was not the half-crazed boy who had made the attack, but the Colonel himself.
It was a sudden and awkward attack, and there was something stranger about it still. The Colonel was angry. He had tried to knock the weapon out of the boy's hand, failed, and tried instinctively, still, to get possession of it, but he was not making an adequate and necessary attempt to disarm him, he was no longer adequate or calm. He was angry, suddenly angry with the poor specimen of humanity that was making its futile attempt at protest and rebellion, as if it were an equal and an enemy. His face was distorted and his eyes were dull and unseeing. His breath came in panting gasps, and he made inarticulate little sounds in his throat. He struck furious and badly directed blows.
It was a curious thing to see, in the heart of the great man's admiring circle, at the climax of his most successful party of the year. It did not last long. The two struggling figures broke away from each other, and the boy staggered backward and stood with the revolver still in his hand. He was a little sobered by the struggle, and a little weakened by it, pale and dangerous, with a fanaticlight in his eyes. Some one who had an eye for danger signals, if the Colonel had not, had made his unobtrusive way forward, and joined him now. He was not the most formidable looking of allies, but he stood beside them as if he had a right to be there, and the Colonel turned to him as if he recognized it.
"Hugh, you heard what he said?" he appealed; "you heard?"
"Judge, you keep out of this," Brady called, "keep out, sir."
Judge Saxon, keeping a casual hand on his most prominent client's arm, stood regarding Mr. Brady with mild and friendly blue eyes. He had quite his usual air of being detached from his surroundings, but benevolently interested in them.
"Charlie," he said, as if he were recognizing Mr. Brady for the first time at this critical moment, and deriving pleasure from it. "Why, Charlie," his voice became gently reproachful, but remained friendly, too. "Everard, this boy don't mean a word he says," he went on, with conviction, "he's excited and you're excited, too. This is a pretty poor time for you to get excited, Everard."
"You're right, Hugh," muttered the Judge's most prominent client thickly; "you're right. Get him away. Get him home."
"He's a good boy," pronounced the Judge.
It was not the obvious description of Mr. Brady just at that moment. There was only friendly amusement in the Judge's drawling voice and shrewd eyes, but back of it, unmistakably there, was something that made every careless word worth listening to. Mr. Brady was resisting it. His face worked pitifully.
"Judge, I told you to keep out. I don't want to hurt you."
"Thanks, Charlie."
"Every word I say is God's truth, Judge."
The Judge did not contradict this sweeping statement. He was studying Mr. Brady's weapon with some interest. "Your uncle's," he commented, pleased. "Why, I didn't know you still owned that thing, Charlie."
"I want Maggie. I want——"
"I'll tell you what you want," offered the Judge, amicably, "you want to hand that thing to me, and go home."
Mr. Brady received this suggestion in silence, a silence which left his audience uncertain how deeply he resented it. Indeed, they were painfully uncertain, and showed it. Bits of advice reached the Judge's ears, contradictory, though much of it sound, but he took no notice of it. He only smiled his patient and wistful smile and waited, like a man who knew what would happen next.
"Hand it to me," he repeated gently.
"I won't, Judge." Mr. Brady's weapon wavered, and then steadied itself. His thin body trembled. The fanatic light in his eyes blazed bright. The excitement which had gripped him, too keen to last long, reached its climax now in one last burst of hysterical speech.
"He's a liar and a thief," he asserted, uncontradicted. He was not to be contradicted. There was a dignity of its own about the hysterical indictment, grotesque as it was, an unforgettable suggestion of truth. "He's a thief and a murderer, too. I don't have to tell what I know. Everybody knows. You all know, all of you, and you don't dare to tell. He's murdering the town."
The high, screaming voice broke off abruptly. Mr. Brady, still with the echo of his big words in his ears and apparently dazed by it, stood looking blankly into the Judge's steady and friendly eyes.
"I can't—I won't——" he stammered.
"Hand it to me," said the Judge, as if no interruption had occurred. For a moment the boy before him looked too dull and dazed to obey or to hear. Then, as suddenly as if some unseen hand had struck it out of his, the revolver dropped to the ground, and he collapsed, sobbing heartbrokenly, into the Judge's arms.
He was a heroic figure no longer. The alienforces that made him one had deserted him abruptly, and he looked unworthy of their support already, only an inconsiderable creature of jangled nerves and hysterical speech, which would be discredited if you looked at him, even if it still echoed in your ears. The Judge, holding him and quieting him, looked allied with him, humble and discredited, too. The relieved audience hung back for a moment, taking in the full force of the picture, before it broke ranks to crowd round the Colonel and offer him belated support. The Colonel said a few inaudible words to Judge Saxon, and then turned from him and his protégé with the air of washing his hands of the whole affair. He looked surprisingly unruffled by it, even stimulated by it. The interruption to his party was over.
It ended as it had begun, the most successful party of the year. Mr. Brady's invasion was not the first unscheduled event which had enlivened a party at the Birches. There was more open and general speculation about the fact that the Randalls left immediately after, did not linger over their good-nights, and were obviously not permitted by their host to do so.
Mrs. Randall, leaning back in her corner with her hand tight in Harry's, and her long-lashed eyes, that were like Judith's, tightly shut, showedthe full strain of the evening in her pale face. She was a woman who did not look tired easily, but she was also a woman who could not afford to look tired.
There was no appeal or charm about her pale face now, only a naked look of hardness and strain. Her husband, staring straight ahead of him with troubled eyes, and his weak, boyish mouth set in a hard, worried line, spoke rapidly and disconnectedly not of Judith, or the Colonel's ominous coldness to him, but of Mr. Brady.
"Maggie's a bad lot," he was explaining for approximately the fifth time as they whirled into the drive and under their own dark windows. "She always was. Everard isn't making away with the belle of Paddy Lane. Not yet. He's not that far down. But that dope about old Neil Donovan——"
"Oh, Harry, hush," his wife said, "here we are. What do you care about Brady?"
"Nothing," he whispered, his arm tightening round her as he lifted her down. "I don't care about anything in the world but Judith."
"Neither do I. Not really," she said in a hurried, shaken voice that was not like her own, "you believe that, don't you, Harry?"
He did not answer. Gathering up her skirts, she followed him silently to the front of the house,single file along the narrow boardwalk, not yet taken up for the summer, creaking loudly under their feet.
"Look," she whispered, catching at his arm. The front of the house was dark except for two lights, a flickering lamp that was being carried nearer to them through the hall, and a soft, shaded light that showed at a bedroom window. The window was Judith's. He fumbled for his key, but the door opened before them. Norah, her forbidding face more militant than ever in the flickering light of the kerosene hand-lamp she held, her white pompadour belligerently erect, and her brown eyes maliciously alight, peered at them across the door chain, and then gingerly admitted them.
"It's a sweet time of night to be coming home to the only child you've got," she commented, "why do you take the trouble to come home at all?"
It was a characteristic greeting from her. If it had not been, Mrs. Randall would not have resented it now. She clutched at the old woman's unresponsive shoulder.
"Where is she?" she demanded breathlessly.
"Judith is it you mean?"
"Oh, yes."
"How should I know how she spends her evenings? At some of the girls' to-night. Rena Drew's maybe. I don't know. It's a new thing for you to care. She was late in, and it's no wonder I was worried. She's like my own to me. But she needs her sleep now. You'd better go softly upstairs."
"Do you mean she's here?"
"What is it to you?" Norah, one bony hand clutching the newel post as if it were a negotiable weapon of defense, and her brown eyes flashing as if she were capable of using any weapon for Judith, barred the way up the stairs.
"I tell you, she needs her sleep, poor lamb—poor lamb," she said, "and you're not to go near her to-night. You're to promise me that. But she's here fast enough. My lamb is safe at home in her own bed."
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 thesame 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 thepeople 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. Nobodyknew 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 smileconveyed 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 heavilyladen 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 youthin 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 flasheda 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 themost 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 thetown, 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 onceknown 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 foundwithin 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 thoughthey 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 upwardslant 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 allthe 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?"
'Oh, Judith, won't you speak to me?'
"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 unrelentingfor 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 notrelax 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. Thewords 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 andanger 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 allthe 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 thatthe 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-lyingflicker 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."