"I don't like the look of you," said Mrs. Donovan.
"Then you're hard to please." Neil turned at the foot of the steps to say, trying to smile as he said it. "Harder than I am. I do like the look of you."
The Donovans, mother and son, were both quite sufficiently attractive to the eye at that moment. This was the second day of September, and also the second day of the county fair in Madison, five miles away—the big day of the fair, and Neil's uncle had been up at dawn to escort the younger Bradys there in a borrowed rig, and in the company of at least half Green River in equipages of varied style and state of repair. Neil had slept late, breakfasted sketchily, and dined elaborately alone with his mother. Now the long, still, sunny afternoon was half over, and she stood in the kitchen door, watching him start for town.
The kitchen, newly painted this year, looked empty and unnaturally neat behind her, but friendly and lived in, too, with the old, creaking rocker pulled to an inviting angle at the windowoverlooking the marsh, and a sofa under the other window, its worn upholstery covered freshly with turkey-red; one splash of clear colour, sketched in boldly, just in the corner where it satisfied the eye. Her neighbours did not take this humble fabric seriously for decorative purposes; indeed, they would not have permitted a sofa in the kitchen at all, but her neighbours were not of her gracious race. They could not wear a plain and necessary white apron like the completing touch to a correct toilette assumed deliberately. Mrs. Donovan could, and she did to-day. Also her brown hair, dulled to a softer, more indefinite brown by its sprinkling of white, rippled softly about her low forehead, and her dress was faded to a tender, vague blue like the blue of her eyes. Her eyes, almost on a level with Neil's as she stood on the step above him, had the charm that was peculiarly their own to-day, cloudy as they were with the faraway look of a race that believes in fairies, but warm and human, too, with an intimate mother look of concern for Neil.
Neil met it steadily, not a sullen boy as he would have been under that questioning a year ago, not resenting it at all, but keeping his secrets deliberately. It had always been hard for her to make him answer questions. It was not even easy for her to ask them now.
"You don't sleep," she began.
"Neither do you, if you've been catching me at it," reasoned her son correctly.
"You work too hard." She had made an accusation that he could not deny, so he only smiled his quick, flashing smile. "You won't even take a day to yourself."
"I'll have the office and most of the town to myself this afternoon. I'll have to go. I've got something special to look into."
"Where's Charlie?" she demanded at once.
"Oh, he's not troubling me to-day. He's safe at Madison with his new mare. He'll break loose there, then come home and repent and stay straight for weeks and make no trouble for me. He's due to break loose. He's been good too long—too good to be true. He was in fine form last night." Mr. Charlie Brady's cousin grinned reminiscently.
"What do you mean?"
"He gave me quite a little side talk on good form in dress and diction. Charlie claims I won't make an orator, and he don't like my taste in ties."
"Who does he think he is?" flashed Mr. Brady's aunt indignantly.
"Who do you think he is?" her son inquired unexpectedly. "For whatever you think, that's me. I'm no better than Charlie."
"Charlie?" Mrs. Donovan gasped, and then plunged into an indignant defence of her son, not pausing to take breath.
"You?" she began. "You that's planted firm on the ladder and right-hand to the Judge already, and him getting older every day, and Theodore Burr just kept on in the office because Everard's after Burr's wife. So he is, and the town knows it, and Theodore'll wake up to it soon. A fine partner Theodore is for the Judge, poor boy, but he's a good boy, too, though none too strong in the head; Lil Burr is a good girl, too, and she'd make a good wife to Theodore if she could be left to herself. She'd make it up with Theodore, as many a girl has done that's got more for her husband to forgive than Lil.
"Poor Lil. Her head's high above me now, but the time was she cried on my shoulder; crying for Charlie, she was, before ever Charlie took up with Maggie and Lil with Theodore; when the four of them were all young together, and the one as good as the other. Young they were, and the hearts of them young—wild, doubtful hearts. Many's the time Lil would come to me then, here in this same kitchen, and go down on her knees, her that was tall and a fine figure of a girl, and cling onto me, crying her heart out; crying she was for all the world like—like——"
Mrs. Donovan checked herself abruptly with shrewd eyes upon her son.
"Like young things do cry, and tell you their troubles in tears, not words." She ended somewhat vaguely, and came quickly back to her main subject again.
"You that can walk into the big rally next week and sit with the men that count, and whisper and talk to them, and hold your head high, with nothing against you, and will be sitting up on the platform soon, with the best of them, and be mayor yet, like Everard's going to be, or governor, maybe—you to compare yourself with Charlie, if he is my half-sister's own son. He's a drunken good-for-nothing. He's got no spirit in him if he'll stay here at all, where he's ashamed himself and make a show of himself. How is it he's able to stay? Where does he get the money he spends? This town don't pay it to him. Who does?"
"What put that into your head?" her son asked sharply.
"There's talk enough of it, and there'll be more. The whole town will be asking soon."
"The town asks a lot of questions it don't dare hear the answers to," said Neil softly, unregarded. His mother returned to her grievance:
"You to be likening yourself to Charlie."
"When Charlie was twenty-five," Neil beganslowly, "he was where I will be then, or better. The Judge was a friend to him, too, and the Judge was a better friend then to have. Charlie was setting up for himself, well thought of. My own father trusted him. When I was a boy and not grown, Charlie was a son to him, and more. He was a better spoken lawyer than I'll ever make, quick and smooth with his tongue, and he was fine appearing, and put up a better front than I do. I've gone part of the road that Charlie went. What will stop me from going the whole road? What's beat Charlie is strong enough to beat me.... Don't look so scared, mother. I don't want to scare you. I only want you to be fair to Charlie."
"His heart's broke," she conceded, melting. "He's nothing with Maggie gone."
"His heart's broke, but that's not what beat him," her son stated with authority. "He was beat before."
"When?"
"He was beat," Neil stated deliberately, "when Everard moved to Green River."
This was a sweeping statement, but Neil did not qualify it. He dropped the subject and stood silent, turning absent eyes upon the green expanse of marshy field that had been the starting-place of all his dreams when he was a dream-struck,gazing boy. His mother's eyes followed his, growing cloudier and soft as if even now she could read them there.
"Rests your eyes," Neil said, after a minute; "looks pretty, too, in the sun. It's a pretty green. We'll drain it, perhaps, by the time I'm mayor or governor. It might pay. I'll be going now."
"Neil, when did you see her last?" asked his mother suddenly.
"See who?" he muttered, and then flushed, and straightened himself, and met her eyes bravely.
"I saw Judith yesterday," he said, "on Main Street, and—she cut me."
"Did she walk past you?"
"No, she wouldn't do that. She pretended not to see me, but she saw me, all right. She passed me in an automobile."
"Whose?"
"One of Everard's."
"Was he with her?"
"Yes."
"Neil," his mother began a little breathlessly, "I want to tell you something. I've said hard things to you, and they weren't deserved. I know it now, and I'm sorry. I want to take them all back. I've said hard things about Judith Randall."
She hurried on, afraid of being stopped, but he made no move to stop her. He listened courteously, his face not changing.
"Neil, she's not what I thought. There's no harm in her. There's no pride in her. She's just lonesome. She's just a young, young girl. She's sweet-spoken and sweet-faced. Neil, from all I hear——"
"You didn't hear all this direct from—Judith, then?"
"Judith?" she hesitated, flashing a questioning glance at him. "Is it likely? How would I get the chance? But from all I hear, she's too good for Everard and the like. And she's not safe with them. She needs——"
"What?" interrupted her son gravely, with the air of seeking information on a subject quite strange to him and rather distasteful. But she tried to go on.
"—Judith needs—any one that's fond of her, any one that she's fond of, to be good to her now. I've seen her, and it's in the eyes of her. No man ever knows just what a woman is grieving for, but that's all one if he'll comfort her when she's grieving. She needs——"
Neil's eyes were expressionless. She sighed and put her two hands on his shoulders. "Have it your own way," she said. "I'll say no more."
Neil caught at one of the hands on his shoulders and kissed it.
"For one thing," he said, "Judith or any girl needs a mother with a heart in her—like I've got, but you're the one in the world. I'm going."
But he did not go at once. Standing beside her, suddenly awkward and shy, he first gave her the confidence that she could not force from him, all in one generous breathless burst of words.
"Mother, Charlie's not the only one with his heart broke. But heart-break isn't the worst thing I've got to bear. There's something else. I can't tell you. I'd rather bear it alone. I've got to. Good-bye."
Then he left her standing still in the door, shading her cloudy blue eyes with one small hand and looking after him. He swung into the dusty road and, keeping his head high and his eyes straight ahead, undazzled by the sharp sunlight of mid-afternoon on the long stretch of unshaded way, passed out of sight toward Green River.
Neil turned into Post-office Square just on the stroke of four. The square was as empty and strange to the eye as his mother's kitchen, though this was the rush hour of the day in that business centre upon ordinary days, when the fair had not emptied the town.
A solitary Ford of prehistoric make stood before the post-office, and even that was just cranking up. It lurched dispiritedly off, leaving a cloud of dust behind. A dejected-looking group of children hung about the door of the ice-cream parlour, and appeared to lack the initiative to enter in. Half the shops were shut. In the big show-window of the central section of Ward's Emporium Luther Ward, usually on parade and magnificently in charge of his shop and his staff of employees at this time of day, stood in his shirt sleeves, embracing an abnormally slender lady in a mauve velveteen tailored suit.
At first glance he seemed to be instructing her in the latest dance steps, but on a nearer view the visible part of her proved to be wax, and the suit was ticketed nineteen-fifty. He jerked her intoplace, turned and saw Neil, and hailed him cheerfully, waving him round to the main entrance door, where he joined him, still wiping his brow.
"If you want a thing well done, do it yourself," he said, explaining his late exertions with the air of believing the explanation was original with him and did credit to his intellect. "What are you here for, brother? Isn't Madison good enough for you?"
"No," Neil said. "Not with the big race called off."
"Called off? How's that?"
"Because you weren't there, Luther."
Mr. Ward gave a gratified laugh at this graceful compliment, and descended to facts.
"I'm too old for horse racing. It's my boy's turn. He went over with Willard Nash's crowd to-day. Why didn't you?" Mr. Ward demanded severely.
"Oh, Willard asked me all right. He's quite strong for me now." Mr. Ward had doubted this, being on the watch for slights to Neil and resenting them, though he never made an effort to prevent them. This was the usual attitude of Neil's more influential friends.
"Willard's a shrimp," said Mr. Ward gruffly. "And I like you," he added in a burst of frankness. "I always did like you, Neil. You've pulledyourself up by your boot-straps, and I hope you hang on to them tight. There's nobody better pleased than I am. Oh, I got a rig and sent all the help from the store over to the fair to-day," he added, turning quickly to impersonal subjects.
"You always do treat them right."
"Well, this wasn't my idea. I got it from the Colonel." A look of harmless but plainly evident pride came into Mr. Ward's open and ruddy countenance as he mentioned the great man's name. It was only the week before that he had received his first dinner invitation from the Everards. It came at the eleventh hour and did not include his wife, but he was dazzled by it still. "You know what he's doing? Closing his house, practically, for all three days of the fair, and sending all the help on the place over there—two touring cars full. It's a fine thing for them. They're high-class help and don't have it any too interesting down here. Anybody that says he's not democratic don't know the Colonel. This town don't half know him yet."
"You're right," Neil put in softly.
"Democratic," declaimed Mr. Ward, "and public spirited. Look at the fountain he's going to put up in the square. Look at the old Grant house going to be fitted up for a library. Look at him running for mayor, when he's been turningdown chances at bigger offices for years—willing to stay here and serve for the good of the town. There's talk against him more than ever this year. I know that. It amounts to an indignation meeting when the boys get together at Halloran's. Well, failures hate a successful man, and their talk don't count. It will die down. But I hate to hear of it. For the Colonel's put this town on the map. He's not perfect, but who is? And suppose he does have a good time his own way? We've got a right to—all of us. It's a free country."
Mr. Ward delivered this last sentiment with touching faith in its force and freshness, and waved a plump hand of invitation toward the little private office back of the main section of his store, where he had developed his unfailing eloquence of speech upon subjects of public interest, and liked best to practise it. But Neil, himself listened to with growing deference by the groups that forgathered there, was not to be lured to that sanctum to-day. Speaking hastily and vaguely of work to be done, he escaped from his good friend and across the street to Judge Saxon's office.
He climbed the stairs heavily, and did not linger before the door to picture the sign changed to "Saxon, Burr, and Donovan," as he had done more times than he cared to admit. The officewas not a thing to be proud of as a step up in life for him to-day; it was a place to be alone in, as men feel alone and safe in the place that is their own because they have worked there.
Showing this in every move, Neil locked the door, threw off his cap, and dropped into the broken-springed chair at the desk that was nominally Theodore Burr's, but really his. He groped mechanically for the handle of the drawer where he usually rested his feet, found it hard to open, gave up the attempt and, leaning back without its support, stared at Mr. Burr's ornate, brass-mounted blotter with unseeing eyes.
Sitting there, he was no longer the boy who had the privilege of intimate talk with prominent citizens like Mr. Ward and valued it; or the boy who had laughed at his mother's anxiety so bravely. He was not even the boy that he used to be, sullen, but rebellious, too. To-day for the first time he was something worse, a defeated boy. The long minutes dragged like hours, and he sat through them as he would have sat through hours, silent and motionless, losing run of time and acknowledging defeat.
For there was something that this boy wanted, and had always wanted, as he could never want other things, even success or love, as a boy or a man can want one thing only in one lifetime. Itwas a remote and preposterous dream that he had, a dream that nobody else in Green River was foolhardy enough to cherish long, but this boy belonged to the race of poets and dreamers, the race that must sometimes dream true, because it always dreams. His dream had taken different forms: sometimes he saw himself doing desperate things, setting fire to a house that he knew and hated, striking a blow in the dark for which nobody thanked him, but the issue was always the same, and the dream never left him. He was to find Green River a new master. He was to save the town. That was his dream. It had never left him till now.
He was only a lean, tense boy, crouched over a battered desk and staring out of the window at a country street with absent, beautiful eyes, but he was living through a tragic hour; the terrible hour that poets and dreamers know when they lose hold upon their dreams. Measured by minutes, this hour was not long. Neil passed a hand across his forehead and sat up, reaching for his cap in a dazed way, for he was not to be permitted to hide longer from his trouble here. The plump and personable figure of Mr. Theodore Burr was crossing the square and disappearing into the door below. His unhurried step climbed the stairs. Neil opened the door to him.
"Hello, stranger. Why aren't you at Madison?" Neil said.
"I didn't go," said Mr. Burr lucidly. "Where are you going? I don't want to drive you away from here."
"Oh, just out. I was going anyway."
"You don't invite me. I don't blame you. I'm poor company, and I've got business to attend to here."
"No!"
"Why shouldn't I have business here?" snapped Mr. Burr.
"You should, you should, Theodore. Say"—the question had been troubling Neil subconsciously all the time he sat at the desk—"what's wrong with that lower drawer? I can't open it."
"It's locked."
"What for?"
"That," said Mr. Burr with dignity, "is my private drawer—for private papers."
"Papers!" Mr. Burr's private papers were known to consist chiefly of a file of receipted bills and a larger file of unreceipted bills, both kept with his usual fastidious neatness. "What papers?"
"That's my business. I've got some rights here, if I am a figurehead. I've got some privileges."
"Sure. Don't you feel right to-day, Theodore?"
"That," said Mr. Burr, "is my business, too."
Neil stared at his friend. Mr. Burr was faultlessly groomed, as always, his tie was of the vivid and unique blue that he affected so often, and a very recent close shave had acted upon him as usual, giving him a pink and new-born appearance, but his eyes looked old and tired, as if he had not slept for weeks and had no immediate prospect of sleeping, and there were lines of strain about his weak mouth. He was not himself. Even a boy preoccupied with his own troubles could not ignore it.
"Don't you feel right?" Neil said. "Don't you want me to do something, Theodore?"
"Yes. Get out of here. Leave me alone," Mr. Burr snapped angrily.
"Sure," said Neil soothingly.
Suddenly Mr. Burr gripped Neil's reluctant, shy, boy's hand, kept it in his for a minute in silence, and then abruptly let it go, pushing Neil toward the door.
"Don't begrudge me one locked drawer when you'll own the whole place some day," he said, with all the dignity that his fretful burst of irritation had lacked. "I'd like to see that day. You're a good boy, Donovan."
"You're not right. You've got a grouch.Come with me and walk it off," Neil said uneasily, but he did not press the invitation, and his friend had little more to say. His silence was perhaps the most unusual thing about his behaviour, which was all out of key to-day. Neil remembered afterward that just as he closed the door upon Mr. Burr and his vagaries, shutting them at the same time out of his mind, Mr. Burr, sitting rather heavily down in the broken-springed desk chair, was bending and stretching out a faultlessly manicured, slightly unsteady hand toward the locked drawer of the desk.
Neil stepped out into the street with a cautious eye upon the Emporium across the way, but no portly form was in sight there now, and no hearty voice hailed him. He crossed the square and turned north, walking quickly, soon leaving the larger houses behind, and then the smaller houses above the railroad track, always climbing gradually as he walked. Finally, at the entrance to an overgrown road that led off to his left, and at the highest point of his long and slow ascent, he turned and looked back at the town.
The town that Colonel Everard had put on the map hardly deserved the honour, seen so in a glitter of afternoon light, with the long, sloping hill leading down to it, and the white tower of the church pointing high above it, a cozy huddle ofhouses at the foot of the hill. It looked unassuming and sheltered and safe, only a group of homes to make a simple and sheltered home in. The boy looked long at it, then turned abruptly and plunged into the road before him.
It led straight across a shallow belt of fields and deep into the woods. Only a cart-track at first, it soon lost itself here in a path, and the path in turn grew fainter and became a brown, alluring ghost of a path. It was hard to trace, but this was ground that Neil knew, a favourite haunt of his, though few other boys ventured to trespass here. The woods were part of the Everard estate.
Neil had found his first May flowers here on the first spring that he was privileged to give them to Judith. Last year she had helped him look for them here. His errand here was not so pleasant to-day. The brown path did not really lead to the heart of the woods as it seemed to. It was not so long as it looked. It was a fairly direct short cut to the Everard house.
The boy followed it quickly, with no eyes for the dim lure of the woods to-day.
"You've beat me," he muttered once to himself; "I'll have a look at you."
Soon the woods were not so thick. They fell away around him, carelessly thinned at first, littered with fallen trees and stumps, but nearerthe house combed out accurately by the relentless processes of landscape gardening, and looking orderly and empty. The little path vanished entirely here. Ahead of Neil, through a thin fringe of trees, was the Colonel's rose garden; beyond it, the broad stretch of lawn and the house, bulky and towered and tall.
Neil broke through the trees and stood and looked at it, straight ahead, seen through the frame of the trellised entrance to the garden, upstanding and ugly and arrogant.
"You've beat me," he said to the Colonel's house. "You've beat me; you and him. I hate you!"
His voice had a hollow sound in the empty garden. Garden and lawn and house had the same look that the whole deserted town had caught to-day; the look of suddenly empty rooms where much life has been, a breathless strangeness that holds echoes of what has happened there, and even hints of what is to happen; haunted rooms. It is not best to linger there. Neil turned uneasily toward the path again.
He turned, then he turned back, stood for a tense minute listening, then broke through the rose garden and began to run across the lawn. Very faint and small, so that he could not tell whether it was in a man's voice or a woman's, butechoing clearly across the deserted garden, he had heard a scream from the house.
It came from the house somewhere, though as Neil ran toward it the house still looked tenantless. The veranda was without its usual gay litter of cushions and books and serving trays. At the long windows that opened on it all the curtains were close drawn—or at all but one.
As Neil reached the house he saw that the middle window was thrown high and the long, pale-coloured curtain was dragged from its rod and dangling over the sill. Just then he heard a second scream from the house. It was so choked and faint that he barely heard it. Neil ran up the steps and slipped through the open window into the Everards' library.
Little light came through the curtained windows. The green room, sparsely scattered with furniture in summer covers of light chintz that glimmered pale and forbidding, looked twice its unfriendly length in the gloom. There was a heavy, dead scent of too many flowers in the air. On a table across the room a bowl of hothouse hyacinths, just overturned, crushed the flowers with its weight and dripped water into the sodden rug.
Neil, at the window looking uncertainly into the half-dark room, saw the bowl and the white massof crushed flowers, and then something else, something that shifted and stirred in a far corner of the room. He saw it dimly at first, a dark, struggling group. There were two men in it.
One was a man who had screamed, but he was not screaming now. It would hardly have been convenient for him to scream, for the other, the smaller and slighter man of the two, was clutching him by the throat, gripping it with a hand that he could not shake off as the two figures swayed back and forth.
"Who's there?" Neil cried.
Nobody answered him. Nobody needed to, for just then the two men who seemed to be fighting swung into the narrow strip of light before the uncurtained window and he could see their faces. He could see, too, that they were not fighting now, though they had seemed to be. The bigger man was choked into submission already. No sound came from him and he hung limp and still in the little man's hold. Just in the centre of the strip of light the little man relaxed his grip, and let him fall. He dropped to the floor in a limp, untidy looking heap, and lay still there, with the light full on his face, closed eyes and grinning mouth. The man was Colonel Everard, the man who stood over him was Charlie Brady.
As Neil looked Brady dropped on his kneesbeside the Colonel, felt for his heart, and found it. He knelt there, motionless, holding his hand pressed over it and peering intently into his face. Presently he got to his feet deliberately, gave a deep sigh of entire content with himself, and looked about him. Then and not until then he saw Neil. He saw him without surprise, if without much pleasure, it appeared.
"You're late," he remarked.
"You drunken fool," Neil began furiously, then stopped, staring at his cousin. Whatever the meaning of this exhibition was, Charlie was not drunk. The excitement that possessed him was excitement of some other kind. It possessed him entirely, though it was under control for the moment. His muscles twitched with it. His shoulders shifted restlessly. His hands closed and unclosed. His eyes were strangely lit, and there was an absent, exalted look about them. Whatever the excitement, it was strong—stronger than Charlie. Neil, his eyes now used to the half-light, could see no weapon in the room, dropped on the floor or discarded. Mr. Brady, normally a coward in his cups and out of them, had attacked his enemy with his bare hands.
"Charlie, what's got you?" Neil said. "What's come to you?"
"What's come to him, there?" Charlie said, in avoice that was changed, too, and was as remote and as strange as his eyes, a low voice, with the deceptive, terrible calm of gathering hysteria about it.
"Look what's come to him," the voice went on. "Don't he deserve it, and worse? How did I find him to-day when I broke in through the window there? At his old tricks again. There was a woman with him in the library there, when he came out to me. He locked the door. She's there now. Neil, you'd better get away from here. I don't know what you're doing here, but you'd better go, and go quick."
He had given this advice indifferently. He made his next observation indifferently, too, with his furtive, absent eyes on the library door.
"I've killed him."
"What's got you? Are you crazy?"
"No—not now. You'd better go. I want to take a look in there first. The key's in the door."
"Charlie, come back here."
The note of command that he was used to responding to in his young cousin's voice reached and controlled Mr. Brady even now; he obeyed and swung round and stood still, looking at Neil. Neil's dark eyes, just above the level of his own, and so like them, were unrecognizable now. They were dull with anger, and they were angry with him.
"What's the matter?" he quavered. "What's the matter, Neil?"
Between the two cousins, as they stood facing each other, the Colonel lay ominously still. The cruel eyes did not open, and the distorted mouth did not change.
"Look! You can see for yourself. Feel his heart," Mr. Brady offered, but his cousin's dark, disconcerting eyes did not leave his face. "What's the matter, Neil? What are you going to do?"
"I'm going to make you talk out to me," Neil said. "You'll tell me what's got you, and why you did this, which will be the ruin of you and me, too, but first you'll tell me something else. You'll tell me what you've hid from me for a year, you who can tell me the truth when you're drunk and lie out of it when you're sober, till you've worn me out and I'm sick of trying to get the truth from you. I'll be getting it now too late, but I'll get it. Have you or have you not been living on this man's money?"
"Yes."
"Was it hush money?"
"Yes," Mr. Brady said. "Neil, I'll tell you everything. You've guessed most of it, but I'll tell you the rest. I can prove it. I can prove everything I know. I did take hush money. Itwas dirty money, but I didn't care. I didn't care what happened. I didn't care till to-day."
"To-day?"
"I got—a letter."
"Go on," Neil said.
As he spoke Mr. Brady's face began suddenly to change, lighting again with that strange excitement which had gripped him, revived, and burning through its thin veneer of control. His eyes blazed with it, and his voice shook with it. He waved a trembling hand toward the library door. A sound had come from the library, the faintest of sounds, a low, frightened cry. It was like the ghost of a cry, but he heard. Neil heard it, too, and was at the door before him, trying to unlock it, fumbling with the key.
"She's there yet," Mr. Brady cried; "whoever she is. Well, she'll be the last of them. I had a letter, I tell you, a letter from Maggie. She's coming home, what's left of her—what he's left of her—Everard. I never thought he was to blame. I said he was, but I was talked out of it. If I'd thought so, if I'd suspected it, would I have touched a penny of his dirty money? But she's coming home. Maggie's coming home."
For the moment Neil was not concerned with the fact. Graver revelations might have passed over him unheeded. The key had turned at last.Then Neil felt the door being pushed open from inside. He stepped back and waited. The door opened cautiously for an inch or two, then swung suddenly wide. Standing motionless, framed in the library door, was Judith.
The two cousins, Mr. Brady shocked into sudden silence, stood with Colonel Everard's unconscious body behind them, unregarded, like any other bulky and motionless shape in the dim room, and stared at the girl who had come from the locked library.
"Not you," Neil's voice said dully. "Not here."
But the girl was Judith.
Bare-headed, slender in soft-falling white, she stood in the library door with both hands behind her, clasping her big, limp hat by its flaring brim. Her lightly poised, blond head was fluffy with small, escaping curls, her clear-coloured cheeks were warmly flushed, and between her red, slightly parted lips her breath came too quickly, but softly, still. A sheer, torn ruffle trailed from her skirt. One rose-coloured bow hung from her girdle awry and crushed, and looked the softer for that, like a crumpled flower.
About her dress and her whole small self there was a drooping and crumpled look. It was the look of a child that has played too hard. Surelythe most incongruous and pathetic little figure that had ever appeared from a room where a distressed or designing lady was suspected of hiding, she stood and returned Neil's look, but there was blank panic in her eyes.
They turned from Neil to Mr. Brady, wild eyed and pale beside him, to the disordered room, and back to Neil again, with no change of expression at all. They were wide and dilated and dark, intent still on some picture that they held and could not let go. Judith came an uncertain step or two forward into the room, stiffly, as if she were walking in her sleep, and stood still.
"Neil, what did you come here for?" she said. "I'm glad you came."
Her voice was sweet and expressionless, like her eyes, and though she had called Neil by name, she looked at him as if she had never seen him before. One small hand reached out uncertainly, pulled at his sleeve, and then, as he made no move to take it, dropped again, and began to finger the big hat that she held, and pluck at the flowers on it, but her eyes did not leave his face.
"Will they stand for this?" Mr. Brady was demanding incoherently behind them, "as young as this? Will the town stand it? No. And they won't blame me now. They can't. It was coming to you—you——"
He was in the grip of his own troubles again, and breaking into little mutterings of hysterical speech, which he now addressed directly to Colonel Everard, standing over him and not seeming to feel the need of an answer. It was an uncanny proceeding. The girl and boy did not watch it. They were seeing only each other.
"Judith," Neil began stumblingly, "what were you doing there? What's frightened you so? What you heard out here? That's all that frightened you, isn't it? Isn't it? But what made you come here alone like this? Didn't you know—— Oh, Judith——"
He stopped and looked down at her, saying nothing, but his eyes were troubled and dark with questions that he did not dare to ask. There was no answer to them in Judith's eyes, only blank fear. As Neil looked, the fear in Judith's eyes was reflected in his, creeping into them and taking possession there.
"Oh, Judith," he whispered miserably. "Oh, Judith."
Judith seemed to have heard what he said to her from far away, and to be only faintly puzzled by it, not interested or touched. Her eyes kept their secrets under his questioning eyes. They defied him. She was not like his little lost sweet-heart found again, but a stranger and an enemy,one of the people he hated, people who intrigued and lied, but were out of his reach and above him, and were all his enemies.
The boy's world was upsetting. Nothing that had happened to him in that room or ever had happened to him before had shaken it like that minute of doubt that he lived through in silence, with the strain of it showing in his pale face, and Charlie's voice echoing half heard in his ears. He drew back from Judith slightly as they stood. He was trembling. Judith's face was a blur of white before his eyes, then he could not see it—and then, as suddenly as it had come, his black minute was over.
"Take me away. I don't want to stay where he is any more. Is he dead?" Judith said, and she slipped her hand into Neil's.
Judith's voice was as lifeless and strange as before, and the hand in his was cold, but it was Judith's own little clinging hand, and the boy's hand closed on it tight. He stood still, feeling it in his, and holding it as if the poor little cold hand could give him back all his strength again. He looked round him at the dim room and its motionless owner and Charlie as if he were seeing them clearly for the first time. He was not angry with Charlie any longer. He was not angry at all. He drew a deep, sobbing breath of relief, droppedhis dark head suddenly and awkwardly toward Judith's unresponsive hand and kissed it, and then very gently let it go.
"Judith, you're you," he said, "just you, no matter what happens, and nothing else matters; nothing in the world, as long as you are you."
Judith only smiled her faint half smile at him, as if she guessed that some crisis had come and passed, but did not greatly care.
"Take me away," she repeated patiently. "I thought there'd be other people here. He said so. But I've come here alone before, only he was different to-day. He was different."
"Don't tell me. I don't want to know. I won't ever ask you again. I never ought to have asked you. It's all right, dear. It's all right."
"I didn't know people were like that—anybody, ever. I just didn't know——"
"Don't, dear," said Neil sharply. The small, bewildered voice that held more wonder and pain than her words broke off, but her bewildered eyes still wondered and grieved. Neil's arms went out to her suddenly and drew her close, holding her gently, and hiding her small, pathetic face against his shoulder.
"Don't," he whispered. "I'll take care of you. I'm going to take care of you. Nobody's going to hurt you any more."
"Neil, I just didn't know. I didn't know."
"It's all right. I'm going to take you away. Just wait, dear. I'm going to take care of you."
He spoke to her softly, saying the same thing over and over, as if he were quieting a frightened child. She was quiet in his arms like a frightened and tired child in any arms held out to it. One arm had slipped round his neck and clung to him. She drew long choking breaths as if she were too tired to cry. Gradually they stopped, but the arm round his neck only clung tighter.
"Don't leave me," she whispered.
"No, I'm not going to. I'm going to take care of you. You know that, don't you, Judith?"
"Yes. Neil?"
"Yes, dear."
"Neil." Still in his arms, because she felt safe and protected there, Judith lifted her head and looked at him, and into her sweet, dazed eyes, full of a terror that she could not understand, came a faint flash of anger. This boy who held her so safe and comforted was her enemy, too. Long before the ugly accident of what had happened behind the library doors he had been her enemy, and he was her enemy now, though she needed his protection and took it. Their quarrel was not over.
"Neil, I don't forgive you. I'm never going to forgive you."
"All right, dear."
"And I hate you. You know that, don't you? I hate you."
"Yes, dear, I know it. We aren't going to talk about that now. Let me go."
Both arms were round him now. Judith let him draw them gently apart and down, and drew back from him. The anger was gone from her eyes. She watched him wide eyed and still, as children watch the incomprehensible activities of grownups, or devoted but jealous dogs watch them.
"Don't leave me," she said. "You're sweet to me." Then she gave a sharp, startled little cry.
"Neil," she begged, "don't touch him. I don't want you to touch him. What are you going to do?"
The light had not had time to dim or shift perceptibly in Colonel Everard's big room while so much was settling itself for Neil and Judith. The Colonel still lay with the pale shaft of afternoon light on his unconscious face. Now the boy was kneeling beside him. He slipped a strong, careful arm under his shoulders, and bent over him, touching him with quick, sure hands. He ignored Mr. Brady, who stood crying out incoherent protests beside him, and finally put a shaking hand on his shoulder.
Neil shook it off, and rose and stood facing his cousin.
"I thought so," he said, with a short laugh. "You had me going at first, Charlie, when I came in here and saw what a pretty picture you made. I believed you. I thought you had killed him. I might have known things like that don't happen in Green River."
Neil put both hands on his cousin's shoulders and looked at him. Mr. Brady was not an attractive sight at that moment. The excitement that had held and swayed him was leaving him now, and he looked shaken and weak. An unhealthy colour purpled his cheeks, and his sullen eyes glared vindictively, but could not meet Neil's eyes.
"Don't laugh at me," he muttered. "Don't you dare to laugh at me."
"Going to beat me up, too?" his cousin inquired. "Poor old Charlie! Let's hope your friend there will laugh at you when he talks this over with you. He'll come out of this all right, but he'll be in a better temper if he has a doctor here. I'll 'phone for one."
"What do you mean? I've killed him. I'm glad I killed him."
His cousin laughed again. "Killed him? The man's no more dead than you are. You've knocked him out, that's all. But you didn't kill him. Is that the 'phone over there?"
A desk telephone on a big Louis Quinze table at one end of the room, the instrument masked by the frilly skirts of a French mannequin, perhaps the only lady who had ever been permitted to be insipid in that room and to stay there long, answered Neil's question by ringing faintly, once and again. Neil started toward it, but did not reach it. Mr. Brady had flung himself suddenly upon him in a last burst of feverish strength, which he dissipated recklessly by shrieking out incoherent things, and striking misdirected blows.
Neil parried them easily, caught his thin arms and held them at his sides. Keeping them so, he forced him against the edge of the flimsy table and held him there and looked at him.
"You shan't answer that 'phone," Mr. Brady cried, in a last futile burst of defiance. "You shan't stop me. You shan't interfere. I'll kill him, I tell you, and you shan't answer that 'phone. You shan't——"
Mr. Brady's voice died away, and he was silent under his cousin's eyes.
"Through?" said Neil presently.
"Yes," he muttered.
"Do you mean it?"
Mr. Brady nodded sullenly.
"You've made a fool of yourself?"
Mr. Brady nodded again.
"Neil," he got out presently, "I can make it up to you. I haven't been square with you, but I can. I will. You don't know——"
"You've done talking enough. Will you go now?"
"Yes."
"You'll quiet down and go to mother's and stay there till I come?"
"Yes."
Neil let him go.
"Maybe I'll finish up your friend for you myself, Charlie, after you leave here," he offered. "I've thought of it often enough. Now I come here and fight for him instead of fighting against him. I fight with you. Poor old Charlie. Murder and sudden death! I tell you, things like that don't happen in Green River."
Neil stopped talking suddenly. The telephone at his elbow had rung again, this time with a sharp, sudden peal, peremptory as an impatient voice speaking. Neil caught it up, jerked off the simpering lady by her audacious hat, and answered.
At once, strangely intimate and near in that room where the three had been shut in for the last half hour alone and away from the rest of the worldwhile it went on as usual or faster, a man's voice spoke to him. It was almost unrecognizable, so excited and hoarse, but it was Luther Ward's.
"Hello," Neil said. "Hello. Yes, this is Everards'. No, he can't come to the 'phone. He—what? What's that?"
Neil stopped and listened breathlessly. Mr. Brady, slinking head down from the room, turned curiously to stare at him, and Judith, slipping across the room like a little white ghost, drew close to him and felt for his hand. Neil took her hand, this time with no response of heart or nerves. He had put down the telephone, replacing the receiver mechanically, but Luther Ward's voice still echoed in his ears.
It had spoken to an uncanny accompaniment of half-heard voices, rattling unintelligibly in the room where Ward was, the prosaic, tobacco-scented room that Neil knew so well.
"Tell Everard to come," Ward's voice had said. "He's to come down here, to Saxon's office. I'm there now. Theodore Burr has shot himself. Yes, shot himself. He won't live through the night. Who's this talking to me? Neil Donovan, it's you. What are you doing at Everard's? Never mind. Come down here yourself. Come straight down. Theodore's conscious, and talking, and he's been asking for you."
Green River was getting ready for the rally in Odd Fellows' Hall. It was six o'clock on the evening of the seventeenth of September, and "Grand rally, Odd Fellows' Hall, September Seventeenth at eight-thirty," had been featured for weeks in the Green RiverRecord, on the list that with a somewhat arrogant suggestion of prophetic powers possessed by the _Record_ was headed "Coming Events." It was always a scanty list, especially in the fall, when ten, twenty, thirty companies began to play larger centres, and church lawn parties and circuses could no longer appear on it. Sometimes not more than six events were to come in a gray and workaday world. But six were enough to announce. Even a true prophet is not expected to see all the future, only to see clearly all that he sees, and theRecorddid that.
This rally was important enough to be listed all by itself, and it did not need the adjective grand. It was The Rally.
It was Green River's own—a local, almost a family, affair. No out-of-town celebrities wereto be imported this time, to be listened to with awe and then wined and dined by the Colonel safe from the curious eyes of the town. This time old Joe Grant was to preside, as he had done as a matter of course on all such occasions when he was the acknowledged head of the town in political and financial matters, in the old days of high-sounding oratory and simpler politics that were gone forever, but were not very long ago. Judge Saxon, an old timer, too, and better loved than the Honourable Joe, had declined the honour of presiding, but had the authentic offer of it, his first distinction of the kind for years.
It was a local but very important occasion. It was Colonel Everard's first official appearance as candidate for mayor. It was to be a very modest appearance. No more time was allotted for his speech than for Luther Ward's. He was putting himself on a level with Luther and the Judge and the Honourable Joe and identifying himself at last with local politics. The evening emphasized the great man's condescension in accepting this humble office and honouring Green River. Even with the scandal of Theodore Burr's suicide unexplained still and only two weeks old, interest centred on the rally. It was a triumph for the town.
Green River was almost ready. Dugan's orchestra was engaged for the evening, instead of a rival organization from Wells, which the Colonel often imported upon private and public occasions. Jerry Dugan was getting old, too, like the Judge and the Honourable Joe. He had not lost the peculiar wail and lilt from his fiddling, but he had made few recent additions to his repertoire. Just now the band concert in front of Odd Fellows' Hall was winding up with his old favourite: "A Day on the Battlefield."
It had the old swing still, contagious as ever. Loafers in front of the hall shuffled their feet in time to it. Moon-struck young persons hanging two by two over the railings of the bridge to gaze at the water straightened themselves and listened. An ambitious soloist lounging against the court-house fence across the square began to whistle it with elaborate variations, at the inspiring moment when "morning in the forest" had bird-called and syncopated itself into silence, and actual fighting, and the martial music of the charge began.
High and lilting and shrill, it hung in the still night air, alive for the hour, challenging the echoes of dead tunes that lingered about the square, only to die away and be one with them at last; band music, old-fashioned band music, blatant and empty and splendid, clear through the still night air, attuned to the night and the town.
"Good old tune. Gets into your feet," Judge Saxon said, while his wife adjusted his tie before the black walnut mirror in their bedroom, but his unusual tribute to the tune was perfunctory to-night, and his wife ignored it, wisely taking this moment of helpfulness to plunge him suddenly and briskly into a series of questions which she had been trying in vain for some time to get the correct answers to.
"Hugh," she said, "why wouldn't you take the chair to-night?"
"You were the only thing I ever tried to take away from Joe Grant and got away with it, Millie," the Judge explained gallantly.
"Don't you think this rally is like old times? Don't you want to see the town stand on its own feet again, instead of being run from outside?"
"I do, Millie."
Mrs. Saxon made her next point triumphantly, connecting it with the point before by some obscure logic known only to ladies.
"Hugh, a father could not do more for Lillian Burr than the Colonel has since poor Theodore went. The house full of flowers, calling there himself every day and twice a day, though she won't see him; but Lillian won't see any one. The Colonel's been ailing himself, too, but he wouldn't put off the rally and disappoint the town. Andthe new library will open this fall, and there's talk that he's giving an organ to the church. Hugh, don't you think Theodore's death may have sobered him? Don't you think this may be the beginning of better things? Don't you think——"
"I think you're making a butterfly bow. I don't like them," said the Judge, with the ingenuous smile that somehow closed a subject. She sighed, but changed her attack.
"Turn round now. I want to brush you. Hugh, what has happened to Neil Donovan?"
"What do you mean, happened to him?" snapped the Judge, and then added soberly, "I don't know, Millie. I wish I did."
"An Irish boy can get just so far and no farther."
"How far, Millie?"
"Don't be flippant, Hugh. There's something strange about Neil lately. He didn't speak three times at the table last time he came to supper here. He looks at me as if he didn't know who I was when I speak to him on the street sometimes. There's no life in him. He's like Charlie and all the rest of them—giving out just when things are going his way; that's an Irish boy every time."
"When things are going his way? When his best friend has just shot himself?"
"I didn't refer to that, Hugh," said Mrs. Saxon with dignity.
"No?"
"I referred to Neil's family affairs, and the fact that Colonel Everard has taken him up."
"Maggie home and behaving herself and no questions asked, Charlie shipped to Wells, and Neil going shooting twice with the Colonel?"
"Three times, Hugh."
"And that's what you call things going his way."
"Hugh, why should those two spend any time together at all? They hate each other, or I always thought so—that is, if a man like the Colonel could hate a boy like Neil. What does he want of Neil now? What does Neil want of him?"
"They don't tell me, Millie."
"But it's queer. It frightens me, Hugh. It's as queer as——"
"What?"
"Everything," Mrs. Saxon said, goaded into an exaggeration foreign to her placid type, "everything, lately. You refusing to preside to-night. Lillian Burr shutting herself up in this uncanny way. It is uncanny, even if she is in trouble. Minna Randall taking to church work, and sewing for hours at a time, and taking long drives with her husband. They haven't been inside the Colonel's doors for weeks. Their second girl toldour Mary that they have refused five invitations there in the last month. It's my idea that he gave that last stag dinner because he couldn't get Minna or Edith there, or any woman. Why should his own circle turn against him, just when he's doing real good to the town? And it's not only his own circle that's against him. I was matching curtains at Ward's when Sebastian came in to-day, and Luther Ward was barely civil to him—the Colonel's own secretary. What's wrong with the town, Hugh? Can't it be grateful to the Colonel, now when he really deserves it?"
"Don't worry about what Everard deserves. He's not likely to get it, Millie."
Again the Judge was closing the subject, and this time his wife had no more to say. She gave his threadbare, scrupulously pressed coat a final pat and jerk of adjustment, and stood off and looked at him.
"You'll do," she said, "now go along. The music's stopping. It won't look well if you're late."
She turned off the flickering gas jet above the marble-topped bureau abruptly, but not before the Judge had caught the gleam of tears in her eyes.
"Why girl," he said, and came close to her andslipped an arm round her plump, comfortable waist. "You're really troubled."
"Yes."
"And vexed with me for not helping you."
"Yes."
He had drawn her toward a front window of the big, square room. The Judge and his wife stood by it quietly, looking down through a triangle of white, starched curtains at the glimmering, sparsely lit length of street below, and straightening out their difficulties in darkness and silence, as all true lovers should, even lovers at fifty, as these two were fortunate enough to be.
"Millie, I don't want to tease you," the Judge said. "I'll tell you anything you want to know."
"I've been so worried," she wept comfortably against his shoulder. "I'm so afraid."
"Why?"
"I feel as if something—anything might happen. I—oh, you'll only laugh. I can't just tell you, Hugh."
"I'll tell you," said the Judge.
He hesitated and then went on slowly, speaking more to himself than to her.
"Women hate change. That makes them dread it, even when it's not coming. You're dreading it, but it's not coming now, dear. There's feeling against Everard. You're right, but you exaggerate it. It's instinctive and unformulated. It hasn't gone far and won't go any farther. He won't let it. The rally and the library and this new democracy stuff, stag dinners to Ward's crowd and all, are part of a campaign to stop it. The campaign will succeed. Everard's own crowd won't quarrel with him. They can't afford to. Everard has pulled through worse times than this. I've helped him myself, and I shall help him again.
"There'll be no change, Millie. Things will go on just the way they are. I've lived the best years of my life believing that it was best they should, and if I'm wrong, I'm too old to change my mind. I've said somebody had to own the town, and it might as well be Everard. I've said the Burrs and Kents and Randalls, and old Joe Grant's young wife with their parties and drinks and silly little love affairs, were playing too hard, but doing no real harm, planting their cheap, fake smart set here in Green River where it don't belong. Now poor Theodore Burr's dead. That don't look like play. Harry Randall's so deep in debt to the bank for what Everard's let him borrow that he has to stay on there at three thousand a year, though he's been offered twice that in Wells. Everard won't let him go. And the best I can say about myself in the years I've worked for Everard is that I've kept my hands clean, ifI have had to keep my eyes shut, but I can say that to you, Millie."
"It does look like old times down there," he went on softly, after a minute. "The street and the lights are the same. And it sounds like old times. It was from a rally in the hall that I first went home with you, Millie. Remember? I was just a boy then, but I wish I was half the man I was then, to-night." He heard a murmur of protest, and laughed. "But I do, Millie. I—wouldn't be helping Everard."
"Oh, Hugh!"
"Don't worry. Everard will pull through all right. Look at the Randalls over there, starting for the hall. Leave your windows open, Millie, and you'll soon hear them all cheering for Everard. The moon won't rise till late, but it will be full to-night. Listen, the band's going into the hall now."
The Judge rested his cheek for a moment against his wife's soft, smooth hair, the decorous, satisfying caress of a decorous generation, then he raised his head with a long, tired sigh.
"I wish I was young," he said. "I wish I was young to-night."
"I wish I was young," the Judge had said, with a thrill and hunger that was the soul of youthitself in his voice. At the moment when he said it, a boy who had the privilege that the Judge coveted, and was not enjoying it just then, was leaning against the court-house railing, and watching Green River crowd into Odd Fellows' Hall.
Another boy had pushed his way across the square to his side, and was not heartily welcomed there, but was calmly unconscious of it.
"Some night, Donovan," he remarked,
"Some night, Willard," Neil agreed gravely.
"Going in? Good for three hours of hot air?"
"I'm not going. No."
"Good boy. Say—" Mr. Willard Nash lowered his voice as he made this daring suggestion—"we'll go around to Halloran's, and get into a little game."
His invitation was not accepted.
"Jerry Dugan's not dead yet," observed Willard presently.
Strains of a deservedly popular waltz tune, heard from inside the hall, gave faint but unmistakable proof of this. Willard kept time with his feet as he listened, paying the tune the tribute of silence, a rare one from him. Standing so, the two were sharply contrasted figures, though the flickering lamps in the square threw only faint light here, and showed them darkly outlined against the railing, as they leaned there side byside. Pose, carriage, every movement and turn of the head were different, as different as a bulky and overgrown child is from a boy turning into a man.
"Some night," Willard repeated, unanswered, but unchilled by it, "and some crowd."
The hall had been filling fast. Though the waltz still swung its faint challenge into the night, so much of Green River had responded to it already that now it was arriving only by twos and threes. But the groups still followed each other fast under the big globe of light at the entrance door, gayly shaded with red for the occasion, and up the bare, clattering stairs to the floor above, and the hall.
Willard was right, more right than he knew. There was a crowd up there, a crowd as Willard did not understand the word; a crowd with a tone and temper of its own and a personality of its own. It was subject to laws of its own and could think and feel for itself, and its thoughts and feelings were made up of the brain stuff of every person in it, but different from them all. It was a newly created thing, a new factor in the world, and like all crowds it was born for one evening, to live for that evening only, and do its work and die.
Upstairs behind closed doors, such a crowd was forming; getting ready to think its own thoughtsand act and feel, and so many houses, little and big, had emptied themselves to contribute to it, so many family discussions like the Saxons' had gone on as a prelude to it, that you might fairly say the crowd up there was Green River.
Willard, watching the late arrivals and commenting upon them to Neil, still an uncommunicative audience, was vaguely stirred.
"This gets me," he conceded. "There's something about old Dugan's music that always gets me. For two cents, I'd go in. I sat through a patent medicine show there last week, because I didn't have the sense to stay away. It always gets me when there is anything doing in the hall. And—" he paused, heavily testing his powers of self-analysis, "it gets me," he brought out at length, "more to-night than it ever did before. It—gets me."
"Look, there's Joe Grant," Willard went on. "This is his night, all right. Look at the bulge to that manuscript case, and the shine to his hair. He mixes varnish with his hair dye, all right. I said, look at him."
"I'm looking."
"Well, you don't do much else. What's eating you to-night? Say, will you go in if I will?"
An inarticulate murmur answered him.
"What's that?"
"No."
"All right. Well, what do you know about that? Look there."
"I'm looking."
The latest comers were crowding hurriedly into the entrance hall by this time, and with them, a slender, heavily veiled figure had slipped quickly through the door and out of sight.
"Was that Lil?" Willard said. "Lil Burr?"
"Yes."
"She wouldn't come here; I don't believe it."
"I know it."
"How?"
"She told me."
"What was she doing, talking to you? Why, she won't talk to anybody. She——"
"You'll be late at Hallorans'."
"Aren't you coming?"
"No."
"But you said you would. I don't want to go if you don't. I don't half like to leave you here, you act so queer to-night. What makes you act so? What's eating——"
"Nothing."
Willard detached himself from the railings and regarded his friend, suddenly breathless with surprise, and deeply grieved. Nothing. The word, harmless in itself, had been spoken so that it hithim like an actual blow, straight from the shoulder. Neil, shifting so that the light showed his face, was returning his look with the sudden, unreasoning anger that we feel toward little sounds that beat their slow way into our consciousness at night, to irritate us unendurably at last.
"Go," he urged, "go along to Halloran's. Go anywhere."
"Well, what do you know about that?" began Willard, offended, and then forgave him. There was a look in Neil's pale face that commanded forgiveness. It was pale and strained with a trouble that had nothing to do with Willard, and Willard was respectful and inarticulate before it.
"That's all right," Willard muttered, "that will be all right. I'll go."
Neil took no notice of this promise. Up in the hall the waltz had swelled to a high, light-hearted climax, heady and strained, like the sudden excitements that sweep a crowd. It came clear through the open windows, making one last appeal to the boy below to come up and be part of what was there. And just then a small closed car swept down through the empty square and stopped. Two men stepped out, and paused in the doorway under the red-shaded light.
One was the Colonel's secretary, waiting on thestep beyond range of the light, a tall, shadowy figure, and the other, who stood with the light on his face, was Colonel Everard.
He was still pale from his week of illness, but his keen eyes and clear-cut profile were more effective for that. He stood listening to the sounds from upstairs, and he smiled as he listened. He turned at last and looked out across the square as if he could feel Neil's eyes upon him and were returning their look, and then turned away and disappeared up the stairs.