"It was I who helped you to all this land, money, the grand house we shall live in. Oh, who ever thought that a bit of crumpled paper would do so much?"
Storms shrugged his shoulders, and prepared to walk onward.
Judith saw this, and her temper, always ready to take fire, kindled up.
"You lift your shoulders--you keep silent when I speak of the paper which brought all these grand things, as if you did not mean to give me credit for giving it to you."
"What would the paper have been without a shrewd man to use it?
Besides, you found it in the bushes where any other person might have picked it up."
Judith felt a strange choking in her throat.
"What does this mean, Richard Storms?"
"Mean? why, nothing. Only it is getting stormy here. When you lift your voice in that way, it might be heard from the house. Walk on; you have nothing to flare up about."
There was something in the man"s voice that would have warned Judith, but for her own rising temper. As it was, she walked toward the precipice, sometimes keeping ahead, and looking back at him over her shoulder. He certainly looked pale in the moonlight.
"Now, Richard, what is the meaning of this offish talk? Is it that you want to get rid of your promise, with all these twistings and turnings?"
When Judith put this question, she had halted close by the brink of the precipice and turned around, facing the young man, who came up more slowly.
Storms attempted to laugh, but he was too hoa.r.s.e for that.
"I haven"t said a word about being off; but, if I had, all this temper wouldn"t hold me back. What should hinder me doing as I please? The paper was as much mine as yours."
"What should hinder you, d.i.c.k Storms? Don"t ask me that. I do not want to talk about the things I saw, that night."
Judith stood close to the precipice as she said this, between the very edge and Storms, who strode forward till his white sinister face was close to hers.
"You saw what? No more hints, I am tired of them. You saw what?"
"I will not talk about it here. When I do speak, it will be to Sir Noel Hurst," answered the girl, bravely.
"Sir Noel Hurst will be very likely to believe you against my oath, and the paper signed by Jessup himself."
"The paper that I gave you, fool that I was!"
"Exactly, if you could not trust me."
"I did trust you--I did shield you. I gave you the paper. I kept still as the grave about what I saw that night."
"Still as the grave--there is no stillness like that," said the man, in a voice so hoa.r.s.e and strange that Judith instinctively attempted to draw sideway from her perilous position.
But Storms changed as she did, still with his face to hers, pressing her toward the edge.
"If I kept back another paper, it was because I meant to give it you on our wedding day, and prove how much a poor girl could do toward saving the man she loved from--"
"From what?" questioned Storms, throwing his arm around the girl and drawing her back from the precipice, as if he had for the first time seen her danger. "Of what are you speaking, Judith?"
"Of a paper I found in the dress that was taken off William Jessup after he died, which makes the one I gave you of no worth at all."
"You have such a paper, and kept it back?" The man absolutely threw a tone of tender reproach into a voice that had been cold as ice and bitter as gall a minute before. "Let me read it; the moonlight is strong enough."
"It is not with me. I have put it by in safe hiding, meaning to burn it before your face and pay you for the marriage lines with your life."
Storms drew the girl farther away from the precipice, for he feared to trust the instinct of destruction that had brought him there, and would not all at once be subdued. He felt that his own life was, for the time, bound up in hers, and absolutely shuddered as he thought of the fate from which a word had saved him and her.
For a time they walked back to the orchard in silent disturbance: she unconscious of the awful danger she had run; he pondering new schemes in his mind.
"Why will you always doubt me?" he said, at last.
"Because you force me to doubt," she answered, almost patiently, for the ebb-tide of her anger had set in.
"No; it is your own bad temper, which always drives me into teasing you. I have the license in my pocket, and came to settle everything."
"The license!"
At this word Judith turned her face to the moonlight, and Storms saw that his falsehood had done its work.
"While you have been doubting me," he said, with a look and tone of deep injury, "I have been upon my knees almost, persuading the old people to give up this Jessup girl, and take you in her place."
"And they have? Oh, Richard!"
"I came to set the day when you would come to the farm and stop a bit with the old mother."
"Ah!" said Judith, with tears in her eyes, "I cannot remember when I had a mother."
Storms lifted his hand impatiently. Even he shrunk from using the name of his kind old mother as a snare for the girl.
"You will say nothing of this to your father, or of my coming here at all. When we are wedded and ready to start for the new home, it will be a grand surprise for him."
"Shall we--oh, Richard, shall we take him with us?" cried Judith.
"That may be as you wish. I will not object."
"Oh, Richard, I would give up that horrible paper now if I had it with me!"
"No, let it rest until I can exchange it for the marriage lines; then it will be as much for your interest as mine that it should be made ashes of. But be sure and have it about you then."
"I will, I will. Only it is like putting a snake in my bosom when I hide it there."
"And that pretty dress. Leave nothing behind you. On the second day from this I will be at the nearest station. Meet me there, but mind that no one sees us speaking to each other."
"I will be careful."
"Good-night, then."
The girl looked at him wistfully, as if she expected something more; but Storms only reached out his hand. He was not quite a Judas, and did not kiss her.