"I can"t stay very long. They"d miss me."
"I"ll let you go when you want to."
"I don"t want to. I feel so comfortable--all sleepy, but so wide-awake.
I never want to go."
Judith, remembering this moment until she carried it into her dreams with her, could not have shared it with Natalie. It was a dream already, to be wondered at and forgotten by daylight, as she stared across the schoolroom at Neil, not a romantic figure at all with his ill-fitting suit and his tumbled hair; forgotten until the next moment like it came--next in a lengthening series of dream pictures, of moonlight and candlelight and faintly heard music, a secret too sweet to share, a hidden treasure of dreams.
Certain pictures stood out clearest. In one, she was skating with Neil.
Willard was giving a chowder party at the Hiawatha Club. This imposing name belonged to a rough one-room camp with a kitchen in a lean-to and a row of bunks in the loft above, and a giant chimney, with a crackling blaze of fire to combat the bleakness of the view through the uncurtained windows--Mirror Lake. It was a failure as a mirror that day, veiled with snow, and the white birches fringing it showed bare and cold among the warm green of spruce and pine.
The camp was built and owned and the canoes and iceboats kept in repair in the boathouse, and the cook maintained and replaced when he left from loneliness, all by a syndicate with Judge Saxon as president. Forming it was one of the last independent social activities of the town before the Colonel took charge.
It was bad ice-boating to-day. The wind was fitful, and the boat, a graceful and winged thing in full flight, dragged heavily along, looking the clumsy makeshift box of unpainted boards that it was. It was a day to be towed along on your skates with one hand on the boat. Judith and Neil had tired of this and fallen behind.
Close together, but not taking hands, they swung slowly through the unpeopled emptiness, leaving a tiny scattering of tracks behind, the blue-white ice firm under their feet through a light film of snow. The ice-boat was out of sight, the sprightly and unexpurgated ballad of "Amos Moss," rendered in the closest of close harmony, could be heard no longer, and a heavy silence hung over the lake. The camp lay far behind them, a vanishing speck.
"Neil, take me back," Judith directed suddenly.
"Not yet."
"Please. I want some pop-corn.... Neil, I don"t like you. You won"t talk. You"re queer to-day."
He did not answer. They cut through the ice in silence. It was rougher here. They were near the north end of the lake. There was open water there to-day, black water into which a boat might crash and go down; it made the water under them seem nearer to Judith, black water with only the floor of ice between. She shivered, and Neil broke the silence abruptly, his eyes still straight ahead.
"Judith."
"Oh, you can talk then?"
"Judith--do you love me?"
"Don"t be silly." Judith spoke sharply. Days at the camp were always a trial to her. The crowd, bunched together in a big hay-rack mounted on runners, started out noisy and gay, like a party of children, singing, groping for apples in the straw, and playing children"s games. But at night, slipping home under the moon to a tinkle of sleigh-bells, covered with rugs two by two, a change would take place: arms would slip around waists that yielded after perfunctory protest; in the dark of the woods there would be significant whispering and more significant silences; Willard would be unmanageable. Judith saw this with alien eyes because of Neil, and dreaded it. This that was between them was so much more beautiful, not love-making, not real love, only a strange, white dream.
"You don"t, then? You don"t love me?"
"We"re too young."
He did not argue the point. His silence had made her lonely before, now it frightened her. She slipped a hand into his, warm through its clumsy glove.
"Cross hands. Don"t you want to?"
"No."
"But I want to. I"m tired. How limp your hand feels. Hold my hands tighter. Neil----"
"What?"
"You don"t mind--what I said just now?"
"What did you say?"
"That about not loving you."
"That?" He laughed a bitter, lonely sort of laugh, as if she were talking about something that happened a long time ago. "You had to say it. It"s true. I knew it well enough. I just thought I"d ask you."
"Do you want me to very much--want me to love you?"
"Don"t talk any more about it."
"Neil, suppose I should marry Willard?"
"I suppose you will."
"You won"t mind too much?"
"What call would I have to mind? Who am I? What am I?"
He laughed again, the same hard and bitter laugh, and struck out faster, gripping her hands hard, so that it hurt, but looking away from her across the dead, even white of the trackless snow. There was a pain not to be comforted or reached in his beautiful eyes. It had nothing to do with her.
"Neil, wouldn"t you care at all?" she said jealously.
"Care?"
"If I married Willard?"
"Oh, yes."
"Neil, do you love me?"
He did not answer or seem to hear, and now Judith gave up asking questions. Carried along at his side in silence, she listened to the m.u.f.fled creak of the skates on the snow-covered ice, hushed by the steady and sleepy sound of it, half closing her eyes. His left arm was behind her shoulders now, to support her, and she could feel it there, warm and strong. Breathing when he breathed, her heart beating in time with his, swinging far to right and left, tense with the stroke or yielding deliciously in the recovery, caught in the rhythm of it as if some force outside them both were carrying them on like one, and not two, and would never let them go, Judith yet felt far away from him.
She was alone in the heart of a snow-covered world, but she was growing content to be alone. She looked up at his white, set face with wide and fearless eyes, while the lure of unexplored and unseen ice invited them all around, and the gray and brooding sky shut them in closer and closer.
"Neil," she said softly, not caring now whether he answered or heard, "I wish we needn"t ever go back. I love to-day."
Not long after this Judith and Neil went snow-shoeing one Sat.u.r.day afternoon by special appointment, an epoch-making event for them. Judith did not often walk with him or take him driving when the sleigh was entrusted to her. She was not often seen with him. With quartette practice and committee work for the dramatic club and other official pretexts for the time they spent together, Willard was not jealous yet, though the winter was almost over, and the treasury of dreams was filling fast.
But this time she made an engagement with Neil as openly as if he were Willard, while Natalie listened jealously. She started with him openly from the front door, with her mother"s disapproving eyes upon them from the library window, and Neil proudly carrying her snowshoes, all unconscious of the critical eyes. The afternoon began well, but no afternoon with Neil could be counted upon to go as it began. Two hours later, when they emerged from the Everard woods into the Colonel"s snow-covered rose garden, they had quarrelled about half a dozen unrelated subjects, all equally unimportant in themselves, but suddenly important to Neil, who now found further matter for debate.
"What did you bring me in here for?"
"Didn"t you know I was?"
"How should I know? I"m no friend of Everard"s. I don"t know my way through his grounds."
"What makes you call him Everard, without any Colonel or Mr.? It sounds so--common."
"It"s good enough for me. Here, I don"t want to go near his house. I hate the sight of it."