It was entirely clear. The Judge had left no room for uncertainty or argument, and the boy did not attempt to argue or even to answer. He stood looking uncertainly down at the Judge, as if for the moment he could not see anything in the room quite distinctly, the Judge"s face, with its near-sighted blue eyes and red-gold beard and thinning hair, or Colonel Everard"s clear-cut profile.
"Better go," said the Judge gently.
"I"d better go," the boy repeated mechanically, but he did not move.
Colonel Everard put down his papers deliberately, and favoured him with a glance, amused and surprised, as if he had not expected to find him still in the room, and was prepared to forget at once that he was there; a disconcerting sort of glance, but the boy"s brown eyes met it gallantly, and cleared as they looked. They grew bright and defiant again, with a little laugh in the depths of them. The ghost of a laugh, too, lurked in the boy"s low voice somewhere.
"You"re right, Judge. I"ll go. I"m wasting my time here," he said, "asking you who"s back of what you"ve done to me--when I know. I won"t ask you again, but I"ll ask you, I"ll ask you both, who"s back of everything that"s crooked or wrong in this town? Little or big, he"s back of it all; straight back of it, or well back of it, hiding his face and pulling the wires. He"s to blame for it all, for he"s made the town what it is.
"He"s got his hand on the neck of the town, and got hold of it tighter, gradual, so n.o.body saw it and knocked it off; tighter and tighter, squeezing the life out. He never made a gift to the town with one hand that he didn"t take it back with the other. What the town gets without him giving it, he won"t let it keep. The whole town"s got his stamp on it, grafting and lying and putting up a front. The whole town"s afraid of him. The Judge here, that"s the best man in town, don"t dare call his soul his own. Me, I"m afraid of him, too, and the only reason I dare stand up and say to his face what"s said behind his back is because I"ve got nothing to lose. It"s him, there----"
"Don"t, son," muttered the Judge tardily, unregarded, but Colonel Everard listened courteously, with a faint, amused smile growing rather stiff on his thin lips.
"Him, that"s too good to speak to me or look at me, sitting there grinning, and reading fine print, making out not to care, he"s back of it all--him, Everard."
The two men, who had heard him out, did not interrupt him now. It was only a pa.s.sionate jumble of boyish words they had listened to, but behind it, vibrating in his tense voice, was something bigger than he could frame words to express, something that commanded silence; pain forcing its way into speech, long repression broken at last. The dignity of it was about him still, though his brown eyes flashed no more defiance, and he was only a shabby and hopeless boy walking uncertainly to the office door, and fumbling with the handle.
"I"ll go out this way," he said. "I"ve had enough of Theodore. And I"ve had enough of this place. I"ll say good morning, gentlemen."
In a prosaic and too often unsatisfactory world, which is not the stage, no curtain drops to relieve you of the embarra.s.sment of thinking what to say next after a record speech; you have to step out of the limelight, and walk somewhere else. Neil Donovan, emerging from the ancient building which contained Judge Saxon"s office into Post-office Square after a brief interval of struggling successfully for self-control in a dusty corridor little suited to such struggles, and not even ensuring the privacy which is wrongly believed to be necessary for them, had one more appointment to keep. He was late for it already. He glanced at the town clock and started off hurriedly to keep it.
Back of Court-house Hill another street, starting parallel to Court Street, rapidly loses its sense of direction and its original character of a business street, wavers to right and left, past a scatter of discouraged looking houses, and finally slants off in the general direction of the woods at the edge of the town, and the abortive, spa.r.s.ely wooded hill known to generations of picnickers--not the elite of the town, but humbler, more rowdy picnickers--as Mountain Rock.
The street never reaches it, but loses itself in a grubby tangle of smaller streets, thickly set with small houses, densely and untidily populated, the section known at first derisively and later in good faith as Paddy Lane. Through the intricate geography of this quarter Colonel Everard"s only openly declared enemy might have been seen making a hasty and expert way ten minutes later; quickly and directly as it permitted him to, he approached the base of the hill.
Disregarding more public and usual ways of ascent, he struck straight across a stubbly field that lay behind a row of peculiarly forlorn and tumbledown houses into a path so narrow that it was hard to see until you were actually looking down it, between the twin birches that marked the entrance. He followed it to the base of the cliff itself. The belt of stunted birches and dusty-looking alders that skirted the cliff was broken by an occasional scraggly pine. The boy stopped under one of them, leaned against the decaying trunk, produced a letter, and read it.
It was only a pencilled scrawl of a letter, on the roughest of copy paper, and so crumpled that he must have been quite familiar with it, but he read it intently.
"Neil," it ran, "I"ll meet you Sat.u.r.day, on top of Mountain Rock, same time and place. I shan"t see you till then. I don"t want to.
You frightened me last night. I don"t like you lately. Be nice to me Sat.u.r.day. JUDITH."
Only a pencilled scrawl, but he knew every word of it by heart, and of the burst of excited speech in the Judge"s office nothing remained in his mind but the general impression that he had made a fool of himself there. Perhaps he was too familiar with Judith"s letter, for the sting he had found there at first was gone from the words. He looked at them dully.
"I can"t stand much more," he said aloud.
He said it lifelessly, and with no defiance in his eyes, stating only a wearisome fact. He had seen the Colonel"s face through a kind of red mist in the Judge"s office, and felt reckless and strong. He did not feel like a hero now. He was tired.
He would hardly have cared just now if you had told him that back in Judge Saxon"s office two men who had not moved from their chairs since he left them, and who would not move until several vital points were settled, were discussing something he would not have believed them capable of discussing at such length and with so much feeling--the fortunes of the Donovan family.
He did not care just now for the little sights and sounds of spring that were all around him, the cl.u.s.ter of arbutus leaves at his feet, the faint, nestling bird noises, sweeter than song, and the stir and rustle of tiny, uncla.s.sified sounds that were signs of the pulse of spring beating everywhere, of change and growth going on whether human beings perceived or denied it.
"I can"t stand any more," said the boy.
Up the cliff to his right, strewn with pine needles that were brown-gold in the sun, a steep and tiny trail led the way to the top of the hill and his rendezvous. Now the boy crushed Judith"s letter into his pocket, turned to the trail with a sigh, and began to climb.
CHAPTER TEN
"They won"t like it, Judith," said Mrs. Randall for the last time, as she slipped into her evening coat.
"They? If you mean the Colonel----"
"I do."
Judith, looking up at her mother from the chaise-longue, could not have seen the radiant vision that she had adored as a child, when the spring and the Everards and the habit of evening dress all returned at once to Green River. Mrs. Randall"s blue gown was the creation of a Wells dressmaker, but lacked the charm of earlier evening frocks, anxiously contrived with the help of a local seamstress, when the clear blue that was still her favourite colour had been her best colour, when there was a touch more pink in the warm white of her complexion, and before the tiny, worried line in her broad, low forehead was there to stay. But there was no reflection of these changes in her daughter"s big, watching eyes.
"It will do him good not to like it," said Judith sweetly.
"What do you mean?"
"Oh, nothing, Mamma. Is that the carriage? Don"t be late."
Minna Randall looked down at her daughter in puzzled silence a moment, with the little line in her forehead deepening, then slipped to her knees beside her with a disregard for her new gown which was unusual, and put a caressing hand on her forehead, a demonstration which was more unusual still.
"Your head does feel hot," she said, "but to stay away from a dance at your age, just for a headache----"
"I went to one last night."
"A high school dance!"
"There won"t be any more of them. You needn"t grudge it to me." Judith buried her face in the cushions, and lay very still.
"But the Colonel really arranged this for you. Dancing bores him. He said you ought to be amused."
"He didn"t say so to me."
"Are you laughing? I thought you were crying a minute ago." Judith gave no further signs of either laughing or crying. "Judith, what does he say to you? When you went with him to look at that night-blooming flower with the queer name, last week, and were gone so long, what did he talk to you about? You heard me. Please answer."
"He"s a stupid old thing."
"What did he talk about?"
"I don"t remember."
"Judith," Judith"s mother stood plucking ineffectively at her long gloves, and looking at the motionless white figure, very slender and childish against the chintz of the cushions, soft, tumbled hair, and hidden face, with a growing trouble in her eyes, "I ought to talk to you--I ought to tell you--you"re old enough now--old enough----"
Judith turned with a soft, nestling movement, and opened her eyes again, deep, watchful eyes that asked endless questions, and made it impossible to answer them, eyes that knew no language but their own, the secret and alien language of youth. Her mother sighed.
"You"re the strangest child. Sometimes you seem a hundred years old, and sometimes--you don"t feel too badly to stay alone? Mollie would have stayed in with you, or Norah."
"No. I would have gone, if I"d known you cared so much, but it won"t do any good to make yourself late, Mamma. Father"s calling," said Judith gravely. Still grave and unrelaxed, she returned her mother"s rare good-night kiss, and watched her sweep out of the room, turning the rose-shaded night lamp low as she pa.s.sed.
There was a hurry of preparation downstairs, her mother"s low, fretful voice and her father"s high and strained one joined in a heated argument, and they started still deep in it, for her father did not call a good-night to Judith. The street door shut, and she was alone in the house. Carriage wheels creaked out of the yard and there was no returning sound of them in search of some forgotten thing; a long enough interval pa.s.sed so that it was safe to infer that there would not be, but Judith lay as her mother had left her, as still as if her headache were really authentic, her questioning eyes on the rose-shaded light.