Boy and girl and queer, high-shouldered horse, darkly silhouetted in the moonlight, lost to sight in the shadows of tall trees that looked taller in the dark, and then coming silently into view again, were like dim, flitting shadows in the night; like peculiarly helpless and insignificant shadows, restless and purposeless. The moon, soft and far away and still, seemed more alive than they did, and more competent to adjust their affairs.
They required adjusting. That was in the watching brightness of the girl"s eyes, fluttering open once or twice, only to close quickly again, in the tenseness of the boy"s arm around her, in the set of his shoulders and lift of his stubborn young chin, in the very air that he breathed uneasily, the soft, disturbing air of the May night. It was not a boy and girl quarrel that was before them: it was something more. It was the strangest hour that had come to them in their secret treasury of strange hours that were touched with the glamour of black magic and swayed by laws they did not know. It might be the darkest hour. It was the test hour.
There is no sure and easy way through such hours. If they faced theirs unprepared and afraid, so must the rest of the world, the part that is older and counted wiser. But this could have been no comfort just then to the boy and girl in the antiquated buggy, under the untroubled gaze of the wishing moon.
They were almost on the crest of the hill now. One long, upward slant of road led straight to it, bare of trees, and silvery in the moonlight. At the foot, and just at the edge of a thick belt of woods, the boy pulled up as if to rest his horse for the gradual ascent. At his left, hardly visible at all to-night unless you stopped your horse to look for it, a narrow and overgrown road led off through the trees. Tightening the arm that held her cautiously, the boy looked down at the face against his shoulder, the faint, half-smile on the lips, and the lightly closed eyes.
The girl did not move. Her cap had slipped off, and one small, bare hand clutched the fuzzy white thing tight, as a sleeping child"s hand might have closed on some favourite toy. Her hair showed silvery blond and soft against his dark coat. With a quick, hungry motion, the boy dropped his head and kissed it lightly. Then, gripping the reins with a firmness that no present activity of the animal called for, he left Green River"s only noteworthy view without a backward glance, and turned his horse into the road through the woods.
For the next few minutes he had no attention to spare for Judith, suspiciously quiet in his arms. He could not see her face. It was black dark under the trees, dark as if it had never been light. The track was wider than it looked, but also rougher. The trees grew close. Branches that he brushed aside sprinkled dew into his face. The buggy creaked out vain protests and useless warnings. Finally moonlight showed at the end of the black tunnel, and the horse, which had been encountering its difficulties in resourceful silence, made a faint, snorting comment which sounded relieved, and presently, with unexpected jauntiness, swung into the road again.
It was technically a road, and it was the wreck of a very good road, but it was not in much better shape than the track they had reached it by.
Aspiring amateurs had sketched it and camera fiends haunted it in their day. It was Colonel Everard"s favourite bridle path, which naturally prevented repairs upon it. But before the railroad went through it had been Green River"s only link with a wider world. Now a better built but more circuitous road had replaced it, designed for motoring. No motors ever penetrated here, and few carriages. It was left to the ghosts of ancient traffic, if they ventured here. The glancing moonlight under the close-growing trees might have been full of them to-night.
But the boy was not looking for ghosts or interested in the history of the road or its charm, as he hurried his high-shouldered horse along it, still responding jauntily. He squared his chin more stubbornly than ever, and muttered encouragingly to the horse, and reached for his battered whip. Round this corner, beyond this milestone, the stage drivers used to make up time when the mail was late. A generous mile of almost level road curved ahead of Neil into the moonlight, a fairly clean bit of going even now. Judith and Neil were on the old coaching road to Wells.
Neil reached for his whip, but did not take it out of the socket. A small hand closed over his. The head on his shoulder did not move, but dark eyes, watchful and deliberate, opened and looked up at him quietly.
"Now," said a cool little voice, "you can take me home."
"You"re awake?"
"Of course."
"Then why----"
"I waited to see where you were going, and what you were going to do,"
explained Judith simply. They were covering the banner stretch of road at a rate the old stage drivers had never emulated. Judith pushed Neil"s arm away, and sat straight and looked at him. Her cheeks were gloriously flushed with the quick motion, and her soft, tumbled hair had broken into baby curls round her forehead, but her eyes were a woman"s dark, unforgiving eyes. Neil gave her one furtive glance, and looked away.
"I told you to take me home," she said.
He made a muttered reply, inarticulate, so that it would have been hard to tell whether it was really addressed to Judith or the horse, and bent forward over the reins.
The colour deepened in Judith"s cheeks, her soft lips tightened into a straight line that was like her mother"s mouth. Her cool, unhurried voice was like her mother"s, too: "I knew when we started out I"d have trouble with you. Now I don"t intend to have any more. I don"t want to have to tell you again. Take me home."
She had adopted the tone which Green River"s self-made gentlewomen like Mrs. Theodore Burr mistakenly believed to be effective with servants.
The boy beside her gave no sign that it was effective with him. He spoke softly to the horse again, and flicked at it coaxingly with the whip.
"Neil, I am sorry for you," Judith stated presently, with no sympathy whatever in her judicial young voice. "I have been awfully good to you."
"Good!"
"Yes, good. I--had to be. Because I knew we didn"t have much time. I knew--this--would have to stop some day. I knew it and you knew it, too.
You always knew it. Well, I"ve been trying to tell you for a long time that it had got to stop. I tried, but you wouldn"t let me. We"re both getting older, too old for this, and I"m going away next year. And some things have happened to me, just lately--last week--that made me think.
I"ve got to be careful. I"ve got to take care of myself. This has got to stop now--to-night. I wanted to tell you so. That"s why I came; because----"
"I know why you came."
"Don"t be cross. Be good, and turn round now, and take me home. Neil, I"m not sorry, you know, for--anything. Ever since that first night at the dance you"ve been so sweet to me. I"m not sorry. Are you?"
"No."
"How funny your voice sounds. Why don"t you turn round?"
He had no explanation to offer. The buggy plunged faster through the dark, and Judith braced herself in her corner.
"Neil, turn round. Don"t you hear me?"
He gave no sign of hearing. The horse swung gallantly into a bit of road where the stage drivers had never been in the habit of hurrying, a tricky bit of road, with overhanging rocks jutting out just where you might graze them at sudden turns, and with abrupt dips into precipitous hollows. One stretched dark ahead of them now. Judith caught her breath as they plunged into it, and clutched Neil"s arm. He laughed shortly, and did not shake off her hand. She pulled at his wrist and shook it.
"Upset us if you want to. We"d go together," he urged, with a logic not to be questioned. "Together, and that suits me, Judy."
"Neil, turn round. Neil!" Judith"s voice was shrill with sudden terror repressed too long, but she struggled to make it steady and cold again, in one last effort at control.
"Who do you think you are, Neil Donovan? I tell you to take me home."
He did not even turn to look at her. He was getting the horse down the rocky slant of dimly lit road with a patience and concentration which there was n.o.body to appreciate just then. Judith collapsed into her corner. There was a faint sound of helpless crying from her, then silence as she choked back the tears; silence, and an erect, stubborn figure showing oppressively big and dark between Judith and the moon.
"Neil, I"m sorry.... Neil, I can"t stand this," came a m.u.f.fled voice.
"Please speak to me."
They were on level ground again, and the horse was disposed to make the most of it. The boy pulled her into a jolting walk which was not the most successful of her gaits, but represented a triumph for him just now, and then he turned abruptly to Judith, gathering both her hands into his free hand and gripping them tight.
"I"ll talk to you now," he said. "It"s time I told you. Judith, you and I are not going back."
CHAPTER TWELVE
"What do you mean?"
"We"re not going back," he repeated deliberately.
"We are!" flashed Judith.
"We"re not going back. We"re never going back."
Judith drew back and stared at him, her hands still in his, and the boy stared back with a look that matched her own in his big, deeply lit, dark eyes. White faces, with angry, dark eyes, were all that they could see clearly, though they were crossing a patch of road where a ragged gap in the trees let some of the moonlight through; white faces like strangers" faces.
They were only a boy and girl jolting through the woods in the night in a rattletrap buggy behind a caricature of a horse, but what looked out of their angry eyes and spoke in their tense young voices was greater than the immediate issue of their quarrel, and older and wiser than they were; as old as the world. Ancient enemies were at war once more. A man and a woman were making their age-old fight for mastery over themselves and each other.
"Never, Judy."
"Where are we going, then?"
"What difference does it make?"