"He"s sucked your town dry for years and you know it. He"s had the pick of your men and used their brains and their youth, and he"s had the pick of your women. If there are any of you here that he"s got no hold on, it"s because you"re worth nothing to him. He"s got the town. Now he"s driven one of your boys to his death.
""I can"t beat him." That"s what Theodore Burr said to me the night he died. "They won"t blame him for this. I want to die because I don"t want to live in the world with him, but I"ll do no harm to him by dying, only to Lily and me. They won"t blame him. You can"t beat Everard."
"Well, you don"t blame Everard. He"s got you where you don"t blame him, whatever he does. You shut your eyes to it. He"s got you. You know all this and you shut your eyes. Now I"ll tell you some things you don"t know. Everard"s been trying for weeks to bribe me to keep my mouth shut, like he bribed Charlie for years. He might have saved his breath and his money. I can"t hurt him, whether I keep my mouth shut or not. You won"t blame him. You"ll let him get away with this, too. But you"re going to know."
The boy came closer still to the footlights and leaned across them, pausing and deliberately choosing his words. The pause, and the look in his dark, intent eyes as he stood there challenged Green River and dared it to interrupt him. But it was too late to interrupt, too late to stop him now. And behind him in the place of honour in the centre of the row of chairs on the stage, one man at least was powerless to stop him: Colonel Everard, who listened with a set smile on his lips, and a set stare in his eyes.
"He"s the man that broke Maggie Brady"s life to pieces," Neil"s low voice went on. "Everard"s the man. He got her away from town. He filled her head with him and set her wild and she had to go. When he was tired of her, he left her in a place he thought she"d be too proud to come back from. She was proud, but he"s broken her pride, and she crawled back to us. The prettiest girl in the town, she was, and you all knew that, and my sister and more to me----" he broke off abruptly, and laughed a dry little laugh that echoed strangely in the silent room. His voice sounded dry and hard as he went on.
"He broke Maggie"s life, but what"s that to you, that give him a chance at your women, knowing well what he is, and leave them to take care of themselves with him, your own women that are yours to take care of, daughters and wives? It"s nothing to you, but you"re going to know it, and you"re going to know this. I had it straight from Theodore Burr the night he died.
"Everard"s going to sell you out at the next election, the whole of you--his own crowd, too. He"s been planning it for months. He"s worked prohibition for all it"s worth to him; worked for it till the state went dry, and then he"s made money for you that are in it with him, and more for himself, protecting places like Halloran"s that sell liquor on the quiet, and the smuggling of liquor into the state. Well, he"s made money enough that way, and it"s getting risky, and now he sees a way to make more and let n.o.body in on it. He"s going to sell out to the liquor interests and work against prohibition, and the big card he"ll use will be exposing Halloran"s and the secret traffic in liquor, and all the crowd that"s been buying protection from him. There"s a big campaign started already, and big money being spent. There"ll be big money in it for him. There"ll be arrests made here and a public scandal. He"s going to sell the town.
"Maybe that interests you some. Maybe it gets you. It won"t for long.
He"ll crawl out of it and lie out of it and talk you and buy you back to him. Well, I know one thing more, and he can"t lie or crawl out of it.
My father could have put him behind bars any time in twenty years. He"s a common thief.
"It was when he was seventeen, and studying law first, back in a town up state that"s not on the map or likely to get there, and he was called by a name there that wasn"t Everard. He was seventeen, but he was the same then as now; he had the same will to get on and the power to, no matter who he trampled on to get there, and the same charm that got men and women both, though they didn"t trust him--got them even when he was trampling on them and they knew it. It got him into trouble there with two girls at once. One was the girl that gave him his start, the chance to go into her uncle"s office. He was the biggest man in the town. Older than Everard, this girl was, and teaching in the school he went to, when she fell in love with him and brought him home to her town and gave him his chance. He was tired of her, and she was where it was bound to come out soon how things were with them, and so was the other girl, a girl that he wasn"t tired of, the daughter of the woman where he boarded. He tried to get her to go away with him. She wouldn"t go and she wouldn"t forgive him, but the town was getting too hot for him, and he had to go.
"He had to go quick and make a clean getaway and he wanted a real start this time. He had to have money. That was a dead little town. There was only one place he could get money enough, in the little hotel there. It was the only bank they had. The keeper of it used to cash checks and make loans. Everard was lucky, the same then as now. There was almost five thousand dollars in the safe in the hotel office the night he broke into it, and that was enough for him. He had a fight with the hotel clerk, but he got away with the money, and he got away from the town.
"The clerk was his best friend in town--never trusted him, but fell for him the same as the girls and lent him money and listened to his troubles--and fell for him again when he ran across him again, years later, here in Green River. Everard told him he"d sent the money back, and he kept the secret. He never took hush money for it like Charlie. He said Everard ought to have his chance, and was straight now. But he fell for Everard again, that"s what happened. Everard had him, the same as the rest of you.
"The clerk was my father."
The boy"s voice broke off. There was dead silence in the hall. Green River had been listening almost in silence, and did not break it now.
Presently the boy sighed, shrugged his thin shoulders as if they were throwing off an actual weight, and spoke again, this time in a lifeless voice, with all the colour and drama wiped out of it, a voice that was very tired.
"That"s all," he said. "That"s back of him, with his fine airs and his far-reaching schemes and his big name in the state. You"ve stood for a crook. Will you stand for a common criminal, a common thief? Now you know and it"s up to you. That"s all."
An hour later a boy was hurrying through the dark along the road to the Falls.
He was almost home. Green River lay far behind with its scattered, spa.r.s.ely strewn lights. The flat fields around him and the unshaded road before him, so bleak by day, were beautiful to-night, far reaching and mysterious. Above them, flat looking and unreal, remote in a coldly clouded sky, hung the yellow September moon.
"I"ve done for myself," the boy was saying half out loud, as if the faraway moon could hear. "I"ve lost everything now. I"ve done for myself."
The boy was sure of this, but could have told little more about the events of the evening. He remembered listening outside the hall doors until he was drawn inside in spite of himself, and listening there until something snapped in his brain, and suddenly the long days of repression, of vainly wondering what to do with his hard-won knowledge, were over, and he was pouring it all out in one jumbled burst of speech.
He had no plan and no hope of doing harm to his enemy by speaking. He had to speak.
After he had spoken he remembered getting down from the stage and out of the hall somehow. He remembered the crushed goldenrod, slippery under his feet. Against a background of blurred, unrecognizable faces, he remembered a tall, black-garbed figure that rose to its feet swaying and then steadying itself. It was Lilian Burr. Less clearly he remembered a wave of sound from the hall that followed him as he hurried away across the square. It was not like applause. He did not know or care what it meant. After that, he remembered only the cool dark of the September night as he walked through it aimlessly at first, and then turned toward home.
"I"ve lost everything," he had said, and it must be true. How could he face the Judge again? How could he go on living in Green River? This was what all his long-cherished dreams had come to; a scene that Charlie might have made, and disgrace in the eyes of the town. He had lost everything.
Yet strangely, as he said it, he knew that it was not true. Whatever he had lost, he had better things left. He had those free and splendid minutes of speaking out his heart. They could not be taken from him. The freedom and relief of them was with him still. And he had the road firm under his feet, and the clean air blowing the fever out of his brain, and the strength of his own young body, clean strength, good to feel as he walked through the night. And along the dark road before him, familiar as it was, and worn so many times by discouraged feet, the white track of moonlight beckoned him, clean and new. It was a way that might lead anywhere--to fairy-land, to success, to the end of the world.
Now the boy made the turn in the road that brought him within sight of home. Faint lights twinkling from it, intimate and warm, invited him as never before. Was his mother waiting up for him? Home itself, lighted and intimate and safe, was enough to find waiting. His heart gave a strange little leap that hurt, but was keen pleasure, too. Almost running, he covered the last bit of road, crossed the gra.s.sy front yard and then climbed the creaking front steps, and stood for a minute that was unendurably long, fumbling with the door.
The door was unlocked and gave suddenly, opening wide, and he stood on the threshold of the kitchen. The lights he had seen were in the sitting-room beyond. In this room there was only moonlight. It came through the window that looked out on the marshy field, the fairies"
field. Surely there must be fairies there to-night, out in the empty green s.p.a.ces, flooded with moonlight. But the fairies were not all in the field, there was one in the room. Neil could see it.
The old rocking chair stood in the moonlit window. It was holding two, his mother, and some one else--the fairy, golden haired and white robed and slender, and close in his mother"s arms. As he stood and wondered and looked, a board creaked under his feet. It was the faintest of sounds, but a fairy"s ears are keen, and the fairy heard, and stirred, and turned in his mother"s arms.
Now Neil could see her face. It was flushed and human and warm, and in her eyes, opening grave and deep, was a look that was the shyest but surest of welcomes. The welcome was all for Neil, and the fairy was Judith.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
A boy and a girl sat on the doorsteps of the Randall house.
It was almost a year since the night of the rally. It was an evening in late May--late, but it was May, and the fairies" month still. There was a pleasant, shivery chill in the air. A far sprinkling of stars made the dark of the still, windless night look darker and warmer and safer to whisper in. The big horse-chestnut tree at the corner of the syringa hedge was only a darker blot against the surrounding dark, and the slope of faintly lit street on the other side of the hedge looked far away, with the dark sweep of lawn between. It was a night for the fairies, or for the girl and boy, and that was quite as it should be, for it was their first together for months.
Judith and Neil sat discreetly erect on the steps, undoing what those months apart had done with little bursts of shy speech, and long, shy silences that helped them more. In the longest and shyest silence their hands had groped for each other once, met as if they had never touched before, and clung together for a minute as if they never meant to let go, but Judith kept firmly to impersonal subjects still.
"You did it all," she said. "Things do happen so fast when they happen.
Just think, this time last year he was like a king!"
"Everard?"
"Yes. Do you remember how I used to be cross when you called him that, and wouldn"t say Colonel? How childish that was!" Judith patronized her dead self, as a young lady may, with her twentieth birthday almost upon her.
"You weren"t childish."
"What was I?"
"Just what you are now."
"What"s that?"
"Wonderful." Neil chose his one adequate word, from the tiny vocabulary of youth, small because few words are worthy to voice the infinite dreams of it. "Wonderful."
"No, I"m not wonderful. You are. That dreadful old man, and every one knew he was dreadful and wouldn"t do anything about it till you----"
"Bawled him out? That"s all I did, you know, really. It was a kid"s trick. He lost out because it was coming to him anyway. Poor Theodore saw to that. He turned the town against Everard when he killed himself.
It wasn"t turning fast, but it was turning. I did give it a shove and make it turn faster, but I didn"t even have sense enough to know I had until the day after the rally, when the Judge sent for me and told me. I didn"t dare go near him until he sent for me, and I thought he had sent for me to fire me."
"But you broke up the rally. They were dead still in the hall until you left, and then they went crazy, calling for you, and all talking at once, talking against you, some of them, till it really wasn"t a rally any more, but just like a mob. Oh, I know. The Judge tells me, every time I go to ride with him, and when he came on to the school last winter and saw me there, he told me all over again. Father has never half told me. He hates to talk about the rally or the Colonel either, but I don"t care, he and mother are both so sweet to me lately--just sweet.
"So it was just like a mob, and then poor Mrs. Burr got up and tried to speak, and they got quiet and listened, and she said "Every word the boy says is true and more--more----" just like that, and then she got faint and had to stop, and then the Judge took hold. That"s what he says he did, took hold, and he says it was time, because they might have tarred and feathered the Colonel if he hadn"t. I don"t suppose they would, but I wish I could have seen the Judge take hold. I love him."
"Don"t you love anybody else?"
Judith ignored this frivolous interruption, as it deserved.
"And so your work was done, though you didn"t know it and ran away. And the Judge says you are a born orator, Neil. That you"ve got the real gift, the thing that makes an audience yours. I don"t know just what he means, but I know you"ve got it, too. You"re going to be a great man, Neil."