"At the Falls, and I know when you moved there--five years ago, or six."
"Six. How do you know?"
"Oh, I know."
As you grew older, and learned to call more boys and girls in the school by name, and more of the clerks in the shops, you discovered new people in the town where you thought you knew everybody, and it made the town infinitely large. But this boy had not been so near her, or she would have seen him. He could not have been in school with her. He must have worked on a farm and studied by himself with the grammar-school teacher at the Falls, and taken special examinations to enter the Junior cla.s.s this year, as Willard said that some boy at the Falls was doing. He must be that boy or Judith would surely have seen him.
She nodded her head wisely. "I know."
"You know a lot." In his soft brogue this sounded like the most complimentary thing that could be said.
"But you don"t remember me." This had troubled her at first. Now it seemed like the most delicious of jokes, and they laughed at it together.
"That was the first thing you said to me."
"Isn"t it queer"--Judith"s eyes widened and darkened as if it were something more than queer, something far worse--"so queer! I can"t think what the first thing was that you said to me."
They confronted this problem in silence, staring at each other with wide-open eyes. Though they were circling smoothly at last, carried on by the slow, sweet music, so that they hardly seemed to be moving at all, and though he did not really move his head, the boy"s eyes seemed to Judith to be coming nearer to hers, nearer all the time. They were beautiful eyes, deep brown, and very clear. His brown hair grew in a squarish line across his forehead, and waved softly at the temples. It looked as if he had brushed it hard there to brush the curl out, but it was curliest there.
"You"ve got the brownest eyes," said Judith.
"You"ve got the biggest eyes. Won"t you tell me your name?"
Judith did not answer. She looked away from the disconcerting brown eyes and down at her hand, against his shoulder, her own little hand, with the careful manicure and the dull polish that was all her mother permitted; bare of rings, though Norah had given her a beautiful garnet ring for Christmas. How shiny his coat-sleeve was, and her hand looked unfamiliar to her--not like her own at all. She pressed tighter against his shoulder to steady herself.
The music was growing quicker and louder, working up gradually but surely into a breathless crescendo that meant the end of the dance. It whirled them dizzily about. The sleepy spell of the dance broke in this final crash of noise, and as it broke a sudden panic caught Judith.
What had she been saying to this boy? She had never talked like this to a boy before. And why was she dancing with him? She ought to be dancing with Willard--Willard, waiting there in the dressing-room door with her dance order in his hand, with the patient and puzzled look in his eyes, with brick-red colour in his cheeks from the affront she had subjected him to. What would Willard think of her? What would her mother think?
And who was this boy? Just what the children had called him in taunting screams, on that long-ago May night, and she would have liked to scream it now--a paddy.
Instead, she lifted her head, no longer afraid of the boy"s brown eyes, and said it, as cruelly as she could, in her soft and clear little voice:
"Paddy," she said; "a paddy from Paddy Lane."
She looked defiantly into his eyes, but they did not grow angry. They only grew very soft and kind, and they laughed at her. She wanted to look away from the laughter in them, but she could not look away from the kindness. Now she was not angry with him any more, but glad she was dancing with him. She knew she never wanted to stop dancing.
"Paddy?" He thought she had said it to remind him of that May night; he was remembering it now. "Are you that little girl?"
"Yes."
"The little girl who broke the lantern?"
"Yes," said Judith proudly.
"And had such long black legs, and went scuttling across the lawn, and screaming out to me--that funny little girl?"
"But I did break the lantern," said Judith.
All the bravest stories that she had made up in the dark to put herself to sleep with at night, all the perilous adventures of land and sea, camp fire or pirate ship, began with the breaking of that lantern, and the boy she rescued had been her companion upon them, her brushwood boy, her own boy. She had found him at last, and he was laughing--laughing at her.
"Sure you did. As if I couldn"t have broken away from a bunch of fool kids, without being doped with the smell of kerosene, and yelled at by another fool kid. Sure you broke the lantern. How mad I was."
"You didn"t remember." It was not a joke any longer now, but a tragedy, and Judith felt overwhelmed by it, alone in the world. "You forgot, and I--remembered."
The brown eyes and the gray met in one last long look and when the brown eyes saw the hurt in Judith"s, the laughter died out of them. Again they seemed to be growing nearer and nearer to hers, but this time Judith was not afraid, she was glad.
"If you didn"t save my life then, you did to-night." It came in a husky burst of confidence, straight from his shy boy"s heart, very rare and very precious. Judith caught her breath.
"Oh, did I? Did I?"
"Yes. This crowd here had me mad--crazy mad. I was going home. I was going to get off the team. I wasn"t going to school next week, and I"ve worked my hands off to get there. Maybe you remembered and I forgot, but--I won"t forget again. You were that little girl." It was not a slight to the little girl she used to be, but a tribute to the girl she was; that was what looked out of his brown eyes at Judith, and sang through the brogue in his voice.
"You were that little girl--you!"
"Yes," breathed Judith; "yes!"
They whirled faster and faster. This was really the end of the dance, and this dance could never come again. Judith held tight to his shiny shoulder, breathless, hurrying to part with her secret and strip herself bare of mystery generously in a breath. All sorts of barriers might come between them, she might put them there herself, and she was quite aware of it, but not yet, not until the music stopped.
"My name"s Judith--Judith Randall. Call me Judy."
CHAPTER FIVE
Colonel Everard sat at the head of his dinner table. A little dinner for twelve was well under way at the Birches. Mrs. Everard was confined to her tower suite to-night with one of the sudden headaches which unkind critics held were likely to come when the Colonel entertained. Randolph Sebastian, his secretary, had superintended the arrangements for the dinner.
Pink roses, rather too many of them, were ma.s.sed on the big, round table. Rather too much polished silver was to be seen on it; the most ornate candlesticks in the Everard collection, and a too complete array of small, scattered objects, each with a possible but not an essential function, littering a cloth already complicated by elaborate inserts of lace. But the brilliantly lighted, over-decorated table was effective enough in the big, darkly wainscoted room, a little island of light and colour.
The room was characterless, but finely and generously proportioned, and not so blatantly new as the rest of the colonel"s house still looked.
Against the dark walls the pale-coloured gowns around the table were charming. Indeed, most of the gowns were designed for this setting.
For there were no outsiders among the Colonel"s guests to-night.
Sometimes there were distinguished outsiders, politicians and other big men, diverted from triumphant tours through larger centres by the Colonel"s influence, and by his courtesy exhibited to Green River after they had dined, or bigger men still, whose comings and goings the public press was not permitted to chronicle. Sometimes, too, there were outsiders on probation, the outer fringe of Green River society, admitted to formal functions, and hoping in vain to penetrate to intimate ones; ladies fl.u.s.tered and flattered, gentlemen sulky but flattered, conscious that each appearance here might be their last, and trying to seem indifferent to the fact.
But this was the Colonel"s inner circle, gathered by telephone at twenty-four hours" notice, as they so often were. No course that the chef had contributed to the rather too elaborate menu was new to them.
The Pol Roger which the big English butler was just starting on his second round was of the vintage year usually to be found on the Colonel"s wine list, and on most intelligently supervised wine lists. A dinner for twelve, like plenty of little dinners elsewhere, no more correct and no less, but it had this to distinguish it; it was being served in Green River.
Served complete from hors-d"oeuvres to liqueurs, in a New England town where high tea had been the fashion not ten years ago, and church suppers were still important occasions--where you were rich on five thousand a year, and there were not a dozen capitalists secure of so much, where a second maid was an object of pride, and there was no butler except the Colonel"s. And he had imported this butler and his chef and his wines, but not his guests; they were quite as impressive, quite able to appreciate his hospitality, if not to return it in kind, and they were all but one native products of Green River.
The youngest guest was eating mushrooms _sous cloche_ in contented silence at the Colonel"s left. The scene was not new to her. She could not remember her first party here; she was probably the only person in Green River who could pa.s.s over that momentous occasion so lightly. She had grown up as the only child in the inner circle. She had been privileged to excuse herself, when the formal succession of courses at some holiday function was too much for her, and read fairy tales on a cushion by the library fire, out of the fat, purple edition de luxe of the "Arabian Nights" that was always waiting for her there. Though her white ruffled skirts had grown long now, and her silvery gold braids were pinned up, and she was allowed to fill an empty place at the Colonel"s table whenever he asked her, if not quite on his regular dinner list yet, Judith was not much changed from that wide-eyed child, and to-night her eyes looked sleepy and soft, as if she had serious thoughts of the cushion by the fire and the fairy book still.
The scene was not new, but it kept a fascination for her, like a transformation scene in a pantomime. Mr. J. Cleveland Kent, the manager of the shoe factory, who had taken her in to dinner, had been leaning out of a factory window in his shirt-sleeves, his black hair tumbled, and badly in need of a shave, when she pa.s.sed on her way home from school. He looked mysterious and interesting in a dinner coat, like her idea of an Italian n.o.bleman.
When Judith knocked at the kitchen door to deliver a note, Mrs. Theodore Burr, in a pink cooking ap.r.o.n, corsetless, and with her beautiful yellow hair in patent curlers, had been blackening the kitchen stove, and quarrelling with the furnace man about an overcharge of fifty cents on his monthly bill. The Burrs had no maid. Theodore Burr had been a.s.sisting Judge Saxon ever since he pa.s.sed his bar examinations, but he was not admitted to partnership yet. This was beginning to make gossip, for he worked hard. He had broken his dinner engagement to-night, as he often did, to stay at home and work. Randolph Sebastian, the secretary, with the queer, hybrid foreign name, and thin face and ingratiating brown eyes, had his place at the table.
Mrs. Burr, stately and slender now in jetted black, the lowest cut gown in the room, her yellow hair fluffing and flaring into an unbelievable number of well-filled-out puffs, was chattering to the Colonel in a low voice, so that Judith could not understand, and breaking into French at intervals--Green River High School French, but she spoke it with an air, narrowing her blue-gray eyes after an alluring fashion she had and laughing her full-toned laugh. She was a full-blown, emphatic creature, though she had been married only three years, and was Lil Gaynor still to half the town.