The Wishing Moon Part 12

This word was forbidden in the upper circles of the Green River younger set, and Willard looked pained, but collected himself.

"We are the same as engaged," he insisted st.u.r.dily.

He had forced an issue at last, but Judith evaded it, laughing softly in the dark.

"Oh, are we?"

"Aren't we?"

"How do you know there isn't anybody else?"

"Well, you won't look at Ed, and Murph don't count." Willard made this p.r.o.nouncement lightly, though the adamantine rules and impa.s.sable barriers of a whole social order were embodied in it. "Murph that you're so thick with, all of a sudden. He's a bully fellow, all right, next captain of the team, probably. Good thing he's broken into the crowd a little way. Too bad he's Irish. Murph don't count."

"No--no!" A sudden and poignant sweetness thrilled in Judith's voice.

The tenor of the Green River High School quartette, not ordinarily sensitive to variations of tone in the voices of others, could not ignore it. The change had disturbed him vaguely. It seemed to call for some comment.

"Judy, you look great to-night.... I'd do anything for you."

"Then go home, Willard."

"You haven't answered my question."

"What question?"

"Don't tease."

"I honestly don't know."

"You don't hear one word I'm saying to you."

Judith laughed guiltily. "Then what makes you talk to me?"

"Judith--are we the same as engaged?"

Judith hesitated. "Kissing each other good-night--and all that--is silly. I don't want to. Only sometimes I want to, and then afterward I'm ashamed, and can't understand why. Willard, I don't want to grow up. I don't ever want to. I want things to stay just the way they are. They are--lovely. Oh, Willard----"

She stopped, with tears in her eyes. There had been a real appeal in his earnest young voice, and she had done her best to answer it, painfully thinking out loud, with her heart in her words, making him an authentic confidence. But the confidence was off the point, and he ignored it, pursuing his subject with the concentration which will keep his s.e.x the stronger one, votes for women or no votes for women.

"Are you the same as engaged to me?"

"Will you go home if I say I am?"

"Are you?"

"There isn't any such thing as being the same as engaged."

"Are you?"

"Yes."

Willard, forgetting himself in the heat of debate, had withdrawn his foot from the door. Judith, narrowly on the watch for this moment, now seized it, shutting him and his Belle Isle outside, and slamming the door in his face. He had gained his point, and would not linger. She heard him ring the bell once or twice in perfunctory protest, then put down his candy on the steps.

"Good-night," he called cheerfully, through the flimsy barrier of the pseudo-Colonial door.

"Good-night, Willard--dear!"

Judith's voice was sweet, but indifferent, and her manner was indifferent, for a young lady who would have seemed, to a literal-minded person, to have materially affected her whole future life by this conversation. She did not watch Willard go. She turned and stood in the library door, smiling absently and humming a little s.n.a.t.c.h of a waltz tune. It was eleven now, but the hour had ceased to concern her, as if she had been watching the clock for Willard. Presently, as if she really had, she tossed the cushions back on the couch, drew the shades over the window, turned off the lights, and disappeared upstairs.

m.u.f.fled sounds of a methodical but unhurried preparation for bed drifted faintly down, one last ripple of song, and then it was silent there.

It was very still in the library. The stillness of the whole empty house and the moonless night outside seemed to centre there. The dying fire threw out little spurts of flame and made wavering shadows on the hearth as if Judith were still crouching there. The embers glowed as red as when she had been fire-gazing, but they did not show what it was she had seen in the fire. They kept her secrets as safely as she kept them herself; as youth must keep its secrets, inarticulate, dumb, because it sees into the heart of the world so deeply that if it were granted speech it would make the world too wise. What Judith had seen in the fire, what had really been in her heart when she talked to Willard in the groping and pitiful language of youth, the only language she had, the fire could not tell, and perhaps Judith did not know.

It was still, and the tiniest sounds were exaggerated: a board creaking at the head of the stairs, and creaking again, the stair-rail creaking, the ghost of a faint little sigh; tiny and intermittent sounds, but the silence became a listening hush because of them: listening harder and harder. At last a sound broke it: the doorbell, rung three times, one long peal and two short.

It was rung faintly, but loud enough. There was a soft hurry of slippered feet down the stairs, and a slender figure, tall in straight-falling draperies, slipped cautiously down and across the hall to the door, stopped and stood leaning with one ear pressed against it, silent and motionless, hardly breathing. The faint signal was repeated.

Judith did not move.

There was one more ring, a soft tapping, and then silence. Judith listened for a minute, then whistled softly, a clear little signal, one long and two short, like the signal ring. There was no answer. She pulled frantically at the chain, got it loose, and threw open the door.

A boy was standing on the steps, a stolid, unmoving figure, looming deceptively tall in the dark. He did not step forward or greet her.

Judith put out a groping hand and caught at his shoulder.

"Is it you? Oh, I thought you had gone," she said. "I was watching for you upstairs."

"I am going. I can't come in so late."

"No, of course not."

"Then what made you watch for me?"

"I wanted to see if you came."

"Well, I did come, and now I'm going."

"You walked past the house five times."

"Eight." The boy laughed shortly, and Judith's soft laugh echoed his.

"Oh, what's the use? I'm going."

"Don't you want to come in?"

"No."

"Then what made you walk past the house?"

"You know well enough."

"I want you to tell me.... You can come in just five minutes if you want to."