The Wishing Moon Part 17

"Your father could."

"He's kind to father. He's kind to me."

"You talk like a child."

"Well, you talk like my mother's cook.... Oh, Neil, I didn't mean to say that. Forgive me. Where are you going? I didn't mean to say it."

"Let me go."

"You're hurting me."

"I hate you! You're one of them--one of the Everard crowd. I hate you, too!"

"What are you going to do?" Her short, panting struggle with him over, her wrists smarting from the backward twist that had broken her hold on him, she leaned against the veranda rail breathless and stared with fascinated eyes. When this quarrel had gone the way of their other quarrels, atoned for by inarticulate words of infinite meaning, justified by the keen delight of reconciling kisses, Judith was to keep one picture from it: Neil as she saw him then, standing over her white-faced and angry, ragged and splendid, Neil as she had seen him once before.

"May-night!" she cried. "You look the way you did that May-night. I'm afraid of you."

"Everard!" He turned from her, and looking at the windows again as if the Colonel were behind him, swung back his arm, and sent it crashing through the gla.s.s of the nearest one--once and a second time. "Oh, you don't want me to call him Everard. Colonel Everard!"

"Neil, I'm afraid."

He looked at the fragments of broken gla.s.s and at Judith scornfully, but the angry light was fading out of his eyes already, the magic light; against her will she was sorry to see it go.

"Are you hurt? Did you hurt your hand?"

"What do you care if I did? Don't be afraid, Judy. He can pay for a pane of gla.s.s or two. He wouldn't care if I burned his house down. n.o.body cares what I do. I'm a paddy."

Awkward, suddenly conscious of his snowshoes, he shuffled across the matched boards of the Colonel's veranda and down the steps, turning there for a farewell word:

"I'm going. Don't cry. I'm not worth it. I'm a paddy, from Paddy Lane."

Dream pictures, pleasant or sad, making her cheeks burn in the dark, or little secret smiles come when Judith recalled them. Some lived in her heart and some faded. Judith did not choose or reject them deliberately.

They chose or rejected themselves, arranging themselves into an intricate pattern of growing clearness. She did not watch it grow. It was only when it was quite complete that she would see it, but it was growing fast.

CHAPTER EIGHT

"You'll find the coffee pot on the back of the stove. I'm washing out a few things," said Mrs. Donovan.

Though she kept her five little nephews and nieces in dark-patterned dresses or shirts, as the case might be, and encouraged her brother Michael to wear flannel shirts, and even limited her eldest niece, Maggie Brady, clerking in the Green River Dry Goods Emporium now, instead of helping her father in his little store at the Falls, to three white waists a week, she was usually washing out a few things.

The contending odours of damp clothes and rank coffee were as much a part of the Brady kitchen as the dishes stacked in the sink for Neil to wash, or the broken-legged, beautifully grained mahogany card table in the warm corner near the stove, where his school books were piled, a relic of his dead father's prosperous saloon-keeping days, or the view of Larribee's Marsh through the curtainless windows with their torn green shades.

The swampy field was the most improvident part of an improvident purchase--a brown, tumbledown house, wind swept and cold, inconveniently far from the settlement at the Falls and the larger town, heavily mortgaged, and not paid for yet, but early on sunny spring mornings like this the field was beautiful; level and empty and green, the only monotonous thing in that restless stretch of New England country, billowy with little hills, and rugged with clumps of trees. A boy could people the sunlit emptiness of the field with airy creatures of folk-lore, eagerly gleaned in a busy mother's rare story-telling moments, or with Caesar's cohorts marching across it, splendid in the sun, if he had eyes for them. The only boy who ever had regarded the familiar, glinting green of the field with unkindled eyes to-day as he sat finishing his lukewarm breakfast. Yet it was Sat.u.r.day morning, that magic time, the last Sat.u.r.day of his last spring vacation, and he had only one more term of school before him.

On this Sat.u.r.day morning he had an unpleasant errand to do, and he was carefully dressed for it, just as he had been dressed for the Lyceum declamation contest and ball the night before, but not so effectively, for his best black suit showed threadbare in the morning sun, and the shine on his shoes was painstakingly applied, and a heavy, even, blue black, but they needed tapping. His brown eyes had a big, rather hungry look that was unquestionably picturesque, and Miss Natalie Ward would have approved of it, if his mother did not, watching him as she trailed in and out of the room.

"Making out all right? Don't hurry," she said.

"I'm in no hurry to get there," agreed her son.

"He won't say no to you. He never has yet, and he likes you."

"Oh, he won't say no. Nothing new will happen to me in this town; not even that."

Neil's mother paused, balancing her clothes basket against one hip, and deftly favouring the string-mended handle, then put it heavily down, and leaned on the table and looked at him--a small, tired, pretty woman, with gray, far-away eyes that were like no other eyes in Green River, and a smile like Neil's.

"Tired?" she said.

"Dog tired."

"Well, you were out till three."

"One. That was Maggie you heard at three. Where was she?"

"That's her business."

"It's Charlie's, if he's going to marry her."

"It's not yours, then. Never mind Maggie. Your uncle and I had a talk about you last night."

"Why don't you ask to see my dance order?" He made a defensive clutch at his pocket as if she had, and quick colour swept into his cheeks. She watched it, and watched it fade, leaving his face tired and sullen, and too old for its years. "Uncle!"

"He's been like a father to you."

"I've been two sons to him, then. He's worked me like two. If he grudges the time I take off, I can make it up to him. There's been little enough of it, and there'll be little more, and there's been little enough enjoyment in it, and I'm not ashamed of it. Why don't he spy on his own daughter, if he's curious? Why----" This outburst ended as suddenly as it began, in a short, sullen laugh as he pushed his empty cup away. "Dan thinks he can land something for me with the telephone company. I couldn't send money home at first, but I'd be off your hands. Tell that to Uncle."

"Would you be with Dan, in Wells?"

"Somewhere outside Wells. It won't be too gay. You needn't be afraid I'll go to too many dances."

"Don't glare at me. I'm not your uncle."

"Sorry. I don't know what's wrong with me."

"Don't you?"

He flushed, laughed, and ignored the question, producing a small box and offering it. "I got that last night. Don't wipe your hands. They're good enough to handle it wet." A gold medal glittered in her hand. He observed it without enthusiasm, and noticing that, his mother shut the box abruptly.

"Neil, that's the first prize."

"Looks like it. I spoke the Gettysburg address, and they always fall for that. Good-bye, I'm off."

"Neil, come back here."

He swung round with his cap doubled under his arm, and stood before her, helpless and sullen, hedged about with that sudden dignity which no woman creature can break through, but seeming to derive no comfort from it. Painful colour mounted to her cheeks, as if the effort of keeping him there was all she could manage without the effort of opening delicate subjects.