The Wishing Moon Part 29

"Hand it to me," he repeated gently.

"I won't, Judge." Mr. Brady's weapon wavered, and then steadied itself.

His thin body trembled. The fanatic light in his eyes blazed bright. The excitement which had gripped him, too keen to last long, reached its climax now in one last burst of hysterical speech.

"He's a liar and a thief," he a.s.serted, uncontradicted. He was not to be contradicted. There was a dignity of its own about the hysterical indictment, grotesque as it was, an unforgettable suggestion of truth.

"He's a thief and a murderer, too. I don't have to tell what I know.

Everybody knows. You all know, all of you, and you don't dare to tell.

He's murdering the town."

The high, screaming voice broke off abruptly. Mr. Brady, still with the echo of his big words in his ears and apparently dazed by it, stood looking blankly into the Judge's steady and friendly eyes.

"I can't--I won't----" he stammered.

"Hand it to me," said the Judge, as if no interruption had occurred. For a moment the boy before him looked too dull and dazed to obey or to hear. Then, as suddenly as if some unseen hand had struck it out of his, the revolver dropped to the ground, and he collapsed, sobbing heartbrokenly, into the Judge's arms.

He was a heroic figure no longer. The alien forces that made him one had deserted him abruptly, and he looked unworthy of their support already, only an inconsiderable creature of jangled nerves and hysterical speech, which would be discredited if you looked at him, even if it still echoed in your ears. The Judge, holding him and quieting him, looked allied with him, humble and discredited, too. The relieved audience hung back for a moment, taking in the full force of the picture, before it broke ranks to crowd round the Colonel and offer him belated support. The Colonel said a few inaudible words to Judge Saxon, and then turned from him and his protege with the air of washing his hands of the whole affair. He looked surprisingly unruffled by it, even stimulated by it. The interruption to his party was over.

It ended as it had begun, the most successful party of the year. Mr.

Brady's invasion was not the first unscheduled event which had enlivened a party at the Birches. There was more open and general speculation about the fact that the Randalls left immediately after, did not linger over their good-nights, and were obviously not permitted by their host to do so.

Mrs. Randall, leaning back in her corner with her hand tight in Harry's, and her long-lashed eyes, that were like Judith's, tightly shut, showed the full strain of the evening in her pale face. She was a woman who did not look tired easily, but she was also a woman who could not afford to look tired.

There was no appeal or charm about her pale face now, only a naked look of hardness and strain. Her husband, staring straight ahead of him with troubled eyes, and his weak, boyish mouth set in a hard, worried line, spoke rapidly and disconnectedly not of Judith, or the Colonel's ominous coldness to him, but of Mr. Brady.

"Maggie's a bad lot," he was explaining for approximately the fifth time as they whirled into the drive and under their own dark windows. "She always was. Everard isn't making away with the belle of Paddy Lane. Not yet. He's not that far down. But that dope about old Neil Donovan----"

"Oh, Harry, hush," his wife said, "here we are. What do you care about Brady?"

"Nothing," he whispered, his arm tightening round her as he lifted her down. "I don't care about anything in the world but Judith."

"Neither do I. Not really," she said in a hurried, shaken voice that was not like her own, "you believe that, don't you, Harry?"

He did not answer. Gathering up her skirts, she followed him silently to the front of the house, single file along the narrow boardwalk, not yet taken up for the summer, creaking loudly under their feet.

"Look," she whispered, catching at his arm. The front of the house was dark except for two lights, a flickering lamp that was being carried nearer to them through the hall, and a soft, shaded light that showed at a bedroom window. The window was Judith's. He fumbled for his key, but the door opened before them. Norah, her forbidding face more militant than ever in the flickering light of the kerosene hand-lamp she held, her white pompadour belligerently erect, and her brown eyes maliciously alight, peered at them across the door chain, and then gingerly admitted them.

"It's a sweet time of night to be coming home to the only child you've got," she commented, "why do you take the trouble to come home at all?"

It was a characteristic greeting from her. If it had not been, Mrs.

Randall would not have resented it now. She clutched at the old woman's unresponsive shoulder.

"Where is she?" she demanded breathlessly.

"Judith is it you mean?"

"Oh, yes."

"How should I know how she spends her evenings? At some of the girls'

to-night. Rena Drew's maybe. I don't know. It's a new thing for you to care. She was late in, and it's no wonder I was worried. She's like my own to me. But she needs her sleep now. You'd better go softly upstairs."

"Do you mean she's here?"

"What is it to you?" Norah, one bony hand clutching the newel post as if it were a negotiable weapon of defense, and her brown eyes flashing as if she were capable of using any weapon for Judith, barred the way up the stairs.

"I tell you, she needs her sleep, poor lamb--poor lamb," she said, "and you're not to go near her to-night. You're to promise me that. But she's here fast enough. My lamb is safe at home in her own bed."

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

On an afternoon in June a year later than the interrupted party at the Everards' a young man sat at Mr. Theodore Burr's desk in Judge Saxon's outer office. It was still technically Mr. Burr's desk, but the young man looked entirely at home there. A litter of papers which that fastidious gentleman would never have permitted himself now covered it, and the air was faintly scented with the smoke of a cigarette widely popular in Green River, but not with devotees of twenty-five-cent cigars, like Mr. Burr. The bulky volume open on the desk was thumbed and used as Mr. Burr had never used any book that looked or was so heavy.

The book was Thayer on Const.i.tutional Law, and the young man dividing his attention between it and Main Street under his window flooded with June sunshine was Neil Donovan.

He divided his attention unequally, as Main Street late on that sunny afternoon might persuade the most studious of young men to do. The square was crowded--crowded, it is true, much as a busy street on the stage is crowded, where the same overworked set of supers pa.s.s and repa.s.s. The group of bareheaded girls now pacing slowly by arm in arm under the window were returning from what was approximately their fourth visit that afternoon to the post-office, the ice-cream parlours, the new gift shop and tea-room, or some kindred attraction. The Nashes' new touring car, driven by the prettiest girl in Willard's June house party, under the devoted instruction of Willard himself, was whirling through the shopping district for at least the third time.

However, it was an imposing pageant enough, though the boy at the window did not appear to find it so, regarding it with approving but grave eyes, and returning Mr. Nash's flourishing salute unsmilingly--a brave pageant of gay and flimsy gowns, of youth returning to the town, and movement and colour, and June fairly begun.

June so far was like other Junes in Green River. Colonel Everard and the season of social and political intrigues were here. Rallies in the town hall would soon begin. Men with big names in state politics would make speeches there, while the Colonel presided with his usual self-effacing charm, which did not advertise the known fact that he was a bigger power in the state than any of them. The good old question of prohibition was the chief issue, as usual; discreet representatives of the people would, according to a catch phrase at the capital, vote for prohibition, and then go round to the best hotel and get drunk; and discreet politicians, like the Colonel, would make money out of both these facts in their own way.

Behind the closed door of Judge Saxon's office low-keyed, monotonous voices were talking, and a secret conference was going on. Troubled times were here again for those deep in the Colonel's councils. They were never sure of a permanent place there, but always on the watch for one of his sudden changes of front, which threatened not only his enemies but his friends. But he had recovered and held their confidence before, and he could this year.

All scandals of the year before were decently hidden. Maggie Brady was missing and continued to be missing. By this time it was the general verdict that she had always been bound to come to a bad end, and Charlie Brady to drink himself to death. n.o.body interrupted his attempts to do so. His drunken outburst of speech had echoed a growing sentiment in the town, but it grew slowly, for under its thin veneer of sophistication Green River was only a New England town still, conservative and slow to change.

Green River had not changed much in a year, but Neil Donovan's fortunes had. n.o.body knew the full history of the change except Neil, but others could have thrown sidelights upon it, among them Mrs. Randall's second maid, Mollie. On the morning after that same party of the Colonel's, which Mr. Brady attended so unexpectedly, and Judith did not attend, Mollie opened the Randalls' door to an early caller.

Even in curl papers, she was usually too much for the young man now on the doorstep. He was in the habit of looking at his boots and addressing them instead of her, and Mollie quite understood that, for they were shabby boots. They looked shabbier than ever to-day, and so did his shiny coat, but his eyes were steady and clear, and there was clear colour in his cheeks, as if he had had the only restful and well-earned sleep in Green River.

"Miss Judith," he said.

"Not at home," said Mollie, in a manner successfully copied from French maids in the ten, twenty, thirties.

"Nonsense. Her curtains aren't up," replied the young man who was usually made speechless by it.

"She's asleep," conceded Mollie, in a manner more colloquial but also more forbidding. "She don't want to see you."

Mollie was incapable of interpreting Judith's wishes, but the young man was not; his smile conveyed this, though it was friendly enough. "When Miss Judith gets up, tell her----"

"I tell you she don't want to see you," snapped Mollie in a tone any French maid would have deplored. "She don't want to see anybody."

"Tell her that I'll call again at three this afternoon," directed the young man calmly, and completed his disturbing effect upon Mollie by turning and walking briskly away without a backward glance, and without his usual air of self-consciousness when her eyes were upon him. He carried his shabby coat with an air, and held his head high, and swung out of sight down the sleepy little street as if he were the only wide-awake thing in the whole sunny, sleepy town.

It was a disconcerting moment for Mollie or any lady properly conscious of her power, and sorry to see a sign of it disappear, even the humblest of signs. It would still have been disconcerting, if she could have foreseen that Judith would not receive this young man alone, either at three that afternoon, or for many afternoons. The young man was not overawed by Mollie. That was established once and for all. He would never be overawed by her again. She slammed the door rather viciously.

"Keep quiet there," said Norah, appearing inopportunely, as her habit was, with a heavily laden breakfast tray. "She needs her rest. But she's awake. She rang. You can take this up and leave it outside her door. Who was talking to you?"