The Wishing Moon

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Willard stood still and stared after Judith for one bewildered minute;that was as long as he could stand still. Odd Fellows' Hall had ceasedto afford standing-room.

  The floor was filling and more than filling with determined youngpersons who were there to dance, and looked as if they had never had anyaim but to dance. The enthralled silence, which was more general thanconversation, advertised it. Even acknowledged belles, like the girl inred, coquetted incidentally, with significant but brief confidences andbriefer upward glances. There was an alarming concentration, intent asyouth itself, to be read in their unsmiling faces and eager eyes.

  They danced quite wonderfully, most of them, as only country-bred youngpeople can, with free-limbed young bodies, more used to adventuring inthe open air than to dancing, but attuned to the rhythm of the dance byright of their youth. The old-fashioned waltz, that our grandmotherslost their hearts to the time of, still prevailed in Green River; notthe jerkier performance that was already opening the way for theone-step and the dance craze in larger centres, but the old waltz, withthe first beat of each measure heavily emphasized--a slow swinging,beautiful dance, and they danced it with all their hearts.

  In and out among them, two slender, quick-turning figures were making anintricate way. The girl danced delicately and surely, a faint, halfsmile parting her lips, her small, smooth head erect, the silvery goldhair that crowned it shimmering and pale in the uncompromising light ofthe newly installed electric chandeliers, her eyes intent on the boy.

  His performance was not expert, but it had a charm all its own. He put agreat deal of strength into it, and made it evident that he possessedstill more; strength enough to master the art of dancing once and forall, by the sheer force of it, if he cared to exert it, and a laughinglight in his eyes, as if dancing was not important enough for that, andnothing else was.

  An ambitious pair, experimenting with the dip waltz, just introducedthat year, and pausing on the most awkward spots in the crowded floor,blocked his path, and he swung heavily out of their way just in time,squaring his chin and holding his head a shade higher. The girl in redwas whirled toward him in double-quick time, and he dodged,miscalculated his distance, but met the shock of her squarely, whiskingJudith out of her way.

  "Good try, Murph," her partner called.

  Willard regarded the encounter disapprovingly from the door of thegentlemen's dressing-room, to which he had edged his way. His was not anexpressive countenance, and that was a protection to him just now. Hewas bewildered and deeply hurt, but he merely looked fat and slightlypuzzled, as usual.

  "Judy turn you down?" inquired his friend Mr. Ward, also watching fromthe dressing-room door, with the few other gentlemen who were withoutpartners for this dance. It was the most important dance of the evening,for you danced it with the lady of your choice, or with nobody. Itcemented new intimacies or foreshadowed the breaking of old; settledanew the continually agitated question of "who was going with who."

  "Judy turn you down?" said Mr. Ward, but he meant it as a pleasantry.Mr. Willard Nash was not often turned down, even at this early age. Hewas too eligible.

  "Rena turn you down, Ed?"

  "Yes." Mr. Ward became suddenly confidential, and lowered his voice."Mad. She wanted me to get her a shinguard to mount tintypeson--tintypes of the team."

  "Buy it or steal it?" inquired Willard sarcastically.

  "I offered to buy it," his friend confessed, "buy her a new pair, butshe wants one that's been used."

  "You spoil Rena. You can't spoil a girl." They laughed wisely. "It don'tpay."

  "Mad with Judy?"

  "Well--no," said Willard magnanimously. He thought quite rapidly, as hisbrain, not overworked at other times, could do in emergencies. "My feethurt. Pumps slip at the heel. I've been stuffing them out. Judy camewith me, but I had to be excused for this dance."

  "Good thing for him."

  "Who?"

  "For Murph--for Neil Donovan. They'll all dance with him if she does;though Judy don't know that. She's not stuck on herself, and never willbe. I didn't know she knew Murph."

  "Well, you know it now," said Willard shortly, his man-of-the-worldcomposure failing him. Judith was circling nearer now, slender anddesirable. He hesitated between an angry glare and a forgiving smile,but she did not look to see which he chose. She whirled quickly by.

  "Smooth little dancer, and she's no snob. Judy's all right," said Ed."Watch Murph! He's catching on--never danced till last night. Some ofthe fellows taught him. He never danced with a girl before."

  "If my feet hurt," remarked Mr. Nash irrelevantly, and without the closeattention from his friend which this important announcement called for,"I may not dance at all to-night."

  Willard stopped abruptly. "What do you know about that"; a voice wassaying, in the rear of the dressing-room; he stiffly refrained fromturning to see whose, "Judith is dancing the first dance with NeilDonovan!"

  Judith was dancing the first dance with Neil Donovan. It was socialhistory already, accepted as such, and not further discussed, even byWillard. But many epoch-making events are not even so much discussed,they look so simple on the face of them. We cross a room, and change thecourse of our lives by crossing it, and few people even observe that wehave crossed the room.

  If Judith had affected the course of her life materially by crossing theroom to the strange boy, she did not seem to be thinking of it just now.She was not thinking at all. She was only dancing, following herpartner's erratic course quite faithfully, and quite intent on doing so;feeling every beat of the music, and showing it, pink-cheeked andsparkling eyed, and pleasantly excited, but nothing more.

  The wistful and dreamy look was gone from her eyes, and her half-formeddesire for something to happen this evening, something that had neverhappened before, was gone from her, too. She felt content with whateverwas going to happen, and deeply interested in it, and particularlyinterested in dancing.

  They had danced almost in silence, rather a grim silence at first, butnow that the boy could let the music carry him with it, and wasbeginning to trust it, too, the silence was comfortable. But the fewwords he managed to say were worth listening to and answering, not to bedreamed through and ignored, like Willard's. His voice was not as sheremembered it, and that was interesting, too, deeply significant, thoughshe could not have said why. Everything seemed unaccountably interestingto-night.

  "I thought it was louder," she said, "or higher--or something."

  "What?"

  "Your voice."

  It was quite husky and low, and he pronounced a word here and there witha brogue like Norah's, only pleasanter, with a kind of singing sound.It was never the word you expected. You had to watch for it. She couldhear it now.

  "Won't you please tell me who you are?"

  "I know who you are, and I know where you live."

  "Where do I?"

  "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 schoolby name, and more of the clerks in the shops, you discovered new peoplein the town where you thought you knew everybody, and it made the towninfinitely large. But this boy had not been so near her, or she wouldhave seen him. He could not have been in school with her. He must haveworked on a farm and studied by himself with the grammar-school teacherat the Falls, and taken special examinations to enter the Junior classthis year, as Willard said that some boy at the Falls was doing. He mustbe 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 mostcomplimentary thing that could be said.

  "But you don't remember me." This had troubled her at first. Now itseemed like the most delicious of jokes, and they laughed at ittogether.

  "That was the first thing you said to me."

  "Isn't it queer"--Judith's eyes
widened and darkened as if it weresomething more than queer, something far worse--"so queer! I can't thinkwhat the first thing was that you said to me."

  They confronted this problem in silence, staring at each other withwide-open eyes. Though they were circling smoothly at last, carried onby the slow, sweet music, so that they hardly seemed to be moving atall, and though he did not really move his head, the boy's eyes seemedto Judith to be coming nearer to hers, nearer all the time. They werebeautiful eyes, deep brown, and very clear. His brown hair grew in asquarish line across his forehead, and waved softly at the temples. Itlooked as if he had brushed it hard there to brush the curl out, but itwas 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 eyesand down at her hand, against his shoulder, her own little hand, withthe careful manicure and the dull polish that was all her motherpermitted; bare of rings, though Norah had given her a beautiful garnetring for Christmas. How shiny his coat-sleeve was, and her hand lookedunfamiliar to her--not like her own at all. She pressed tighter againsthis shoulder to steady herself.

  The music was growing quicker and louder, working up gradually butsurely into a breathless crescendo that meant the end of the dance. Itwhirled them dizzily about. The sleepy spell of the dance broke in thisfinal 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 toa boy before. And why was she dancing with him? She ought to be dancingwith Willard--Willard, waiting there in the dressing-room door with herdance 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 subjectedhim 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 tauntingscreams, on that long-ago May night, and she would have liked to screamit 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 littlevoice:

  "Paddy," she said; "a paddy from Paddy Lane."

  She looked defiantly into his eyes, but they did not grow angry. Theyonly grew very soft and kind, and they laughed at her. She wanted tolook away from the laughter in them, but she could not look away fromthe kindness. Now she was not angry with him any more, but glad she wasdancing with him. She knew she never wanted to stop dancing.

  "Paddy?" He thought she had said it to remind him of that May night; hewas 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, andscreaming 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 herselfto sleep with at night, all the perilous adventures of land and sea,camp fire or pirate ship, began with the breaking of that lantern, andthe 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 ather.

  "Sure you did. As if I couldn't have broken away from a bunch of foolkids, without being doped with the smell of kerosene, and yelled at byanother 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, andI--remembered."

  The brown eyes and the gray met in one last long look and when the browneyes saw the hurt in Judith's, the laughter died out of them. Again theyseemed to be growing nearer and nearer to hers, but this time Judith wasnot afraid, she was glad.

  "If you didn't save my life then, you did to-night." It came in a huskyburst of confidence, straight from his shy boy's heart, very rare andvery precious. Judith caught her breath.

  "Oh, did I? Did I?"

  "Yes. This crowd here had me mad--crazy mad. I was going home. I wasgoing to get off the team. I wasn't going to school next week, and I'veworked 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 aslight to the little girl she used to be, but a tribute to the girl shewas; that was what looked out of his brown eyes at Judith, and sangthrough 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 shinyshoulder, breathless, hurrying to part with her secret and strip herselfbare of mystery generously in a breath. All sorts of barriers might comebetween them, she might put them there herself, and she was quite awareof it, but not yet, not until the music stopped.

  "My name's Judith--Judith Randall. Call me Judy."