XIX A Web in the Moonlight
I
Judith was glad, afterward, that the responsibility for Eileen had been lifted from David Trench’s shoulders, howsoever humiliating the conditions might be. All that would have made for guidance had long since been wrested from his hands, and the inevitable pain would be robbed of the corrosive quality of self-reproach. She wondered what he was thinking, that portentous Monday evening, as he gazed past her and Theodora to the row of seats across the aisle where Hal and Eileen sat, munching popcorn and making audible comments on the speeches, comments that bubbled with cleverness not always refined in its quality.
Just as the perspiring statesman appeared on the flag-draped platform, bearing a message from the Governor of the state, Dr. Schubert and his son came down the aisle, looking to right and left with searching eyes. Theodora stood on tiptoe to signal them. There was a shifting of the original seating arrangement, so that Sydney and Sylvia might be together. The first few sentences of the florid oration were lost in the general confusion, and when Judith looked again into the row of seats across the aisle, two places were vacant. Hal and Eileen had gone.
II
After the fireworks the town went home. Sydney Schubert walked with Sylvia, talking of other Fourth of July experiences in a tone from which the restraint of the disappointed lover was wholly wanting. David played sweetheart to Theodora, a rôle that had been developed by long practice. It came to Judith, walking behind them with Lary and Dr. Schubert, that David Trench was essentially a lover—and love must have something to feed upon.
“Will we wait for Eileen?” he asked, when the feast had been prepared.
“They’ll be here any minute,” Sylvia cried flippantly. Then, in a voice that echoed her mother’s objurgatory habit of speech: “For goodness’ sake, papa, stop worrying about that girl. She’s old enough to take care of herself. Syd and I were traipsing all over the country when I was her age, and I can’t remember that you sat up nights worrying about me.”
“Young Marksley isn’t Sydney Schubert,” her father reminded her.
III
It was one o’clock when the merry party separated, and still no Eileen. A light rain was falling, and the coat closet must be searched for umbrellas. Lary lingered at Judith Ascott’s door, unwilling to say good night. Some misshapen apprehension that had tormented him all evening struggled for expression.
“Do you believe, Judith, that whatever is, is right?”
“I can recall the time, less than six months ago, when I was convinced that whatever is—is wrong,” she answered, mystified.
“And now?” He searched her face, there in the moist dusk of the veranda. When he spoke again, it was with something of Theo’s kindling animation: “I don’t know what you have done to me. A moment ago I was facing a great onrushing wall of black water. And all at once it has broken into ripples of silver joy. Last night I watched a great black and yellow spider, playing with his web in the moonlight. He was such a handsome, capable fellow—and the moth was so blunderingly stupid. I wondered if there were not something to be said in favour of the spider. But—you will think me a fatalist, if I finish the thought I had in mind. You will believe me when I tell you that I am not, in the least?”
“No, Lary, I will not believe you—one whit more than I can believe that it was an empty accident that brought me to Springdale—to Vine Cottage—four months ago. You and Eileen and I are caught in the web. The spider is Fate. I begged the gods to burn my fingers with the fire of life ... and they heard my prayer....”
“You delicious pagan! I might fancy gentle Clotho spinning a silken strand for you. But to sear your fingers—” He caught them and pressed them to his lips. Then he hurried across the lawn in a panic, his bare head wet with the summer rain. Judith looked after him, Sylvia’s best umbrella in her hand. She wanted to call him back, but it would only mean a double wetting. And Sylvia need not know.
She went up to her room but not to sleep. Taking down the thick coils of her pale chestnut hair, she braided it deliberately. A strand, blown across her face by the breeze from the west window, reminded her, all at once, of the web. She relaxed weakly on a hassock, watching the glittering drops on the edge of the awning that shaded her window from the afternoon sun. Was the web inevitable ... Fate? As yet she was free. Could she view with equanimity a future that involved, not Lary and his two young sisters, but those others who were of his flesh? Could she bear the heartache that was David Trench? Could she.... Her head drooped low on the window sill and her mind drifted rudderless on a sea of dreams.
IV
When Hal and Eileen left the stadium it was in accordance with a prearranged plan to meet Ina and Kitten and two of the boys who had contrived the loan of a touring car for the evening. They would drive to Olive Hill for the celebration—the exciting part of it. Competitive drilling, not in gaudy uniforms, but that more useful drilling that had to do with ledges of shale and limestone. It was at best but a poor imitation of the annual drill contest in the gold mining country, where powerful muscles contended with steel bitted drills against the tough impediment of granite. Here the very ledge had to be faked—removed from the nearby hillside with infinite care, and mounted against an improvised wall of mine refuse. It was the best the coal mines of Illinois could afford, but it served its purpose. There were money prizes and lesser trophies—geese, chickens and baskets of provisions.
The contest finished, there was a dance in the pavilion. Hal had parked his roadster where he and Eileen could watch the antics of the dancers. He was not sorry when he learned that the borrowed car must be returned by midnight, and the others must be on their way towards Springdale. He and Eileen would be following in a little while, he said.
“I’ve been trying all evening to dodge them,” he added, as he waved farewell to the departing car. “Some people simply can’t take a hint.”
The girl nestled close. “Just you and me ... all alone in the universe.”
“Sweetheart,” Hal slipped his arm around her waist and laid his cheek against hers, “it’s all fixed with my father. He’s set on having me go to Pratt; but he’s agreed on an allowance that ought to take care of two. We’re in luck that you can cook. And you won’t mind a little flat? I can count on Adelaide to help us out if we get in a pinch. Of course my mother’ll raise Cain—and I’ll be on the lookout for a job, from the start. If they think I’m going to wait all that time for you—why, I can’t, Eileen!”
The girl’s breath came so thick, it choked her. The dancers swam dizzily before her eyes. The saplings in the little grove took up the dance, swaying with uncertain rhythm, their lithe trunks bending to the tumult in her brain. “Do you love me well enough to get along that way for a year or two? Will you come to me, sweetheart, when I send for you?”
And then the rain. Men and women went scurrying to places of shelter. The thin grove, the pavilion with its dilapidated roof, the mine house—whose inner spaces were always barred to the public as soon as the last workman had gone—these offered meagre protection. Over there behind the mine dump was a corn crib and feed room where provender for the now obsolete pit mules had formerly been kept. No one else had thought of this refuge. Hal and Eileen were alone, the rain pounding on the rusty tin roof to the tune of their madly beating hearts.
V
How long Judith lay asleep she did not know. She was aroused at length by voices, so close that they seemed to emanate from the lawn beneath her window. She tried to move. Her arm, her neck, her shoulder creaked with pain. She must have been there in that cramped position a long time. Her hair and her thin negligée were quite damp. As her scattered senses collected themselves she realized that the sound came from beyond the wall. A voice, hoarse with rapture, Eileen’s voice, murmured over and over:
“Oh, darling, I never knew I loved you until now.”
Some high platitude touching manly fidelity punctuated the girl’s impassioned utterance. The façade of the house lay in ghostly shadows that enveloped the figures completely. But out there across the lawn lay the white moonlight, frosting the wet grass with a shimmering incrustation of unearthly jewels. Hal Marksley’s substantial form came like a skulking wraith from the gloom, gliding along the thin edge of the shadow until he reached a convenient screen of shrubs, vaulted over the wall and crossed close beneath Judith’s casement. He was cranking the reluctant engine of his motor car, out there in the side street, as the clock in the chapel tower struck three.
VI
It was ten o’clock when Eileen came down stairs, refused breakfast and wandered listlessly out into the hot July air. She was pale and her full lips were swollen. Her eyes were set in murky pools of shadow, as yellow as ochre, beneath their screen of long lashes, and her blond braids hung stiff and obdurate. As she entered the summer house, Theodora greeted her with a derisive gesture.
“Lady Judith, tell her what she missed. I never saw the automobile yet that could take me away from such a lobster salad.”
“Perhaps she didn’t know about it.”
“Indeed she did. She made the mayonnaise herself. Sylvia can’t hit it one time in three. And mamma and Drusilla ... the oil always separates, on them.”
“Separates on them!” Eileen sniffed. “Where do you get that line of talk?”
She had relaxed on the oaken bench and sat kicking the gravel with the toe of her loose slipper. After a time she broke the sullen silence:
“I didn’t mean to be discourteous to you, Lady Judith. That’s what Sylvia scolded me about; but that wasn’t what she had in mind. She’s sore because I didn’t bring Hal to her party. I knew what kind of a frosty shoulder he’d get from Lary and papa. And the way she fawns over him! It makes me sick. He hates to be toadied to—because his people have money. He knows that if he didn’t have a rich father, mamma and Sylvia wouldn’t think any more of him than Lary does. He’d take me away from that house to-day, if he had his way about it. He knows what I’m in for ... Sylvia to order me around for a month. I almost wish mamma hadn’t gone to Bromfield.”