“I don’t see how anybody can be hardhearted thataway with a person they love,” she said softly as the song descended to its doleful end.
The next morning Judith hurried her work that she might get through and go over to the Bonbright house, there to put in execution her long-cherished plan of cleaning it and making it fit for Creed’s occupancy that night. Old Dilsey Rust, their tenant, came in to help at the Turrentine cabin always on occasions like this, or with the churning or washing; and penetrated with impatience the girl finally left her assistant in charge of matters and set forth through the woods and across the fields, the little key which she had carried ever since that morning in early April in her pocket like a talisman. At last it was to open her kingdom to her. Behind the bolt that it controlled lay not only the home of Creed’s childhood, but supposably the home of his children. Judith’s heart beat suffocatingly at the thought.
Halfway across she met Huldah Spiller coming up from the Far spring with a bucket of sulphur water which was held to be good for Jim Cal’s rheumatism.
“Whar ye goin’?” asked Huldah, looking curiously at the broom over Judith’s shoulder, the roll of cloths and the small gourd of soft soap she carried.
“I’m a-goin’ whar I’m a-goin’,” returned Judith aggressively. But the other only smiled. It did not suit her to be offended at that moment. Instead, “What are you goin’ to wear to-night, Judy?” she inquired vivaciously. It was one of the advantages of waiting on table at a boarding house in the settlement—pieced out perhaps by the possession of red hair—that Huldah had the courage to address Judith Barrier as “Judy.”
The hostess of the evening’s festivities was half in the mind to pass on without reply; then her curiosity as to Huldah’s costume got the better of her, and she compromised, with a laconic,
“My white frock—what are you?”
“Don’t you know I went down to Hepzibah after you said you was goin’ to have a play-party?” asked Huldah, tossing her head to get the red curls out of her eyes. “Well, Iley had give me fifty cents on my wages—” Huldah worked as a servant in her sister’s family, which is not uncommon in the mountains—“an’ I tuck it and bought me ten yard of five-cent lawn, the prettiest blue you ever put yo’ eyes on.”
“Blue!” A sudden shock went over Judith. She had forgotten; and here Huldah Spiller would wear a blue dress, and she—oh, the stupidity, the bat-like, doltish, blindness of it!—would be in white, because it was now too late to make a change. Out of the very tragedy of the situation she managed to pluck forth a smile.
“I was aimin’ to wear blue ribbons,” she said finally. It had just come into her head that she could pull the blue bow from her hat—that blue bow with which she had zealously replaced the despised and outcast red—and so make shift.