“Oh, no,” disclaimed Judith, whose little shudder had been as much from excitement as from the sharp chill of the night air after the heated play-room. “I reckon somebody jest walked over my grave—I ain’t cold.”
But he had pulled off the coat while he spoke, and now he turned to put it about her, and drew her back to the doorstep. Judith was full of a strange ecstasy as she slipped her arms into the sleeves. The lover’s earliest and favourite artifice—the primitive kindness of wrapping her in his own garment! Even Creed, unready and unschooled as he was, felt stir within him its intimate appeal.
A nebulous lightening which had been making itself felt behind the eastern line of mountains now came plainly in view, late moon, melancholy and significant, as the waning moon always is. By its dim illumination Creed saw Judith Barrier standing at the door of his own house, smiling at him tremulously, with the immemorial challenge in her dark eyes. To that challenge the native man in him—the lover—so long usurped by the zealot, the would-be philanthropist, rose thrilling, yet still bewildered and uncertain, to respond. Something heady and ancient and eternally young seemed to pass into his soul out of the night and the moonlight and the shining of her eyes. He was all alive to her nearness, her loveliness, to the sweet sense that she was a young woman, he a young man, and the loveliness and the dearness of her were his for the trying—for the winning. His breath caught in his throat.
“Wait a minute,” he whispered hurriedly, though she had not moved. With eager hands he wrapped the coat close about her. “Let’s sit here on the doorstep and talk awhile. There are a heap of things I want to ask you about—that I want to tell you.”
Young beauty and belle that she was, Judith had been sought and courted, in that most primitive society, since she was fourteen. She was love’s votary by birthright, and her wit and her emotions were schooled in love’s game: to lure, to please, to exploit, to defend, evade, deny; in each postulant seeking, testing, trying for the right man to whom should be made love’s final surrender. But Creed, always absorbed in vague altruistic dreams, had no boyish sweethearting behind him to have taught him the ways of courtship.
Fire-flies sparkled everywhere, thickest over the marshy places. A mole cricket was chirring in the grass by the old doorstone. Sharp on the soft dark air came the call of that woodland night bird which the mountain people say cries “chip-out-o’-white-oak,” and which others translate “chuck-wills-widow.”
“I—” he began, hesitated momentarily, then daunted, grasped at the familiar things of his life—“I don’t get on very well up here. I’m afraid I’ve made a failure of it; but”—he turned to her in a curious, groping entreaty, his hat in his hands, the dim moonlight full on his fair head and in his eager eyes—“but if you would help me—with you—I think I ought to——”
“I say made a failure!” cooed Judith in her rich, low tones. “You ax me whatever you want to know. You tell me what it is that you’re aimin’ to do—I say made a failure!”
Her trust was so hearty, so wholesale, she filled so instantly the position not only of sweetheart but of mother to a small boy with an unsatisfactory toy—that would always be Judith Barrier—that Creed’s heart—the man’s heart—a lonely one, and beginning to feel itself misunderstood and barred out from its kind—melted in his bosom. There was silence between them, a silence vibrant with the coming utterance. But even as the dark, fond, inviting eyes and the troubled, kindling blue ones encountered, as Creed lifted the girl’s hand timidly, and essayed speech, the voice of that one who had stepped on her grave harshly aroused them both.
“I vow—I thort it was thieves, an’ I was a-goin’ to see could I pick off you-all,” drawled Blatchley Turrentine’s level tones from the shadow of the garden. Mutely, with a sense of chill and disappointment that was like the shock of a physical blow to each, the two young creatures got to their feet and turned to leave the place, preparing to go by the high road, without consultation. As they passed him near the gate, Blatch Turrentine fell in on the other side of the girl and walked with them silently for a time.