Mountain Part 15

The older woman turned to the girl with ruffled rudeness. "Stay on for supper, Jeanne?"

The other shook her head. "I must run along. Choir practice to-night,"

with a mischievous dimple.

"Religious all of a sudden?"

"The rector flourishes in my spiritual presence."

"How is his new reverence?"

Her mouth twisted piquantly. "Mushy.... Nice boy, though. Coming by to-morrow?"

"Between three and four."

"So long.... Good night, Mr. Mine Superintendent."

Pelham convoyed her to the steps, doubly unwilling to let her go, as he reflected on her fresh charm, and the blind alley of the other woman's amorousness. "I enjoyed our talk, Miss Lauderdale. Could the course continue?"

"I'm always glad to have a human being to talk to. I'm staying with the Andersons; the number's in the phone book."

Thoughtfully he returned to the porch, and a cretonned wicker chair, ignoring the message of the partly-occupied couch.

Inquisitive gray eyes watched him. "Do you like her?"

"Oh, so-so. She seems intelligent."

"Men never do like Jeanne," she a.s.sured him, with a complacent rippling gesture of her flounced body. "She's a dear, but too dreadfully serious.

Doesn't like dancing, and all----" waving vaguely in the direction of the club.

"Tell me something about her."

"There isn't much. Jeanne--I love the French twist, don't you?--Jeanne's a queer, dear girl, Pelham; always busy with labor committees, or something as uplifting and tiresome."

"I've never heard of her, except from you. Is she kin to the Andersons?"

"Oh, no; her people are northern. She was living with an aunt in Philadelphia; tired of her, and skipped out. Another of her modern notions.... She's intelligent; but, then, brains don't marry,--they go to Congress. Or is it the other way? Anyhow, Lyman says that I have no brains." She smiled provocatively.

This time he came, in answer to her pouting, unworded bidding. He was heartily glad, as apparently eager arms gave her the desired harborage, that the other girl was by now blocks away.

A day or two later he telephoned, and on Friday evening came by the Anderson house at eight.

"I'll be down in a minute," she called from the top of the bal.u.s.trade.

The Andersons were away for the month, he recalled. With a pleasant restlessness, he prowled around the cosy living-room, and finally selected a library book on the table. It was by a favorite author; but the t.i.tle, "A Modern Utopia," was new to him. He was into the second chapter when she appeared.

"What a remarkable Wells book!"

She smiled at the enthusiasm. "You don't mind walking, do you?... It's stuffy inside."

"No indeed. Just a moment." He jotted a memorandum of the volume on a handy envelope back.

For all the quiet grace of her face, he noticed that Jane fitted into his stride naturally--and he was a good walker. Instinctively they turned up the hill; the height beyond reached out an irresistible invitation.

Her face drew his eyes as inevitably as the mountain drew their feet.

The face had sparkled on the Meade porch; but the brisk fingering of the night breeze woke it to a positive radiance. When she turned her eyes upon him, their radiant lashes enclosed darker heavens than those above, framing two stars brighter than Vega.

"Tell me about yourself," he urged. "Dorothy said you had 'run away'

from your aunt----"

"Sounds like a naughty little girl, doesn't it? It wasn't quite that bad, though."

"Think of running away to Adamsville!"

"It is an 'H' of a place----" She looked quizzically at him; his smile rea.s.sured her. "I believe in that kind of h.e.l.l. But it's nothing, compared to what I left." Her lips closed decidedly.

He would not drop the subject. "Your aunt was a doctor, wasn't she? And a politician?"

"So you are determined to slice to the skeleton. Yes, she's a doctor, runs her own hospital, and as much of the rest of the city as she can.

She had the running habit, Mr. Judson; and, the first few years I was with her, she ran me too ... and then ran me away." Unwilling lips locked, as if unhappy at the recollection.

"Just why?"

The words were picked carefully. "She wanted me to live as her echo--parrot her likes and dislikes, accept every limping bias as final truth. My mother was the same type." He fancied that the eyes shone more l.u.s.trously; but they were turned away. This topic, of the conflict between the girl and her parents, stirred him to a disquieting curiosity, avid for all the details, the hows and the whys; as if the answers held some clew that he sought for.

She answered the question that he refrained from asking. "Yes, she's alive; I left her, to go and live with Auntie. The thing sounds unbelievable, and ridiculous; but she wanted to keep me forever at the age of thirteen and a half. Father was dead, and she looked young; a grown daughter was something to explain away. Why, she would have kept me in knee skirts if the neighbors hadn't talked.... When she married again, I left."

"Are those the only times you ran away?" he smiled the query.

She pointed to the red scowl in the north, where some startled furnace had opened its giant eye beneath the cloudy mirror of the heavens.

"Isn't it marvelous!... Did I ever run away before? I believe when I was four I got tired of home--we were living in Indiana then--packed my rag doll and the puppy into my baby-carriage, and started out.... They caught me before I had gone a block."

He watched the vacant sky. The red glare had abruptly died. "You should see the view from our crest--Crenshaw Hill.... I almost ran away, once.

I got as far as the railroad station." He detailed the weeks of punishment that had preceded his attempted escape.

"Your father must be a brute!" The contagious sympathy that shook her tones moved him.

"He's really nice.... His viewpoint is old-fas.h.i.+oned."

"Old fas.h.i.+oned! It's paleolithic. No wonder you ran away."

"He figured that I was his son--accent on the 'his.' He has the idea still."

She stared moodily at the dark blankness of the mountain, then swung beside him on a slender coping at the head of a little park lost in a bend of the highland boulevard.

"That's the trouble with the whole family system," she reflected slowly.

"Parents never realize that children grow up. Why not go to the other extreme, and a.s.sume that the child has an individuality from the start?"

"You like children?" Something in his thoughtful tone threw a shadow of embarra.s.sment over both, intimate and strangely agreeable.