‘O Judy,’ I cried, catching at her sleeve, ‘he is only a boy!’
‘There were times when I thought that conclusive. Now the misery of it has gone to sleep; don’t waken it. It pleases me to believe that the years are a convention. I never had any dignity, you know, and I seem to have missed the moral deliverance. I only want--oh, you know what I want. Why don’t you open your telegram?’
I had been folding and fingering the brown envelope as if it had been a scrap of waste paper.
‘It is probably from Mrs. Watkins about the victoria,’ I said, feeling its profound irrelevance. ‘I wired an offer to her in Bombay. However’--and I read the telegram, the little solving telegram from Army Headquarters. I turned my back on her to read it again, and then I replaced it very carefully and put it in my pocket. It was a moment to take hold of with both hands, crying on all one’s gods for steadiness.
‘How white you look!’ said Mrs. Harbottle, with concern. ‘Not bad news?’
‘On the contrary, excellent news. Judy, will you stay to lunch?’
She looked at me, hesitating. ‘Won’t it seem rather a compromise on your part? When you ought to be rousing the city--’
‘I don’t intend to rouse the city,’ I said.
‘Thank you,’ I said, grimly, ‘but the only real favour you can do me is to stay to lunch.’ It was then just on one.
‘I’ll stay,’ she said, ‘if you will promise not to make any sort of effort. I shouldn’t mind, but it would distress you.’
‘I promise absolutely,’ I said, and ironical joy rose up in me, and the telegram burned in my pocket.
She would talk of it, though I found it hard to let her go on, knowing and knowing and knowing as I did that for that day at least it could not be. There was very little about herself that she wanted to tell me; she was there confessed a woman whom joy had overcome; it was understood that we both accepted that situation. But in the details which she asked me to take charge of it was plain that she also kept a watchful eye upon fate--matters of business.
We were in the drawing-room. The little round clock in its Armritsar case marked half-past three. Judy put down her coffee cup and rose to go. As she glanced at the clock the light deepened in her eyes, and I, with her hand in mine, felt like an agent of the Destroyer--for it was half-past three--consumed myself with fear lest the blow had miscarried. Then as we stood, suddenly, the sound of hoofs at a gallop on the drive, and my husband threw himself off at the door and tore through the hall to his room; and in the certainty that overwhelmed me even Judy, for an instant, stood dim and remote.