Crespin spoke—in Hindustani—but it drew a blank. It was evident that Hindustani was as useless here as English or Norse. The priest listened blankly, and then in his turn poured forth a speech of some length—almost as long as it was guttural, voluble and heated, pointing dramatically now to the dusky incarnadined temple, now to the beetling palace.
Perhaps Mrs. Crespin and Dr. Traherne expected little from Crespin’s embassy, perhaps they were willing to wait patiently to hear from him its result. For they made no steps to follow him, and paid little attention, but stood together just where he left them.
“You were splendid all through,” Traherne said in a low, tense voice that said more than his words.
“I had perfect faith in you,” the woman answered, her eyes full and frank on his.
And his eyes thanked her. But he only said regretfully, “If I’d had another pint of petrol I might have headed for that sort of esplanade behind the castle up there. . . .”
“Yes, I saw it.”
“. . . and made an easy landing. But I simply had to try for this place, and trust to luck.”
“It wasn’t luck,” Lucilla said quickly, “but your skill that saved us.”
The sudden blood rushed over Traherne’s wind-browned face. It was more than she had said to him ever before—not the simple, conventional words, but the pride in him that pulsed in them, pride in him, and something too of a claiming. She did not know that, and he knew that she did not. But he heard and understood, and his heart lashed at his ribs, and was hurt. In all the few hard years of his service to her, man’s service never stinted, never underlined, no such open recognition of the hidden thing that lay between them had ever been told. He had known—from the first. But he had hoped and believed that she did not. Was he glad or sorry? He was both. His loyalty and friendship regretted, but his man’s nature leapt and was glad. When he had tried to hide Antony’s weakness from her, and to shield her from it—to keep it out of her presence, to drive it from her thoughts, when together they had strained and schemed, as they constantly had, to save Crespin from himself, and her and her children from the present shame and coming consequences of his sick misdoings, no word, no sign, had been let slip from him to her, or from her to him, acknowledging why he stood to her side. She often had spoken to him of Antony’s good qualities, never of Antony’s faults.
But now a barrier was down—only one of many, the others still held, but one—and she had let it fall. It usually is the woman who lets it fall.