“I am a happy man,” said Throckmorton to her. “Jacqueline has promised to marry me.”
His words were few, but Judith understood how much was conveyed in his sparing speech.
“I am happy, too,” she returned, pressing his hand. “You deserve to be happy, and you will make—Jacqueline happy.”
As she said this, she smiled tremulously. Throckmorton was too much absorbed to notice it.
“I will, so help me Heaven!” he answered.
In all his life before, Throckmorton did not remember ever to have felt the desire of communion about his inner thoughts and feelings. Was it because he himself had changed, or that Judith had that delicate and penetrating sympathy that drew him on to speak of what he had never spoken before? Anyway, he sat down by her, and talked to her a long time—talked of all the doubts and pitfalls that had beset him; his plans that Jacqueline might be happy; his confidence that Judith would be his strongest ally with Mrs. Temple, who was by no means a person to be counted on. She might object to Throckmorton’s profession, to his being in what she continued to call the Yankee army, to his twenty-odd years’ seniority, to his not being a member of the church; as like as not this was the very rock on which Throckmorton’s ship would split. Judith, with the same heavenly smile, listened to him; she even made a little wholesome fun of him; and when he rose to go, Throckmorton felt, even at that time—and nobody could say that he was a laggard in love—that he had gained something else besides Jacqueline, in the sweet friendship of a woman like Judith. He took her little hand, and was about to raise it to his lips with tender respect, when Judith, who had stood as still as a statue, suddenly snatched her hand away and gave Throckmorton a look so strange that he fancied her attacked by a sudden prudery that was far from becoming to her or complimentary to him. She slipped past him out of the door, and he heard her light and rapid footfall as she sped up the stairs. As there was nobody left to entertain the newly accepted lover, he put on a battered blue cap, for which he had a sneaking affection, and sometimes wore under cover of night, and let himself out of the front door and went home across the snow-covered fields, in an ecstasy.
Meanwhile, Jacqueline, as soon as she had heard the bang of the hall-door after Throckmorton’s quick, soldierly step, stole out of her own room into Judith’s. In answer to her tap, Judith said, “Come in.”
Judith was seated before the old-fashioned dressing-table, her long, rich hair combed out, and was making a pretense of brushing it, but occasionally she would stop and gaze with strange eyes at her own image in the glass. She rose when Jacqueline entered, and took the girl in her arms as Jacqueline expected.
“Judith,” Jacqueline said, “I am to be married to Major Throckmorton. I wonder what Freke will say!”