His Honour, and a Lady

by Sara Jeannette Duncan

The south wind drove them along together. Judith felt it on her neck and arms, and in little, cool, soft touches about her face. She did not pause to question the happiness it brought her: there were other times for pauses and questions; her eyes were ringed with them, under the powder. She abandoned herself to her woman’s divine sense of ministry; and the man she loved observed that she did it with a certain inimitable poise, born of her confidence in him, which was as new as it was entrancing.

People began to flock downstairs to supper in the wake of the Viceroy and the visiting royalty; the verandah emptied itself. Presently they became aware that they were alone.

“You have dropped your fan,” Ancram said, and picked it up. He looked at its device for a moment, and then restored it. Judith’s hands were lying in her lap, and he slipped the fan into one of them, letting his own rest for a perceptible instant in the warm palm of the other. There ensued a tumultuous silence. He had only underscored a glance of hers; yet it seemed that he had created something—something as formidable as lovely, as embarrassing[as embarrassing] as divine. As he gently withdrew his hand she lifted her eyes to his with mute entreaty, and he saw that they were full of tears. He told himself afterwards that he had been profoundly moved; but this did not interfere with his realisation that it was an exquisite moment.

Ancram regarded her gravely, with a smile of much consideration. He gave her a moment of time, and then, as she did not look up again, he leaned forward, and said, quite naturally and evenly, as if the proposition were entirely legitimate: “The relation between us is too tacit. Tell me that you love me, dear.”

For an instant he repented, since it seemed that she would be carried along on the sweet tide of his words to the brink of an indiscretion. Once more she looked up, softly seeking his eyes; and in hers he saw so lovely a light of self-surrender that he involuntarily thanked Heaven that there was no one else to recognise it. In her face was nothing but the thought of him; and, seeing this, he had a swift desire to take her in his arms and experience at its fullest and sweetest the sense that she and her little empire were gladly lost there. In the pause of her mute confession he felt the strongest exultation he had known. Her glance reached him like a cry from an unexplored country; the revelation of her love filled him with the knowledge that she was infinitely more adorable and more desirable than he had thought her. From that moment she realised to him a supreme good, and he never afterwards thought of his other ambitions without a smile of contempt which was almost genuine. But she said nothing: she seemed removed from any necessity of speech, lifted up on a wave of absolute joy, and isolated from all that lay either behind or before. He controlled his impatience for words from her—for he was very sure of one thing; that when they came they would be kind—and chose his own with taste.

“Don’t you think that it would be better if we had the courage and the candour to accept things as they are? Don’t you think we would be stronger for all that we must face if we acknowledged—only to each other—the pain and the sweetness of it?”

“I have never been blind,” she said softly.

“All I ask is that you will not even pretend to be. Is that too much?”

“How can it be a question of that?” Her voice trembled a little. Then she hurried illogically on: “But there can be no change—there must be no change. These are things I hoped you would never say.”

“The alternative is too wretched: to go on living a lie—and a stupid, unnecessary lie. Why, in Heaven’s name, should there be the figment of hypocrisy between us? I know that I must be content with very little, but I am afraid there is no way of telling you how much I want that little.”