[CHAPTER XLV]
HOW CHALLIS AND JUDITH MET AGAIN AT TROUT BEND, AND TALKED IT OVER. HOW SHE CRIED OFF, FEELING SECURE. AND OF THE ARRANGEMENT THEY MADE. OF A CENTENARIAN WHO GOT HALF-A-SOVEREIGN
It was early morning at Trout Bend, and the man who sat on the moss-grown beechen root this story told of—more than a year ago now—was turning over in his heart all that had come about in that short time, and trying to say to himself point-blank that it was no fault of his own. He succeeded in saying it—said it aloud in words, that there should be no doubt at all about it. He said it twice, in fact, and seemed in the end dissatisfied.
Every little incident of the day's life seemed to throw doubt on the point. The discordant jay that shrieked in the thicket as good as cried out "Liar!" and fluttered away disgusted. The squirrel that paused half-way up the beech-trunk had an air of shocked reproach in his very large and startled eye, and when he moved again seemed to want to get out of the way as soon as possible, and to mix with sincere Society again. The fish that leaped in the pool had come to the surface this time, clearly, to say to Challis: "We have met before, and my life has not changed. Yours has, and you have only yourself to thank for it! Why need you leave your native waters uncompelled?"
Challis denied the suggestion his own mind had made. He had had to share in what followed; his exodus from those waters had been compulsory. Or, rather, was it not true that the waters had drained away from him, and left him to find another pool downstream, or die unnourished on the dry sands? But it was a metaphor that rang false, and he dismissed it impatiently; the more so that some mental distortion, akin to the one he invented the strange name for, must needs intrude an unwarranted image of an angler with rod and line, and rouse him to an indignant denial of that angler's identity. Whose fault soever it was, it was none of Judith's.
And as he thought this, there she was herself, crossing the little plank bridge where the convict dropped the ring, and found it again so many years too late.
He was on his feet in a moment, and on his way to meet her. He had a double-barrelled kiss ready on his lips, supposing the coast clear at the moment of their meeting. Saladin, who was present, was in confidence, and didn't count. Botheration take that old woman gathering sticks!—did she matter?
Judith thought so, evidently, and payment had to wait. "Company!" said she. She was looking as beautiful as ever—more so! "She's a hundred and two, I believe," she added. "But one has to lay down a rule in these matters, and stick to it." She was referring to the old woman, who most likely neither saw nor heard, or if she did, only harked back to eighty years ago, and thought, "Why not?"
All Challis's cloud of doubt and self-reproach vanished as her consolatory hand lay in his arm. Something of her masterful nature was in the touch of it, communicable through nerve-currents. It reassured him, and he could respond to its pressure, old woman or no!