The Happy Warrior

by A. S. M. Hutchinson

BOOK ONE

A NICE, SHORT BOOK, ILLUSTRATING
THE ELEMENTS OF CHANCE

CHAPTER I

A PAGE OF THE PEERAGE

I

This life we stumble through, or strut through, or through which we creep and whine, or through which we dance and whistle, is built upon hazard—and that is why it is such a very wobbling affair, made up of tricks and chances; hence its miseries, but hence also its spice; hence its tragedies, and hence also its romance. A dog I know—illustrating the point—passed from its gate into the village street one morning, and merely to ease the itch of a momentary fit of temper, or merely to indulge a prankish whim, put a firm bite into a plump leg. Mark, now, the hazard foundation of this chancey life. A dozen commonplace legs were offered the dog; it might have tasted the lot and procured no more pother than the passing of a few shillings, the solatium of a pair of trousers or so. One leg was as good as another to the dog; yet it chanced upon the vicar's (whose back was turned), enjoyed its bite, jerked from the devout but startled man an amazingly coarse expression, and hence arose alarums and excursions, a village set by the ears, family feuds, a budding betrothal crushed by parental strife (one party owning the dog and the other calling the vicar Father) and the genesis of a dead set against the vicar's curate (who hit at the dog and struck the priest) that ended in the unfortunate young man having to leave the village.

But all that is by the way, and is only offered to your notice because commonplace examples are usually the most striking illustrations. It is introduced to excuse the starting of this story with its least and worst character. He figures but occasionally on these pages; yet by this chance and by that he comes to play a vital part as the story draws to an end; he comes, in fact, to close it: and therefore, out of his place, he shall be the first to occupy your attention.

Egbert Hunt his name.

II

Miller's Field, Hertfordshire, an outer suburb of London and within the cockney twang, was put into a proper commotion by the news that had brought a title into its midst—had left a peerage as casually as the morning milk at its desirable residence "Hillside," where Mr. and Mrs. Letham (Lord and Lady Burdon as suddenly and completely as Monday becomes Tuesday) made their home. The commotion chattered and clacked in every household and in every chance meeting in the streets; but it swirled most violently about Hillside and in Hillside, and its brunt—if his own statement may be accepted—pressed most heavily upon Egbert Hunt.

Egbert, morose, a pallid and stoutish boy of fourteen years, constituted the male staff at Hillside. This boy toiled sullenly at a diversity of tasks, knives, boots, coals, windows: any soul-corroding duties of such character, throughout the earlier hours of the day. In the afternoon he fitted himself into a tight page-boy's suit that had been procured through the advertisement columns of the "Lady," and that, on the very day of its arrival, had been shorn of much of the glory it first possessed in Egbert's eyes.

Sunning himself proudly down the village street, the lad had been greeted with a howl of "Marbles!" by the ribald companions he thought to impress.

"Marbles! They're buttons, yer silly toads!" the indignant Egbert had cried.

"Wot O! Marbles!" they jeered, and two of the round silver buttons were wrenched off in the distressing affair that followed.

Egbert carried them home in his pocket. The incident augmented the hostile and suspicious air with which, from his childhood upwards, he regarded the world. For this attitude the accident attending his birth was primarily responsible. When he presented this morose disposition to his mother's friends, Mrs. Hunt, in her softer moods, would instruct them that his sourness—as she termed it—was due to the sudden and unexpected discharge of a cannon during her visit to a circus, when Egbert was but eight months on the road to this vale of tears. The cannon had hastened his arrival (she never knew, so she said, how she managed to get home) and the abruptness, she was convinced, was responsible for his glum demeanor. By a dark process of reasoning, wherein were combined retribution to the clown who had fired the cannon and recompense to the child it had unduly impelled into the world, she had named the boy Egbert, this being the title by which the clown was announced on the circus programme.

The story became a popular joke against the lad; to shout "Bang!" at Egbert from behind concealment became a favourite sport of his grosser companions. It rankled him sorely. For one so young he was unnaturally embittered; his digestion, moreover, was defective.

III

Upon the evening of the day on which his employers, Mr. and Mrs. Letham, had been miraculously elevated to the style and title of Lord and Lady Burdon, Egbert's hostility towards the world was at its height. From half-past three onwards, callers followed one another, or passed one another, over the Hillside threshold. Egbert was bone-tired. It was close upon seven when kindly Mrs. Archer, the doctor's wife, addressing him as he showed her out, inquired in her gentle way after his mother and passed down the path with a "Well, good night, Egbert!"

"Good night, mum," Egbert muttered. He added in a lower but more devout key, "An' I yope ter Gawd yer the last of um."

The cool air invited him to the gate and he leaned wearily over it, his bitterness of spirit increased by a boy who, spying him, cried, "Bang!" as he passed, "Bang!" in retort to Egbert's tongue thrust out in hatred and contempt across the gate, and "Bang! bang!" again, as the gathering evening took him in her trailing cloak.

Egbert drew in his tongue with a groan of misery and hate, of indigestion and of weariness. An approaching footstep along the road caused him to thrust it out again and to keep it extended, armed lest the newcomer should be one of the bangers who irked his young life.

It chanced to be his father, returning from work in the fields. Mr. Hunt paused opposite his son and gazed for a few moments at the outstretched tongue. At some pain to himself Egbert pressed it to further extension: the boy was a little short-sighted and in the gloom did not recognise his parent.

"Tongue sore?" Mr. Hunt inquired, after a space.

Recognising the voice, Egbert restored the member to his mouth.

"Comes of tellin' a lie, so I've 'eard," said Mr. Hunt.

Considerable sympathy was in his tone; but Egbert gave no more attention to this view of retributive justice than he had vouchsafed to the question preceding it.

Father and son—neither greatly given to words when together—continued to regard each other solemnly across the gate. Presently Egbert jerked his head back at the house. "Heard about it?" he inquired.

The news had long since permeated the village. Mr. Hunt said, "Ah!" and taking a step forward, gazed earnestly at the house, first on one side of Egbert's head and then on the other. His air was that of a man who, the inmates suddenly having reached the peerage, rather expected to see a coronet suspended from the roof or a scarlet robe fluttering from a window; and as he stepped back he said, "Ah!" again, in a tone that committed him, as a result of his observations, neither to complete surprise nor complete satisfaction.

"Ah!" said Mr. Hunt, and shifted the spade he carried from his left hand to his right and waited.

"Goin' to take me with 'em when they move to the 'Ouse o' Lords," Egbert announced. "Told me so, dinner time."

Mr. Hunt put the spade before him, and leaning on it gazed profoundly at his son. "Ah! You'll wear one of them wing things side of yer 'at, that's what you'll wear," he informed him. "Tall 'at."

"Cockatoos they call um, don't they?" Egbert inquired.

"That's right. Side of yer 'at," his father replied. "Tall 'at."

Egbert appeared to ponder gloomily on the prospect. It was the habit of this boy's sombre mind to suspect a hidden indignity in each change thrust into his life. Seeking it in the cockatoos, he presently found it.

"Make me a Guy-forx again, I suppose," he said. "Same as these 'ere buttons."

Mr. Hunt took a step forward, and peering over the gate gazed down at his son's buttons with considerable concern.

The inspection finished, "Different in the 'Ouse o' Lords," he consoled. "Expec' they'll all wear them wing things side of their 'ats there. Call 'em same as they call you, that's what you can do. Tall 'ats."

But this boy's pessimism was incurable. "I'll have the biggest, you'll find," Egbert responded. "Else they'll give me two an' make a Guy-forx of me that way."

Mr. Hunt mentally visualised cockades the size of albatross wings on each side of his son's hat. The picture made him unable to deny the slightly outré effect that would be produced, and he began to move away.

"Comin' in to see your mother to-night, I suppose?" he asked.

Egbert grunted.

"Tongue still sore?"

"Boilin'," said Egbert, and turning from the gate moved moodily towards the house.

At nine o'clock, following his usual Tuesday night privilege, he betook himself down the village street to his parents' cottage. A further word or two dropped by his mistress joined with kitchen gossip during supper to enable him to supply something of the information for which he found his mother impatiently waiting.

"So you're goin' with 'em, I hear?" she greeted him.

Egbert nodded.

"Think you was goin' to prising, 'stead of to a lord's castle, one would, judgin' by your face," Mrs. Hunt exclaimed.

"Goin' to wear one o' them wing things side of his 'at, that's what he's goin' to wear," announced her husband. "Tall 'at."

"An' oughter be proud," cried Mrs. Hunt. "Hold yer yed up, Sulky, do!"

Sulky gave a stiff jerk to his bullet head. "Not goin' to the 'Ouse o' Lords, after all," he answered his father.

"'Ouse o' Lords! 'Ouse o' nonsense!" Mrs. Hunt exclaimed. "Goin' to live in a castle, that's where you're goin' to live, young man. Down in Wiltsheer; the cook told me all about it when I popped round this afternoon."

"Goin' to wear one o' them wing things side of 'is 'at, that's what he's goin' to wear," pronounced Mr. Hunt doggedly. "Tall 'at. Tall 'at," he reaffirmed; but "In a castle!" Mrs. Hunt continued, heedless of the interruption. "Burdon Old Manor, they call it, at a place called Little Letham, which Letham is the family name of the family, they giving their name to it as is very often the case, and a proper castle it is, too, though called a Manor."

Mrs. Hunt foamed out this information with a heat that increased as she perceived the morose indifference with which Egbert accepted it. Throwing herself into the third person, "Don't you 'ear what your mother is a telling of you, Sulk?" she demanded. Her eye caught on the wall behind Sulk's head a coloured presentation calendar depicting Lambert Simnel at scullion's work in an enormous kitchen, and she took inspiration. "A proper castle, your mother's telling you, where you'll have scullings in the kitchen; that's what you'll 'ave, you nasty sulk, you! Can't you say something?"

"I'll sculling 'em!" breathed Egbert, yielding to her request. He scented in this new form of acquaintance some fresh trial and indignity. "I'll sculling 'em!" he repeated.

His fierce intention earned him at once, and earned him full, the thump upon his head that his mother's excitement and his own gloom had been conspiring to inflict ever since he entered the cottage; and he trudged his way back to Hillside viciously embittered against every point of an aching day: his mistress, her visitors, the approaching change in his life, his mother, the "scullings." "Tyrangs!" said Egbert. He stumbled over a stone as he pronounced the savage word and bit his tongue most painfully. "Boil yer," said Egbert to the stone; and, including the stone with the "tyrangs," as wearily he got him to bed, "Boil um!" he said. "Tyrangs! Toads!"

CHAPTER II

A CHANGE IN THE PEERAGE

This hazard foundation of life! As a stone tossed down a hillside dislodges others and sets them rolling, themselves dislodging more till the first light pitch will gather to a rumble where was peace, the first stone cause to jump and shout many score that might have held their place long after the thrower's idle hand was equal dust with the dust of their descent—so it is with the lightest action that the least of us may idly toss upon our small affairs. We cannot move alone. Life has us in a web, within whose meshes none may stir a hand but he pulls here, loosens there, and sets a wave of movement through a hundred tangles of the coil.

This hazard foundation of life! Egbert Hunt was made to lean wearily over the gate that evening and the toads and "tyrangs" whose oppression had cost him a bitter day were set in his path by a movement in the web, leagues upon leagues of land and sea from Miller's Field. Life has us in a web. In one remote corner an Afridi tribesman shot a British officer: that was his movement in the meshes, and swift, swift, the chain of tugs set up thereby acted upon a morose page-boy in another remote corner, rendering him bone-tired through ushering the visitors come to congratulate those who had stepped into the dead man's shoes.

This hazard touch even in the billet that the Afridi tribesman selected for his bullet! In sheeting rain, behind a rock above a pass on the northwestern frontier of India, Multan Khan—Afridi, one-time sepoy, deserter from his regiment, scoundrel, first-class shot—snuggled his cheek against his stolen rifle, hesitated for a moment between the heads of three British officers, drew a line on one, pressed the trigger; and, while he chuckled over his success, himself pitched dead with a bullet through the incautious skull he had craned over the rock the better to enjoy the fruits of his skill.

Brief his pleasure but lusty the tug he had given the web. The news of it reached London just in time to catch the final edition of the evening papers as they went to press, just in time to supply a good contents-bill for an uncommonly dull night.

PEER
KILLED IN
FRONTIER
FIGHTING

went flaming down the streets, substantiated in the news columns by a brief message announcing Lord Burdon's name among the casualties of a brisk little engagement in the Frontier Campaign.

The morning papers did better with it, particularly that which Egbert Hunt took in from the doorstep of Hillside. This paper's "Own Correspondent" with the British force, eluding vigilance, had enjoyed the fortune of getting among the party detailed for clearing the rocks whence Multan Khan and his friends had made themselves surprisingly unpleasant; and his long despatch, well handled in Fleet Street, bravely headlined above:

Gallant Young Peer
Lord Burdon Killed in Sharp Frontier Engagement
Leads Dashing Charge

and nicely rounded off below with a paragraph written up from "cuttings about Lord Burdon" in the newspaper's library, was distributed far and wide on the morrow. The journalists dished it up, the presses hammered it out, the carts, the trains, and the boys galloped it broadcast over the country. To some it fetched tragedy (as we shall see); to others idle interest; to Egbert Hunt a bone-aching day and cruel indignities (as have been shown); to Mrs. Letham bewildering excitement.

CHAPTER III

INTO THE PEERAGE

I

It made Mrs. Letham very excited. Mrs. Letham, coming upon it as she idly turned over the newspaper at her breakfast, took a bang at the heart that for the moment made the print difficult to read. Recovering, she read it through, her pulses drumming, her breath catching, her hands shaking so that the paper rustled a little between them. She half rose from her seat, then read again. She read a third time and now pursued the lines to that subjoined paragraph written up from the "cuttings about Lord Burdon."

"Lord Burdon, the twelfth Baron, was attached to the staff of General Sir Wryford Sheringham, commanding the expeditionary force. He was a lieutenant in the 30th Hussars and left England in October last with General Sheringham when the latter went out to take command. Lord Burdon, who only attained his majority in April last, was unmarried. This is the first time since the creation of the Barony in 1660 that the title has not passed directly from holder to eldest son; and about Little Letham, Wilts, where is Burdon Old Manor, the family seat, the expressions "Safe as a Burdon till he's got his heir," and "Safe as a Burdon heir" have passed into the common parlance of the countryside. The successor is of a very remote branch—Mr. Maurice Redpath Letham, whose paternal great-grandfather was the eighth baron. It will be noticed as a most singular event that the first break in a direct succession extending over two hundred years should cause the new heir to be found in the line of no fewer than four generations ago of his house."

When Mrs. Letham presently arose, she arose suddenly as if she forced herself to move against spells that numbed her movements. She arose, the paper clutched between her hands, and for a space she stood with a dizzy air, as if her thoughts reeled in a giddy maze and perplexed her actions. A jostle of visions—half caught, bewildering glimpses of what this thing meant to her—spun through her brain, the mind shaping them quicker than the mental eye could distinguish them, as one half-stunned by a blow, dizzy between its violence and the onward pressure of events. She put a hand for support upon the table before her and felt, but did not think to end, the unpleasant shrinking of her flesh communicated by her fingers scraping the wood where they bunched the cloth beneath them.

She was Lady Burdon...!

II

With that amazement singing in her ears, and recovered from the first effects of her bewilderment, she went quickly to the door and excitedly up the stairs. She was thirty-five; they called her pretty; and certainly she made an attractive presence as she came to the threshold of the room where she sought her husband. Her entry was abrupt: a quick jerk on the door handle, the door wide open and she with a sudden movement standing there, tense, animated, a flush on her cheeks, sparkle in her eyes, and a high, glad, strange note in the "Maurice!" that she cried. "Maurice!"

"Con-found!" came the answer. "Conster-nation!" and illustrating the reason of the words, a fleck of blood came through the snowy lather on a chin in process of being shaved.

Mr. Letham—portly; forty; pleasant of countenance in a loose-lipped, good-natured fashion; in a shirt and trousers before the looking-glass; pain on face; finger firmly on the blood stain; razor in the other hand—Mr. Letham peered short-sightedly into the mirror, made a very squeamish stroke with the razor in the vicinity of the wound, and, quickly over his concern, pleasantly addressed his wife.

"'Morning, old girl. I say, you made me jump. Am I so fearfully late? What's for breakfast?"

He did not turn to face her. Viewed from behind, half-hitched trousers and bulging shirt, he had a lumpish appearance, and it was the more inelegant for the contortions of his arms and shoulders, characteristic of a clumsy shaver.

The spectacle caused Mrs. Letham a pucker of the brows that marred her rosy animation. She said, "Maurice! Do turn round! I've something to tell you."

"M-m-m," murmured Mr. Letham, at very ticklish work with the razor.

"Maurice!"

"M-m-m—M-m-m. Beastly rude, I know. Half-a-second, old girl. This is a most infernal job—"

She interrupted him, "Oh, listen! Listen! In this paper here—" Her voice caught. "In this paper—you are Lord Burdon!"

Mr. Letham, signalling amusement as best he was able, gave a kind of wriggle of his back, held his breath while he made another stroke with the razor, and expired the breath with: "Well, I'll buy a new razor then, hanged if I won't. This infernal thing—" and he bent towards the glass, peering at the reflection of the skin he had cleared.

The door behind him slammed violently, and then for the first time he turned. He had thought her gone—angry, as she was often angry, at his mild joking. Instead he saw her standing there, one hand behind her in the action with which she had swung-to the door, the other clutching the newspaper all rumpled up against her bosom; and there was that in her face, in her eyes, and in the tremble of her parted lips that made him change the easy, tolerant smile and the light banter with which he turned to her. "Only my silly fun, Nelly," he began. "What is it? Some howler in the newspaper? Let's have a—" Then appreciated the pose, the eyes, the parted lips; and changed nervously to: "Eh? Eh? What is it? What's up?"

She broke out: "Your fun! Will you only listen! It's true—true what I tell you! You are Lord Burdon." Angry and incoherent she became, for her husband blinked at her, and looked untidy and looked doltish. "He's unmarried. I was trying only the other day to interest you in what that meant. When his uncle died last August I spoke to you about it—"

Mr. Letham, blinking, more untidy, more doltish: "Who's unmarried?"

And she cried at him: "Young Lord Burdon! Young Lord Burdon is dead! He's been killed in the fighting in India—"

She stopped. She had moved him at last.

III

Mr. Letham laid down his razor—slowly, letting the handle slip noiselessly from his fingers to the dressing-table. Slowly also he lifted his face towards his wife, and she saw his mild forehead all puckered, his eyes dimmed with a bemused air, his loose mouth parted: she particularly saw the comical aspect given to his perturbation by its setting of little patches of soap with the little trickle of red at the chin.

He put out a hand for the paper and made a slow step towards her. "Eh?" he said—a kind of bleat, it sounded to her.

"No! Listen!" she told him. "Listen to this at the end of the account," and she spread the sheet in her hands. A little difficult to find the place ... a little difficult to control her voice.... "Listen!" and she found and read aloud, in jerky sentences, the paragraph that had been made out of "cuttings about Lord Burdon."

Almost in a whisper the vital clause "...the successor is of a very remote branch—Mr. Maurice Redpath Letham, whose paternal great-grandfather was the eighth baron...."

And in a whisper, dizzy again with the amazement of it: "Maurice! Do you realise?"

His turn for bewilderment. He ignored her appeal. He did not heed her agitation. He took the paper from her and she read that in his eyes—preoccupation with some idea outside her range—that caused her own to harden. She crossed and stood against the bed rail, and she eyed him with narrowing gaze as he read Our Own Correspondent's despatch.

"Poor young beggar!" he murmured, following the story. "Poor, plucky young beggar!"

She just watched his face, comical with its dabs of drying soap, reddening a little, eyelids blinking. She watched him reach the fold of the paper, ignore the paragraph relating to himself, and turn again to Our Own Correspondent's account. "Poor—poor, plucky young beggar!" he repeated.

She gave a little catch at her breath. He exasperated her—exasperated! Here was the most amazing fortune suddenly theirs, and he was blind to it! Often Mrs. Letham flamed against her husband those outbursts of almost ungovernable exasperation that a dull intelligence, fumbling with an idea, arouses in the quick-witted. They are the more violent, these outbursts, if the stupid fumbling, fumbling with some moral issue, conveys a reproach to the quicker wit. She was made to feel such a reproach by that reiterated "Poor young beggar! Poor, plucky young beggar!" It intensified the outbreak of exasperation that threatened her; and she told herself the reproach was unmerited, and that intensified her anger more. It was nothing to her and less than nothing, this boy's death; but she had rushed up to her husband the better to enjoy her natural joy by sharing it with him, and ready, if he had met her excitement, to compassionate the fate of young Lord Burdon. He greeted her, instead, only with "Poor young beggar! Poor, plucky young beggar!" She caught her breath. Exasperation surged like a live thing within her. If he said it again! If he said it again, she would break out! She could not bear it! She would dash the paper from his hands. She would cry in his startled face—his doltish face: "What! What! What! What! Don't you see? Don't you understand? Lord Burdon! Lady Burdon! Are you a fool? Are you an utter, utter fool?"

IV

He opened his lips and she trembled. It is natural to judge her harshly, natural to misjudge her, to consider her incredibly snobbish, cruel, common. She was none of these. Given time, given warning, she would have received her great news, received her husband's reception of it, gently and kindly. But life pays us no consideration of that kind. Events come upon us not as the night merges from the day, but as highway robbers clutch at and grapple with us before we can free our weapons.

Happily, for the first time since he had taken the paper, Mr. Letham seemed to remember her. He glanced up, flushed, damp in the eyes, stupidly droll with the dabs of drying soap: "I say, Nellie, did you read this:

"The boy—he was absolutely no more than a boy—poked this way and that on the little ridge we had gained, trying, whimpering just like a keen terrier at a thick hedge, to find a way up through the rocks and thorns above us. We were a dozen yards behind him, blowing and cursing. 'Damn it! we've taken a bad miss in balk on this line!' he cried, turning round at us, laughing. Next moment he had struck an opening and was scrambling, on hands and knees. 'This way, Sergeant-major!' he shouted...."

Portly Mr. Letham, carried away by the grip of the thing, drew himself up and squared his shoulders. He repeated "'This way, Sergeant-major!'" and stuck, and stopped, and swallowed, and turned shining eyes on his wife (she stood there brooding at him) and exclaimed: "Can't you imagine it, Nellie? Listen: 'This way, Sergeant-major!' he shouted, jumped on his feet, gave a hand to his sergeant; cried 'Come on! Come on! Whoop! Forward! Forward!' and then staggered, twisted a bit on his toes, dropped. I saw another officer-boy jump up to him with 'Burdon! Burdon, old buck, have you got it?'..."

Portly Mr. Letham's voice cracked off into a high squeak, and he lowered the paper and said huskily: "I say, Nellie, eh? I say, Nellie, though? That's the stuff, eh? Poor boy! Brave boy!"

With unseeing eyes he blinked a moment at his wife's face. Brooding, she watched him. Then he turned to the washstand and began to remove the signs of shaving from his cheeks, holding the sponge scarcely above the water as he squeezed it out, as though a noise were unseemly in the presence of the scene his thoughts pictured.

And she just stood there, that brooding look upon her face. Ah! again! He was off again!

"And his grandmother," Mr. Letham said, wiping his face in a towel, sniffing a little, paying particular attention to the drying of his eyes. "I say, Nellie, his poor grandmother, eh? How she will be suffering! Think of her picking up her paper and reading that! ... Only saw him once," he mumbled on, brushing his thin hair. "Took him across town when he was going home for his first holidays from Eton. Remember it like yesterday. I remember—"

It was the end of her endurance; she could stand no more of it. "Oh, Maurice!" she broke out; "oh, Maurice, for goodness' sake!"

Mr. Letham turned to her in a puzzled way. He held a hair brush in either hand at the level of his ears and stared at her from between them: "Why, Nellie—" he began; "what—what's up, old girl?"

She struck her hands sharply together. "Oh, you go on, you go on, you go on!" she cried. "You make me—don't you understand? Can't you understand? I thought that when I brought you this news you'd be as excited as I was. Instead—instead—" She broke off and changed her tone. "Oh, do go on brushing your hair. For goodness' sake don't stand staring at me like that!"

He obeyed in his slowish way. "Well, upon my soul, I don't quite understand, old girl," he said perplexedly.

"That's what I'm telling you," she cried sharply and suddenly. "You don't. You go on, you go on!"

He seemed to be puzzling over that. His silence made her break out with the hard words of her meaning. "Do you really not understand?" she broke out. "Do you go on like that just to irritate me? I believe you do." She gave her vexed laugh again. "I don't know what to believe. It's ridiculous—ridiculous you should be so different from everybody else. It means to me, this news, just this: that it makes you Lord Burdon. Can't you realise? Can't you share my feelings?"

"Oh!" he said, as if at last he understood, and said no more.

"How can I work up sympathy for people I have never seen?" she asked.

He did not answer her—brushed his hair very slowly.

"Nobody can say I should. Anybody in my place would feel as I feel."

Still no reply, and that annoyed her beyond measure, forced her to say more than she meant.

"What are they to me, these Burdons?"

"They're my family, old girl," Mr. Letham ventured.

She did not wish to say it but she said it; he goaded her. "You've never troubled to make them mine," she cried.

Mr. Letham had done with his hair. He struggled a collar around his stout neck, examined what injury his finger nails had suffered in the process, and set to work on his tie.

V

For a few minutes Mrs. Letham frowned at the solid, untidy back turned towards her—the lumped shoulders, the heavy neck, the bulges of shirt sticking out between the braces. She gave a little laugh then—useless to be vexed. "You've never quarrelled with any one in your life, have you, Maurice?" she said; and with a touch in which kindliness struggled with impatience, she jerked down the bulging shirt, straightened a twisted brace, said, "Let me!" and by a deft twist or two gave Mr. Letham a neater tie than ever he had made himself. "There! That's better! Have you?" she asked.

He told her smiling: "Not with you, anyway, Nellie." Little attentions like these were rare, and he liked them. In his weak and amiable way he patted the hand that rested for a moment on his shoulder, and he explained. "You're quite right, of course, old girl. Of course I realise what it means to you and I ought to have shared it with you at once. I'm sorry—sorry, Nellie. Just like me. And about never making them your family. I know you're right there. But you don't really mean that—don't mean I've done it intentionally. You know—I've often told you—we were miles apart, my branch and theirs; you do see that, don't you, old girl? A different branch—another crowd altogether. I don't suppose you've ever even heard of the relations who stand the same to you as I stand to the Burdons. All the time we've been married, long before that even, I've never had anything to do with 'em." He smiled affectionately at her. "That's all right, isn't it?"

She was getting impatient that he ran on so. "Of course, of course," she said indifferently. "I never meant to say that." And then: "Oh, Maurice, but do—do—do think what I'm feeling." She entwined her fingers about his arms and looked caressingly up at him. "Have you thought what it means to us, Maurice?"

He liked that. He liked the "us" from her lips. His normal disposition returned to him; he smiled whimsically at her. "'Pon my soul, I haven't," he said; and added, smiling more, "it's a big order. By Gad, it's a big order, Nellie."

She clapped her hands in her excitement and stood away from him, her eyes sparkling. "Maurice! Lord Burdon! Fancy!"

"It'll be a nuisance, I shouldn't wonder," he grimaced.

She laughed delightedly. "Oh, that's just like you to think that! A nuisance! Maurice! Think of it! Lady Burdon—me! It's a dream, isn't it?"

"It's a bit of a startler," he agreed, smiling tolerantly down upon her excitement.

She laughed aloud. "But fancy you a lord!" and she looked at him, holding him by both his arms and laughed again. "A startler! A nuisance! What a—what a person you are, Maurice! Fancy you a lord! You'll have to—you'll have to buck up, Maurice!"

He turned away for a moment, occupying himself in fumbling in a drawer. When he turned again to her, his face had the tail of a grimace that she thought expressive of how repugnant to him was the mere thought of any change in his life. "Well, there's one thing," he said. "It won't be for long;" and he tapped his heart, that doctors had condemned.

She knew that was only his characteristic way of joking, but a flicker of irritation shadowed her face. She hated reference to what had often been a spoil-sport cry of "Wolf! Wolf!"

"Oh, that's absurd!" she cried. "That's nonsense; you know it is. Those doctors! Make haste and dress and come down. Make haste! Make haste! I want to talk all about it. I want you to tell me—heaps of things: what will happen, how it will happen. Now, do make haste. I'll run down now and see to Baby." She had danced away towards the door; now turned again, a laugh on her face. "Baby! What is he now, Maurice?"

"Still a baby, I expect you'll find, though I have been nearly an hour dressing."

For once she laughed delightedly at his mild absurdity; just now her world answered with a laugh wherever she touched a chord. "His title, I mean. An honourable, isn't it—the son of a peer? The Honourable Rollo Letham! I must tell him!" She laughed again, moved lightly to the door and went humming down the stairs.

Mr. Letham waited till the sound had passed. When the slam of a distant door announced the unlikelihood of her return, he dropped rather heavily into a chair and put his hand against the heart he had playfully tapped. "Confound!" said Mr. Letham, breathing hard. "Conster-nation and damn the thing. Like a sword, that one. Like a twisting sword!"

For the new Lady Burdon had been wrong in estimating any humour in the grimace with which he had looked at her after turning away, while she told him he must buck up.

CHAPTER IV

A FORETASTE OF THE PEERAGE

I

A worrying morning foreshadowed—or might have foreshadowed—to Egbert Hunt the strain and distress of the afternoon whose effect upon him we have seen. Normally his master was closeted in the study with the three young men who read with him for University examinations; his mistress engaged first in her household duties, then in her customary run on her bicycle before lunch; shopping, taking some flowers to the cottage hospital, exchanging the magazines for which her circle subscribed. These occupations of master and mistress enabled Egbert to evade with nice calculation the tasks that fell to him. This morning the household, as he expressed it, was "all of a boilin' jump," whereby he was vastly incommoded, being much harried. The three young men thoughtfully denied themselves the intellectual delights of their usual labours with Mr. Letham. "Lucky dawgs," said Egbert bitterly, hiding in the bathroom and watching them from the window meet down the road, confer, laugh, and skim off on their bicycles; his mistress—writing letters, talking excitedly with her husband—did everything except settle to any particular task. The result was to keep Egbert ceaselessly upon "the 'op," and he resented it utterly.

II

With the afternoon the visitors; the satisfying at last of the excitement that had thrilled Miller's Field to the marrow since the newspapers were opened.

A little difficult, the good ladies thought it, to know exactly what to say.

Some, on greeting Mrs. Letham, boldly plumped: "My dear, I do congratulate you!" At the other extreme of tact in grasping a novel situation, those who cleverly began, "My dear, I saw it in the 'Morning Post'!" a wary opening that enabled one to model sentiments on the lead given in reply.

"My dear, I do congratulate you!" "My dear, I saw it in the 'Morning Post'!" and "Ho, do yer, thenk yer!" from bone-tired Egbert, mimicking as he closed the door behind the one; and "Ho, did yer, boil yer!" closing it behind the other.

Between these forms, then, or with slight variations upon them, fell all the salutations but that of Mrs. Savile-Phillips who, arriving late, treading on Egbert's foot in her impressive halt on the threshold, called in her dashing way across the crowded drawing-room, "And where is Lady Burdon?"

She was at her tea table, closely surrounded, prettily coloured by excitement, animated, at her best, tastefully gowned in a becoming dove-grey that fortuitously had arrived from the dressmaker that morning and mingled (she felt) a tribute to her new dignity with a touch of half-mourning for the boy her relationship to whom death with a hot finger had touched to life. Thus Mrs. Letham—new Lady Burdon—took the eye and took it well. This was the moment of her triumph; and that is a moment that is fairy wand to knock asunder the shackles of the heavier years, restoring youth; to warm and make generous the heart; to light the eye and lift the spirit. Hers, hers that moment! She the commanding and captivating figure in that assembly!

Her spirit was equal with her presence. Physically queening it among her friends, psychically she was aloft and afloat in the exaltation that her bearing advertised. Each new congratulation as it came was a vassal hand put out to touch the sceptre she chose to extend. The prattle of voices was a delectable hymn raised to her praise in her new dignity. She was mentally enthroned, queen of a kingdom all her own; and as she visualised its fair places she had a sense of herself, Cinderella-like, shedding drab garments from her shoulders, appearing most wonderfully arrayed; shaking from her skirts the dull past, with eager hands greeting a future splendidly coloured, singing to her with siren note, created for her foot and her pleasure.

Consider her state. The better to consider it, consider that something of these sensations is the lot of every woman when, on her marriage eve, a girl, sleepless she lies through that night, imaging the womanhood that waits her beyond the darkness. It is the threshold of life for woman, this night before the vow, and has no counterpart in all a man's days from boyhood to grave. How should it? The sexes are as widely sundered in habit, thought, custom, as two separate and most alien races. Love has conducted every plighted woman to this threshold and has so delectably engaged her attention on the road that she has reckoned little of the new world towards which she is speeding. Now, on her marriage eve, she is at night and alone: her eager feet upon the immediate moment beyond whose passage lies the unexplored. Love for this space takes rest. To-morrow he will lead her blindfolded into the new country; to-night, poised upon the crest to which blindfolded he has led her, she stands and looks across the prospect, shading her eyes, atremble with ecstasy at the huge adventure. Mighty courage she has—a frail figure, barriers closing up behind her to shut forever the easy paths of maidenhood; hill and valley stretching limitless before, where lie lurking heaven knows what ravening monsters. But she is the born explorer, predestined for this frightful plunge into the unknown, heedless of its dangers, intoxicated by its spaciousness, amazingly confident in Love's power and devotion to keep her in the pleasant places. And Love—he the reckless treaty-monger between the alien races—is prone, unhappily, to lead her a dozen entangling steps down the crest, and there to leave her in the smiling hills suddenly become wilderness, in the little valleys suddenly become abyss.

Mrs. Letham had enjoyed that intoxicating moment upon the crest. Something of its sensations were hers again now; but she found their thrill a far more delectable affair. Again she was upon the crest whence an alluring prospect stretched; but now she looked with eyes not filmed by ignorance; now could have seen desert places, pitfalls, if such had been, but saw that there were none. Or so she thought.

Already, in the congratulations she was receiving, she was tasting the first sweets, plucking the first fruits with which she saw the groves behung. For the first time she found herself and her fortunes the centre of a crowded drawing-room's conversation. For the first time she enjoyed the thrill of eager attention at her command when she chose to raise her voice. It was good, good. It was sufficient to her for the moment. But her exalted mind ran calculating ahead of it, even while she rejoiced in it. She had her little Rollo brought in to her, and kept him on her knee, and stroked his hair; and once and twice and many times went into dreams of all that now awaited him; and with an effort had to recall herself to the attentions of her guests.

As evening stole out from the trees, in shadows across the lawn and in dusk against the windows, like some stealthy stranger peering in, her party began to separate. A few closer friends clustered about her, and the conversation became more particular. Yes, it would mean leaving Miller's Field—dear Miller's Field; and leaving them, but never, never forgetting them. Elated, triumphant, and therefore generous, emotional, she almost believed that indeed she would be sorry to lose these friends.

As one warmed with wine has a largeness of spirit that swamps his proper self in its generous delusions, so she, warmed with triumph, was genuine enough in all her protestations. With real affection she handed over kindly Mrs. Archer, the doctor's wife, who stayed last, to the good offices of Egbert Hunt, and in a happy, happy glow of elation returned to her drawing-room. This was the beginning of it!

This the beginning of it! She drew a long breath, smiling to herself, her hands pressed together; through the glass doors giving on to the lawn she espied her husband, and smiling she went quickly across and opened them.

III

Mr. Letham was coming in from work in the garden. He had a watering-can in one hand, with the other he trailed a rake. He was in his shirt-sleeves, and his face was damp with his exertions around the flower-beds. "Hullo! All gone?" he asked.

The warmth of her spirit caused her to extend her hands to him with a sudden, affectionate gesture:

"All, yes. Maurice, you were an old wretch! You might have come in."

"Simply couldn't, old girl. I had a squint through the window, and fled and hid behind a bush. Thousands of you; it looked awful!"

She laughed: "Miserable coward! I was hoping you would."

"Were you, though?" he said eagerly. "I'd have come like a shot if I'd known."

That made her laugh again: he was always the lover. "Well, come and have a talk now to make up," she told him. "Out here in the garden. It's frightfully hot in this room."

His face beamed. He put down the implements he was carrying, wiped a hand on his waistcoat and slipped his fingers beneath her arm. "That's a stunning dress," he said.

She gathered up the trailing skirt and glanced down at it, well pleased. "It is rather nice, isn't it?"

"Fine! You look as pretty as a picture this evening, Nellie. I tell you, I thought so, when I squinted in through the window."

"That's because I'm so happy."

"So am I." He pressed her arm to show why, and "Maurice! you are a goose," was her gay comment; but for once his foolish loverlikeness pleased her; her mood was widely charitable.

They paced the little lawn in silence. She suddenly asked, "You don't mind my being happy, do you?"

"Mind! Good Lord!" and he pressed her arm again.

"Being excited about—about it, I mean. It's natural, Maurice?"

"Of course it is. Of course it is, old girl."

"But you're not—it doesn't excite you?"

Mr. Letham was too honest, even at risk of disturbing this happy passage, to pretend the untrue. "Well, that's nothing," he said. "That's nothing. I'm so beastly slow. An earthquake wouldn't excite me."

"I don't believe it would," she laughed, then was serious. "But I'm excited," she said abruptly. "Oh, I am!" She put up her face towards the veiling sky—a dim star here and a dim star there and a faint breeze rising—and she drew a deep breath just as she had breathed deeply in the drawing-room a few moments earlier. "Oh, I am!" she repeated. "Maurice! I want to talk about it."

He was not at all conscious of the full intensity of her feelings; but for such of it as he perceived he smiled at her in his tolerant way. "Well, you say," he told her. "You do the talking."

She was silent for a considerable space; her mind run far ahead and occupied among thoughts to which she could not introduce him, for he had no place in them. That he shivered slightly recalled his presence to her. That his presence had been deliberately shut from among the castles she had been building caused her one of those qualms which (if we are kind) often sting us back from our worser self to our better nature. And she was kind, alternating ceaselessly between the many womanly parts she had and those other parts we all possess; only to be pitied if the events now quickly shaping for her tempted her too much, led her too far from the point whence kindness is recoverable.

Recalled to him and to her womanliness, "Oh, your coat!" she exclaimed. "You've been getting hot and you'll catch your death of chill. You're dreadfully careless. Where is it?"

"In the summer-house. But what rot!"

"I'll get it." She slipped her arm from his hand and ran away across the lawn. "There!" she said, returning. "Now button it up. Ah! You're all thumbs!"

She fastened it for him and turned up the collar. The action brought her face close to his. "You're jolly good to me, Nellie," he said, and his lips brushed her forehead. A kiss it had been, but she drew back a step. "Not going to have you ill on my hands," she told him brightly. Then she slipped a hand into his arm and resumed, "What are we going to do—first? I want to talk about that."

She had talked to him of it all the morning; but as if it were undiscussed—anything to preserve these happy moments—"Yes, go on," he said.

She responded eagerly. "Well, we must write to Lady Burdon, of course—Jane Lady Burdon, now, you said, didn't you? Not to-day. Better wait a day—to-morrow."

"That is what I thought."

"Yes—yes—and then you will have to go to see her. By yourself. I won't come at first." She gave a little sound of laughter. "I don't think I shall much like Jane Lady Burdon, from what you told me this morning."

He asked her: "Good lord, why, Nellie? Why, what did I tell you? I've only seen her once, years and years ago."

"You made her out proud; you said she would feel this terribly."

"That poor boy's death? Of course she would. She was devoted to him. Look, he was no more than Rollo's age when his father died. She brought him up. Been mother and father to him all his life. Imagine how she'd feel it."

"Oh, I don't mean that; feel us coming in, I mean. Proud in that way."

It was an idea that another man, though he knew it true, would have laughed aside. Mr. Letham's hopeless simplicity put him to a stumbling explanation. "Ah, but proud's not the word—not fair," he said. "She has pride; you understand the difference, don't you, old girl? A tremendous family pride. She'll feel this break in the direct descent—father to son, as it said in the newspaper, ever since there was a Burdon. It is one of their traditions, at the bottom of half their traditions, and they're simply wrapped up in that kind of thing. I should think there never was a family with so many observances—laws of its own."

"Tell me," she said: and while they paced, he spoke of this family whose style and dignity they were to take; and while he spoke, sometimes she pressed together her lips and contracted her brows as though hostile towards the pictures he made her see, sometimes breathed quickly and took a light in her eyes as though she foretasted delights that he presented. She had no romantic sense in her nature, else had been moved by such traditions of the House of Burdon as, he said, he could remember. That white roses were never permitted in the grounds of Burdon Old Manor, that no male but the head of the family might put on his hat within the threshold, that the coming of age of sons was celebrated at twenty-four, not twenty-one,—she scarcely heeded the legends attaching to these observances. "Rather silly," she named them, and did not condescend a reply to her husband's weak defence, "Well, they rather get you, you know, don't you think?"

He spoke of the Burdon motto, the arrogant, "I hold!" that was of the bone of Burdon character, so he said. "I remember my old grandfather telling me lots about that," he told her. "It sums them up. That's the kind they've always been: headstrong and absolutely fearless, like that poor boy, and stubborn—stubborn as mules where their rights, or their will, or their pride is concerned. Stubborn in having their own way, and stubborn in doing or not doing simply because the thing's done or not done in the traditions they're bred up in."

He stopped and bent to her with "Yes, what did you say?" but only caught her repeating to herself intensely and beneath her breath, "I hold!"

"Yes, it's rather fine, isn't it?" he said; and he went on: "Well, that's just what I mean about old Lady Burdon. She'll have felt that she was holding for her grandson, had held all these years, and now was the one, the only one, to see the tradition break, the direct succession pass. That's what I mean by saying she has pride and will feel it. That time I saw her, as I was telling you this morning, when that poor boy was about Rollo's age and I was doing a walking tour down in Wiltshire and managed to get up courage to go to Burdon Old Manor and introduce myself, I noticed it then. She was dividing all her time between the boy and a quaint kind of 'Lives of the Barons Burdon' as she called it, a manuscript life of each holder of the title, hunting up all the old records and traditions and things with the librarian; he was as keen on it as she. He..."

"Where will she be now, do you think?" Mrs. Letham interrupted. "In town?"

"In town for certain. She'd be sure to be where she could always get earliest news of the boy."

"In the town house? Burdon House in Mount Street, you said, didn't you? Have you ever been there? What's it like?"

"No, never been in. A whacking great place, from the outside. That's where she'll be all right, unless they've sold it."

Mrs. Letham gave him a sudden full attention. "Sold it? Why should they have sold it?"

"The ancient reason—want of money," he replied lightly.

She made no response nor responsive movement; yet some emotion that she had seemed to communicate itself to him, for looking down at her, half-whimsically, half-gravely, "I say, you don't think we've come into untold wealth, do you, Nellie?" he said.

She took her hand sharply from his arm. Much that he had said, though she could not have analysed why, had caused her kinder self to ebb. Now it left her. She answered him by asking him: "What of all those names you told me? Tell me them again."

"The property? The Burdon Old Manor property? Little Letham, and Shepwell, and Burdon, and Abbess Roding, and Nunford, and Market Roding: those, do you mean?"

"Yes, I mean those. How do you mean 'the ancient reason, want of money'?"

"Well, that's all there is, though. The money is all out of the estate. Nothing more."

She said impatiently: "Well? All those villages?"

"All those duties." he corrected her. "That's the Burdon way of looking at it. What they make on Abbess Roding they lose on Market Roding, so to speak. It's that 'I hold!' business again. They won't sell; they won't raise rents when leases fall in; they never refuse improvements that can possibly be afforded. The tenantry have been there for generations. No Burdon would ever think of turning them off or of refusing them anything; it wouldn't enter his head. That's why I said Burdon House in Mount Street might be sold. It's unlikely, but I remember there was talk of it in my grandfather's time. It belongs to an older day, when they were wealthier. They'd sacrifice that, if need be, though it would be like a death in the family; but anything rather than the bare idea of interfering with the people they regard as a trust."

He spoke quite easily, never realising the intensity of her feelings. "Oh, it's no untold wealth," he laughed. "You mustn't think that."

She said after a little space, "Richer than we are, though?" and added, comforting herself with an old truism, "What's poverty to one is wealth to another."

"Oh, richer than we are. Good lord, yes, I hope so. I'm thinking of years ago, anyway. Things may have changed. I'm telling you of when I was a kid."

She gave a little sigh of relief and she made a little laugh at the mood she had permitted to beset her—that sigh we give and that laugh we make when we shake ourselves from vague fears, or open our eyes from disturbing dreams. Folly to be fearful! Life is a biggish field; easy to give those fears the slip! The day is here, night ridiculous! She laughed and turned smiling to her husband and proposed they should go in. "I've got an extra special little dinner for you—to celebrate," she told him.

He pressed her arm against his side. "And I've got an extra special little appetite for it," he said. "Makes me feel fearfully fit to see you so happy."

"Well, I am," she replied, and sighed her content and said again "I am!"

IV

The night ridiculous! But when night came it caught her unstrung, too excited for immediate sleep, and visited her with vague resentments, with vague but chilly fears. They came gradually. Long, long she lay awake, visioning the gleaming future. Her Rollo trod it with her—its golden paths, limitless of delights—her little son rejoicing into manhood as he walked them. She was intensely devoted to her baby Rollo, born two years before. Marriage had disappointed her; from its outset, directly she began to realise Maurice, she accounted herself robbed of all it ought to have given her. Motherhood had recompensed her; from Rollo's birth she had begun to dream dreams for him. Now! She got out of bed and went to his cradle and bent above him, most happily, most adoringly, as he slept. It was there and so occupied that the first vague, unreasonable fear came to disturb her night. It was gone as soon as it had come, and it had neither shape nor meaning. Yet its discomfort made her frown. She had frowned in the midst of happiness when Maurice was telling her of Burdon traditions, and the repetition of the action returned her mind to what had occupied it then.

At once resentments began to stir. She found herself resentful of Jane Lady Burdon, as drawn by Maurice; of the tenantry at Burdon Old Manor, who were regarded as a trust—a greedy, expensive trust on his showing; nay, of the Old Manor itself, if saturated in traditions such as he described. Why resentful? At first she could not say, and worried. Then the reason came to her. It was the feeling that this old lady, not proud but having pride, a ridiculous distinction, this old lady, these tenantry, those traditions would resent her. Resent her? She could not get away from the thought, and it irritated her and tired her. Yes, and rob her, and that irritated and tired her the more. She began to desire sleep and could not sleep for these resentments. Resent her? Rob her? She grew angry that she could not sleep, and then suddenly calmed herself by deliberately setting herself to see how grotesque such thoughts were. After all, what could they do, even suppose they desired her hurt? It came to her, with a grim sense of the humour of it, that their own motto was against them. "I hold!" It was she who held!

"I hold!" The old motto did its new mistress its first service. It charmed her, at last, to sleep. Immediately, as it seemed to her, she passed into dreams of her amazing happiness; and in their midst the motto rose against her. In their midst the vague fear that had troubled her while she bent over her Rollo—but vague no longer—became definite and horrible. She was taunted, she was terrified by some force that told her it was all untrue; that tortured her she was befooled and did not hold and should never hold the amazement she fancied hers. Terrified and struggling, "I hold!" she cried. It became the delirium of her sleep. Again and again "I hold! I hold!" and always from that force the answer, quiet but most terribly assured: "No, you do not! Nay, I hold!" Horror and panic overcame her. She was so nearly awake that she tried to awake but could not. "I hold! I hold!" "No, you do not. Nay, I hold!" There was no escape, no escape.... When at last her fevered brain broke out of sleep, she awoke to hear her own voice cry it aloud in agony: "I hold!" and shaking, unnerved, thanked God for young morning stealing about the room, and none and nothing to rebuke or contradict that waking cry.

CHAPTER V

MISREADING A PEERESS

I

We will give them their title now.

Events fell out much as the new Lady Burdon had planned. On the day following the news, the new Lord Burdon wrote a few sympathetic lines to Jane Lady Burdon; two days later he received an acknowledgment from the house in Mount Street. She would like to see him, Jane Lady Burdon, wrote, but she would like a little time in which to accommodate herself to her sad affliction. Perhaps he would arrange to call on that day week; and meanwhile, if he could see Mr. Pemberton, they would be spared much explanation relative to the sudden change.

"Rather cold," was Lady Burdon's comment; but her attention was taken by another letter brought in with Jane Lady Burdon's by Egbert Hunt, as they sat at early breakfast, and overlooked in the excitement. "And Mr. Pemberton—who is Mr. Pemberton?" she asked, but had opened this other envelope while she spoke, taken the gist of its letter at a glance, and herself answered her question, looking up with flushed face and sparkling eyes. "He's the solicitor," she said.

Lord Burdon nodded. "So he is. The name comes back to me."

"This is from him—to you. It's all right. He says it's all right, Maurice. He's the lawyer. He knows. He admits it."

"Sounds as though he'd committed a crime. What does he admit?"

She was very happy, so she laughed. "Listen!" and she read him the letter in which, in stilted, lawyer like terms, Matthew Pemberton (as it was signed) formally advised him of the death in action on the northwestern frontier of India, and of his succession to the barony and entailed estates. The firm of Pemberton, it appeared, had for many generations enjoyed the honour of acting for the house of Burdon, and, acting on Jane Lady Burdon's instructions, Matthew Pemberton desired to propose an interview "here or at your lordship's residence, as may be most convenient to your lordship."

"Maurice!" Lady Burdon exclaimed, and handed him the letter; and when he had read it, "There! There's no doubt now, is there?"

He had frowned over it as though it troubled him. At her words he looked up and smiled at her beaming face and patted her hand. "Why, you never had any doubt, had you?" he asked.

She gave the slightest possible shiver; but with it shook off the recollection that had caused it. "Oh, I don't know," she answered. "I do believe I had; yes, I had. I couldn't realise it sometimes. There was nothing—nothing to go on. Now there is, though!" And she touched the letters that were the magic carpet arrived to wing her from the delirium of that night toward the amazement that night had threatened.

She exclaimed again, "Now there is!" and, pushing back her chair, rose vigorously to her feet, casting aside forever (so she told herself) that nightmare dream and animatedly breaking into "plans." Too animated to be still, too excited to eat, gaily, and with a commanding banter that rendered him utterly happy, she easily influenced her husband, against his purpose, to bid Mr. Pemberton make the proposed interview at Miller's Field, not Bedford Row. "'At your lordship's residence,'" she laughed. "It's his place to do the running about, not yours. And tell him—I'll help you to write the letter—tell him to come the day after to-morrow, not to-morrow. Don't let him think we're bursting with eagerness."

"By gum, he'd better not see you, then," Lord Burdon said grimly.

She gave him a playful pinch. "Oh, I'll do the high and haughty stare all right," she told him, and she laughed again and ran gaily humming to the Hon. Rollo Letham in the garden.

II

Mr. Pemberton, on arrival, proved incapable of much of that running about, in the literal sense of the term, that Lady Burdon had pronounced to be his place.

"Here he is!" Lady Burdon said, watching through the drawing-room window from where she sat, as a closed station-fly drew up before the gate. "Here he is!" There was a longish pause before the cab door opened, and then a walking-stick came out and tapped about in a fumbling sort of way until it hit the step. A very thin leg came groping down the stick, its foot poking about nervously as though to make sure that the step was stable. "Good gracious!" Lady Burdon exclaimed. "The poor old man!"

She forgot the high and haughty stare premeditated for the interview, and she crossed to the window, womanly and womanishly alarmed. The knee above the trembling leg took a jerky shot or two at stiffening, then stiffened suddenly and took the weight of a little wisp of an old man, who swung suddenly out upon it, whirled half around as the gusty breeze took him and, clutching frantically against the side of the cab with one hand, with the other made agitated prods of his stick at the road desperately far beneath.

"Oh, goodness!" Lady Burdon cried. "He'll kill himself! And that idiot like a frozen pig on the box! Maurice!" But she was quicker than her husband and, the high and haughty stare completely abandoned, was swiftly from the room, down the path, through the gate, and with firm young hands under a shaky old arm, just as the little old man, unable to balance longer, was dropping stick and leg towards the ground and in danger of collapsing tremendously upon them.

She landed him safe. "The road slopes so frightfully here, doesn't it?" she said. "I am afraid you are shaken."

The little old man, very visibly shaken by the fearful adventure, essayed to straighten his bent old frame. He raised his silk hat and stood bareheaded before her. "You saved me from that," he said. "It was very, very kind of you. I am clumsy and stupid at moving about."

She was flushed by her run, the breeze was in her hair; she looked pretty and she was quite natural. "Oh, I saw you," she smiled. "I ought to have come before. Let me take your arm. The path is steep; we are on the side of a hill, as you see."

She swung open the gate with one hand and put the other beneath his arm.

He seemed to hesitate, looking at her curiously. "Oh, I am all right when I am on my legs," he said, with a little laugh. "Well, well—it is very, very kind of you," and he accepted the aid she offered.

"It is steep, you see,"—she smiled down at him,—"and rough. It ought to be rolled, but we have the idlest gardener boy in the world. You are Mr. Pemberton, aren't you? I am—I am Lady Burdon."

He halted in his nice little steps and looked full up at her. "I am very glad to know that," he said simply, and put himself again to the task of making the house.

III

Mr. Pemberton was more than pleased; he was intensely relieved and intensely happy. His thoughts, as he came down in the train to Miller's Field, had caused his face to wear a nervous, a wistful, almost an appealing, look. Bound up in inherited devotion to the noble house whose service was handed down in his firm as the title itself was handed down, he had feared, he had dreaded what manner of people the tragic break in the famous direct succession might have brought to the name he loved. Nothing could so well have reassured him as that most womanly action of Lady Burdon when she ran to his assistance at the gate; nothing could so well have affirmed the confidence with which he turned to her husband, come to the door to meet them, as the simple honesty of character imprinted on Lord Burdon's face and expressed in his greeting. Both impressions were sharpened as they sat talking at tea. Mr. Pemberton had come to talk business; he found himself drawn by this sympathetic atmosphere into speaking intimately of the gay young life whose cruel termination had caused his visit.

Clearly he had been deeply attached to that young life; he speaks of it in the jerky, disconnected sentences of one that does not trust his voice too long, for fear it may betray him; and when he comes to his subject's young manhood, after eulogy of childhood and youth, clearly Lady Burdon is interested. She draws her chair a trifle towards him, and with her elbow on the low tea-table, cups her chin in the palm of her hand, the fingers against her lips, watches him and attends him closely. Her throat and face are dusky, her wrist and hand are white against them. Her eyes have a deep and kind look. She makes a gentle picture.

Encouraged by her sympathy, "He was a little wild," says Mr. Pemberton. "I am afraid a little inclined to be wild.... Always so full of spirits, you see ... eager ... careless, reckless perhaps, impetuous ... lovable—ah, me, very lovable....

"I was very fond of him, Lady Burdon," he says apologetically, "very fond;" and he stumbles into an example of what he is pleased to call the young man's impetuous carelessness. It is of his last months in England, before he sailed for India, that this deals. Between June and August, having leave from his regiment, he disappeared, it seems; was completely lost sight of by his grandmother and his friends. Towards the end of August he appeared again. "Not himself—not quite himself," says Mr. Pemberton, shaking his head as though over some recollection that troubled him, "and no explanation of his absence, and, when the chance came—General Sheringham was a relation, you know—wild to get out to this frontier 'show,' as he called it.

"Typical of him," says Mr. Pemberton after a pause, and smiling sadly at Lady Burdon. "Typical. A law to himself he would always be, and not responsible to any one for what he chose to do. A Burdon trait that; and he was a Burdon of Burdons."

Lady Burdon asks a question, breaking into Mr. Pemberton's history for the first time. "But that really is extraordinary, Mr. Pemberton," she says. "Wouldn't Lady Burdon—wouldn't his grandmother—have felt anxious during that disappearance, and wouldn't she have questioned him when he came back?"

"Not unless he seemed disposed to tell her. In a way—in a way, you know, relations between them were a little difficult. Poor boy"—and Mr. Pemberton gives a sad little laugh—"poor boy, he often came to me in a great way, and her ladyship, too, has had occasion. He, on his side, passionately devoted to her, hating to hurt her, but enormously high-spirited, difficult to handle. And she, on hers, making all the world of him and a little apt on that account to claim too much from him, if you follow me. He sometimes chafed—chafed, you know; hating to hurt her but restless of her control, her claim. Latterly she had to be very tactful with him. No, she wouldn't have questioned him unless he seemed disposed to tell her."

They are interrupted here by the entrance of baby Rollo on his way to bed, for it is getting late. "The rummiest little beggar," says Lord Burdon, introducing his small son. "Not much more than eighteen months, and solemn enough for an archbishop, aren't you, Rollo?"

The solemn one, pale and noticeably quiet and far from strong looking, justifies this character by having no smiles, though Mr. Pemberton greets him cheerfully and says approvingly: "Rollo, eh? The Burdon name. His name," he adds, and looks at Lady Burdon, who gives him a gentle smile of understanding.

IV

Mr. Pemberton looked after her very gratefully when she excused herself to take the child up-stairs. The door closed, he turned to Lord Burdon. "Nice—nice," he began in a stifled kind of voice, "to have a little son growing up—to watch. We watched young Lord Burdon—that poor boy—growing up—anxiously—so anxiously...."

He gave a nervous little laugh. "When I say 'we' you've no idea with what a terrible air of proprietorship the family is regarded by those, like myself, attached to it for generations, by those dependent on it. We looked so eagerly, so eagerly as the time drew on, to his coming of age. He was wanted so."

"Wanted?" Lord Burdon asked. "Wanted?" He pronounced the word heavily, as though he had an inkling of the answer and was apprehensive.

It started Mr. Pemberton on a recital that he spoke with seeming difficulty and yet as though he had prepared it. It occupied longer than either knew, and Lord Burdon, before it was finished, was sitting sunk low in his chair, as though what he heard oppressed him. The little old lawyer spoke of difficulties in connection with the estate; the diminished rent roll; the urgent necessity for comprehensive improvements essential to make the land pay its way; the long-urged necessity for the sale of Burdon House in Mount Street, heavily mortgaged and the interest an insupportable drain on the estate. It led him to why they had looked so anxiously for the coming of age. Everything that was essential was impossible, he showed, in the reign of gentle Jane Lady Burdon, who felt that she held in sacred trust for her grandson and would suffer no risks in raising of loans, nor depredation of her charge by sale of the town property. He had no eloquence, this devoted little lawyer, but he had earnestness that seemed to him who listened to fill the room, as it were, with living shapes of duties, demands, traditions of a great heritage that marshalled before him and looked to him to be carried forward, as soldiers to a leader.

A change in Mr. Pemberton's tone aroused him.

"He was wanted so," Mr. Pemberton said jerkily, and stopped.

No response, and in a funny little cracked voice, "Well, he's dead," Mr. Pemberton said.

Lord Burdon raised his eyes, contracted with the trouble that had given him that drooped, oppressed appearance while the other spoke, dim, clouded as with looking at something that menaced; and their eyes met—two very simple men.

Mr. Pemberton stretched out fumbling hands. He cried blunderingly and appealingly, his mouth twisting: "It has affected me—this death, this change. I am only an old man—a devoted old man. As we looked to him, so now we look to you."

"Look to me!" Lord Burdon said slowly. "Look to me! Good God, Pemberton, I funk it!" he cried. "I funk it and I hate it. I'm not the sort. I wish I'd been left alone. I wish to God I had!"

There followed his words a silence of the intense nature caused by speech that has been intense. In that silence, consciousness of some other personality in the room caused Mr. Pemberton to turn suddenly in his chair. He turned to see Lady Burdon standing in the doorway. She was not in the act of entering. She was standing there; and for the briefest space, while Mr. Pemberton looked at her and she at him, she just stood, erect, her head a trifle unduly high, with estimating eyes and with purposed mouth.

V

It had been an anxious Mr. Pemberton that came down to Miller's Field. It was a reassured Mr. Pemberton that stayed there, but a gravely disturbed Mr. Pemberton that went back to town. He knew Lady Burdon had been listening, the look he had seen on her face informed him of her displeasure with what she had heard, and he knew that in his first estimate of her he had misread her.

For he read her look aright. In her husband's cry—his weak, contemptible cry—in what she had heard of the little lawyer's statements and proposals—his tears and prayers of duties—she knew hostility to her plans, to her dreams, to her pleasures. Her estimating eyes that met Mr. Pemberton's inquired the strength of that hostility; her purposed mouth was the mirror of her determination against it.

CHAPTER VI

MISCALCULATING A PEER

I

The little clock that is perched high over the vast fireplace in the library at Burdon House, Mount Street, marks a shade before ten of the evening. Its delicate ticking joins with the fluttering of the flames, and with the steady scratch of Mr. Librarian Amber's pen, to make the only sounds in this dignified apartment with its high-bred air, that has known many a Burdon and that shortly is to acknowledge another bearer of the title and serenely give farewell to the lady seated before the fire.

A gracious lady of many sorrows, as the Vicar of Little Letham parish, in a surprising flight, had named Jane Lady Burdon on the previous Sunday—and rightly named her. Sorrow has companioned Jane Lady Burdon before; now again is called whence it has lightly slumbered—walks hand in hand with the gentle lady, is her bedfellow, crouches on the hearth beside her as she sits, drooping slightly, in the high-backed chair, fingers enlocked on lap, eyes dimly upon the flames.

Lord Burdon, who has stepped into the dead boy's shoes—(Ah, Sorrow, walk here and here with me. Look, Sorrow, where he used to sport and run!)—has paid his visit that afternoon; sympathetic little Mr. Pemberton, with his papers and documents, has occupied a part of her morning. It has been a trying day for her. Her only desire now is to be left alone with her thoughts. (Come away, come away, Sorrow, Sorrow; and hold me close, and open me his prattling lips, his strong young lips.)

II

Mr. Librarian Amber—very conscious of Sorrow crouching there, but busy, busy—is writing at a table behind the drooping figure in the high-backed chair. The bald top of Mr. Amber's narrow head, nose hard after his pen like a diligent bloodhound on a slow scent, shines between the splendid yellow candles in their tall, silver holders that light his work. Neat little packets of papers, neatly arranged, dot the polished surface of the table, like islands set in a still, dark sea about the greater island that is Mr. Amber's manuscript. On a chair by Mr. Amber's side is a large, slim volume held by a gilt clasp and lettered on its cover of white vellum:

Percival Rollo Redpath Letham
XIIth Baron Burdon

He is engaged, Mr. Librarian Amber, on that "Lives of the Barons Burdon" of which Lord Burdon had spoken to his wife, walking in the garden of Hillside.

Then that little clock perched over the mantelpiece tinkles the hour of ten.

"How do you progress, Mr. Amber?" Jane Lady Burdon inquires gently.

Mr. Amber—constitutionally nervous—starts, drops his pen, grabs at it as it rolls for the floor, misses it in the stress of a short-sighted fumble, makes a distressed Tch-tch! as it rattles to the boards, clears his throat, starts on one reply and, in the manner of nervous persons suddenly interrogated, strangles it at birth and has a shot at fortune with another.

"I have almost got—I am just concluding the newspaper reports of the fight, my lady. Very nearly at the end." He recollects a resolve to be bright in order to cheer my lady, so he adds with a funny little pop: "Almost done!" and then with a brisk little puff blows imaginary dust from his manuscript. "Almost done! Hoof!"

"I will read it over to-morrow, Mr. Amber, immediately after breakfast. To-day is Friday. By Monday you should have finished, I think, and the book will be ready to go into its place at the Manor. You will come with me when I go down there next week, Mr. Amber, and we will put it in its place together. I shall be glad to see it in its place before I leave: all the Lives finished—our little hobby, Mr. Amber;" and her gracious ladyship of many sorrows puts into the words the smile that faintly touches her lips.

Mr. Amber, desperately agitated and pleased by this coupling of himself with his dear mistress, takes from the warmth of his happiness courage sufficient to introduce to her a matter that has been troubling him. He gets awkwardly to his feet, a spare, stooping figure, mild of face, little over fifty but looking more, frowns horribly at his chair for the noise it makes upon the polished floor as he pushes it back, and comes forward, twisting the fingers of his hands about one another.

"My lady—yes, I will surely finish by Monday. Your ladyship will forgive me—intruding myself—your ladyship speaks of leaving—I am—if I may venture—so attached—I scarcely—"

He is quite painfully agitated. His fingers, tightly locked now by their twistings, present a figure of his halting sentences come to a final tangle, an ultimate and hopeless knot.

Her gracious ladyship of many sorrows smiles in her kind way. "Dear Mr. Amber, you should know, of course. I have been thoughtless of you in my sorrow. I am going to my sister in York, Mr. Amber—Mrs. Eresby, you remember. Here nor the Manor is no longer my home, you understand. Indeed, how should I stay in houses of sad memories only?"

Mr. Amber murmurs "Ah—my lady!" and she continues: "I intend a last visit to the Manor—to take leave of our dear friends, Mr. Amber, and to collect a few—memories. I would go now, but I have first to meet Lady Burdon. Lord and Lady Burdon will very kindly come here for that purpose on Monday so that we may know one another for a few days."

She pauses and smiles inquiringly as though to ask Mr. Amber if he is now sufficiently informed. He blinks considerably, starts to work at his hands again, and suddenly says with a mouth all twisted: "It will be very—strange—to me to be parted from your ladyship."

She extends a gentle hand towards his that twist and twist, touching them softly: "Dear Mr. Amber. It has been the pleasantest friendship."

He says stupidly and brokenly, "What will I do?"

"You must go on living with the books," she tells him. "Why, what would they do without you, or you without them? I will speak to Lord Burdon. You must live on just the same in the Manor library where we have been together so often—all of us. I shall like to think of you there. It is my wish, Mr. Amber."

She says gently, "There!" as he clutches her hand to his lips. "I will go to bed now. I think I hear Colden coming for me," and as her maid enters, she rises.

Mr. Amber tries for words. That twisting mouth forbids them, and he turns to hold the door open.

"Thank you. Good night, Mr. Amber. Here is our kind Colden so thoughtful for my sleep. I am ready, Colden. Yes, I will take your arm. Good night, Mr. Amber." And as Mr. Amber stands watching, there comes to him faintly across the great hall: "We'll rest a moment here, Colden. A little trying, these stairs. Do you remember how he used to take me up? He never missed a night when he was home, did he? Do you remember how he made us laugh about this seat...?"

Then Mr. Amber returns to the library, closes the door and eases emotion by a trumpet blast upon his nose.

III

Mr. Amber took a seat before the fire. He was unsettled, he found, for further progress that night upon the work that had engaged him at the table. But his mind turned to it and from it to the eleven fine volumes into whose company it would go, completing the lives of the Barons Burdon that were the fruits of many years of loving labour—result of "our little hobby." In memory he trod again those happy days—saw himself installed librarian at Burdon Old Manor, a bookish youth, weak-backed, weak-eyed, son and despair of a tenant farmer; rehearsed again that youth's aimless, browsing years among the books, acquiring strange and various knowledge from the shelves, developing affections, habits, tastes that, as with tentacles, anchored him by heart and mind to the house of Burdon. Mr. Amber moved restlessly in his chair and came to the beginning of the great scheme, propounded by her gracious ladyship, that was to become "our little hobby," as immediately it became the purpose and enthusiasm of his life. Well, it was done—or almost done. The results of desperately exciting scratching about the library—among distressed old books, among family trees, among deeds, letters, parchments, rolls, records—were in eleven fine manuscript volumes—only the twelfth to finish.

A leisurely volume this twelfth, now lying on the table behind Mr. Amber's chair. Written up during its subject's short life—dear and most well-beloved to Mr. Amber every moment of it—the volume is as naturally detailed as some of the earlier volumes are naturally scrappy. Pettily detailed, perhaps. Mr. Amber starts with the precise hour and moment—6:15-½ A.M.—of the birth of the Hon. Rollo Percival Redpath Letham; notes his colouring—fair; his weight at successive infantile months—lusty beyond the average, it would appear; date of his first articulate speech; date of first stumbling run across the nursery floor—and suchlike small beer. His father's death is chronicled ("cf. vol. XI, pp. 196 et seq.") and he is shown to be yet in his third year when he becomes twelfth Baron Burdon.... Date of measles.... Date of whooping cough.... First riding lesson.... Preparatory school.... First holidays.... First shooting lesson.... Puts a charge of shot into a keeper. It is all very closely detailed. It is detailed so closely that a gap towards the end is made conspicuous: and this is precisely that gap occupied by the "disappearance" of which Mr. Pemberton had spoken in the drawing-room at Hillside. The chronicle, that is to say, is brought very fully up to the May in which, as it shows, my lord suddenly went down to Burdon Old Manor from London, his grandmother being at Mount Street, and thence for a long holiday. It jumps to October and at once begins again to be remarkably detailed, "Our Own Correspondent's" account of the frontier engagement waiting on the table there to conclude it. But of this May to October period, covering the June to August of which Mr. Pemberton had spoken, Mr. Amber, like Mr. Pemberton, for the good reason that he knew nothing of how my lord occupied it, has nothing to say. Let it be said. My lord was in that June secretly married in London: a matter closely germane to this history, and now to be examined.