The Happy Warrior

by A. S. M. Hutchinson

She shook her head. "But little ladies?"

"I know one," said Percival. "White! Well, you'd stare if you saw her, Ima. Snow-White-and-Rose-Red, I call her," and in his tone was something akin to the mingled admiration and awe with which small schoolboys speak of their cricket captain.

She was silent for a moment; then, "Well, tell me, little master," she said.

It was of Dora that he told her.

When Lady Burdon had returned that call paid on her by Mrs. Espart from Abbey Royal she had been as greatly captivated by Dora as she had been taken by Dora's mother. She found in Mrs. Espart a curiously cold and high-bred air that appealed to her—being a quality she was at pains to cultivate in herself—and appealed the more in that it very graciously unbent towards her. Its unbending was explainable by the quality that, for her own part, she presented to Mrs. Espart—that of her rank and station.

Mrs. Espart had been married in her teens, brought from school for the purpose, by a mother whose whole conception of duty in regard to her daughters was wealthy marriage, and who had fastened upon it in this case in the person of Mr. Espart—a nice little man, an indifferently bred little man, but a most obviously well-possessed little man. The girl was hurriedly fetched from her finishing school, whirled through a headachy fortnight of corseting and costuming, and put in Mr. Espart's way and then in his possession with the docility of one educated from childhood for such a purpose. Used as a woman who never had realised there was a life beyond the cloisters bounded by lessons in deportment, in the nice languages and the nice arts; as a wife who never yet had been a child but always a young lady, Mrs. Espart discovered that she was mated with a vulgarian, Mr. Espart that he had married, as he expressed it, "a frozen statue." She thought of him and despised him as the one; he thought of her, feared her, and adored her as the other. The chill she struck into his mind communicated itself in some way to his bones, and very shortly after he had bought Abbey Royal—her command being that he should nurse the local political interests, enrich the Party from his coffers and so win her the social status her sisters had—he began to shrivel and incontinently died—frozen.

Mrs. Espart proceeded to bring up the child born of this marriage precisely as she had herself been brought up,—in narrow cloisters, that is to say, in dutiful obedience and for the ultimate purpose of suitable marriage. She repeated in Dora's training the training she had received from her own mother, its object the same, with this difference—that whereas in her case that object was a wealthy match, in Dora's—Mr. Espart having made wealth unnecessary—it was position. Time was absurdly young for any plans when Mrs. Espart first met Lady Burdon, but plans had crossed her mind when she drove out to leave cards at the Manor: she had heard of Rollo. She made Lady Burdon very welcome when Lady Burdon came.

Dora was two years younger than Rollo, Lady Burdon found. When, on the occasion of this visit, she was brought to the drawing-room—a strikingly pretty child in a curiously unchildish way—she already showed marks of the machinery that ordered her life. She was curiously prim, that is to say, of noticeably trained deportment; curiously self-assured and yet not childishly frank; curiously correct of speech and with a dutiful trick of adding "Mamma" to every sentence she addressed to her mother.

She was her mother's child; similarly trained; similarly developing. "A very well brought-up child," as Lady Burdon afterwards commented to her husband, and noted in her also the strong promise of the beauty that later years were to realise. She was to be notably tall and was already slim and shot-up for her years; she was to be notably fair of complexion and showed already a wonderful mildness and whiteness of skin, curiously heightened by the little flush of colour that warmed in a sharply defined spot on either cheek. Lady Burdon rallied her once during their conversation—the subject was French lessons, which it appeared she found "Terribly puzzling, Lady Burdon, do I not, Mamma?" and her face responded by a curious deepening of the red shades, her cheeks and brow gaining a hue almost of transparency by contrast.

It was that quality and that characteristic that made Percival—meeting her when she was brought over to tea with Rollo—call her, as he told Ima, Snow-White-and-Rose-Red.