The Happy Warrior

by A. S. M. Hutchinson

And Aunt Maggie: "And look at that beer, dear. You'd scarcely think it was a new cask, would you? As clear as crystal."

And Honor: "Ah, 'Pitch that cask about,' I says to the man when he delivered it. 'Pitch that cask about, my beauty, and you can pitch it back into your waggin', I says. 'Young master don't want to eat his beer with a knife and fork, not if you do,' I says sharp."

And Aunt Maggie: "You see what care we take of you, Percival, although you leave us all day long."

And Honor: "And now I'll just get your slippers down for you. Nothing like slippers when you're tired. And then you'll be to rights."

II

So these fond women, perceiving him amiss, strove, as women will, to heal him with their sympathy; and reckoned nothing—as is woman's part—that he nothing responded to their gentleness nor anything abated his set and brooding air. The world may be chased up and down to find men conspired to soothe a woman's brow and scarcely will disclose a single case. Men weary or wax impatient of such a task. But every household at some time shows women gently engaged against a bearish man. It is the woman's part—womanly as we say: using a rare word for a beautiful virtue.

At another time—in the days before that evening's magic, in the life that preceded his present only by that hour in the drive with Dora—Percival had long been won from moodiness by their solicitude for him. Not now! Those days were only a single hour gone; its events sundered them from the present by an abyss that had a lifetime's depth, a lifetime's breadth from marge to marge. New feelings were his and they enveloped him against old appeals as a suit of mail against arrows. New prospects held his eyes and they blotted out homelier visions as the changed scene of a play is dropped across an earlier background. He was not preoccupied and therefore unaware of the loving sentences addressed to him. His case was this—that he was a new man, and as a stranger, therefore, listening to affections that did not concern him. That he found himself insensible to their appeal was not that he loved Aunt Maggie less or had suffered abatement of the affection he had for hot-tongued, warm-hearted Honor. None of these. It was this only—that he loved another more; this only—that the fires of his love had sprung out in a new place and there burned with heat infinitely more fierce than the flame where formerly his affections had warmed their hands.

III

Such of his meal as he required—and that was what habit, not appetite, demanded—he ate in silence. To silence also Aunt Maggie went, shortly after Honor had left them. She attempted once or twice to continue to persuade him from his mood—protested that he was eating nothing; sought to rally him with little scraps of gossip, with questions touching his afternoon. Of no avail. Presently she clasped her hands together on the table before him, and only watched him, and only sought to discover from his face what thing it was his face betided, and only felt her fears increase.

When he was done he pushed back his chair and she dropped her eyes, for his were now upon her and had the steady, reckoning look she had observed—and feared—when he regarded her for that moment at his entrance. She could not endure the feeling that he watched her, and watched her so. "You will go to bed soon, Percival," she said. "You do look so tired."