The Happy Warrior

by A. S. M. Hutchinson

Three closely-written sheets came from the envelope. They contained many paragraphs, each of a different date—Aunt Maggie waited, as she explained, until she could be sure of an address to which to post her letter. There was much gossip of a very intimately domestic nature, each piece of news beginning with "I think this will interest you, dear." Before he was through with the letter the recurrence of the phrase, speaking so much devotion, caused a moisture to come to his eyes. "I think this will interest you, dear"—and the matter was that Honor burnt a hole in a new saucepan yesterday. "I think this will interest you, dear"—and "fancy! fourteen letters were posted in the box to-day." "I think this will interest you, dear"—and would he believe it! "one of the ducks hatched out sixteen eggs yesterday."

The more trivial the fact, the more Percival found himself affected. He was touched with the profound pathos of Aunt Maggie's revelation of how he centered each smallest detail of her remote and lonely life; he was rendered instantly responsive to the appeal with which at the end of her letter she cried to him to come home to see her—if only for a night. "This will be the second Christmas that you have been away. The days are, oh! so very, very long for me without my darling boy."

He told Japhra that he must go—not for long, and if for longer than he thought, at least the first of the new year would see him back. They were in Essex. Urgent with this sudden determination that had him, he took train for London on the next morning, and before midday was set down at Liverpool Street Station. Holiday mood seized him now that he had taken holiday. He counted again and again the sixty-five pounds that, to his amazed joy,—he, who till now had never earned a penny!—Japhra paid him for two seasons' wage and share. It seemed a fortune—forced up the holiday spirit as bellows at a forge; and on the way to Waterloo he ridded his burning pockets of a portion of it in clothes and swagger kit-bag for this his holiday, and in presents that brought parcels of many shapes and sizes into his cab—for Aunt Maggie, for Honor, for Mr. Amber, for Mr. Hannaford, for all to whom his heart bounded now that he was to see them again.

III

In these delights he missed his train. Two hours were on his hands before the next, and as he contemplated them a daring thought (so he considered it) came to him. He took a hansom cab and bade the man drive him to Mount Street,—through Mount Street and so back again. He would see where she lived!

"Drive slowly up here," he told the man when the cab turned into the street for which he watched. "Do you know Burdon House?"

It was pointed out ahead of him. "Set down there many a time. Lord Burdon's 'ouse it was. Another party's got it now."

Percival leant back, not to be seen—not daring to be seen!—and stared, his pulses drumming, as he was slowly carried past.

Might there have troubled him some vague, secret feeling of association between himself and that brown, massive front of Burdon House with its broad steps leading to the heavy double doors, with its tall, wrought-iron railings above the area, with its old torch extinguishers on either side the entrance, with its quiet, impassive air that large old houses have, as of guardians that know much and have seen much—brides come and coffins go, birth and death, gay nights and sad, glad hours and sorry—and look to know more and see more? Might he have felt, as he told Aunt Maggie he had felt at Burdon Old Manor, "thinking without thinking, as if some one else were thinking," as he passed those steps where one that he might have called Father often had gaily passed, where one he might have called Mother had gone wearily up and come fainting, dizzily down?

He felt, nor was disturbed, by none of those. He only gazed, gazed as he would pierce them, at all its solemn windows, riveted its every feature on his mind; but only because it was where she must have looked, because it sheltered her where she must be. It was a new setting against which he might envisage her; he only thought of it as that.