The Happy Warrior

by A. S. M. Hutchinson

"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..."