The Happy Warrior

by A. S. M. Hutchinson

I

That day of Audrey's death was in two minds at two breakfasts in different quarters of London on a morning some while later. In the Mount Street house Jane Lady Burdon, starting in an hour to make her home with her sister in York, was reading to Lord and Lady Burdon a letter just received from India. It was a sympathetic note from the officer who had been with her Roly when he fell. "'His last words,'" she read aloud with faltering lips, "'were: Tell Gran to love Audrey. It was difficult to catch them, but I think that was it.'"

Jane Lady Burdon laid down the letter and smiled feebly. "They have no meaning for me," she said.

And Lord Burdon: "Nellie! What's up, old girl?"

Lady Burdon struggled with the dreadful agitation the words had caused her. They had meaning for her. "I am Audrey—I am Roly's wife."

"So sad," she exclaimed, "so sad—excuse me—I—" She rose shakily and went from the room. After two days of suspense she had thought that hideous alarm defeated and disproved. What now? And what had she done?

The other breakfast was at Mrs. Erps's—also immediately before a journey. "No one," Mrs. Erps had said, "no one hadn't oughter travel on a nempty stomach," and had forced Miss Oxford to the table before the start for Little Letham and "Post Offic." "I know you've had bitter trouble as loved the pretty dear meself ever since 'Excoose me,' I says to 'er, 'excoose me,' as I've told yer. An' Gord alone knows I know what trouble is, as 'ad twings of me own pop off in one mumf. But you've got the living for to think of. Same as I 'ad my ole man, you've got this blessed ingfang what never know'd a muvver's breast and took to the bottle like nothing I never did see."

And to the blessed "infang" reposing in her arms while she talked: "Didn't yer, yer saucy sossidge? That's what you are, yer know—a saucy sossidge. Ho, yes yer are. No use yer giving answer back ter me, yer know. A saucy, saucy sossidge, wot I should cook up with mashed if I had me way with yer, bless yer."

Maggie scarcely heard; but there was one sentence of Mrs. Erps that joined her thoughts: "You've got the living for to think of." Yes, she had that—and the dead to revenge. "They have killed her," she had cried to the doctor. Through the long night, when she knelt beside the still figure, that thought had burned within her and refused her tears. It grew to an intolerable agony that pressed upon her brain as though a band of steel were there. She understood what had bewildered Audrey—who it had been that had said "I am Lady Burdon." Her imagination pictured the woman. An orgasm of most terrible hate possessed her, increasing that dreadful pressure on her brain, and suddenly something seemed to her to have given way beneath the pressure.

Hate or passion of that degree never filled her again. She was strangely quiet in manner when Mrs. Erps came to her in the morning, strangely quiet at the funeral in Highgate Cemetery while Mrs. Erps wept in loud emotion, and always quite quiet in mind. The child was going to live, she was somehow fully assured of that, and she was not going to give him up—her Audrey's child—as, if she spoke, she might have to give him up. He was going to live with her at "Post Offic" and take his mother's place; and one day.... They had taken Audrey from her. One day she would return to them Audrey's son. "I am Lady Burdon" had murdered Audrey. One day, when "I am Lady Burdon" was secure and comfortable in her possessions, and had forgotten Audrey, Audrey's son should avenge his mother....