The House of Defence v. 1

by E. F. Benson

He had apparently quite forgotten about Maud as he spoke, and had turned a side face to her as he talked to the gillie. And though, during this little speech, all the kindliness and merriment that had twinkled in his eyes and twitched in his mouth when “the situation” had been unfolded between Maud and himself was still there, yet there shone through it now some vital and intense seriousness. He had laid his hand on the rough homespun of Duncan’s shoulder, and spoke with a quiet and convinced air of authority. Then he nodded dismissal to him, and turned to Maud again, while Duncan trudged off down the riverbank.

“I’m so sorry for you and Lord Thurso,” he said, “and I think it’s downright good of you to have come up here, right in the middle of the season, just because your folk were ill. It’s real kind of you.”

Then suddenly his eye fell on the silver-mailed fish that still lay on the bank.

“Hi, Duncan!” he called out after the retreating figure, “take her ladyship’s fish up to the house.”

Duncan came back, and with difficulty folded the big fish into his bag, and shouldered it. But he paused a moment before he went again, looking at Cochrane with doglike eyes that, though they trust, yet beseech.

“But the wife is better, sir?” he asked.

“Ever so much. You are beginning to know that as well as I do. Now, off with you, for you’ve got to look after the baby, as she thinks she can’t. Make it happy. Give it a real good time, and let it pull that great beard of yours.”

He watched Duncan tramp away again with his heavy, peasant-footed tread down the bank.

“Dear blind soul,” he said, half to himself. “But it’s getting near dawn with his night.”

Maud was already “arrested” with regard to her companion—she paid, that is to say, a good deal more attention to him than she paid to nine-tenths of casual strangers with whom she was, as now, accidentally brought into somewhat intimate contact. He had the arresting quality, whatever that is, which compels attention. It may be called animal magnetism, or vitality of a superior kind, but it has nothing to do with love or hate, like or dislike, though it may coexist, and often does, with any of these. It had not, for instance, even occurred to her to wonder whether she liked or disliked him, or was utterly indifferent to him; she only knew that he had the arresting quality. In manner he was very quiet, rather boyish, quite well-bred, and rather good-looking, and in none of these respects was he different from the casual crowd. But there was, and she knew it, something that distinguished him from all men and women that she had ever seen, and this pause of a second or two, as Duncan took up the fish, was sufficient for her to determine in what the distinction lay. And it was this: he was so happy. Happiness of a sort she had never yet seen surrounded him like an atmosphere of his own, which it was given to others to breathe. She herself had breathed it—it radiated from him. Hundreds of people were happy—thank God, that is a very common gift—but the happiness that she now encountered was on a different plane. It was happiness distilled, sublimated. He seemed normally to dwell on the heights to which others in fine moments can attain. He seemed happy in the way that some extraordinary good news makes others happy for a moment or two, or an hour or two. Yet this was no retrospective happiness, the happiness of vivid memory: it was his normally; it gushed from him as from some unquenchable spring.