The Happy Warrior Part 2

The door behind him slammed violently, and then for the first time he turned. He had thought her gone--angry, as she was often angry, at his mild joking. Instead he saw her standing there, one hand behind her in the action with which she had swung-to the door, the other clutching the newspaper all rumpled up against her bosom; and there was that in her face, in her eyes, and in the tremble of her parted lips that made him change the easy, tolerant smile and the light banter with which he turned to her. "Only my silly fun, Nelly," he began. "What is it?

Some howler in the newspaper? Let's have a--" Then appreciated the pose, the eyes, the parted lips; and changed nervously to: "Eh? Eh?

What is it? What's up?"

She broke out: "Your fun! Will you only listen! It's true--true what I tell you! You are Lord Burdon." Angry and incoherent she became, for her husband blinked at her, and looked untidy and looked doltish.

"He's unmarried. I was trying only the other day to interest you in what that meant. When his uncle died last August I spoke to you about it--"

Mr. Letham, blinking, more untidy, more doltish: "Who's unmarried?"

And she cried at him: "Young Lord Burdon! Young Lord Burdon is dead!

He's been killed in the fighting in India--"

She stopped. She had moved him at last.

III

Mr. Letham laid down his razor--slowly, letting the handle slip noiselessly from his fingers to the dressing-table. Slowly also he lifted his face towards his wife, and she saw his mild forehead all puckered, his eyes dimmed with a bemused air, his loose mouth parted: she particularly saw the comical aspect given to his perturbation by its setting of little patches of soap with the little trickle of red at the chin.

He put out a hand for the paper and made a slow step towards her.

"Eh?" he said--a kind of bleat, it sounded to her.

"No! Listen!" she told him. "Listen to this at the end of the account," and she spread the sheet in her hands. A little difficult to find the place ... a little difficult to control her voice....

"Listen!" and she found and read aloud, in jerky sentences, the paragraph that had been made out of "cuttings about Lord Burdon."

Almost in a whisper the vital clause "_...the successor is of a very remote branch--Mr. Maurice Redpath Letham, whose paternal great-grandfather was the eighth baron...._"

And in a whisper, dizzy again with the amazement of it: "Maurice! Do you realise?"

His turn for bewilderment. He ignored her appeal. He did not heed her agitation. He took the paper from her and she read that in his eyes--preoccupation with some idea outside her range--that caused her own to harden. She crossed and stood against the bed rail, and she eyed him with narrowing gaze as he read Our Own Correspondent's despatch.

"Poor young beggar!" he murmured, following the story. "Poor, plucky young beggar!"

She just watched his face, comical with its dabs of drying soap, reddening a little, eyelids blinking. She watched him reach the fold of the paper, ignore the paragraph relating to himself, and turn again to Our Own Correspondent's account. "Poor--poor, plucky young beggar!"

he repeated.

She gave a little catch at her breath. He exasperated her--exasperated! Here was the most amazing fortune suddenly theirs, and he was blind to it! Often Mrs. Letham flamed against her husband those outbursts of almost ungovernable exasperation that a dull intelligence, fumbling with an idea, arouses in the quick-witted. They are the more violent, these outbursts, if the stupid fumbling, fumbling with some moral issue, conveys a reproach to the quicker wit. She was made to feel such a reproach by that reiterated "Poor young beggar!

Poor, plucky young beggar!" It intensified the outbreak of exasperation that threatened her; and she told herself the reproach was unmerited, and that intensified her anger more. It was nothing to her and less than nothing, this boy's death; but she had rushed up to her husband the better to enjoy her natural joy by sharing it with him, and ready, if he had met her excitement, to compa.s.sionate the fate of young Lord Burdon. He greeted her, instead, only with "Poor young beggar!

Poor, plucky young beggar!" She caught her breath. Exasperation surged like a live thing within her. If he said it again! If he said it again, she would break out! She could not bear it! She would dash the paper from his hands. She would cry in his startled face--his doltish face: "What! What! What! What! Don't you see? Don't you understand? Lord Burdon! Lady Burdon! Are you a fool? Are you an utter, utter fool?"

IV

He opened his lips and she trembled. It is natural to judge her harshly, natural to misjudge her, to consider her incredibly sn.o.bbish, cruel, common. She was none of these. Given time, given warning, she would have received her great news, received her husband's reception of it, gently and kindly. But life pays us no consideration of that kind.

Events come upon us not as the night merges from the day, but as highway robbers clutch at and grapple with us before we can free our weapons.

Happily, for the first time since he had taken the paper, Mr. Letham seemed to remember her. He glanced up, flushed, damp in the eyes, stupidly droll with the dabs of drying soap: "I say, Nellie, did you read this:

"_The boy--he was absolutely no more than a boy--poked this way and that on the little ridge we had gained, trying, whimpering just like a keen terrier at a thick hedge, to find a way up through the rocks and thorns above us. We were a dozen yards behind him, blowing and cursing. 'd.a.m.n it! we've taken a bad miss in balk on this line!' he cried, turning round at us, laughing. Next moment he had struck an opening and was scrambling, on hands and knees. 'This way, Sergeant-major!' he shouted...._"

Portly Mr. Letham, carried away by the grip of the thing, drew himself up and squared his shoulders. He repeated "'This way, Sergeant-major!'" and stuck, and stopped, and swallowed, and turned s.h.i.+ning eyes on his wife (she stood there brooding at him) and exclaimed: "Can't you imagine it, Nellie? Listen: '_This way, Sergeant-major!' he shouted, jumped on his feet, gave a hand to his sergeant; cried 'Come on! Come on! Whoop! Forward! Forward!' and then staggered, twisted a bit on his toes, dropped. I saw another officer-boy jump up to him with 'Burdon! Burdon, old buck, have you got it?'..._"

Portly Mr. Letham's voice cracked off into a high squeak, and he lowered the paper and said huskily: "I say, Nellie, eh? I say, Nellie, though? That's the stuff, eh? Poor boy! Brave boy!"

With unseeing eyes he blinked a moment at his wife's face. Brooding, she watched him. Then he turned to the washstand and began to remove the signs of shaving from his cheeks, holding the sponge scarcely above the water as he squeezed it out, as though a noise were unseemly in the presence of the scene his thoughts pictured.

And she just stood there, that brooding look upon her face. Ah! again!

He was off again!

"And his grandmother," Mr. Letham said, wiping his face in a towel, sniffing a little, paying particular attention to the drying of his eyes. "I say, Nellie, his poor grandmother, eh? How she will be suffering! Think of her picking up her paper and reading that! ...

Only saw him once," he mumbled on, brus.h.i.+ng his thin hair. "Took him across town when he was going home for his first holidays from Eton.

Remember it like yesterday. I remember--"

It was the end of her endurance; she could stand no more of it. "Oh, Maurice!" she broke out; "oh, Maurice, for goodness' sake!"

Mr. Letham turned to her in a puzzled way. He held a hair brush in either hand at the level of his ears and stared at her from between them: "Why, Nellie--" he began; "what--what's up, old girl?"

She struck her hands sharply together. "Oh, you go on, you go on, you go on!" she cried. "You make me--don't you understand? Can't you understand? I thought that when I brought you this news you'd be as excited as I was. Instead--instead--" She broke off and changed her tone. "Oh, do go on brus.h.i.+ng your hair. For goodness' sake don't stand staring at me like that!"

He obeyed in his slowish way. "Well, upon my soul, I don't quite understand, old girl," he said perplexedly.

"That's what I'm telling you," she cried sharply and suddenly. "You don't. You go on, you go on!"

He seemed to be puzzling over that. His silence made her break out with the hard words of her meaning. "Do you really not understand?"

she broke out. "Do you go on like that just to irritate me? I believe you do." She gave her vexed laugh again. "I don't know what to believe. It's ridiculous--ridiculous you should be so different from everybody else. It means to me, this news, just this: that it makes you Lord Burdon. Can't you realise? Can't you share my feelings?"

"Oh!" he said, as if at last he understood, and said no more.

"How can I work up sympathy for people I have never seen?" she asked.

He did not answer her--brushed his hair very slowly.

"n.o.body can say I should. Anybody in my place would feel as I feel."

Still no reply, and that annoyed her beyond measure, forced her to say more than she meant.

"What are they to me, these Burdons?"

"They're my family, old girl," Mr. Letham ventured.

She did not wish to say it but she said it; he goaded her. "You've never troubled to make them mine," she cried.

Mr. Letham had done with his hair. He struggled a collar around his stout neck, examined what injury his finger nails had suffered in the process, and set to work on his tie.

V

For a few minutes Mrs. Letham frowned at the solid, untidy back turned towards her--the lumped shoulders, the heavy neck, the bulges of s.h.i.+rt sticking out between the braces. She gave a little laugh then--useless to be vexed. "You've never quarrelled with any one in your life, have you, Maurice?" she said; and with a touch in which kindliness struggled with impatience, she jerked down the bulging s.h.i.+rt, straightened a twisted brace, said, "Let me!" and by a deft twist or two gave Mr.

Letham a neater tie than ever he had made himself. "There! That's better! Have you?" she asked.