The Happy Warrior Part 4

"Fine! You look as pretty as a picture this evening, Nellie. I tell you, I thought so, when I squinted in through the window."

"That's because I'm so happy."

"So am I." He pressed her arm to show why, and "Maurice! you are a goose," was her gay comment; but for once his foolish loverlikeness pleased her; her mood was widely charitable.

They paced the little lawn in silence. She suddenly asked, "You don't mind my being happy, do you?"

"Mind! Good Lord!" and he pressed her arm again.

"Being excited about--about it, I mean. It's natural, Maurice?"

"Of course it is. Of course it is, old girl."

"But you're not--it doesn't excite you?"

Mr. Letham was too honest, even at risk of disturbing this happy pa.s.sage, to pretend the untrue. "Well, that's nothing," he said.

"That's nothing. I'm so beastly slow. An earthquake wouldn't excite me."

"I don't believe it would," she laughed, then was serious. "But I'm excited," she said abruptly. "Oh, I am!" She put up her face towards the veiling sky--a dim star here and a dim star there and a faint breeze rising--and she drew a deep breath just as she had breathed deeply in the drawing-room a few moments earlier. "Oh, I am!" she repeated. "Maurice! I want to talk about it."

He was not at all conscious of the full intensity of her feelings; but for such of it as he perceived he smiled at her in his tolerant way.

"Well, you say," he told her. "You do the talking."

She was silent for a considerable s.p.a.ce; her mind run far ahead and occupied among thoughts to which she could not introduce him, for he had no place in them. That he s.h.i.+vered slightly recalled his presence to her. That his presence had been deliberately shut from among the castles she had been building caused her one of those qualms which (if we are kind) often sting us back from our worser self to our better nature. And she was kind, alternating ceaselessly between the many womanly parts she had and those other parts we all possess; only to be pitied if the events now quickly shaping for her tempted her too much, led her too far from the point whence kindness is recoverable.

Recalled to him and to her womanliness, "Oh, your coat!" she exclaimed.

"You've been getting hot and you'll catch your death of chill. You're dreadfully careless. Where is it?"

"In the summer-house. But what rot!"

"I'll get it." She slipped her arm from his hand and ran away across the lawn. "There!" she said, returning. "Now b.u.t.ton it up. Ah!

You're all thumbs!"

She fastened it for him and turned up the collar. The action brought her face close to his. "You're jolly good to me, Nellie," he said, and his lips brushed her forehead. A kiss it had been, but she drew back a step. "Not going to have you ill on my hands," she told him brightly.

Then she slipped a hand into his arm and resumed, "What are we going to do--first? I want to talk about that."

She had talked to him of it all the morning; but as if it were undiscussed--anything to preserve these happy moments--"Yes, go on," he said.

She responded eagerly. "Well, we must write to Lady Burdon, of course--Jane Lady Burdon, now, you said, didn't you? Not to-day.

Better wait a day--to-morrow."

"That is what I thought."

"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 pa.s.s. 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 Wilts.h.i.+re 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 ma.n.u.script life of each holder of the t.i.tle, hunting up all the old records and traditions and things with the librarian; he was as keen on it as she. He..."

"Where will she be now, do you think?" Mrs. Letham interrupted. "In town?"

"In town for certain. She'd be sure to be where she could always get earliest news of the boy."

"In the town house? Burdon House in Mount Street, you said, didn't you? Have you ever been there? What's it like?"

"No, never been in. A whacking great place, from the outside. That's where she'll be all right, unless they've sold it."

Mrs. Letham gave him a sudden full attention. "Sold it? Why should they have sold it?"

"The ancient reason--want of money," he replied lightly.

She made no response nor responsive movement; yet some emotion that she had seemed to communicate itself to him, for looking down at her, half-whimsically, half-gravely, "I say, you don't think we've come into untold wealth, do you, Nellie?" he said.

She took her hand sharply from his arm. Much that he had said, though she could not have a.n.a.lysed why, had caused her kinder self to ebb.

Now it left her. She answered him by asking him: "What of all those names you told me? Tell me them again."

"The property? The Burdon Old Manor property? Little Letham, and Shepwell, and Burdon, and Abbess Roding, and Nunford, and Market Roding: those, do you mean?"

"Yes, I mean those. How do you mean 'the ancient reason, want of money'?"

"Well, that's all there is, though. The money is all out of the estate. Nothing more."

She said impatiently: "Well? All those villages?"

"All those duties." he corrected her. "That's the Burdon way of looking at it. What they make on Abbess Roding they lose on Market Roding, so to speak. It's that 'I hold!' business again. They won't sell; they won't raise rents when leases fall in; they never refuse improvements that can possibly be afforded. The tenantry have been there for generations. No Burdon would ever think of turning them off or of refusing them anything; it wouldn't enter his head. That's why I said Burdon House in Mount Street might be sold. It's unlikely, but I remember there was talk of it in my grandfather's time. It belongs to an older day, when they were wealthier. They'd sacrifice that, if need be, though it would be like a death in the family; but anything rather than the bare idea of interfering with the people they regard as a trust."

He spoke quite easily, never realising the intensity of her feelings.

"Oh, it's no untold wealth," he laughed. "You mustn't think that."

She said after a little s.p.a.ce, "Richer than we are, though?" and added, comforting herself with an old truism, "What's poverty to one is wealth to another."

"Oh, richer than we are. Good lord, yes, I hope so. I'm thinking of years ago, anyway. Things may have changed. I'm telling you of when I was a kid."