Читать книгу The Happy Warrior - A. S. M. Hutchinson - Страница 6

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INTO THE PEERAGE

I

It made Mrs. Letham very excited. Mrs. Letham, coming upon it as she idly turned over the newspaper at her breakfast, took a bang at the heart that for the moment made the print difficult to read. Recovering, she read it through, her pulses drumming, her breath catching, her hands shaking so that the paper rustled a little between them. She half rose from her seat, then read again. She read a third time and now pursued the lines to that subjoined paragraph written up from the "cuttings about Lord Burdon."

"Lord Burdon, the twelfth Baron, was attached to the staff of General Sir Wryford Sheringham, commanding the expeditionary force. He was a lieutenant in the 30th Hussars and left England in October last with General Sheringham when the latter went out to take command. Lord Burdon, who only attained his majority in April last, was unmarried. This is the first time since the creation of the Barony in 1660 that the title has not passed directly from holder to eldest son; and about Little Letham, Wilts, where is Burdon Old Manor, the family seat, the expressions "Safe as a Burdon till he's got his heir," and "Safe as a Burdon heir" have passed into the common parlance of the countryside. The successor is of a very remote branch—Mr. Maurice Redpath Letham, whose paternal great-grandfather was the eighth baron. It will be noticed as a most singular event that the first break in a direct succession extending over two hundred years should cause the new heir to be found in the line of no fewer than four generations ago of his house."

When Mrs. Letham presently arose, she arose suddenly as if she forced herself to move against spells that numbed her movements. She arose, the paper clutched between her hands, and for a space she stood with a dizzy air, as if her thoughts reeled in a giddy maze and perplexed her actions. A jostle of visions—half caught, bewildering glimpses of what this thing meant to her—spun through her brain, the mind shaping them quicker than the mental eye could distinguish them, as one half-stunned by a blow, dizzy between its violence and the onward pressure of events. She put a hand for support upon the table before her and felt, but did not think to end, the unpleasant shrinking of her flesh communicated by her fingers scraping the wood where they bunched the cloth beneath them.

She was Lady Burdon … !

II

With that amazement singing in her ears, and recovered from the first effects of her bewilderment, she went quickly to the door and excitedly up the stairs. She was thirty-five; they called her pretty; and certainly she made an attractive presence as she came to the threshold of the room where she sought her husband. Her entry was abrupt: a quick jerk on the door handle, the door wide open and she with a sudden movement standing there, tense, animated, a flush on her cheeks, sparkle in her eyes, and a high, glad, strange note in the "Maurice!" that she cried. "Maurice!"

"Con-found!" came the answer. "Conster-nation!" and illustrating the reason of the words, a fleck of blood came through the snowy lather on a chin in process of being shaved.

Mr. Letham—portly; forty; pleasant of countenance in a loose-lipped, good-natured fashion; in a shirt and trousers before the looking-glass; pain on face; finger firmly on the blood stain; razor in the other hand—Mr. Letham peered short-sightedly into the mirror, made a very squeamish stroke with the razor in the vicinity of the wound, and, quickly over his concern, pleasantly addressed his wife.

"'Morning, old girl. I say, you made me jump. Am I so fearfully late? What's for breakfast?"

He did not turn to face her. Viewed from behind, half-hitched trousers and bulging shirt, he had a lumpish appearance, and it was the more inelegant for the contortions of his arms and shoulders, characteristic of a clumsy shaver.

The spectacle caused Mrs. Letham a pucker of the brows that marred her rosy animation. She said, "Maurice! Do turn round! I've something to tell you."

"M-m-m," murmured Mr. Letham, at very ticklish work with the razor.

"Maurice!"

"M-m-m—M-m-m. Beastly rude, I know. Half-a-second, old girl. This is a most infernal job—"

She interrupted him, "Oh, listen! Listen! In this paper here—" Her voice caught. "In this paper—you are Lord Burdon!"

Mr. Letham, signalling amusement as best he was able, gave a kind of wriggle of his back, held his breath while he made another stroke with the razor, and expired the breath with: "Well, I'll buy a new razor then, hanged if I won't. This infernal thing—" and he bent towards the glass, peering at the reflection of the skin he had cleared.

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 compassionate 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 snobbish, 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. 'Damn 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 shining 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, brushing 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 brushing 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.

"Nobody 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 shirt 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 shirt, 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.

He told her smiling: "Not with you, anyway, Nellie." Little attentions like these were rare, and he liked them. In his weak and amiable way he patted the hand that rested for a moment on his shoulder, and he explained. "You're quite right, of course, old girl. Of course I realise what it means to you and I ought to have shared it with you at once. I'm sorry—sorry, Nellie. Just like me. And about never making them your family. I know you're right there. But you don't really mean that—don't mean I've done it intentionally. You know—I've often told you—we were miles apart, my branch and theirs; you do see that, don't you, old girl? A different branch—another crowd altogether. I don't suppose you've ever even heard of the relations who stand the same to you as I stand to the Burdons. All the time we've been married, long before that even, I've never had anything to do with 'em." He smiled affectionately at her. "That's all right, isn't it?"

She was getting impatient that he ran on so. "Of course, of course," she said indifferently. "I never meant to say that." And then: "Oh, Maurice, but do—do—do think what I'm feeling." She entwined her fingers about his arms and looked caressingly up at him. "Have you thought what it means to us, Maurice?"

He liked that. He liked the "us" from her lips. His normal disposition returned to him; he smiled whimsically at her. "'Pon my soul, I haven't," he said; and added, smiling more, "it's a big order. By Gad, it's a big order, Nellie."

She clapped her hands in her excitement and stood away from him, her eyes sparkling. "Maurice! Lord Burdon! Fancy!"

"It'll be a nuisance, I shouldn't wonder," he grimaced.

She laughed delightedly. "Oh, that's just like you to think that! A nuisance! Maurice! Think of it! Lady Burdon—me! It's a dream, isn't it?"

"It's a bit of a startler," he agreed, smiling tolerantly down upon her excitement.

She laughed aloud. "But fancy you a lord!" and she looked at him, holding him by both his arms and laughed again. "A startler! A nuisance! What a—what a person you are, Maurice! Fancy you a lord! You'll have to—you'll have to buck up, Maurice!"

He turned away for a moment, occupying himself in fumbling in a drawer. When he turned again to her, his face had the tail of a grimace that she thought expressive of how repugnant to him was the mere thought of any change in his life. "Well, there's one thing," he said. "It won't be for long;" and he tapped his heart, that doctors had condemned.

She knew that was only his characteristic way of joking, but a flicker of irritation shadowed her face. She hated reference to what had often been a spoil-sport cry of "Wolf! Wolf!"

"Oh, that's absurd!" she cried. "That's nonsense; you know it is. Those doctors! Make haste and dress and come down. Make haste! Make haste! I want to talk all about it. I want you to tell me—heaps of things: what will happen, how it will happen. Now, do make haste. I'll run down now and see to Baby." She had danced away towards the door; now turned again, a laugh on her face. "Baby! What is he now, Maurice?"

"Still a baby, I expect you'll find, though I have been nearly an hour dressing."

For once she laughed delightedly at his mild absurdity; just now her world answered with a laugh wherever she touched a chord. "His title, I mean. An honourable, isn't it—the son of a peer? The Honourable Rollo Letham! I must tell him!" She laughed again, moved lightly to the door and went humming down the stairs.

Mr. Letham waited till the sound had passed. When the slam of a distant door announced the unlikelihood of her return, he dropped rather heavily into a chair and put his hand against the heart he had playfully tapped. "Confound!" said Mr. Letham, breathing hard. "Conster-nation and damn the thing. Like a sword, that one. Like a twisting sword!"

For the new Lady Burdon had been wrong in estimating any humour in the grimace with which he had looked at her after turning away, while she told him he must buck up.