Читать книгу The Happy Warrior - A. S. M. Hutchinson - Страница 9

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MISREADING A PEERESS

I

We will give them their title now.

Events fell out much as the new Lady Burdon had planned. On the day following the news, the new Lord Burdon wrote a few sympathetic lines to Jane Lady Burdon; two days later he received an acknowledgment from the house in Mount Street. She would like to see him, Jane Lady Burdon, wrote, but she would like a little time in which to accommodate herself to her sad affliction. Perhaps he would arrange to call on that day week; and meanwhile, if he could see Mr. Pemberton, they would be spared much explanation relative to the sudden change.

"Rather cold," was Lady Burdon's comment; but her attention was taken by another letter brought in with Jane Lady Burdon's by Egbert Hunt, as they sat at early breakfast, and overlooked in the excitement. "And Mr. Pemberton—who is Mr. Pemberton?" she asked, but had opened this other envelope while she spoke, taken the gist of its letter at a glance, and herself answered her question, looking up with flushed face and sparkling eyes. "He's the solicitor," she said.

Lord Burdon nodded. "So he is. The name comes back to me."

"This is from him—to you. It's all right. He says it's all right, Maurice. He's the lawyer. He knows. He admits it."

"Sounds as though he'd committed a crime. What does he admit?"

She was very happy, so she laughed. "Listen!" and she read him the letter in which, in stilted, lawyer like terms, Matthew Pemberton (as it was signed) formally advised him of the death in action on the northwestern frontier of India, and of his succession to the barony and entailed estates. The firm of Pemberton, it appeared, had for many generations enjoyed the honour of acting for the house of Burdon, and, acting on Jane Lady Burdon's instructions, Matthew Pemberton desired to propose an interview "here or at your lordship's residence, as may be most convenient to your lordship."

"Maurice!" Lady Burdon exclaimed, and handed him the letter; and when he had read it, "There! There's no doubt now, is there?"

He had frowned over it as though it troubled him. At her words he looked up and smiled at her beaming face and patted her hand. "Why, you never had any doubt, had you?" he asked.

She gave the slightest possible shiver; but with it shook off the recollection that had caused it. "Oh, I don't know," she answered. "I do believe I had; yes, I had. I couldn't realise it sometimes. There was nothing—nothing to go on. Now there is, though!" And she touched the letters that were the magic carpet arrived to wing her from the delirium of that night toward the amazement that night had threatened.

She exclaimed again, "Now there is!" and, pushing back her chair, rose vigorously to her feet, casting aside forever (so she told herself) that nightmare dream and animatedly breaking into "plans." Too animated to be still, too excited to eat, gaily, and with a commanding banter that rendered him utterly happy, she easily influenced her husband, against his purpose, to bid Mr. Pemberton make the proposed interview at Miller's Field, not Bedford Row. "'At your lordship's residence,'" she laughed. "It's his place to do the running about, not yours. And tell him—I'll help you to write the letter—tell him to come the day after to-morrow, not to-morrow. Don't let him think we're bursting with eagerness."

"By gum, he'd better not see you, then," Lord Burdon said grimly.

She gave him a playful pinch. "Oh, I'll do the high and haughty stare all right," she told him, and she laughed again and ran gaily humming to the Hon. Rollo Letham in the garden.

II

Mr. Pemberton, on arrival, proved incapable of much of that running about, in the literal sense of the term, that Lady Burdon had pronounced to be his place.

"Here he is!" Lady Burdon said, watching through the drawing-room window from where she sat, as a closed station-fly drew up before the gate. "Here he is!" There was a longish pause before the cab door opened, and then a walking-stick came out and tapped about in a fumbling sort of way until it hit the step. A very thin leg came groping down the stick, its foot poking about nervously as though to make sure that the step was stable. "Good gracious!" Lady Burdon exclaimed. "The poor old man!"

She forgot the high and haughty stare premeditated for the interview, and she crossed to the window, womanly and womanishly alarmed. The knee above the trembling leg took a jerky shot or two at stiffening, then stiffened suddenly and took the weight of a little wisp of an old man, who swung suddenly out upon it, whirled half around as the gusty breeze took him and, clutching frantically against the side of the cab with one hand, with the other made agitated prods of his stick at the road desperately far beneath.

"Oh, goodness!" Lady Burdon cried. "He'll kill himself! And that idiot like a frozen pig on the box! Maurice!" But she was quicker than her husband and, the high and haughty stare completely abandoned, was swiftly from the room, down the path, through the gate, and with firm young hands under a shaky old arm, just as the little old man, unable to balance longer, was dropping stick and leg towards the ground and in danger of collapsing tremendously upon them.

She landed him safe. "The road slopes so frightfully here, doesn't it?" she said. "I am afraid you are shaken."

The little old man, very visibly shaken by the fearful adventure, essayed to straighten his bent old frame. He raised his silk hat and stood bareheaded before her. "You saved me from that," he said. "It was very, very kind of you. I am clumsy and stupid at moving about."

She was flushed by her run, the breeze was in her hair; she looked pretty and she was quite natural. "Oh, I saw you," she smiled. "I ought to have come before. Let me take your arm. The path is steep; we are on the side of a hill, as you see."

She swung open the gate with one hand and put the other beneath his arm.

He seemed to hesitate, looking at her curiously. "Oh, I am all right when I am on my legs," he said, with a little laugh. "Well, well—it is very, very kind of you," and he accepted the aid she offered.

"It is steep, you see,"—she smiled down at him—"and rough. It ought to be rolled, but we have the idlest gardener boy in the world. You are Mr. Pemberton, aren't you? I am—I am Lady Burdon."

He halted in his nice little steps and looked full up at her. "I am very glad to know that," he said simply, and put himself again to the task of making the house.

III

Mr. Pemberton was more than pleased; he was intensely relieved and intensely happy. His thoughts, as he came down in the train to Miller's Field, had caused his face to wear a nervous, a wistful, almost an appealing, look. Bound up in inherited devotion to the noble house whose service was handed down in his firm as the title itself was handed down, he had feared, he had dreaded what manner of people the tragic break in the famous direct succession might have brought to the name he loved. Nothing could so well have reassured him as that most womanly action of Lady Burdon when she ran to his assistance at the gate; nothing could so well have affirmed the confidence with which he turned to her husband, come to the door to meet them, as the simple honesty of character imprinted on Lord Burdon's face and expressed in his greeting. Both impressions were sharpened as they sat talking at tea. Mr. Pemberton had come to talk business; he found himself drawn by this sympathetic atmosphere into speaking intimately of the gay young life whose cruel termination had caused his visit.

Clearly he had been deeply attached to that young life; he speaks of it in the jerky, disconnected sentences of one that does not trust his voice too long, for fear it may betray him; and when he comes to his subject's young manhood, after eulogy of childhood and youth, clearly Lady Burdon is interested. She draws her chair a trifle towards him, and with her elbow on the low tea-table, cups her chin in the palm of her hand, the fingers against her lips, watches him and attends him closely. Her throat and face are dusky, her wrist and hand are white against them. Her eyes have a deep and kind look. She makes a gentle picture.

Encouraged by her sympathy, "He was a little wild," says Mr. Pemberton. "I am afraid a little inclined to be wild. … Always so full of spirits, you see … eager … careless, reckless perhaps, impetuous … lovable—ah, me, very lovable. …

"I was very fond of him, Lady Burdon," he says apologetically, "very fond;" and he stumbles into an example of what he is pleased to call the young man's impetuous carelessness. It is of his last months in England, before he sailed for India, that this deals. Between June and August, having leave from his regiment, he disappeared, it seems; was completely lost sight of by his grandmother and his friends. Towards the end of August he appeared again. "Not himself—not quite himself," says Mr. Pemberton, shaking his head as though over some recollection that troubled him, "and no explanation of his absence, and, when the chance came—General Sheringham was a relation, you know—wild to get out to this frontier 'show,' as he called it.

"Typical of him," says Mr. Pemberton after a pause, and smiling sadly at Lady Burdon. "Typical. A law to himself he would always be, and not responsible to any one for what he chose to do. A Burdon trait that; and he was a Burdon of Burdons."

Lady Burdon asks a question, breaking into Mr. Pemberton's history for the first time. "But that really is extraordinary, Mr. Pemberton," she says. "Wouldn't Lady Burdon—wouldn't his grandmother—have felt anxious during that disappearance, and wouldn't she have questioned him when he came back?"

"Not unless he seemed disposed to tell her. In a way—in a way, you know, relations between them were a little difficult. Poor boy"—and Mr. Pemberton gives a sad little laugh—"poor boy, he often came to me in a great way, and her ladyship, too, has had occasion. He, on his side, passionately devoted to her, hating to hurt her, but enormously high-spirited, difficult to handle. And she, on hers, making all the world of him and a little apt on that account to claim too much from him, if you follow me. He sometimes chafed—chafed, you know; hating to hurt her but restless of her control, her claim. Latterly she had to be very tactful with him. No, she wouldn't have questioned him unless he seemed disposed to tell her."

They are interrupted here by the entrance of baby Rollo on his way to bed, for it is getting late. "The rummiest little beggar," says Lord Burdon, introducing his small son. "Not much more than eighteen months, and solemn enough for an archbishop, aren't you, Rollo?"

The solemn one, pale and noticeably quiet and far from strong looking, justifies this character by having no smiles, though Mr. Pemberton greets him cheerfully and says approvingly: "Rollo, eh? The Burdon name. His name," he adds, and looks at Lady Burdon, who gives him a gentle smile of understanding.

IV

Mr. Pemberton looked after her very gratefully when she excused herself to take the child up-stairs. The door closed, he turned to Lord Burdon. "Nice—nice," he began in a stifled kind of voice, "to have a little son growing up—to watch. We watched young Lord Burdon—that poor boy—growing up—anxiously—so anxiously. … "

He gave a nervous little laugh. "When I say 'we' you've no idea with what a terrible air of proprietorship the family is regarded by those, like myself, attached to it for generations, by those dependent on it. We looked so eagerly, so eagerly as the time drew on, to his coming of age. He was wanted so."

"Wanted?" Lord Burdon asked. "Wanted?" He pronounced the word heavily, as though he had an inkling of the answer and was apprehensive.

It started Mr. Pemberton on a recital that he spoke with seeming difficulty and yet as though he had prepared it. It occupied longer than either knew, and Lord Burdon, before it was finished, was sitting sunk low in his chair, as though what he heard oppressed him. The little old lawyer spoke of difficulties in connection with the estate; the diminished rent roll; the urgent necessity for comprehensive improvements essential to make the land pay its way; the long-urged necessity for the sale of Burdon House in Mount Street, heavily mortgaged and the interest an insupportable drain on the estate. It led him to why they had looked so anxiously for the coming of age. Everything that was essential was impossible, he showed, in the reign of gentle Jane Lady Burdon, who felt that she held in sacred trust for her grandson and would suffer no risks in raising of loans, nor depredation of her charge by sale of the town property. He had no eloquence, this devoted little lawyer, but he had earnestness that seemed to him who listened to fill the room, as it were, with living shapes of duties, demands, traditions of a great heritage that marshalled before him and looked to him to be carried forward, as soldiers to a leader.

A change in Mr. Pemberton's tone aroused him.

"He was wanted so," Mr. Pemberton said jerkily, and stopped.

No response, and in a funny little cracked voice, "Well, he's dead," Mr. Pemberton said.

Lord Burdon raised his eyes, contracted with the trouble that had given him that drooped, oppressed appearance while the other spoke, dim, clouded as with looking at something that menaced; and their eyes met—two very simple men.

Mr. Pemberton stretched out fumbling hands. He cried blunderingly and appealingly, his mouth twisting: "It has affected me—this death, this change. I am only an old man—a devoted old man. As we looked to him, so now we look to you."

"Look to me!" Lord Burdon said slowly. "Look to me! Good God, Pemberton, I funk it!" he cried. "I funk it and I hate it. I'm not the sort. I wish I'd been left alone. I wish to God I had!"

There followed his words a silence of the intense nature caused by speech that has been intense. In that silence, consciousness of some other personality in the room caused Mr. Pemberton to turn suddenly in his chair. He turned to see Lady Burdon standing in the doorway. She was not in the act of entering. She was standing there; and for the briefest space, while Mr. Pemberton looked at her and she at him, she just stood, erect, her head a trifle unduly high, with estimating eyes and with purposed mouth.

V

It had been an anxious Mr. Pemberton that came down to Miller's Field. It was a reassured Mr. Pemberton that stayed there, but a gravely disturbed Mr. Pemberton that went back to town. He knew Lady Burdon had been listening, the look he had seen on her face informed him of her displeasure with what she had heard, and he knew that in his first estimate of her he had misread her.

For he read her look aright. In her husband's cry—his weak, contemptible cry—in what she had heard of the little lawyer's statements and proposals—his tears and prayers of duties—she knew hostility to her plans, to her dreams, to her pleasures. Her estimating eyes that met Mr. Pemberton's inquired the strength of that hostility; her purposed mouth was the mirror of her determination against it.