The Happy Warrior Part 53

But the tremendous brothers raised simultaneous shoulder-of-mutton fists to stop him, and fell into hurried preparations for departure.

It was disappointment they feared. "Don't speak hasty!" Mr. Hannaford thundered. "Think over it--don't say a word--keep the ledger--proper good business in it--pay you what you like--make you a partner in it--set you up for life properly to rights." He wrung Aunt Maggie's hand. "Say a word for us, Mam! loved him more'n a son ever since--"; in great emotion backed down the path taking j.a.phra with him; and in tremendous excitement returned to wring the hand of Stingo who, after opening and shutting his mouth several times without sound, at length produced: "Set you up for life properly to rights--more'n that, too.

You're young. We're bound to pop off one day. No one to leave nothing to. Rough 'Uns. You're young. Bound to go to you in the end. Rough 'Uns--"

"O' course! O' course! O' course!" joined Mr. Hannaford, wringing Stingo's hand in ecstasy and wringing it still as he led him down the path. "O' course! That was a good bit. Never thought of it. Bound to pop off! Bound to go to him!"

III

"Tears in your eyes, Percival," Ima said, smiling at him as immense trumpetings at the gate announced the Rough 'Uns' departure in a din of emotional nose-blowing.

"Well, dash it all, there always are, nowadays," Percival laughed.

"Everybody's so jolly, jolly good to me."

He lay back with new and most wonderful visions before his eyes; set his gaze on the dear, familiar line of distant Plowman's Ridge and peopled it with the scenes of his new and wonderful prospects. His hand in his pocket closed about letters received from Dora between that night at Baxter's and the night of the fight. Black and impossible his outlook then; limitless of opportunity now. Set up for life properly to rights! by a miracle, nay, by a chain of tricks and chances--and he ran through the amazing sequence of them--he suddenly was that! Dora no longer immeasurably beyond him; Snow-White-and-Rose-Red possible to be claimed.

Aunt Maggie broke into his thoughts. "Are you glad, dear--about the Hannafords?"

"Glad! Aunt Maggie, I was just thinking I seem to be a sort of--sort of thing for other people's plans. Old j.a.phra planned a fighter of me and, my goodness! I had a dose of it. Here's old Hannaford always been planning to have me with him, and here I am going sure enough!"

He laughed at an almost forgotten recollection. "Why, even you--even you had a wonderful plan for me. Don't you remember? I say, it's in hot company, your plan, Aunt Maggie. All come out right except yours.

You'll have to hurry up!"

"Mine will come out right," she said.

CHAPTER IX

ONE COMES OVER THE RIDGE

I

"Mine will come out right." But Percival's twenty-first birthday, that was to have seen the consummation of Aunt Maggie's plan, came--and Aunt Maggie held her hand and let it go.

A double reason commanded her. Percival's coming of age arrived with the Old Manor closed and Rollo and his mother far afield on that two years' travel which Lady Burdon had long before projected for her son to introduce his "settling-down." It were an empty revenge, Aunt Maggie thought, that could be taken in such case; robbed of its sting, sapped of all its meaning, unless it were delivered to Lady Burdon face to face, as face to face with Audrey she had struck Audrey down.

That was one reason that found Percival's twenty-first birthday gone, and still the blow not struck. The other was in tribute to the fate that had carried forward Aunt Maggie's plan through many hilly places and that, fatalistic, she dared not hasten when the promised land drew into sight. When she heard during the three months of Percival's zestful life on the little horse farm leading to his birthday that Rollo, before that birthday dawned, would be shipped and away on his leisurely journey round the world, she was at first strongly tempted to make end of her long waiting; at last to Audrey's murderer send Audrey's son. Her superst.i.tious reliance on fate prevented her. With fate she had worked hand in hand through these long years. Vengeance had been nothing had she taken it at the outset when Audrey lay cold and still in the room in the Holloway Road. Under fate's guidance it was become a vengeance now indeed--Lady Burdon twenty years secured in her comfortable possessions; her husband by fate removed, and the blow to be struck through her cherished son; a friendship by fate designed suddenly to turn against her and drive her forth as she had driven Audrey. Fate in it all, in each moment and each measure of it, and Aunt Maggie had the fear that now to dismiss fate and antic.i.p.ate the hour that she and fate had chosen would be to risk by fate's aid being dismissed.

Fate gave her hint of it--gave her warning. She was in one moment being told by Percival of Rollo's intended departure and long absence; and seeing herself robbed, her plan for his twenty-first birthday defeated, was urging herself with "Now--now. No need to wait longer--now;" she was in the next hearing Percival's desolation at the thought of losing "old Rollo" for so long--of their plans for closest companionship during the few weeks that remained to them; and hearing it, was warned by the same question she once before had asked herself and dared not finish, much less answer then, and dared not finish now: "What, when I tell him, if--"

Fate in it. Fate warning her, Aunt Maggie thought. Fate threatening her. Fate had been so real, so living a thing to her, its hand so plain a hundred times, that she had come to envisage it as a personality, an actuality--a grim and stern and all-powerful companion who companioned her on her way and who now stooped to her ear and told her: "Go your own way--if you dare. Seek to take your revenge now without my aid and short of the time that you and I have planned--if you dare. Abandon me and tell him now." Then the threat: "What, when you tell him, if--"

"Strange-like"? "Touched-like"? Thus, at least, she held her hand, paying tribute to fate; thus when the birthday came, and Rollo and Lady Burdon across the sea, and empty her vengeance made to seem if she then took it, she turned to fate and asked of fate "What now?"

"Strange-like"? "Touched-like"? Again to her ear that strong companion stooped--not threatening now; encouraging, supporting....

"Why, Aunt Maggie," Percival cried, "you do look well--fit, this morning. Fifty times as bright as you've been looking these past days.

Younger, I swear!"

"Well, it is your birthday, dearest," she told him.

"All very well! But every time we've mentioned my birthday, my twenty-first--even last night--you've been--I've thought it has made you sad, as if you didn't want me to have it!--growing too old, or something!"

For answer she only shook her head and smiled at him. But her reason for the stronger air he noticed in her, for her rescue from her depression of the days that led to his birthday, was that to her question of "What now?" she was somehow a.s.sured that she had but to wait, but to have a little more patience, and her opportunity would come. Fate was shaping it for her; fate in due time would present it....

II

Percival for his own part was also in some dealing with fate in these days. As one that is forever feasting his eyes on a prized and newly won possession, the more fully to realise it and enjoy it, so frequently in these days he was telling himself "I'm the happiest and luckiest beggar in the world!" and was marvelling at the train of tricks and chances by which fate--luck as he called it--had brought him to this happy, lucky period.

Every human life falls into periods reckoned and divided not by years but by events. Sometimes these events are recognised as milestones immediately they fall; a death, a birth, a marriage, a new employment, a journey, a sickness--we know at once that a new phase is begun, we take a new lease of interest in life; not necessarily a better or a brighter lease, a worse, maybe--but new and recognised as different.

More frequently the milestone is not perceived as such until we look back along the road, see the event clearly upstanding and realise that we were one man as we approached it and have become another since we left it behind; again not necessarily a better or a happier man--a worse, maybe; and maybe one that often cries with outstretched arms to resume again that former figure. It cannot be. Life goes forward, and we, once started, like draughtsmen on a board, may not move back.

Beside each event that marks a milestone we leave a self as the serpent sheds a skin--all dead; some better dead; some we would give all, all to bring again to life. It may not be.

Percival in these happy, happy months as right-hand man to the Rough 'Uns on the famously prospering little horse farm often told himself that his life had been--as he expressed it--in three absolutely different periods. He found a wonderful pleasure in dividing them off and reviewing them. Daily, and often more than once in a day, when he had a pony out at exercise, he would pull up on the summit of rising ground and release his thoughts to wander over those periods as his eyes reviewed from point to point the landscape stretched beneath him; his mind aglow with what it tasted just as his body glowed from his exercise of schooling the pony in the saddle. Three periods, as he would tell himself. The first had ended with that night when he came to Dora in the drive. Everything was different after that. Then all his life with j.a.phra and with Ima in the van--the tough, hard, good life that ended with the fight. The third--he now was in the third!

Two had been lived and left, and in review had for their chief burthen the picture of how, as he had said during his convalescence, every one had been so jolly, jolly good to him. Two had been lived and had shaped him--"a sort of _thing_ for other people's plans"; and what kind plans! and what dear planners! and he, of their fondness, how happy a thing!--to this third period that sung to him in every hour and that went mistily into the future whose mists were rosy, rosy, rose-red and snow-white, Snow-White-and-Rose-Red....

III

In the first few months, before Rollo and Lady Burdon took their departure for the two years' travel, he was daily, in the intervals from his work, with "old Rollo"; Dora often with them. Nothing would satisfy Rollo for the few weeks that lay between Percival's beginning of his duties with the Hannafords and his own start for the foreign tour but that they must be spent at Burdon Old Manor, nothing would please him to fill in those days but to pa.s.s them in Percival's company. He made no concealment of his affection for his friend. Men not commonly declare to one another the liking or the deeper feeling they may mutually entertain. The habit belongs to women, and that it was indulged by Rollo was mark in him of the woman element that is to be observed in some men. It is altogether a different quality from effeminacy, this woman element. s.e.x is a chemical compound, as one might say, and often are to be met men on the one hand and women on the other in whom one might believe the male or female form that has precipitated came very nearly on the opposite side of the division--women who are attracted by women and to whom women are attracted; and men, manly enough but curiously unmannish, who are noticeably sensible to strongly male qualities and who arouse something of a brotherly affection in men in whom the male attributes ring sharp and clear as a touch on true bell.

There were thrown together in Rollo and Percival very notable examples of these hazards in nature's crucibles. The complete and most successful male was precipitated in him of whom j.a.phra had said long days before: "I know the fighting type. Mark me when the years come.

A fighter thou." Qualities of woman were alloyed in him who once had cried: "Men don't talk about these things, Percival, so I've never told you all you are to me--but it's a fact that I'm never really happy except when I'm with you." Strongly their natures therefore cleaved, devotedly and with a clinging fondness on the weaker part; on the bolder, protectively and with the tenderness that comes responsive from knowledge of the other's dependence.

"Men don't talk about these things--but I'm never really happy except when I'm with you." That diffidence at sentiment and that self-exposure despite it, made when Percival, off to join j.a.phra, seemed to be pa.s.sing out of his life, were repeated fondly and many times by Rollo now that Percival looked to be back in his life again.

"Hearing me talk like this," he told Percival, "it makes you rather squirm, I expect--the sort of chap you are. But I can't help it and I don't care," and he laughed--"the sort of chap I am. You don't know--you can't come near guessing, old man, what it means to me to think you've chucked all that mad gipsy life of yours that might have ended in anything, the rummy thing it was, and that kept you utterly away from me; to think you've chucked all that and are settled down in a business that really is a good thing, every one says it is, and any one can see it. It means to me--well, I can't tell you what, you'd only laugh. But I can tell you this much, that I do nothing but think, and all the time I'm away shall be thinking, of how we'll both be down here always now when I get back, and of all the things we'll do together."

They were riding as he spoke, their horses at a walk up the steady climb of the down to Plowman's Ridge from Market Roding. His voice on his last sentence had taken an eager, impulsive note, and as though he had a sudden suspicion that it was betraying an undue degree of sentiment he stopped abruptly, his face a trifle red. It was his confusion, not any excess of sentiment, that Percival--quick as of old in sympathy with another's feelings--noticed. He edged his horse nearer Rollo's and touched Rollo with his whip. "Yes, we're going to have a great, great time, aren't we?" he said. "I'm only just beginning to realise it--great, Rollo!"

The affectionate touch and the responsive words caused Rollo to turn to him as abruptly as he had broken off. "I've planned it," Rollo said.

"I'm forever planning it. When I get back--fit--I'm going to settle down here for good. I loathe all that, you know," and he jerked his head vaguely to where "all that" might lie, and said, "London and that kind of thing. I'm going to take up things here. I've never had any interests so far. My rotten health, partly, and partly not getting on with people, and I've let everything drift along and let mother make all the programmes. That's how it's been ever since you went off. Now you're back again and I'm keen as anything. I'm going to work up all this property, going to get to know all the people intimately and help them with all sorts of schemes. Going to run my own show--you know what I mean, no agent or any one between me and the tenants and the land. And you're going to help me--that's the germ of it and the secret of it and the beginning and the end of it."

Percival laughed and said: "Help you! You won't want any help from me.

I can see myself touching-my-hat-to-the-squire sort of thing as you go hustling about the country-side."

But Rollo was too serious for banter. "You know what I mean," he said.

"And you--you're going to be a big man in these parts, as they say, the way you're going, before very long."

They had gained the Ridge and by common consent of their horses were halted on the summit. Rollo turned in his saddle and pointed below them. "Percival, that's what I mean," he said, and carried his whip from end to end along the Burdon hamlets. "That's what I think of.

Look how peaceful and remote it all looks, shut away from everything by the Ridge. We two together down there, planning and doing and living--"

Percival's gaze had travelled on from Burdon Old Manor where the whip had taken it and over the Ridge into the eastward vale. He turned again to Rollo, recalled by the stopping of his voice; and Rollo saw his strong face bright and said: "You'll think me a frightful a.s.s, you'll think me a girl, but you know I get quite 'tingly' when I antic.i.p.ate it all. And not want your help!--Why, only look at that for instance," and he laughed and put his hand against Percival's where it lay before his saddle. The delicate white, the veins showing, against the strong brown fist was ill.u.s.tration enough of his meaning. "And you're not long out of an illness that would have outed me in two days," he said.

He saw the bright look he had observed shade, as it were, to one very earnest. The symbol of their two hands so strongly different quickened in Percival the appeal that he always felt in Rollo's company, that went back to the early years of their play together, that was vital part of this happy, lucky period, and that was warmed again in the thoughts that came to him as he had looked over the eastward valley.

"Why, Rollo," he said earnestly, "it is good to think of. It is going to be good. We two down there. It's wonderful to me how it's all come out. It makes me 'tingly,' too, when I think of it--and of what it's going to be. Help you--why, we two--" He pressed the brown fist about the delicate hand. "There!--just like this good old Plowman's Ridge that shuts us off from everybody! Nothing comes past that to interfere with us."

They were a moment silent, each in his different way occupied by this close exchange of their friendship; and Rollo's way made him almost at once put his horse about, concerned lest his face should betray his feelings, and made him say with an attempt at lightness: "No, nothing, with the good old Ridge to shut us off," and then, "Is that some one riding up from Upabbot?"