The Happy Warrior Part 7

Mr. Amber tries for words. That twisting mouth forbids them, and he turns to hold the door open.

"Thank you. Good night, Mr. Amber. Here is our kind Colden so thoughtful for my sleep. I am ready, Colden. Yes, I will take your arm. Good night, Mr. Amber." And as Mr. Amber stands watching, there comes to him faintly across the great hall: "We'll rest a moment here, Colden. A little trying, these stairs. Do you remember how he used to take me up? He never missed a night when he was home, did he? Do you remember how he made us laugh about this seat...?"

Then Mr. Amber returns to the library, closes the door and eases emotion by a trumpet blast upon his nose.

III

Mr. Amber took a seat before the fire. He was unsettled, he found, for further progress that night upon the work that had engaged him at the table. But his mind turned to it and from it to the eleven fine volumes into whose company it would go, completing the lives of the Barons Burdon that were the fruits of many years of loving labour--result of "our little hobby." In memory he trod again those happy days--saw himself installed librarian at Burdon Old Manor, a bookish youth, weak-backed, weak-eyed, son and despair of a tenant farmer; rehea.r.s.ed again that youth's aimless, browsing years among the books, acquiring strange and various knowledge from the shelves, developing affections, habits, tastes that, as with tentacles, anch.o.r.ed him by heart and mind to the house of Burdon. Mr. Amber moved restlessly in his chair and came to the beginning of the great scheme, propounded by her gracious ladyship, that was to become "our little hobby," as immediately it became the purpose and enthusiasm of his life. Well, it was done--or almost done. The results of desperately exciting scratching about the library--among distressed old books, among family trees, among deeds, letters, parchments, rolls, records--were in eleven fine ma.n.u.script volumes--only the twelfth to finish.

A leisurely volume this twelfth, now lying on the table behind Mr.

Amber's chair. Written up during its subject's short life--dear and most well-beloved to Mr. Amber every moment of it--the volume is as naturally detailed as some of the earlier volumes are naturally sc.r.a.ppy. Pettily detailed, perhaps. Mr. Amber starts with the precise hour and moment--6:15- A.M.--of the birth of the Hon. Rollo Percival Redpath Letham; notes his colouring--fair; his weight at successive infantile months--l.u.s.ty beyond the average, it would appear; date of his first articulate speech; date of first stumbling run across the nursery floor--and suchlike small beer. His father's death is chronicled ("cf. vol. XI, pp. 196 _et seq._") and he is shown to be yet in his third year when he becomes twelfth Baron Burdon.... Date of measles.... Date of whooping cough.... First riding lesson....

Preparatory school.... First holidays.... First shooting lesson....

Puts a charge of shot into a keeper. It is all very closely detailed.

It is detailed so closely that a gap towards the end is made conspicuous: and this is precisely that gap occupied by the "disappearance" of which Mr. Pemberton had spoken in the drawing-room at Hillside. The chronicle, that is to say, is brought very fully up to the May in which, as it shows, my lord suddenly went down to Burdon Old Manor from London, his grandmother being at Mount Street, and thence for a long holiday. It jumps to October and at once begins again to be remarkably detailed, "Our Own Correspondent's" account of the frontier engagement waiting on the table there to conclude it. But of this May to October period, covering the June to August of which Mr.

Pemberton had spoken, Mr. Amber, like Mr. Pemberton, for the good reason that he knew nothing of how my lord occupied it, has nothing to say. Let it be said. My lord was in that June secretly married in London: a matter closely germane to this history, and now to be examined.

BOOK TWO

A BOOK OF THE SAME SIZE, ILl.u.s.tRATING THE ELEMENT OF FOLLY

CHAPTER I

LOVE TRIMS WRECKERS' LAMPS

I

On a May morning, then, love in his heart, purpose in his eye, gathering in his careless hand the meshes that he is going to tug, shaking the unconsidered lives they bind--Rollo Percival Redpath Letham, twelfth Baron Burdon, "Roly" to his gay young comrades of the clubs and messes, was set down at Great Letham by the express from London.

Great Letham marks the nearest approach of the railway to the sequestered villages that touch their hats to the Burdon Old Manor folk. It stands at the head of a country that rolls away on either hand in down and valley. Roughly, Great Letham centres the high lands that bound this prospect on its nearer side, and from its outskirts there strikes away a great shoulder of down that thrusts like a ma.s.sive viaduct straight and far to join the further hills. From a distance this natural viaduct admits to minds however stubbornly practical the similitude of a giant's arm. Rugged and brown and scarred it lies, not green in greenest summer; and the humped shoulder whence it springs, and the great mounds in which it swells along its path, present it as a mighty limb out-thrust to hold away the hills in which its fist is buried. Plowman's Ridge, they call it; and afoot upon it, it is kinder of aspect. Aloof, aloft, alone, the wayfarer stands here, and breathes or b.r.e.a.s.t.s the ceaseless wind that saunters or like a live thing thunders down its track; and has on either hand a spreading valley, whence curls the smoke of scattered hamlets, uprise the spires, come the faint sounds of creature life and gleam the fields, as spread upon a palette, coloured in obedience to this and that design of husbandry.

The railway skirts the eastward vale; along the tranquil westward slope the Burdon hamlets sleep. Viewed from the Ridge, they are ridiculously alike; ridiculously equidistant one from the next; ridiculously tethered, as it were, along the foot of the Ridge--like boats along a sh.o.r.e; ridiculously small to have separate names, but named in their order outwards from Great Letham: Market Roding and Abbess Roding and Nunford--linked by those names with the monastic ruins at Upabbot in the eastward vale; Shepwell and Burdon and Little Letham. They are tethered to the Ridge, and the Ridge is the most direct communication between them. Visitors from village to village, or from Great Letham to any, climb the slope and use the Ridge, rather than plod the winding roads that, as twelfth Baron Burdon has often declared, "take you about two miles from where you want to get before they let you loose to go there."

He struck out along the Ridge now.

Burdon village was his destination; and as he pressed his way towards it, putting up his face to snuff the familiar wind, speeding ahead his thoughts to what he came to seek, twelfth Baron Burdon showed himself a very personable young man. His tawny hair he wore closely cropped about his strong young head; beneath a straight nose he grew a little clump of fair moustache shaved bluntly away at the corners of a firm mouth. At a bold right-angle his jaw came cleanly from his throat; and his chin was thick and round, matching his open grey eyes to advertise purpose and command. A Burdon of Burdons Mr. Pemberton had named him.

A high-spirited young man, vigorous, alert; very boyish in mind, very dominant of character. A Burdon of Burdons. Through a long line the bone of whose quality was their "I hold!" twelfth Baron Burdon inherited a spirit that, when crossed, was quick to be unsheathed as from their scabbards the eager swords of remote ancestors were quick,--dangerous as they. "Enormously high-spirited, difficult to handle," Mr. Pemberton had told new Lady Burdon. It was handling he could not brook. The lightest feel of the curb threw up his head as the fine-tempered colt's. Brow and lips would a.s.sume signs that spoke, even to one unacquainted with him, the imperious resolve of mastery.

He was in pursuit of mastery now.

II

As he came abreast of Burdon he edged down the Ridge, making towards a little copse that ran up from a garden behind the last cottage in the village street, the nearest to Little Letham. In the roadway this cottage displayed, suspended from its porch, the notice, painted in white letters on a black board:

_POST OFFIC_

(The painter had misjudged the s.p.a.ce at his disposal but had added the missing E on the back of the board, "Case," as he explained, "unnybody be that dense as to turn her round to see what her do mean.")

The cottage served in those days for the reception and distribution of all the letters of the westward vale, a community little bothered with correspondence; and "Post Offic" was conducted by a slight little woman whom some called Postmum, some Miss Oxford. She was the daughter of a former vicar of Little Letham; to twelfth Baron Burdon she was Audrey's sister.

Deep in the trees, as he approached the copse, the sharp white of a skirt caught his eager eye. Taking a gra.s.sy path, he went noiselessly down and presently was separated from his Audrey by the dense thorn that hedged the tiny glade in which he found her. A basket of young fern roots was beside her and she was stooped, her back towards him, exploring in the undergrowth.

He thought to steal up to her, and tried. The dense thorn locked him, and she heard him and turned swiftly towards him.

She was flushed with her stooping. Now a deeper flush rose beneath her colour, sinking it in a warmer glow that stained her exquisitely from throat to brow. The dark violet's shade was in her eyes; when her colour abated, the pale rose's delicacy might have been shamed against the fairness of her skin. She wore no hat; her soft brown locks unruled the ribbon at her neck, and the breeze stirred her hair in little waves about her temples. Her arms were bare where she had thrust her sleeves beneath her elbows. She stood poised, as one might say, upon the feet of surprise; and her lips were slightly parted, her gentle bosom seeming to hold her breath as though she feared the smallest sigh would waft away the sudden gladness that had caught it.

She just whispered, "Roly!"

"I'm caught in this da--infernal bush," Roly cried, struggling.

"I wasn't to expect you for a week, you wrote."

He began to writhe and wrench. "You needn't. I shall stay here forever, I believe."

She gave the merriest laugh: "You're simply fixed!"

"Wait till I get at you!" He tried and was more firmly held. "I say, what the _d.i.c.kens_ has happened to me?"

She put her hands together, enjoying his plight as a child that bends forward at a play. "You'll never get through there, Roly. You'll have to go back."

He wrenched and struggled: "Go back! There's a great spike or something sticking into me!"

His struggles broke a network of branches at his waist. A th.o.r.n.y bough sprang loose and whipped beneath his chin, forcing up his head.

"Good Lord! Look here, Audrey, I shall cut my throat and bleed to death; or this dashed spike will come slick through my back in a minute and impale me!"

"Roly! If you knew how funny you look!"

Her tone, the way in which (as it presented itself to him) she "squirmed" with childlike glee, caused him to laugh the jolliest laugh.

No quality of hers attracted him as this fresh and innocent and childlike happiness that was her first characteristic; in none he found so great delight as in the fount of innocence through whose fresh stream came all her thoughts and words like young things at play.

He laughed the jolliest laugh: "Well, I've not come all the way from town just to look funny. I tell you, it's serious. I've never imagined such a fix. I'm dashed if I can move a finger now. Audrey, if you've got a woman's heart that feels, you'll help me out. This infernal thing under my chin--just move that and I'll show you how we fight in the dear old regiment--_d.a.m.n!_"

"Oh, it has cut you!" she cried, all concern as a moment before she had been all glee.

A step brought her face within a hand of his. She found place for her fingers between the thorns of the bramble beneath his chin. She drew the branch downwards, and the action caused her to bend towards him until their brows and eyes and lips were level. She looked directly into his eyes and he directly into hers; and each read there those dear and ardent mysteries that love far better images than ever love can voice.

He no more than breathed, "Kiss me, Audrey."

She waited for the smallest part of a moment. Entranced, enthralled, they only heard a lark that was a speck above them send down a tiny melody, and far upon the down a sheep-bell's distant note. Love's thralldom and Love's music to his thrall. The oldest play that mortals play; and never know befooled were often meeter than enthralled, nor better an a.s.s to bray than some hymn seem to rise in benison. She kissed him tenderly upon the lips; gave the smallest sigh and breathed, "Dear Roly!"