The Happy WarriorHutchinson, A. S. M. (Arthur Stuart-Menteth)
General
The Happy Warrior
Hutchinson, A. S. M. (Arthur Stuart-Menteth)
Fiction
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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