This February noon, while the early sunset reddened the west and the
son made love in the barn, the mother prepared stewed rabbit in the
kitchen. She sliced cold potatoes into a pie-dish, with severe brows
and compressed lips. And a young rabbit, disemboweled and skinned,
ready for dismemberment and interment, leaned languidly over the edge
of a blue plate, waiting the widow’s will.
There was a heavy step upon the flagstones outside the closed half-door
that kept the expectant group of fowls assembled at the outer threshold
from intruding into the kitchen. The upper part of a tall man’s body
appeared over the half-door, blocking out the sunset. Its long shadow
fell over the chopping-board and the widow’s active hands. She knew
whose was the step, and her hands were arrested in mid-movement. Had
her grim nature permitted it, she could have cried out with joy. As it
was, a dimness obscured her vision, and the roaring of the blood in her
ears drowned out the click of the latch as he came in.
“Joshua!...”
“How are you, mother?”
The tall, manly, soldierly figure, towering in the oblong of open
doorway against its background of flaming sunset sky, farmyard, and
stubble sloping to the jade-green river crawling between its frosted
sedges, stepped to her and took her large, hard hand, and kissed her
underneath the high, sallow cheekbone, with a duteous peck of lips.
“I am well, thanks be to the Lord!” said Sarah, regarding him
unflinchingly. He was so like her dead husband, his father, that a wild
surge of emotion strained the hooks and eyes of the brown wincey gown
and swelled her lean throat to choking anguish.
“That’s right. But you always are well, ain’t you, mother? Bobbish,
if not tol-lol? And Miss Nelly?” For she had entered at the moment,
bringing the radiance of youth and happiness to illumine the somewhat
gloomy farm-kitchen. “No need to ask how she is, if looks speak for
anything! How do you do, Miss Nelly? Let me hope as you’ve not quite
forgotten an old friend?”
“No, for sure! and I be nicely, Mr. Joshua, kindly thanks to ’e!”
With her quilted sunbonnet shading a face that the February wind, or
some more ardent lover had kissed to glowing rosiness, from the widow’s
hard black eyes, she put her pink hand in the hypocritical fellow’s
large brown one, and gave him modest welcome.
So modest and discreet, even in those rigorous eyes of Sarah
Horrotian, that the extraordinary snorting sound emanating from Jason
Digweed, who, heralded by his characteristic perfume of pigsties in
combination with unwashed humanity, had appeared outside the half-door,
startled the widow as though a geyser, suddenly opening in the brick
kitchen-floor, had been responsible for the utterance.
“Bain’t you ashamed, man?” she tartly demanded of the offender, “to
make noises like the beasts that perish?”
“No-a!” retorted Jason. He stepped boldly across the kitchen threshold,
permeating its slightly onion-flavored atmosphere with a potent
suggestion of pigs, and planted his huge and dirty boots defiantly
upon the spotless floor-bricks, in defiance of the mute appeal made by
the rope-mat to the entering visitor. He scratched himself leisurely,
within the open bosom of a shirt of neutral hue, and as he scratched
he looked from one to the other of the three faces that bore degrading
testimony to the daily and thorough use of water, soap, and flannel,
and his little eyes burned redly under their populous thatch. It is not
often that to a piggy man who has been wounded by the dart of Amor and
roused to resentful frenzy by the fair one’s contemptuous rejection
of his love, comes so complete an opportunity for vengeance upon a
triumphant rival as Jason savored now.
The soldier’s rashness hastened the descent of the sword....
“Why, ’tis Jason,” he began, with a tingling in the muscles of his
strong arms prompting him to punch a head, and an urgent impulse
concealed within the toes of his spurred Wellingtons, that had ended
before now in somebody being kicked. “No need to inquire after your
health, I see. A perfect picture.... Isn’t he, Miss Nelly?--if so be as
a chap could see the picture for the dirt upon it!”
“Let Digweed be. He is as the Lord made him!” boomed the deep rebuking
voice of Sarah, “and a burning and a shining light of holiness such as
I have prayed in vain the son of my womb might be!”
“The Lord made him as clean as the rest of us at the start, I reckon,”
retorted the soldier, rushing on his fate, “and a burning and a shining
light in a mucky lantern is no better than a bad ’un at the best. Eh,
Miss Nelly?”
At this homely piece of wit Nelly laughed out merrily, and Sarah,
turning her long narrow face and stern black eyes on the blushing
offender, bade her be silent in so harsh a tone that she began to cry.
Mightily relishing Nelly’s tears and confusion, Jason perpetrated a
whinnying imitation of the silly little laugh that had drawn down her
mistress’s rebuke upon her. But upon a sudden forward movement of the
angry-eyed trooper, he hastily turned the whinny into a groan of the
prolonged and gusty kind, wherewith searching pulpit utterances were
ordinarily greeted at the Market Drowsing Bethesda.
“Now, look ye here, Digweed,” began the trooper, upon whose rising
anger the groan had anything but a mollifying effect, “if so be as
you’re a man, and have anything upon your tongue’s end, out with it in
human language, and ha’ done wi’ bellocking and gruntling,--or betake
yourself where the company are more likely to understand ye.”
* * * * *
The speaker slightly jerked his thumb towards the littered yard, in
shape an irregular square; the long straggling mass of the farmhouse
occupying the upper side, the stables, sheds, and cattle-byres
enclosing it upon the right hand; a goodly row of populous pigsties
flanking it upon the left, where a hollow depression was occupied,
during ten months of the year, by a brown pond of gruel-like
consistency, much patronized of paddling ducks and a large black
maternal sow, at that moment engaged in rootling investigations upon
its plashy borders.
“Let be!” sounded in the deep tones of the widow. She checked her son’s
impulse towards continued speech with a semaphore-like movement of the
lean little arm with the great bony hand at the end of it. “If you have
anywhat to say, say it!” she commanded, seeing her unwashed factotum to
be in labor with speech.
“Mis’ess,” said Jason, getting out the word with a violent wrench and
twist, “since Babylonish luxury and scarlet doings be ’lowed on this
here varm, my time ’ooll be up come Mickenmass--and I’ll be ready to
up-stick and bundle!” He wagged his shaggy head at his mistress, but
his piggy eyes were on her son.
“Silence!” boomed the great voice of Sarah Horrotian. She put up her
large hand as the soldier opened his mouth to speak. She set back the
rabbit on the blue plate from which it had lapsed as though overwhelmed
by the secession of the fogger. Then she folded her lean arms upon her
triangular apron-bib, and confronted the shining light with judicial
severity.
“Who speaks of luxury and wickedness doing on this place,” she
proclaimed, “must make his charge good. Out with yours, man!... Let us
hear what you have to say!”
“I were gettin’ my nuncherd o’ bread an’ chaze up to th’ owd barn,”
said Jason, with another spasmodic effort, “leanin’ my back agen th’
boards to th’ wind’erd zide of ’n, as I chudd, when I heern a nise-like
inzide. Like so!”
The pigman primmed his lips, and brought out a long-drawn, chirping
kiss. The sound plopped into the silence as a stone plops into a pond,
creating rings of consternation. Two of the three faces the narrator
scanned with the bilious little savage eyes under his heavy brake of
eyebrow were flaming crimson. The third was pale with wrath, as Sarah
exclaimed indignantly:
“Trapesers again!”
“A male man and a female woman,” continued Jason, “kissing and cuddling
as though the begetting of bastards were th’ only biznurds they med ha’
come into the world to tend.”
He turned up his eyes and groaned again. The soldier’s leathern stock
grew strangling in its embrace. The milk-maid’s bosom lifted on a gasp
for air. Josh and Nelly, each in their different way, prayed that the
ordeal might be soon over....
Meanwhile thunderclouds gathered upon the high sallow forehead of Mrs.
Horrotian, between the scanty loops of her black hair. A suspicion
sharpened and yellowed her. She reviewed possible offenders in her
narrow mind a moment, then said:
“Be you swearing-certain they sinners were tramping bodies?”
Jason returned, plunging two hearers into a hot and cold bath of
perspiration:
“Noa, I bain’t!”
“Med-be,” said Sarah, with a vinegar face of disgust, “that to-yielding
girl of Abey Absalom’s has been straying with some bachelor-mankind
hereabouts. Both Joe Chinney and Tudd Dowsall be sinners prone to fall.”
She waited for no answer:
“And to them and all such, Judgment will be meted out hereafter!”
She took the rabbit from the plate, disposed its limbs upon the
chopping-board, balanced the chopper above the victim, and brought
down the blade. Nelly squeaked as though the rabbit had been capable of
utterance, as the mangling steel fell. The awful voice went on, as its
owner with dreadful dexterity finished chopping up the victim:
“For there is a hell for chamberers and wantoners!” She solemnly laid
the remains of the sacrifice in the pie-dish, strewed cold vegetables
above, poured a cupful of gravy upon the whole, and added, with the
salt and mace and pepper: “Nor shall fornicators fail of their place
therein. Girl, open the oven door!”
Pale Nelly totteringly obeyed, showing a cavernous interior of coaly
blackness, radiating fierce heat, illuminated by red and leaping
reflections of awfully-suggestive flame. Both the son and the
daughter-in-law knew themselves guiltless, their endearments chaste and
lawful as those of Zacharias and Elizabeth. But when the high-priestess
of the mysteries advanced, knelt, and with a powerful shove of her
bony arm drove in the pie-dish to deepest perdition, and clashed the
oven-door as though it shut upon the lost for all eternity, their knees
trembled and their eyes clung together behind the widow’s narrow back.
Even Jason gulped and shuddered. But he recovered as the widow turned
upon him, demanding:
“Was it Joe Chinney wi’ Nance Absalom?”
“Noa!” returned the piggy man. And drove home the negative with a
vigorous headshake.... Horror stiffened Sarah’s facial muscles. Her
great voice deepened to a blood-curdling whisper as she said:
“Dew and Randy be both wedded men.... Betsy Twitch the weeder be only
half a widow.... Jason Digweed, do you mean to tell me the Seventh
Commandment has been broken in my barn?”
For answer Jason raised a gnarled and stubby forefinger and made a
malignant jab with the digit in the direction of the tall, martial
figure in the blue, white-faced uniform.
“Best ask your soger son, Widder Horrotian. Med-be he’d took unto
his’seln’ a praper missus som’ers before he made ’e mother-in-laa to
your own milkin’-wench?”