There was a moment’s horrible silence in which the white-faced clock
was drowned, or so it seemed to the married lovers, by the thumping of
their hearts. Then the dreaded voice boomed forth:
“Joshua Horrotian!”
“Here!” said the soldier, as if the roll were being called.
“Your miserable mother has a question to ask. Are you, the son I bore,
a villain, or an honest man? Is this girl whom I have sheltered under
my roof, and fed o’ my charity, a virtuous woman or a weak, to-yielding
trollop?”
“I should ha’ knocked down the chap who’d asked me them two questions,”
said Josh, turning a blazing crimson countenance, illumined with a
pair of indignant candid eyes, upon the widow. “But I suppose, being
my mother, and a professing Christian, it’s your privilege to think
the worst o’ your own flesh and blood, no less than other folks. And
so far as I can remember, you always have, I’ll say that for you! And
though such usage goes far to the making of a decent young fellow into
a villain and a blackguard as well, I am neither of these things, I
declare before my Maker!” He added, with a clinching vigor that drove
home belief in him: “And this young wife o’ mine is as clean of sin, if
not as innocent--before Him I say it again!--as when she came into this
charitable-thinking world a naked baby!”
The strangling sensation behind the leather stock had lessened, the
ripe-tomato hue that had swamped Joshua Horrotian’s open, florid
countenance had faded to a more normal tinting. The flaming sunset
of the cold, clear evening showed up his stately height and vigorous
handsome proportions to rare advantage. He was only a private trooper
in Her Majesty’s Hundredth Regiment of Lancers, but in the eyes of
the stern mother, whose love of him was intense in proportion to
her rigorous concealment of it, no less than in those of his shy,
worshiping wife, he seemed a king among men. But while the wife
rejoiced in his beauty, his mother loathed it as a snare. She had no
words in which to hid the soldier take not the Holy Name in vain. She
turned her hollow eyes away from him, lest she should offend the grim
Moloch she worshiped by excess of pride in this perishable shape of
clay, formed from her own body. And the resonant manly voice went on:
“Here’s the extent o’ my defaulter’s sheet where you’re concerned. I’ve
married your milkmaid wi’out asking leave of you or anybody. Why? I’ll
save you the trouble of asking the question I see on the end o’ your
tongue. Because I love her and she me! Come here-along, my Pretty!”
He held out, with his dead father’s well-remembered gesture, the strong
arm in the blue-cloth sleeve, and the masterful look of affection
and the becoming air of pride he did this with, the widow of George
Horrotian well knew. An insufferable pang pierced her when Nelly, with
a little, eager cry, ran into the welcoming circle of the embrace. It
closed upon the rounded waist as if it never meant to let go. And a
spasm of rageful, despairing jealousy clutched Sarah as she saw; and
her heart fluttered and clawed and pecked in her lean bosom like a
starling burrowing in a crumbling wall. She closed her haggard eyes to
shut out the sight of the hateful creature who had robbed her....
And yet, although she did not realize it, to the rigid woman who had
yearned for a maid-child and been denied one, this creamy, rose-tinted,
hazel-eyed orphan of a ruined farmer and his fagged-out young wife, was
dear. Nelly had come into grim Sarah’s life too late to bring about a
softening change in it, and garland it with flowers. Indeed, she shrank
with loathing from the widow’s bony touch, and shivered with secret
hatred at the sound of the railing voice that had driven her Josh from
home before she knew him.... But such affection as Mrs. Horrotian had
to spare from the son whom in her own characteristic and uncomfortable
manner she idolized, was bestowed upon the girl who was now his wife.
Unimaginative as the woman was, her bitter love for both of them had
brought its cruel gift of clairvoyance. The premonition of a growing
tenderness between the two had sat by her sleepless pillow many a night
past. The secret conviction that it was not to see his mother, but
this bright-eyed, silken-haired interloper, had made, for months past,
a whispering-gallery of her poor tormented heart. She had been driven
by the nagging dread, against her better nature, to favor Jason’s piggy
wooing by tacit assent rather than by words....
And now--the thing she feared had come upon her. She was never, never
to be beloved by her son as her great love deserved! and the girl she
had taken in and protected had proved herself a traitress. For her
she had no curse; but was not Scripture fruitful in denunciation of
children who disavowed a parent’s right? And yet “_a man shall quit
his father and mother and cleave to his wife_.” When she, the maid,
Sarah Doddridge, daughter of a well-to-do yeoman-farmer of the county,
had eloped with her penniless young lover, the couple had salved their
smarting consciences with this text. Now, behold punishment meted
out.... As she had served her mother, this son of her womb had served
his.
* * * * *
Inexorable, awful justice of that grim idol her own imagination had
made, set up on high, worshiped, and misnamed God! She weakened at
the blow her memory dealt her. A harsh sound that was barely human
came from her dry throat. She took hold of it as savagely as though it
had been an enemy’s, and rocked upon her flat, slippered feet as she
wrestled with herself. Her son and her son’s wife eyed her anxiously.
They saw her moved in that strange inarticulate way, and a faint little
hope awoke in both their hearts, and babbled that she might even melt
and bless them--as parents, at first relentless, usually ended by doing
in story-books and theater-plays.
But it was not to be. The bilious eye of the piggy man was upon the
widow. And Jason, with extra garnishing of words, repeated that he was
ready to go at Michaelmas. Such was his spirit, he added, that he’d be
dalled if he served under a soger-master, on The Upper Clays or any
other farm!
“Swear not!” trumpeted Sarah, turning her long chalk-white face and
resentfully-flaming black eyes upon the factotum. She plucked herself
from a brief descriptive verbal chart of the particular place in the
Lake of Fire specially reserved for profane persons, to add:
“And as long as I am mistress at The Clays there can be no other voice
in authority. While I choose, I rule!”
“Your soger son there says different,” proclaimed the piggy one. “A’s
to be master heer, what time you buys ’n out o’ th’ Army, and then
there’s noan on earth her’ll hang her pretty yead for....” He jerked
a grimy stump of a thumb contemptuously towards Nelly. “Least of all
mother-i’-laa, Widder Horrotian!”
“Mother!” broke out the soldier, controlling by a violent effort the
urgent impulse to punch the speaker’s matted head, “will you let this
mangy dog make bad blood between us? Something of what he was repeating
I did say to my wife. But I’ll take my solemn oath, without a word
disrespectful to you! You promised to buy me out of the Army, and let
me manage the farm for you, and in the course of Nature--and may it be
long a-coming!--a day ’ull dawn when I am master of The Clays. Then,
as I hope my mother never has had or will have reason to be ashamed of
me, so never may my wife. The words were harmless, twist ’em as the
eavesdropper will. Upon my soul they were!”
Sarah swallowed something that might have been an iron choke-pear of
the Middle Ages. She looked in her son’s hot blue eyes, and said with
stern composure:
“Pledge not your soul to its undoing, though I dread it be lost
a’ready. My father left this farm to me, to use at my discretion. ’Tis
for me to decide when my son be fit to rule. Jason Digweed here were
one of th’ witnesses to your grandfather’s Will. He made it his own
self, without borrowing words from any man, an’ ’twas read out here,
in th’ best parlor, by Lawyer Haycock, after the Funeral. Digweed
remembers the wording, I’ll warrant. Speak out, Digweed. Prove to this
undutiful and rebellious son that his mother does not lie!”
Thus adjured, Jason cleared his throat with a sound like the scraping
of roads, and recited with relish:
“‘And I Leaves this ’eer Varm wi’ all of the ’Foresaid Messuages and
Lands hadjoining and Distant To Sarah Ann Horrotian my Deer-Beloved
Daughter Trusting to her Usings and Employings and Disposings of the
Same For the Bennyfit of Her Lawful Son Joshua Who shall succeed to the
Use and Enjoyment of the Property when in the Judgment of my aforesaid
Daughter Sarah Ann Horrotian He shall Hev’ Attaindered to Years of
Discretion.’”
“You hear?” said Sarah.
“Ay, I hear,” her son returned with bitterness. His chest heaved; his
bright blue eyes burned reproachfully upon the haggard indomitable
little woman in meager wincey brown.
“And I see, too,” he added, with a bleak smile that showed the sour
woman’s portion in him, “as my mother is like to go back on her promise
of buying me out of the Army, and setting me to manage the farm.”
“If so be as the Almighty can recall His word because rebellious
creatures to whom His promise was given have backslidden and become
perverted,” proclaimed Sarah, “His servant may do the same!”
“You pious folks have always th’ Bible to back ye,” said Josh bitterly,
“when you’d wrong your neighbors--or betray your sons!”
“I betray no creature born. After such a down-bringing, paltry,
miserable marriage as you ha’ made, do ye suppose I can answer to my
departed father for your discretion? Back wi’ ye along to Barracks,
and bide there! Discipline be the only rod for a stubborn nature such
as yours. ‘_Behold, in My love will I chasten you and will not refrain
from scourging._’” She added, upon the heels of the text: “Nor shall a
penny o’ my money go to buy you out o’ th’ Army. Selah!”
“You ... won’t ... buy me ... out?”
Sarah answered, in one short bark:
“No!”
He clenched his great fist and shouted:
“Who is the blackguard has egged ye on to this? Not--Jowell?”
Her stern conscience forbade her to deny the counsels of the
Contractor. Yet, as a pious body of her type will, she evaded the
answer direct:
“Mr. Jowell no more than yourself, that be gritting your teeth and
clinching your fist at the mother that bore and suckled you.”
Involuntarily Josh’s eye went to the white-spouted brown earthenware
teapot, that, as far back as he could remember, had sat in the middle
of the second shelf of the oak-dresser when not in active use. The
ghost of a twinkle flickered in his blue eye, the hovering shadow of a
grin was on his solid countenance. He remembered the First Exodus and
its cause. His mother may have read his thought. She said in clanging
tones, as intolerable to her son’s hearing as though an iron tray were
being beaten with a poker close to his ear:
“Was it my doing that you casted in your lot with the shedders of
blood? No, but your own upping pride, and wicked stubbornness. Back wi’
ye to Barracks, and bide there! I ha’ got no more to say!”
The fleshy, red-whiskered face that aged and bleached under her
indomitable regard sent strange shudders through her, in its likeness
to the pinched, gray waxen mask she had kissed upon the stiff-frilled
pillow of her husband’s death-bed. From the mouth that had straightened
into a pale line under the flaming mustache came words, uttered in the
very tones of the dying:
“And my wife?”
The broad hand shook that spread itself protectingly over the little
brown head that shed its wealth of dark silken ringlets upon Josh’s
stalwart chest. A voice came from their ambush; no frightened whimper,
but a clear and resolute utterance:
“Her goes wi’ her own dear husband, as a wife ought!”
He groaned, forgetful of the triumphing Digweed, and the hard black
eyes of his listening mother....
“My girl, my girl! you don’t know what you be talking about, or what
kind o’ women you would have to live alongside.”
Nelly lifted her cheek from the blue coat it nestled to, and met his
look. Perhaps, if you had seen the quivering of the short upper-lip
with the golden dust of freckles on it, and the brave way in which the
hazel eyes laughed through a veil of tears, and the twisting of the
pink fingers shyly interlacing upon her apron-band, you would have
loved her nearly as much as Josh did.
“They would be soldiers’ wives, like I be myself, dear heart.”
“But what soldiers’ wives, my girl! Trollops and jades many o’ them,
married in a moment of drunkenness. Honest women the rest; decent
enough, but rough as hemp. And using language, the best o’ them, such
as ’ud scald these little ears to hear!...”
A sob broke from him with the bitter cry:
“Mother, you’ll never deny my wife a shelter in the house where my dead
father lived with you in love?”
Said Sarah, upright as a ramrod and grim as a steam-hammer:
“I ha’ not gone to say as far.”
With his manhood melting in him to the point of tears as he gave back
the faithful look of the dark eyes that wooed his, he stammered:
“God bless you for that!”
“But,” said Sarah, grimmer than ever, for the pink fingers had tapped
his lips, and he had pecked a passing kiss on them, “as she has earned
her dole of food and her penny of wages with service here, so she shall
continue to do. I keep no idlers, nor shall!”
“Nor were asked to, I reckon!”
From the safe rampart of the blue cloth hug Nelly launched with the
words a bright eye-dart of defiance. Sarah thundered in reply:
“Young woman, check your tongue!” She added, with an afterthought of
precaution: “And show me your marriage-lines.”
“My lines?...”
The trooper said, in answer to the puzzled knitting of the girl’s soft
eyebrows:
“The paper the parson as married us ’scribed out and gave ye,
Pretty.... The certificate of our marriage ’twas. The wife always
keeps that!” He added, dipping his tongue in salt pickle saved over
from a brief experience of the lower troop-deck: “’Tis our cable and
sheet-anchor both in the stiff gale we’re weathering. Out with it, my
girl!”
He looked to see her take it from the darling fastness of her bosom.
A hand fluttered there, then dropped. The irises of the hazel eyes
usurped the golden-brown-gray until they seemed all black.... A
frightened voice said:
“Why ... I mind you taking o’ that paper to keep for me....”
“Nonsense!” he broke out, so roughly that Nelly winced, and faltered:
“But indeed and ’deed ’tis true!... Pray do, do remember! Think how I
had no pocket to my gown, having made ’n on the sly in such a hurry as
never, up to th’ garret where I sleep, working by the light of saved-up
dip-ends hours after your mother had took th’ flat candle-stick
away....”
Sarah’s gloomy front contracted ominously. Were not those dip-ends
filched? Nelly went on, appealing to her moody, frowning lord:
“I were for putting the paper in my bosom.... ’Twas you said ‘Nay’ to
that! So you took un and put ’n in th’ pocket o’ your pants.”
“That I never!... Stop, though!...”
His mouth primmed itself into a whistle of dismay, so ludicrous
that Nelly tittered through her tears. He felt in the single pocket
permitted by Government, patted himself all over the blue covering
of his big chest and solid ribs in the hope of drawing forth a paper
crackle, finally bellowed with the full strength of his vast lungs:
“Right, by the Lord Harry! So I did; there’s no denying!”
His eyes grew circular and bulging, his healthy, florid, intelligent
countenance was stricken into the very idiocy of consternation, his
bushy flaming whiskers seemed to droop, grow limp, and fade in color as
he stuttered:
“And never thought about it after or since!... And the chap belonging
to the Rifle Corps--that lent me the plain-clothes suit--if you can
tack on ‘plain’ to a chessboard check in half-a-dozen colors--it being
as many sizes too big for him! offered me the togs as a bargain, him
being ordered out to Bermuda on Foreign Service.... And I hadn’t the
money--and he sold the chessboards to a Jew.... Whew! My eye and Betty
Martin!... Who’s got those pants on now?”
“Then,” said his mother, in tones that cut like broken ice-edges,
“you that are a married couple have no lines to show me?” She paused
and delivered sentence, woman-like wreaking vengeance first upon the
daughter of Eve....
“You poor, to-yielding wench, this man has deceived and ruined ’e! A
woman without her marriage-lines be no wife at all!”