In August and September a marvelous comet flamed over the British
Isles. There were great strikes in the Cotton Districts of the North,
and haggard eyes of starving idlers, and hot and steaming faces of
begrimed and furious rioters were lifted to the wonder at great
open-air meetings; or from the crush that thronged the yards about the
burning mills, and kept the engines back.
Livid sufferers, writhing in the deadly grip of Cholera in foul
uncleanly tenements of provincial towns, or squalid garrets and reeking
cellars of common lodging-houses in great sooty London, would raise
themselves upon their beds of noisome rags--in some brief respite from
hideous spasms--to stare at that strange menace through the broken
skylight or the iron street-grating. But Mrs. Joshua Horrotian never
lifted her head from her work. For little Josh and the baby Sally were
both dead and buried, and their mother was stitching her fingers to the
bone to pay for the mourning and the tiny double funeral; and never
even glanced up, when Moggy Geogehagan--who in defiance of Barrack
Rules was hanging half out of the window--bade her come and look at the
quare ould kind of gazabo did be hangin’ up in the sky.
It was not the Blue Gripes--as the rank-and-file had learned to call
it, out at Buenos Ayres and on Service in East India--it was not the
Cholera that had left this mother’s arms empty and in her heart a vast
and dreadful blank. It was something you called with a shudder and
under your breath--“The Bad Throat”--an invisible, impalpable Something
that rose up in the night beside the crowded cots in the damp, foul,
insanitary, whitewashed sepulchers that were called Barracks--and
gripped little children oftenest, yet sometimes grown men and women--in
a strangling clutch so that--with awful suddenness--they died.
We know, at this date, the name of the unseen demon to be Diphtheria.
We exorcise it with trap-drains and Sanitary Precautions--we fight it
with gargles of chlorine and Jeyes’ Fluid, moppings out of mercurial
perchloride and--in the more serious cases--injections of the
antitoxin. But in spite of all that Science has done for us, we cannot
keep out the grim invisible intruder. And still it is the old story of
the strangling clutch and the swift death that follows, although we
have grown so wise....
This new Barracks--it was rumored, when the Route came for the
Hundredth Lancers to remove to another Cavalry Depot--had had a bad
name for ever so long. “Children did not thrive,” it was said--meaning
that they died like poisoned flies there. So, before the remove, Joshua
Horrotian and his wife had concocted, indited, and dispatched a letter
to the widowed Sarah, his mother, asking her to give the babies shelter
and house-room at The Upper Clays, at least until wholesome lodgings
could be found.
When the answer came, it was a bald, bare, bleak refusal. You read
the stiffness of the widow’s back in it, and the cramped clutch of the
hard, bony fingers on the seldom-used pen. You saw the gaunt black eyes
glooming in their hollow caves under Sarah’s tall, narrow forehead
between the scanty loops of black hair that was growing gray.
What you never would have guessed was that Sarah’s mouth twisted with
anguish as she penned the sentences of denial; and that her hard eyes
were dim with tears. For the woman’s bowels yearned over her unseen
grandchildren. She would have been kind--pardoning even as the parent
of the Prodigal in Scripture. But the Prodigal should first have come
and laid his hands between her hands, and said, “Mother, I have sinned!”
So the invisible spider-thing that spins a yellow web in the children’s
throats, so that they are suffocated slowly under the eyes that love
them, killed both the little ones in a few hours. Tracheotomy--resorted
to by a few daring Continental operators at this date--the Regimental
Surgeon had never heard of. So it was as I have told.
The girl was gone, with a gasp or so and a brief convulsion. The boy
fought manfully for continued life. He thought he had a bone in his
throat, and kept begging his mammy and his daddy to take it away
because he was choking. When they die--believing that you could have
helped it if you had only chosen--quite a special brand of vintage goes
to the brimming of your Cup of Despair.
And the woman had loved with such excess of maternal passion these
children begotten by the man her husband, that when they went they
seemed to take with them his share of love as well as their own.
She had “gone numb” as Mrs. Geogehagan expressed it. The power to
think, or feel, or see anything beyond the open grave with those two
little white deal boxes at the bottom of it, was denied.... She grew
thin, and dowdy, and slovenly; and her husband moodier and more sullen
and lowering of aspect, as day succeeded day. No promotion had come to
the trooper since his clandestine marriage with Sarah’s milkmaid--the
single good-conduct badge now vanished from his sleeve of coarse blue
cloth. For he drank now, in bouts, and by fits and starts. Drunkenness,
the soldier’s common vice, would not have prejudiced him in the eyes
of his commanding officers, in those days, when the nightly feat of
topping up the regulation three bottles of Mess Port with copious
libations of whisky-toddy, and staggering back in jovial curves to
quarters, was accomplished by many a brave and honorable son of Mars.
But in his cups Joshua was betrayed by his countenance and his unrulier
tongue.
According to Mrs. Geogehagan, the Oracle of Troop Room No. 4, it was
the big black scowl Horrotian did be having on the face av him, no less
than the unsaysonable spaches he’d let fly when he was carryin’ a dhrop
too much--that prejudiced the non-commissioned officers, and caused so
many sable entries to be made on the Troop Defaulter’s Sheet, to bear
fruit in Extra Fatigue Duty, C.B., and Punishment Drill.
A hint from Moggy Geogehagan was a slog from a cabbage-stump. Roused
from her stupor of bereavement by such an application, Mrs. Joshua
ventured--during the course of a Sunday walk with her husband--to
repeat this utterance to him.
“My face!” the trooper echoed bitterly. “You found no fault with it
when ye married me five years ago. What has happened to it since?
The bit o’ glass in the lid o’ your workbox shows it much the same,
I reckon.... And if ’tis sullen and rebellious as you say--and makes
me enemies among the officers and men--who stamped that look upon it?
Med-be you’ll tell me you don’t know! Ay! but I know! I have the name
on my tongue’s end this minute. And speak it I would, if I was to be
shot the next! ’Tis Jowell!--Thompson Jowell, and may the Almighty damn
him for it!--that can take his pleasure in grinding, and hazing, and
trampling of me down!”
“Oh, hush!” cried Nelly in terror, and below them the lips of the
sea said “Hus’s’sh!” against the shingle--for the Garrison town
that boasted the insanitary Cavalry Barracks being situated on the
Chalkshire South Coast, their Sunday stroll had led them to the low
white cliffs that overhung the beach. There were fortifications
here, and the grassy slope they sat on was fragrant with wild thyme,
and short-stalked June clover, and gay with yellow dandelions and
coltsfoot, and the air breathed salt from the heaving bosom of the sea.
The sky was clear fresh blue, with floating scarfs of gossamer mist
upon it. Sheep grazed near, and, with pyramidal heaps of whitewashed
forty-pound shot between them--three great iron cannon of the Coast
Defense--imposing enough outside, but rusty-throated as that old
clamorous Fear of Invasion by the Bonaparte on the other side of the
Channel--looked between the rounded breasts of their weather-worn
embrasures--placidly out to sea.
“Believe it or not, as you like,” the trooper went on with increasing
heat and indignation, “since I married ye I have kept a guard upon my
hasty temper--and often bitten my tongue nigh through, rather than
speak words that might ha’ been hurtful to us both. I ha’ lived decent,
and cleanly, and orderly, and sober----” He flushed a dark red and
boggled at the last word, but the faded prettiness of Nelly’s face was
turned from him seawards, looking wistfully beyond the white horses
that rose and fell upon the horizon, towards the grayish haze that
people said concealed the Coast of France.
“Till lately,” the trooper amended, “neither officer nor
non-commissioned officer o’ mine has had just cause to complain o’ me.
But I am breaking under what I have to bear, an’ maddening under it
fast. I am hounded, and drove and put upon--I say it afore the Face of
my Maker, as no Christian man should be!”
His pent-up wrath made him choke and stammer. He unhooked his stiff
collar with a shaking hand, and loosened his stock, and threw it on the
grass. His wife gave him her handkerchief, and he mopped his streaming
forehead with it, and went on talking, gesticulating with the great
brown fist in which he held it--and sometimes pounding the fist upon
the sod.
“Do ye ask me how I know ’tis Jowell that’s my enemy--that’s undermined
my credit and blackened my good name--and lighted this furnace of
hate in me that burns without quenching day and night? Can I doubt it
when I never take my turn to draw troop-rations without being asked
by that black dog Mullett,” (a Squadron Quartermaster Sergeant who
was particularly responsible for many of those sable entries in the
Troop Defaulters’ Book) “to look and make sure the Government hasn’t
cheated me in the quality o’ the Commissariat flour and meat, and so
on?--when I can’t feed my horse without being asked whether I’ve found
any empty jam-tins, old hats, or dead kittens trussed up in the Forage
Contractor’s hay?”
One may here endorse the trooper’s statement, Mullett being really
one of Thompson Jowell’s merry men. Mullett soared to be Regimental
Quartermaster-Sergeant presently, and would have retired, and opened
a snug public-house immediately after the War of the Crimea, but that
another kind of opening presented itself, and he was tumbled in, in
company with honester men, and covered up; to wait the Great Reveille.
“Lord knows,” pursued the angry speaker, “as how I wish my silly tongue
had been cut out, before I taunted a man powerful enough to ruin
me--with what my betters are too sensible even to hint at--the fact
that for the Nation’s honest money, Mr. Jowell, and others like him,
sell bad, poor, rotten goods! But the vengeance he’ve took--and still
takes--is mean, and low, and cowardly!” said the trooper, emphasizing
each adjective with a tremendous blow of the huge brown fist upon the
mild green face of Mother Earth. “And if some day I be drove to tie
a loop of whipcord to the trigger o’ my carbine an’ hitch my toe in
it--Jowell will be the man as blew my brains out--though the Military
Commission of Inquiry and the Jury of the Coroner’s Inquest may call it
Suicide!”
“Oh! my dear husband--no!”
Nelly shut her eyes, and shuddered at the ghastly picture the rough
words conjured up before her. Her numb heart beat a little quicker at
the discovery that she still had something dear to lose that Death
might rob her of.
“Send I don’t meet that man,” pursued the trooper, with a dark frown
and a gesture of his strong right arm that augured ill for Jowell,
“when my heart is bursting with the wrongs he’s heaped on me, and
I’ve a weapon in my hand! The dog he’ve given a bad name to might
swing for him yet, med-be! Meantime, supposing it be true as my mother
believes--that ’tis possible to call down Judgment on the wicked merely
by wishing it with all one’s heart and soul--and since through him
I’ve lost my own two children, I’ll wish--for that bad man has got an
only son and sets his eyes by him--may the sins of Thompson Jowell be
visited on him by means of that same son! Send I may live to see young
Jowell in rags; an’ with an old boot on one foot and an old shoe on
t’other, asking--and asking in vain--for a handshake from an honest
man! As for his father, may the Hand That’s Above us scourge him with
rods of shame and retribution! May he drink of the cup that I ha’ drunk
of, and drink it deep and long! So be it. Amen! Come, let’s be stepping
back-along to Barracks.”
They never called it Home.