Part 16

Meanwhile Josh Horrotian pursued his march, but without the cheerful whistling accompaniment, decapitating the more aggressive weeds and thistles growing by the roadside with such tremendous slashes of the stout riding-whip as to leave no doubt that he executed in imagination condign punishment upon certain individuals unnamed. Indeed, so far did his annoyance carry him, that, disturbed beyond measure by the incessant chattering of the frosty wind amidst the crisp dry leaves of an elm-hedge he was passing, he bade the tameless element hold its noise, in what was for him a surly tone.

But, coming to a hog-backed stile, breaking the hedge and leading, by a narrow right-of-way over some clayey wheatlands, where the first faint green blush of the young corn lay in the more sheltered hollows, together with a powdering of fine unmelted snow, his bent brows relaxed, and the shadow that darkened his handsome sunbrowned face vanished. He whistled again as he threw a long blue leg, with a white stripe down the side of the tight trouser strapped down over the spurred Wellington boot, across the iron-bound log. For on the high bleak ridge of the sixty-acre upland, stood his mother’s farm, facing away from him to the west; where the fall of the clay-lands upon the other side sloped to the deep and muddy Drowse, spanned by an ancient stone bridge that had rude carvings of tilting knights in plate-armor, upon some of the coping-stones of its parapet. The bridge crossed, a mile of country road dotted with farmhouses and cottages led to the small and sleepy borough-town of Market Drowsing, in the shadow of whose square Anglo-Norman church-tower many tall Horrotians had moldered into dust....

The sight of the low, irregular brown-and-red-tiled roof of the old home building, with its paled-in patch of garden at the southern gable-end, its great thatched barn sheltering it on the north side, and its rows of beehive-shaped ricks, each topped with a neatly plaited ball of grass, tarred to resist weather and impaled upon a wooden spike, warmed the man’s heart, not for the reason that a somewhat cheerless boyhood had been passed beneath those mossy-green, lichen-yellowed, old red tiles, but because they sheltered Nelly.

“I wonder if she sees me?” he questioned with himself, as the path took a curve and the great church-shaped barn reared up its gray and ancient bulk between him and the homestead. “The little dairy-window at the house-back--this being about the time o’ day she’s drawing off the skimmings for the pigs--ought, if so be as she’s on the look-out, to have given her a view”--his smile broadened--“of the approaching enemy.”

Of course it had, long happy minutes back.... Even as the image of her rose smiling in his mind, she came running down the pathway straight into his arms, and with the joyful shock and the warm contact of her, vexations fled away, and he snatched her, not at all objecting, to his beating heart, and they took a long, sweet kiss--rather an experienced kiss, if one may say it, and more suggestive of the full-orbed sweetness of the honeymoon than of the wooing-time that goes before.

“Now, do ’e give over, Josh!” she said at last, and emerged all rosy with love and happiness from his strong embrace, and straightened her pink quilted sunbonnet, pouting a little. “Bain’t you ashamed?”

“I’d like to see myself!” declared Josh stoutly, and had another kiss of her upon the strength of it, and then held her off at arm’s length for a long, satisfying look.

She was very pretty, this Nelly, orphan daughter of a small freehold farmer named John Pover, who had borrowed money upon a mortgage from the great Thompson Jowell, and had, unhappy wretch, once the suckers of that greedy octopus were fairly fastened on him, been drained dry by means of extortionate interest, until he cut his throat--an absurd thing to do, seeing how little blood was left in him--leaving his freehold, farm, and stock to be gulped down, and his girl to take service as dairymaid with that grim Samaritaness, Sarah Horrotian.

She had sweet, soft, shy, dark eyes, had Nelly, and a sweet round face, the tops of its rosy cheeks dusted with golden freckles. There were some more on her little nose, a feature of no known order of facial architecture, but yet distracting to male wits, taken in conjunction with the rest; and a powdering of yet more freckles was on her darling upper lip, and the underlip pouted, as though it were jealous at having been overlooked. Her dark hair had a gleam of yellow gold on the edges of the curls that had escaped the control of the sunbonnet that now hung back upon her shoulders; and she had the round neck and plump breast of a dove, or of a lovely young woman, full of the vigor of fresh life and the glow of young hope, and the joy and the promise and the palpitating, passionate fulfillment of Love, without a bitter drop in the cup--until you came to Sarah Horrotian.

Josh came to Sarah, when the first edge had been taken off his appetite for kisses. He asked, unconsciously dropping back into his broad native accent, as he stood under the lee-side of the big barn, with his strong arm round Nelly’s yielding waist, and her curls scattered on the broad breast covered by the tight blue jacket:

“Well, and how be mother?”

“I reckon much about the same. Throwing Scripture at a body,” said Nelly, with a grimace that only produced a dimple, “whenever her be wopsy.”

“And that’s all round the clock,” said Sarah Horrotian’s son decidedly. He added: “Hard texts break us bones, Pretty. I learned that when I was a lad. And how’s old Blueberry? Proper? That’s right. He takes me back to-morrow--starting early so as not to overdo him, good beast!”

“I believe you love him better than poor Nelly,” she said, with tears crowding on her long dark lashes at the thought of losing her love so soon.

“I’ll show poor Nelly whether I love her or not.” He pretended to bite a pink finger of the soft hand he cherished in his own. “Let’s just forget to-morrow till it’s here.” His tongue broadened insensibly into the Sloughshire dialect as he went on: “And how be my old dog Roger? And Jason Digweed? Does he still take off his boots to clean pigsty, and then put ’em on again over all the muck? And wear no clothes at all to-house, and answer a knock at door naked as my hand; and scare expecting females into the straw, weeks before their time might be looked for? O’ course he do! It wouldn’t be Jason else. There’s nobody can tell me anything new about _him_!”

“Med-be I might!”

He took her by the chin, and turned the coquettish face to him, and looked into the dancing eyes with a twinkle in his own.

“Now then, what is it? Speak up, you teasing witch!”

Nelly dimpled and blushed, and finally burst out laughing, smothering her mirth against Josh’s blue sleeve in a very endearing way.

“Hurry up, or I shall guess!” Josh’s florid face broadened in a smile, and his blue eyes twinkled knowingly. “I doubt but I do guess, though, all the same. Still, tell!”

She shunned his eyes with provoking coyness.

“I don’t half like to say it out loud!”

“Whisper, then,” he said gayly, “and give a man a chance to kiss a pretty neck!”

“Behave yourself! But stoop down. You be so tall.”

He stooped, and she whispered, and the whisper sent him off into a guffaw of laughter.

“Ha, ha, ha! Well, to-be-sure!” He slapped his thigh and roared himself red in the face, and she laughed with him, though in demurer fashion. “Whew! that beats all! So Jason be in love, after all his cursing o’ females, and wishing as the Almighty had seen fit to people the world without the help of petticoats. But who’s the maid, if it be a maid, and what’s her mind to him, seemingly? Will she swallow the mortal down, with a hold on her nose? or turn it up, and bid him get to windward with that mug of his, as a New Zealand idol might be jealous of? Come, give her a name! or I’ll say you grudge her her good fortune!”

“You gave her your own, not so long back!”

“You don’t mean yourself?”

Convinced by Nelly’s blushes as by her laughter that she did mean herself; a purple hue swamped the trooper’s florid countenance and a weakness took him in the knees. He rocked awhile, holding his blue-cloth-covered ribs, and then his laughter broke away with him, and wakened echoes that the barrack-room knew, but that the blackened, cobwebbed rafters of the ancient barn had not echoed to since a roaring bachelor squire of the soldier’s name had held Harvest Home there in the dead old days when the Second George was King.

Nelly checked him when he reached the climax of gasping speechlessly and mopping his overflowing eyes. He crowed out:

“Well, that bangs the best! And what did you do when he made up to ’e? Comb his hair wi’ a muck-fork or curtsey and thank him kindly for his damned presumption?”

“Use proper talk, else I’ll tell ’e nowt,” she threatened.

“I will, I vow! From now I’m the best boy in the Sunday-school,--mild as a dish o’ milk, and as mealy-mouthed as Old Pooker--not that he’s a bad sort, as the white-chokered corps go!”

“See you keep your word! Well then.... Says my customer to I....”

“Meaning Jason?...”

“Meaning Jason. Says he, smirking all over his face, as how I be a main pretty maid; and he have wrestled in prayer upon the matter, and med-be if I looked out wi’ my bright eyes sharp enough, I should see myself standin’ up before the Minister to Market Drowsing Baptist Chapel, being preached into one flesh wi’ he--he--he!”

Josh drew a deep breath, inflating his broad chest to the utmost of its lung-capacity and bellowed:

“And this is the man as down-cries all women. Why, he got round mother that way, cussing of the female sex for traps and snares and Babylonish harlots, though why that kind o’ talk should tickle her, hang me if I know! her being a woman herself, by way of!... But how did you meet the bold wooer?...”

“Tossed up my chin like so”--she furnished a distracting example--“and telled ’n as no living minister should mold me into one flesh wi’ any mortal man!”

“Having been regularly tied up in the matrimony-knot by a parson--my blessings on his tallow face!” said Josh, with a triumphant hug, “that snowy day in January when you met me at the little iron church down the Stoke Road near Dullingstoke Junction, wi’ the license buttoned in the pocket of my borrowed suit o’ plain clothes, and the ring jammed on my little finger so precious tight--for fear of losing it!--that it took you and me and the beadle to get it off again!”

Upon the strength of these reminiscences he did some more hugging. She freed herself from the enclosing girdle of warm, muscular flesh and hot blood, pouting:

“Behave, and let a body finish! To that about the minister, and me never marrying, Jason he tells I as all young maids be ’ockerd at axing. ‘But a’ll gi’ thee another chance,’ says he. ‘’Oolt thee or ’ootent thee? Cry ‘beans’ when I cry ‘peas,’ and it’s a bargain!’ Wi’ that, he offers to kiss me!”

“The--frowsy son of a gun! Don’t say you ever----”

“Likely!... I fetched ’n a smack in the face....”

“Bravo!”

“Following up with the promise that I’d rather die than wed ’n, and all the same so if he were hung wi’ gold and di’monds....”

“There’s my girl! What more?”

“Oh, Jason, he were cruel casted down. Quite desperate-like, and threatened me he’d ’list for a soger.... ‘_Why, they would wash ’e!_’ I tells ’n; and he bundled away in a girt hurry, and haven’t come athirt I since.... But your mother must ha’ heard, her looks be so mortal glum.”

“Never mind her looks! Tell her I’ve got a better husband for her pretty dairymaid than her pigman comes to, dang his dratted impudence!”

She rallied him in rude country fashion, its homeliness redeemed by the beauty of the speaking mouth and the dancing hazel eyes.

“You be jealous!”

“Jealous, am I?” He rapped out the fashionable oath, caught from his officers: “Egad! you rogue, I’ll punish you for that!”

She seemed to like the punishment rather than not. And as she gasped, crimson under his kisses, there was a rustling inside the barn, near the great doors of which the lovers stood. One of these swung open, affording to the view of those without, had their absorbed faces but been turned that way, a segment of the vast churchlike interior, with its noble raftered roof upheld by kingposts at the gable-ends, and only lighted by the gleams of cold wintry sunshine that found entrance by the partly open door, and by the cracks between the ancient side-boards, and here and there where birds or rats had tunneled holes in the ancient brown thatch. Mounds of recently-threshed wheat occupied the granary at the higher end; with bales of sacks, cord-tied, destined to receive the hard, sound, golden grain. The lower threshing-floor was ankle-deep with the chaff of beans, and stout bags of these, newly tied, stood in rows against the opposite wall, while a great mound of the straw rose in the background. The wooden thail that had been used in the bean-threshing lay upon the floor. The man who had wielded it had yielded to the desire for a snooze, a weakness of Jason Digweed’s when the beer was working in his muddy brain....

When the lovers had jested about him and his unlucky wooing, there had been a stirring in the heart of the mound of the bean-straw, and a dirty finger shod with a black nail had worked a spying-hole for an unwashed face, embedded in a matted growth of dirty hair, to rest in. Thus, unobserved, Mrs. Sarah Horrotian’s pigman, fogger, cow-keeper, and general factotum, favored by the widow on account of his Dissenting principles and avowed and sturdy misogyny, could see what took place, and be entertained by the conversation.

It had fallen to fitful whispers. The man was urgent, and the damsel coy. The experience of the ambushed hater of the sex had to be drawn upon for the context of the broken sentences that reached the dingy ears under the dirty hair-thatch.

“Miss Impudence!” Josh called his sweetheart after some retort of hers.

“‘_Miss!_’” she breathed, so softly that even her lover barely heard her.

“Miss Nelly Pover to the world as yet, and in the hearing of folks to-home here. But Mrs. Joshua Horrotian in snug corners when there’s none to listen or pry. Eh, my beauty?” he said, hugging her.

“I don’t know how I durst ha’ married you!” she panted, “and me that afraid o’ your mother....”

“Let me but get bought out of the Army and settled in my proper place as master of this farm,” said Josh in a loud, ringing voice of cheerful hope, “and there’s no one on earth you need hang your pretty head for, or ever shall, my darling!”

She turned to him then with all her coyness gone, and put both arms about his neck, and so clung to him, kissing the cloth of his jacket, the rough embroidery of his stiff collar, the hard, manly neck gripped by the leather stock, until the strong man quivered and grew pale, and leaned against the stout tarred timbers of the barn behind him, holding her to his breast. Thus he whispered with his lips at the rosy island of ear that showed among her curls, and his eyes seeking the desired haven revealed by the high partly-opened door. But she shook her head, with her face still hidden against him, and he was fain to wait and curb his passion, lest he should scare this shy and tender thing. He said, and his voice was not quite steady:

“As my girl pleases, be it. I’m hers for life or death! You know that, don’t you, Nell?”

She pressed against the blue jacket, nibbling a bright brass button.

“Speak up and answer!”

No answer.

“Nelly!”

She vibrated at the low, persuasive call. You could see the waves of roseate color chasing each other from the edge of the print neckerchief upwards to the creamy nape of the soft dove’s neck, where the silky little curls clustered under the sunbonnet. And then she yielded to him all at once, and he led her in under the high lintel of the great barn-door, and the wedded lovers vanished in the kindly, fragrant hay-scented gloom of the upper threshing-floor, where were the great golden mounds of tenfold wheat that Zeus and Demeter might have couched on.

XXIII

Meanwhile Sarah Horrotian, a small, determined, flat-bosomed woman of curiously heavy footsteps and rigorously determined aspect, attired in a narrow gown of rasping wincey and a blue-checked apron with a wedge-shaped bib, made plaint, groaning over the hideous wickedness of this world as she pounded with the roller at the dough upon the pastry-board. It helps the picture to add that the widow’s pastry was of a consistence so tough and lasting that no human being, save one, partaking thereof, had ever been known to venture on a second helping, the exception being Digweed, the pigman.

When Sarah’s only child, Joshua, then a white-skinned, red-curled, burly youngster of eighteen, already standing nearly six feet high in his deceased father’s solid mahogany-topped boots and old-fashioned cords, and the baggy velveteen coat with the huge horn buttons, even when the hard, shiny, low-crowned hat hung on its peg against the passage wall--when Josh took the Queen’s Shilling, it may have been an undigested slice of the widow’s Spartan pie-crust, innocent of mollifying medium or shortening of any kind, that spurred him to the act, combined with Sarah’s railing.

For the Lili and the Lilith, that ceaselessly chide, with shrill, weird, human-seeming voices, amongst the ruins of dead and long-forgotten cities on Babylonian plains, were as piping bullfinches compared with Sarah Horrotian.

If she had ever met with any members of the sect, she would have shone as a Muggletonian. To denounce rather than to exhort was her religion. To proclaim sinners lost eternally, and luxuriate in the prospect of their frying, to call down judgments from Heaven upon those who had offended her, was the widow’s way.

News came to her from Jason Digweed, her unsavory Mercury and general intelligencer, that one Whichello, clerk and beadle to the Parish Church of Market Drowsing, whose incumbent claimed tithes from the widow, had suffered the loss of an eye, which had dropped out upon the Prayer-Book in the middle of the Litany, being a blinder all along--though Whichello had never had the ghost of a notion of it--and nearly scared Parson into fits.

“Then the Lord has not forgotten me!” said the grim little woman, folding her great bony hands upon her meager bosom. “He remembered that clutch of thirty addled Black Spanish eggs I bought of that whited sepulcher and set under our old Broody, and He has smitten, sparing to slay.”

“Now, mother!...” began Josh, wriggling on the low-backed settle; “you don’t really go for to say you believe a thing of the Lord like that there!”

“Silence!” said the widow, turning her long, sallow, high-nosed face, with the scanty loops of black hair upon the temples, upon her son, and freezing even his accustomed blood with the glare of her fierce black eyes. “If so be as the Almighty wills to avenge His chosen, who are you to say Him nay?”

She went out of the kitchen, shaking the crockery on the shelves with her ponderous gait, and visited her stores and sent from thence half-a-bag of potatoes and a leg of new-killed pork to the clerk’s wife. “For the Lord never meant the innocent to suffer with the guilty,” she knew. Later, when she subscribed half-a-crown towards the purchase of a glass eye for the bereaved Whichello, she forgot to quote her authority for the act.

Poor folk in want approached Sarah, expectant of verbal brimstone, not unhopeful of receiving more substantial aid. For the widow Horrotian, after severely-exhaustive inquiries, failing to run Deception to its earth, exuded silver in shilling drops, girding as she gave, when the well-to-do buttoned up their pockets and bestowed nothing but sympathetic words. Yet these were praised as kindly folk, when there were no blessings for Sarah. For even as her hand relieved, her tongue dropped vitriol on human hearts, and raised resentful blisters there.

One of these blisters, breaking upon a Sunday night at tea-time, led to the outlawing of Josh and his subsequent enlistment. A teapot was involved in the quarrel, which yet sprang from a milky source. For to the moral scourges with which Mrs. Horrotian lashed the quivering flesh of her only child, she never, never failed to add, as a crowning, overwhelming instance of the filial ingratitude of her son Josh, the reproach that she had nourished him at her maternal bosom--preferably choosing meal-times, and those rare occasions when guests gathered at her board, for these intimate reminiscences of the young man’s helpless infancy.

To look at the woman raised doubts as to the possibility of her ever having nourished anything except a grudge or a resentment. No deal board could be flatter than the surface she would passionately strike with her bony hand in testimony to the fact alleged, causing Josh to choke with embarrassment in his mug of home-brewed ale, and eliciting from the guest--always a partisan and crony of her own--grunts, if a male: or pensive, feminine sighs, or neutral clicks of the tongue against the palate.

“As if I could help it!” Josh suddenly burst out on the epoch-making occasion referred to.

* * * * *

The turning of the worm was so unexpected that the widow leaned back in her chair, and there ensued a silence only broken when the minister of the local Bethesda groaned. For the Reverend Mr. Pooker, with his wife and daughter, were frequently guests at Sarah’s board, the widow, nominally a member of the Established Church, having seceded to Dissent, liking her religion as she liked her tea, hot and strong, and without sugar.

“I think you spoke, young man?” said the Reverend Mr. Pooker, setting down the pot of rhubarb jam into which he had been diving, and staring solemnly at Josh. Mrs. Pooker faithfully reproduced the stare, and little Miss Pooker tried to do so, but only managed to look at the presumptuous youth with her little canary-colored head tilted on one side in an admiring manner. Not being sufficiently regenerate and elect to be insensible to the dreadful fascination of wickedness.

“I did speak!” asserted young Josh, boldly meeting the black eyes that flamed upon him out of the deep hollows under his mother’s high narrow brow. “I said, ‘As if I could help it!’ and I say so again.... Were there no teapots handy? A teapot wouldn’t ha’ pitched itself in a child’s face years after he’s earned the right, Lord knows! to call himself a man.”

“Scoffer!” thundered the great bass voice of the little flat-chested woman. “Mocker! As though I, Sarah Horrotian, would disobey the command that bids a woman suckle her children!”

“Well and nobly said, ma’am!” commented the Reverend Pooker, reaching for the seed-cake. “And let us hope that the respect and gratitood owed by a child so nerrished to a parent----”

“And such a parent!” interpolated Mrs. Pooker tenderly.

“Will not be forgotten,” said the Reverend Mr. Pooker through the intervening medium of seed-cake, “by this misgeided and onrewly Young Man!”

“Very well, then!” said Josh, driven beyond patience. “All right! But why be I to thank her for doing what the Lord commanded her to do? That’s what I want to know!”

Sarah Horrotian rose up at the tea-board end of the Pembroke table in the best parlor.

“Another speech like that, Joshua, and if you was ten times the son of my womb, you should go forth motherless from these doors. What! Shall the Name of the Lord be taken in vain at my table, and I not drive forth the blasphemer from my roof!”

“Dear sister in grace ...” began placid Mrs. Pooker, possibly foreseeing regrettable contingencies. But Sarah was fairly launched.