Part 18

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!”

XXVI

Do you who read cry “Bosh!” at the preposterous notion?... Not so these unlettered, homespun Early Victorians, who never dreamed of its being possible, by the payment of a few silver pieces, to obtain a copy of the original entry in the Marriage Register pertaining to the sacred edifice where the matrimonial knot had been tied. Go, search through the literature of the period. You will find shelves of musty novels, piles of foxy old dramas reeking with this very situation. The cry:

“_Where are my lines?... Lost--lost!..._” meets invariably with the pertinent, potent answer, making Edwin beat his brow in despair, sending Angelina into syncope or convulsions: “_Then also lost, unhappy one, art thou!_”

At the moment when the interview above recorded was taking place, my Aunt Julietta, in the family mansion on the outskirts of Dullingstoke, was reading in the February issue of _The Ladies’ Mentor_ a sweet, sad, sentimental tale hinging on a similar loss. Only Edwin was a passionate, penniless young nobleman, reduced to win his bread by imparting to the daughters of the nobility and gentry of Great Britain lessons on the guitar; and Adelina was the third daughter of the Marquess of K----. And the marriage-lines, cherished in Adelina’s _corsage_ since the happy morn that united her for ever with the _being she adored_, had been picked up on the carpet of her young lady’s dressing-room by Babette, the French lady’s-maid, and employed as a curl-paper for the glossiest and most golden of her young mistress’s ringlets, No. 3 on the left temple next the ear....

Even as Lady Adelina screamed, previously to falling into convulsions and rolling about like a fair and fragile football in book muslin, amongst the legs of the Early Victorian tables and chairs, so did Nelly cry out in anguish, falling, not into syncope or fits, but into the stalwart arms of her man--who received her in them, and as she sobbed upon his broad breast, tried, with a heavy heart under his white-faced blue-cloth jacket, to cheer and comfort her.

“Fiddlesticks! We’re legally married, my girl!” he said. “Why, hang it! the knot was tied by Special License, and egad! I still owe half of the two-pun’-ten I paid for it to the chap that loaned me the cash! If the paper’s lost, the yellow iron church is standing still, I suppose, at the bottom o’ the Stone Road near Dullingstoke Junction. Nobody’s blown it up with a mine, I take it? and sent the mealy-faced young parson up aloft before his time! Bless my button-stick, what a silly little soul it is!”

All this he said, and more. But stout as his words were, the heart of the trooper was as water within his body, and he knew, as he had never known it, even when marched in before his Colonel to receive an orderly-room wigging, the sensation of being gone at the knees. His mother’s impenetrable self-command, her pale face of judgment between the scanty loops of her black hair, flaring torches of terror to evil-doers, began to daunt and quell him as though he had suddenly shrunk to a mere truant boy. She spoke, not to him, but to Nelly:

“This is an honest house. I don’t say but its doors will be open to you, and its roof will give you shelter, if so be as you come and ask your husband’s mother for it, with your marriage-lines in your hand. But till you can show them, get you gone out of my sight! Go with the man you say’s your husband, forth out of these my doors!”

“So be it, then,” said the trooper sullenly. “I’ll take her back to Spurham wi’ me to-morrow!”

“You’ll take her to-night.”

“Mother, you’ll not turn us out like that!”

She had wrung the entreaty from him at last--humbled the hardened man who had braved and defied his mother! A spasm of savage triumph shook her inwardly, but to all appearances she might have been a wooden image of a woman, the pleading seemed to leave her so unmoved. She said, still speaking to Nelly:

“Get you up to chamber-over, and make a bundle of such odds as you’ll need. Pack your box,--’twill be sent by the Railway to the Cavalry Barracks at Spurham, come to-morrow. You, Digweed, tie the clout on the gate as a call to th’ carrier when he passes by.” She added, addressing her son, as the piggy man departed with much alacrity to execute the congenial errand, and Nelly, obeying the order in her husband’s eye, quitted the kitchen and shortly afterwards was heard tripping about with short, quick steps on the joist-supported whitewashed boards that served as ceiling to the kitchen and flooring to the room above:

“If you be ahungered or athirst, there’s cold bacon and bread on th’ dresser there; and she you call your wife can draw you a mug of ale.”

He said, drawing himself up to his splendid height, and using a tone of cold civility that somehow cut his mother to the quick as his fierce upbraidings had failed to do:

“No, ma’am, I thank you!”

She found herself urging, as Nelly opened and shut drawers and cupboards overhead, and was heard to drag a box across the floor:

“You have had a day’s journey, and started with but a dew-bit. You’d better take something to stay you. ’Twill be wise!”

Her bowels yearned over him, knowing him unfed. He said, as a stranger answers a stranger:

“I thank you kindly, but I could not, ma’am.”

She began to tremble at the thing that she had done. She said, almost entreatingly, and with the metallic resonance quite gone out of her voice:

“’Twould be a want of common Christian kindness to let you go fasting!”

A red-hot spark of resentment burned in his blue eye. He said, measuring his words to the tap-tap of Nelly’s little thick-soled shoes, descending the short carpetless stair:

“I have had my bellyful of Christian kindness under this Christian roof.” He added, as Nelly appeared, wearing her Sunday cloak and bonneted, and carrying a rather clumsy bundle of soft consistency tied up in a workaday shawl:

“And I leave it with my wife, to return to it no more! Come, my girl! We’ll quarter in Market Drowsing to-night, and take the route for Barracks to-morrow. Where did I put my haversack?”

His eyes passed over his mother and lighted on the regulation canvas bag lying on a shelf of the dresser near the home-made loaf and the rejected cold bacon, towards which he experienced a yearning that filled his mouth with water and plucked at his resisting pride. He picked up and slung on the pack with a vigorous movement, caught his cap from a wall-hook, took his wife by the hand, and, not without a certain manly, soldierly gallantry, led her out of his mother’s house, leaving Sarah standing in the middle of the kitchen-floor with her great hands folded over her triangular apron-bib.

* * * * *

“Good-by, Old Broody and the rest,” said the bride, so rosy a little while since, pale now and fighting with tears repressed, as some hens, accustomed to receive from her hand the supper-scraps about this hour, hurried to her with squawking, scaly-legged haste. “Who’ll feed ’e now, poor things? and milk the new-calved cow to-night? Her never could bide the sight o’ Jason, that there red Devon wi’ the crumpey horn!...”

“Sensible beast!” said the exiled son of the house, picking up a little frilled nightcap with a Prayer-Book inside it, that had escaped from a yawning fissure in the bundle. That little nightcap in Josh’s great hand transformed Nelly from a white rose into a red one, and was responsible for a sudden rise in the mercury of the trooper’s spirits.

“Ha, ha, ha! Well, to be sure now! And uncommon becoming, I’ll swear, though my money’s on the curls without a cover! Give me the bundle, Pretty!” He stopped in the act of shouldering it to exclaim: “Halloa! We’re forgetting another bit o’ property we’re bound to take with us! Can’t you guess? My horse Blueberry.... My own good beast!... Come back-along and fetch him.”

Together they retraced their steps, crossed the farmyard, and Nelly kept guard over the canvas bag and the shawl-bundle, to which the little frilled nightcap that had wrought such a bright and hopeful change in Josh’s downcast face had, with the Prayer-Book, been returned; while the trooper disappeared into the warm hay-scented darkness within the stable. From which, after some “Come up’s” and “Woa, there’s!” accompanied by the creaking of a girth and the clanking of a bridle, he emerged, leading a handsome horse of strong and powerful build, with one white patch in the middle of his broad hairy frontlet, gentleness and courage in his great misty blue-black eyes, and so rare a purplish sheen on his gray coat, of equine health and vigor, as justified the name bestowed on him by his master.

And Nelly kissed Blueberry’s velvet nose, and told him how he and she and his master were all going away to be happy far from The Clays; and Blueberry whinnied his pleasure at the news; and then the canvas bag and the shawl-bundle were strapped behind the saddle, and, with a kiss from the lips that never more need seek her own in secret, Josh--in defiance, Sarah thought--but really in oblivion of the gaunt eyes that stared at them over the starched muslin blind, and the hedge of winter-housed geraniums and fuchsia-cuttings that blocked the kitchen-window,--lifted his young wife to the young horse’s back. She faltered, as her hands left his broad shoulders, and clung for a brief instant about his strong neck:

“Turn round your head a minute, dear Josh, and look at the old home, and all you’ve given up for the sake of your poor Nelly!”

He said, with a brief glance at the old gray stone building of the farmhouse, from whose mossy-tiled roof and small diamond-paned casements the reflected glow of the sky was fading fast:

“Good-by, old place! And if so-be as I must stick to soldiering all my life; I carry from you the two things a soldier needs the most,--supposing him a cavalryman!... a good horse and a sweet wife!”

Nelly’s tears broke forth at that, but the bright drops were more of joy than sorrow. She urged as he took the bridle, and told her to sit fast:

“You’re quite, quite sure you’ll never repent it?”

“As sure,” he said, walking with measured pace beside the now moving horse, and with a stern ignoring of the pale oval patch that showed against the darkness of the kitchen, above the muslin blind, “as that _she_ will, come her dying day.... Why, I am damned if I’ll put up wi’ this!”

A nervous little shriek from Nelly, caused as much by the sudden appearance of the piggy man, starting up like a frowsy gnome or kobold under Blueberry’s very nose, as by the resulting swerve which had nearly unseated her, provoked the objurgation.

The kobold danced a dance of triumph, accompanying his saltatory exercises upon the voice; and the burden of his song was that the soger and his lass, who had said they were wedded and could produce no bit of scrawly paper to prove their tale true, had got the dirty kick-out, and he, Jason, was main glad of it, that he were!

Dealing separately with the feminine offender, duly visited by express judgment from the skies, for trifling with the affections of a piggy man, he reverted, as the incensed soldier strove to control the restive horse, and Nelly clung in terror to the saddle and Blueberry’s mane alternately, to a kind of recitative....

“She--be--an--Arr!”