Part 41
A vivid recollection of the duel at the School leaped up in Hector as he listened to de Moulny’s thick panting, and saw the savage, livid face, its paleness now blotched with red, coming nearer and more near.... And suddenly he realized that his antagonist was the stronger.... The supple muscular strength once distinctive of Dunoisse had deteriorated; possibly from excess of pleasure--from excess of labor it may be.... He nerved himself for a supreme effort, but the superior force and greater weight of his antagonist were surely gradually crushing him backwards across the sofa-foot, with those big white hands knotted in a strangling grip about his throat.
Choking, he freed one arm, and with fiery circles revolving before his eyes, and a deafening sound as of many waters in his ears, felt for the revolver in the inner pocket of his gray surtout. He meant to use it.... He would have used it, in spite of his determination, but that with lightning quickness his enemy divined his intention, and captured within his own the weaponed hand.
* * * * *
“Truly, old friend,” said de Moulny’s voice, thickly and lispingly, “one must needs be prepared for tricks when one happens to fight with you....” He crushed the imprisoned hand within his own, smiling evilly, and as Dunoisse, almost with a sensation of relief, felt the cold circle of steel forced home against his own temple, de Moulny spoke again:
“Do you comprehend, my excellent Dunoisse, what plan has just occurred to me? It is very simple--just a little more pressure than this upon your trigger-finger--and you will have committed suicide.... When they find you--(an ugly spectacle)--the revolver will be grasped in your dead hand--there will not be the slightest suspicion of foul play attaching to any other person. Nothing will be involved beyond the minor scandal of Madame’s discarded lover having shot himself in her room----”
He laughed silently, puffing short whiffs of breath through his clumsy nose, his bulky body yet heaving with the exertion of the struggle, his big muscles still taut with the effort of keeping the upper-hand. His eyes were very cold, and smiled cruelly. He said, looking into the fierce black eyes that stared up at him out of the discolored face of the strangling man:
“--But as I wish to spare her an ugly spectacle, and further, because I am original in my methods of reprisal....”
The Colt’s revolver, strongly thrown, crashed through the thick rose-colored glass of the one window that was not closely curtained, and, without exploding, was heard to fall upon the soft damp earth of a flower-bed underneath. And the choking grip upon Dunoisse’s throat relaxed--the weight of his enemy’s bulky body ceased to crush him....
“Get up,” said de Moulny coarsely, “and--since you will not take your dismissal from me--take it from Madame there. Look!... She is coming to herself!... In an instant she will speak!”
It was true. Long shudders rippled through Henriette’s beautiful, helpless body. Her bosom heaved with shallow, gasping breaths. The eyes between the parted eyelids rolled and wandered blindly. She moaned a little, as though in pain.
“Awake, my white leopardess!” said the voice Dunoisse so hated. “Unclose your petals, my blood-red, fragrant flower of Sin! Mock your lovers no more with that white sculptured mask of chastity, my imperial Messalina!... Say to this poor wretch, awaiting your sentence in anguish: ‘_Another lover is preferred before you.... You have had your night of rapture.... Depart! and let me see your face no more!_’”
She only moaned, and feebly beat her head from side to side upon the cushions. Her eyelids trembled. Spasms, like shadows, passed over the ivory face.... Her mouth hung a little open, as her lungs drank the cold foggy air that poured in through the shattered window.... And a new idea struck de Moulny. He looked at Dunoisse, standing white and haggard and shame-stricken on the other side of the sofa. And he said, in a changed, less smoothly brutal tone, and without his hateful smile:
“This is a strange, unusual method of settling a dispute for possession, but unconventionality pleases me.... Understand, I am ready to abide by the issue, be it what it may--nor have I any objection to pledge myself by an oath....” He glanced at the wall beyond the bed-foot, where Dunoisse knew well there hung an ivory Crucifix. The figure was covered with a drapery of black velvet. And at the sight the banished light of mockery came back into de Moulny’s hard blue eyes.
“Ah, no! There shall be no oath, my good Dunoisse,” he went on, almost gently.... “Both of us have proved the brittleness of such things!... But listen, and if my plan appeals to you, accept it.... When----” He rose up, and turned his eyes to the sofa. He asked himself, musingly, with cold considering eyes studying what lay there: “Was I mistaken, or did I hear her speak?”
She had only moaned, and muttered something incoherent. De Moulny went on:
“Long years ago--when one whose name is too sacred to be uttered within these walls--lay in a swoon as deathlike and protracted as this”--his big hand motioned towards the sofa--“the first name she uttered upon her recovery, was that of her youngest son.... And I knew then--though she had never made any parade of difference between us,--that of all her children she loved me best. Then listen. Whose name this woman speaks, his she shall be, soul and body! Is that agreed, my virtuous Dunoisse?”
The cold blue eyes and the burning black eyes met and struck out a white-hot flame between them.
“It is agreed!” said Dunoisse in a barely audible voice.
“Her husband is out of the running,--a scratched horse,” said de Moulny, sneering and smiling.... “He has battened on the sale of her beauty, and climbed by the ladder of his shame. Therefore, should those pale lips frame _Eugéne_--it counts less than nothing.... We stand or fall by their dropping into the hair-weight balance of Destiny a ‘Hector’ or ‘Alain.’”
A silence fell. The ashes of the dying fire dropped upon the tiled hearth with a little clicking echo.... Three rivals waited by the moaning figure on the sofa in the disarranged, disordered bedchamber.... De Moulny, and Dunoisse, and Another Whose Face was hidden by a veil....
“_Ah, Jesu Christ!_...”
* * * * *
The Name came from the pale lips of Henriette in a sighing whisper. Then silence fell again like a black velvet pall.... Dunoisse and de Moulny, the fire of lust and anger dead ashes between them, looked with awe and horror, each in the other’s face. And stronger and clearer upon the strained and guilty consciences of both, grew the impression of an unseen Presence, awful, condemnatory, relentless, all-potent, standing between them in the rose-colored room.
* * * * *
De Moulny spoke at last, in a shaking whisper, a strange light burning behind the eyes that were like polished blue stones:
“Do you hear?... She is God’s, this woman for whose body and soul we have disputed.... Christ has claimed her!... She is no longer yours or mine!...”
* * * * *
He thought he spoke to Dunoisse, but Dunoisse had already left the Rue de Sèvres behind him. With despair eating at his heart, and Remorse and Shame for traveling-companions, he had resumed his interrupted journey--he was speeding to the Pestilential Places of South-Eastern Europe to carry out the secret mission of Monseigneur.
LXVII
Have you forgotten a trooper of Her Majesty’s Hundredth Regiment of Lancers, who, being secretly married to his mother’s milkmaid, and detected by a pigman in the administration of divers conjugal endearments--sanctioned by Church and State, but unpardonable in the hollow eyes of Sarah Horrotian--was, by maternal decree, incontinently driven--with his young bride and his good horse Blueberry--forth from the gates of Upper Clays Farm?
* * * * *
The wedded pair supped and slept that night at Market Drowsing, in a garret of the Saracen’s Head Inn. So many thirsty callers were attracted to the bar of this hostelry by the news--disseminated as soon as told--of the rupture between Sarah Horrotian and her son, that the landlord, for the accommodation above-named, refused payment.
“For--my part I praise ’e for the step you’ve taken! All same,” the landlord added, with a touch of the Sloughshire caution, “theer be no need for ’e to go telling Widow Horrotian as much. For her puts up her shay and pony here regularly on market-days--and custom is custom, be it large or small.”
At dawn, fortified by slaps on the back and a good many handshakes, as well as cold bacon, bread and butter, tea for the bride and ale for the groom; man, woman, and horse took the road for Dullingstoke Junction, whence Mrs. Joshua Horrotian was to proceed by rail to the cavalry depot town of Spurham, and await at an address supplied by her husband, his slower arrival by road.
It was a raw, cold, weeping day. A numbing wind blew between its sleety showers. As they paused on the bridge that spanned the swollen river to look their last at the farm perched on the high bleak ridge of the sixty-acre upland, a scarlet mail-phaeton rattled past behind the flying heels of its pair of spirited blacks. The trooper, recognizing the squat and bulky figure buttoned in beside the driving groom under the phaeton’s leather apron, wrapped in a dreadnought cloak and sheltered under the vast green silk umbrella dutifully held over him by the servant who occupied the back seat; reddened to the rim of the idiotic little muffin-shaped forage-cap of German pattern approved by Government, but Thompson Jowell gave no sign.
“Damn my tongue!” had come from Josh in almost a mellow tone of retrospective ruefulness.
“Whatever for, dear Josh?”
Nelly turned on her love rounded eyes of alarmed astonishment. He answered, wiping with the back of his sinewy hand a splash of Jowell’s mud from his sunburnt cheek.
“Because I doubt I ha’ made me another enemy with it, and that’s one too many, Pretty--as things are just now.” He whistled a stave of “The Ratcatcher’s Daughter” with defiant melodiousness, then broke off to say with a broad, irrepressible smile:
“To think of my having twitted of him wi’ buying spoiled hay and mildewed barley, and pitched them kilns that are worked in a name that isn’t his’n at Little Milding--along of the empty jam-tins and dead kittens and so on that ha’ been sarved out to us chaps in the Government Forage trusses--at his head. Egad! I can hardly believe it o’ myself!”
With her bonnet thrust back and falling on her shoulders, and the sweet rosiness hunted from her cheeks by the revelation of his terrible presumption, she panted softly:
“Dear Josh, you never!...”
“Ay! but I did though,” the soldier retorted, “as true as I live!”
“And him that great and rich and powerful,” she breathed. “Whatever will he do to ’e? By way o’ revenge, I mean--come he gets the chance.”
“Why, he med make more bad blood between me and mother--if so be as that’s to be done,” said Josh, meditatively tapping Blueberry’s shining neck with the end of the bridle he held--“or drop a word at Headquarters that ’ud sow salt in my bed.” He added: “By jingo! if--as seems likely--I be doomed to spend my long life sogering, I’ve done none too well by myself. Or you, poor girl, I doubt!”
His tone of pity hung bright drops on her dark eyelashes. She murmured, stroking the blue cloth that covered the broad shoulders:
“How can e’ fare to say that? Haven’t ’e married me? And the long life you talk of will be ours, dear love!--not yours to live alone.”
“The harder for you, maybe!” he said, bending his brows and setting his strong jaw doggedly. “If I were free of the Service, to earn enough to keep you in comfort would be an easy job for hands as strong as mine. But with ’em tied to the lance, carbine and sword--and my legs bent round a horse’s belly--all I am worth in the opinion of my betters is one-and-tuppence a day. You ha’ got to go into decent lodgings somewheres,” pursued the trooper, “till I can get the ear of the Officer Commanding our Squadron--and my Captain being his friend, and a free-spoken, kindly young gentleman--med be he’ll take an interest in our case. If so, the fact o’ my having gone and got married without leave--and I could punch my own head for a fool’s for having done it!--might be blinked at and got over like,--though it comes next to Insubordination and Neglect of Orders on the long list of a soldier’s sins. In which case--inquiries being made and satisfactorily answered--you’ll be allowed fifteen pence a week. It ain’t a handsome income,” commented Josh, “when you remember it’s supposed to find ’e in house-room and food and firing, but at any rate it’ll eke out what we have. Even if I’m disappointed about the Captain’s buying Blueberry, I’ve a pound or so put by in the little green purse you netted, against a rainy day. And if this bain’t the kind o’ weather that calls for it I’m a Dutchman! No!--don’t you begin to talk about your blessed little savings,” the soldier added hastily, “laid up out o’ the four pounds odd to-year my mother’s paid ’e!... There may come a use for them, before you know!”
She faltered, with the banished roses crowding back into the sweet oval cheeks, and the shy hazel eyes shunning his warm blue ones:
“And shall I have to live in lodgings always?”
“Why,” said Josh, setting his strong face ahead as he marched steadily by the side of Blueberry, “if I have luck in getting a good word from Captain Bertham, you may be took upon the strength of the Regiment as a Squadron Woman by-and-by. Which means you’ll live wi’ me in Barracks, and share a room with eight or ten married couples and their families, and maybe a bachelor or two thrown in, in case we’re too private and decent-like among ourselves.... West Indian slaves, I’m told, are allowed separate huts by their masters when they’re married. But an Army blanket or a patchwork counterpane hung on a clothes-line,” said Joshua Horrotian, with a resentful light burning in his wide blue eyes, “is good enough--according to the grand gentlemen who sit in Cabinet and call themselves the Government--to hide the blushes of a soldier’s wife!” He added, with a latent grin hovering about the mouth that was shaded by the bold dark red mustache: “Not that it ’ud take an over-and-above sized one to hide Mrs. Geogehagan’s. She bain’t a blushing sort--though I’ve seen Geogehagan’s ears as red as two boiled lobsters when she’ve took it into her head to pull ’em--the masterful catamaran!”
“Whatever for?”
The trooper’s solid shoulders shook a little. The grin was no longer latent as he replied:
“For the preservation of Discipline--or because the Corporal had stopped in Canteen when he’d ought to ha’ been helping her peel the taters or wash the babbies.... ‘Give me your ear!’--she says to ’n--and he gives it, as meek as a mouse. Ha, ha, ha!” He ceased his laughter to say in a tone not at all mirthful: “And mind you!--she’s the sort of woman you’ll have to live alongside of, if you’re lucky. As for the rest.... But there!--I’ve took oath to cure myself of griding and grumbling.... ‘Discontented,’ that’s one o’ the things Mr. Jowell called me yesterday, and for all I know the man may be right.” He filled his big chest with the keen air and puffed it out again, as though he blew away his discontent with it. “Look here! Let’s make-believe, as the children say, that all’s for the best that’s happened. I’m game if you are!”
“And sure to goodness,” Nelly put in, as the big hairy-backed hand gave the upward twist to the dark red mustaches, and the firm mouth it shaded curved in the old smile, “what wi’ Jason’s ragging and your mother’s nagging, I could no ways ha’ bided to The Clays for long.”
“No more you could, now I come to think of it!”
In cheering the drooping spirits of his bride he had heartened himself; and now he turned a brightened face to Nelly’s, and said in tones that had the old hearty, buoyant ring: “True love drove our nail, Pretty, and Good Luck may clinch it. I said to that big gentleman I angered yesterday wi’ my plain talk--as how I’d leave the crimson silk sash and the officer’s gold epaulettes a-hanging at the top of the tree for some cleverer fellow than me to reach down. But wi’ you standing at the bottom to cheer me on,” said Josh, with a great revival of energy and spirits, “damme if I don’t have another try for ’em! So remember,--the toast for my next mug of beer--which must be a half-pint, seeing as I’m a married man and can’t afford luxuries--should go: ‘Here’s to Promotion--and may it come soon!’ Hup! will ’e, Blueberry!” The soldier added as the young horse obediently quickened his pace. “You’re our best friend just now, it strikes me. For if so be as the Captain’s pleased wi’ you and buys you--there’s his money to put with the rest into the stocking--not to mention his good word for your master’s wife. Look at his ears, Pretty,” adjured Josh, beaming and patting the glossy gray shoulder. “Don’t the twitch and set of ’em seem to answer, that what he can do he will?... Talk about Dick Whittington’s Cat--and Puss in Boots, this here horse o’ mine is worth a shipload o’ such miaulers. When we get to Dullingstoke,--and it’s not but three miles farther,--suppose you hear the bells o’ the little yellow iron church in the Stokes Road begin to ring out ‘Turn again, Joshua Horrotian, Regimental Sergeant-Major!’ don’t you be surprised!”
LXVIII
But although the twitch and set of Blueberry’s ears did not fail of their significance--though the young horse was duly purchased by the kindly Captain for Josh’s troop, and the good word of the officer was not wanting in the interests of the clandestinely-married couple--the day that was to confer upon Nelly the privileges of the barrack-room and the right to revolve in the select if limited social circle where Mrs. Geogehagan reigned in virtue of her rank as Corporal’s lady--did not dawn for many, many months.
The sweet came before the bitter. Though the rose-colored glasses through which couples wedded for love invariably view the scenery of the honeymoon, could hardly disguise the fact that the lodgings--a two-pair-back in a dingy street of rickety houses in the purlieus of the Cavalry Barracks at Spurham--were squalid, dingy and dubiously clean. Yet the neighborhood presented advantages. Regimental visitors were frequent. Healths were pledged with these in foaming pots of ale and stout from one or other of the prosperous taverns in which the neighborhood abounded. And not infreqently the parting guest--counting on the liberality of a man who was not only newly-married, but had the price of a horse in his pocket--appealed to Josh for a loan, and got it. Do you call the lender spendthrift and the borrowers shabby spongers? They would have ministered to their comrade’s need--supposing their pockets had been full, while his were empty. ’Twas a way they had in the Army when Queen Victoria was young and pretty.... ’Tis a way they have still, though her grandson reigns in her stead.
You are asked to imagine the palpitating wonder and delight of Nelly’s first plunge into the giddy round of garrison-town pleasures. The Circus presented charm but not novelty--because every year when the plums were ripe, and the Fair was held at Market Drowsing, Banger’s Royal Terpsichorean and Equestrian Grand Gala Entertainment encamped upon a marshy patch of waste in the town suburbs, and foreign-complexioned men with earrings, carrying whips of abnormal length, came to The Upper Clays to bargain for oats, hay, mangold-wurzel, and cabbages--the last-named commodities constituting the elephant’s favorite bill-of-fare. Free admissions to the sawdust-strewn, horsey land of enchantment within the big creaking tent of patched canvas were granted upon these occasions--not to stern Sarah, in whose gaunt eyes spangled females capering in pink tights upon the backs of ambling piebalds, represented the peculiar progeny of the Babylonish Whore--but to her maid and man. For Jason’s chapel-going never cured him of the horseriders. In the secret estimation of the piggy man the New Jerusalem was but an immensely-magnified, unspeakably more glorious Banger’s. Not but what the lithe and supple gentleman in a sheath of glittering scales--who doubled himself into snaky knots while spewing fire--was hardly the sort of personage one might expect to meet with up here....
You are asked to be present in imagination upon the gallery benches of the Theater Royal, Spurham, upon the never-to-be-forgotten occasion when Josh took his bride to the Play. The blood-curdling melodrama of “The Ruffian Boy” constituted the principal item of the programme. Miss Arabella Smallsopp of the Principal London Theaters having been specially engaged to appear in the character of “Ethelinda,” the Baron’s Bride.
To look down from the gallery--sitting perched up there so high--and beside a husband so big, so manly, and so handsome in his uniform that the old lady in the squashed bonnet and nose to match, who sold you winkles, oranges and nuts, cried “God bless him!” as he rated her for giving short measure in the latter commodity--was in itself an experience thrilling enough to make you gasp even supposing the extraordinary mixture of paint, varnish, gas, drains, damp clothes, and heated humanity that was supplied to the patrons of the gallery in place of air, had not tickled your nose and stung your throat and eyes, making you cough and sneeze and blink....
Only two defacing smudges marred the shining page whereon Memory recorded the history of that evening. Incident No. 1 occurred shortly after a row of heads and shoulders, with musical instruments of various kinds attached to them, which Josh explained to be the Orchestra, had sprung up like mushrooms at the bottom of a big black ditch, below the line of smoky tin-screened lights twinkling at the bottom edge of a great Curtain--with a palace in an astonishing garden, and a lake full of swans, and groups of dancing ladies painted on it; marvelously beautiful, but wi’ so mortal few clothes on as to make a body ashamed to look.
It was just before a lank gentleman with upright hair had popped into a seat raised above the level of the previously-described heads and shoulders, and briskly rapping with a little black stick upon a desk, had caused the Orchestra to burst into a jumble of Popular Airs, described by a waggish young man on the back benches as a “musical bluemange,” beginning with “My Heart’s in the Highland,” continuing with “The Marseillaise”--for some reason or other vociferously applauded--and ending with “Rule, Britannia” and “Britons Strike Home.”
A young female--not so very young neither--Mrs. Joshua Horrotian couldn’t help but notice!--in spite of her vividly red-and-white complexion, and a profusion of light ringlets, tumbling out of a smart bonnet of pink satin trimmed with green ostrich feathers--a gaudy, tawdry young woman of the class we were then, as we are now--content to call unfortunate--closely followed by a tall, lean, pimply-faced young trooper in the beloved blue, white-faced uniform of the Hundredth Lancers--came squeezing her way between the row of knees on one side and the row of shoulders on the other--and plumped herself down in the vacant place by Joshua Horrotian’s side.