Part 45
“Absurd, Peter Michailowitch!” said the autocrat. “All men are to be bought. This one as well as the others.” He added, as a stray gleam of light from a wind-blown lamp in the great courtyard evoked no responsive twinkle from the Prince’s spectacle-glasses: “Unless you mean that he is dead?”
“Look, Sire, when there is light, at the signature to the later document,” said Gortchakoff. “It is the feeble scrawl of a dying man. This officer had undergone many hardships in the past three years--surveying and traveling alone--or with only a peasant to guide him--he knew the country from the Balkans to the Sea of Azov--he had the Danubian Principalities at his fingers’ ends--he was, as Bátiushka says, a man worth any price. But--the day after the last contract was signed he left Kustendje for the delta of the Dobrudja. He had made his way up there from Varna on foot--and he had the fever of the country upon him”--Gortchakoff shrugged--“but he did not stay for that. He pushed on into the Dobrudja, taking the road that goes by the Chain of Lakes--and then the wilderness opened and swallowed him. And--that is now three months ago, and he has not been spit up yet.”
“Akh!” said Nicholas, who was to lose thousands of men in the poisonous marshes, as on the waterless steppes of that same region. “But I should not make sure that he is dead, even now. Men who do not value life are difficult to kill. My Russian soldiers hold it cheap when it comes to a question of obeying the orders of their Emperor.... They will prove themselves in 1854 what they were in 1812. And though Austria desert me and Prussia play the knave, I have Three Allies,” boomed the great bull-voice through the chilly darkness. “Pestilence, and Hunger, and Cold--that never yet failed to serve a Russian Tsar. As for England--I tell you, Peter Michailowitch!--between Louis Napoleon Bonaparte and her Army Contractor”--it would appear that this remarkably well-informed Barbarian had even heard of Jowell--“she will yet climb her Calvary with her Cross upon her shoulders--we shall see her crucified between two thieves!” He rose, and said, clapping his General-in-Chief quite genially upon the shoulder: “This room is cold, and I have a deputation from the Peace Society of England waiting to address me. Come and listen to these Quakers--they seem very honest men!...”
He received the three representatives of the English Society of Friends courteously and kindly. He heard the Address with tolerance and patience. Somewhat after this fashion he replied:
“I do not desire War, but since England and France have sided with the enemies of Christianity; and, without warning to Russia have sent their fleets to Constantinople and thence into the Black Sea--to encourage the Turks and impede our battleships in the protection of our coasts--it would appear that both these Western Powers seek War. I will not attack--but I shall act in self-defense! Now, since I think you have not met my wife and daughter, will you come and be introduced to them? It will give them very great pleasure, you may be assured.”
LXXV
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.
LXXVI
The Tsar was genuinely puzzled to know--War having been declared between himself and the Sultan--why he could not crumple those thirteen vessels of a Turkish Convoy bound with troops, arms, and ammunition for a certain important port on the coast of the Black Sea without provoking such a deafening outcry from Gallia and Britannia; and, indeed, what the Daily Press of both these countries persisted in calling the “outrage” of Sinope, seems at this distance of time no more than a provoked and unavoidable measure of defense.
A Comic Illustrated Paper of the date represents the Sultan as a curled darling in short socks, strap-shoes, petticoats, and pinafore, sniveling, with his little fist in his weeping eyes--the while he blubbers out to grinning, knickerbockered Russia:
“Hoo--boohoo! You’ve broken my nice new Fleet!... Wait till I tell Nursie France and Auntie Britannia--they’ll give you a good spanking, you--boohoo!--naughty Boy!”
* * * * *
For some reason there was hurry. The Holy Standard was unfurled and the Sacred Shirt displayed; the Moslem, who had suddenly become so dear to us, plunged, with renewed vigor, into hostilities; the Russian Ambassadors quitted London and Paris; but weeks before Great Britain and France leagued themselves with the Infidel against Christian Russia, and War was proclaimed by the Lord Mayor of London from the steps of the Royal Exchange, Her Majesty’s Foot Guards received orders to proceed to the East, and the Second Battalion of the Cut Red Feathers marched out from St. George’s Barracks; and the Third Battalion of the White Tufts marched out from the Tower; and the First Battalion of the Bearskins Plain marched out of Windsor--slept a night at Wellington Barracks; and with bands playing “Cheer, Boys, Cheer,” “We are Going Far Away,” “Oh, Susannah! Don’t You Cry for Me!” and “The British Grenadiers,” they were off and away for Gallipoli _via_--why _via_ Malta?
You may conceive the cheers, the tears, the shaking of the earth by the even tread of battalions of marching men; the waving of hats and pocket-handkerchiefs; the wives, and children, and sweethearts crying and clinging to husbands’, and fathers’, and lovers’ arms. You may imagine the roaring trade done by the venders of oranges, whelks, polonies, pettitoes, and other portable refreshments; and the generosity with which these were pressed upon the rank-and-file; and the lavishness with which the thirst of the British soldier--great even in piping times of peace--was assuaged by copious draughts of foaming beer and liquors even more potent....
The Bearskins Plain got the best send-off, for from Bird Cage Walk to Buckingham Palace, and along the Strand to Waterloo, many thousands of people were gathered to give them God-speed, and the Mall was made gay with bunting and streamers. Jowell, Sewell, Cowell, Towell, Bowell, and Co., of whose cunning, and greed, and rapacity most of these departing warriors were presently to perish--filled an official window in Pall Mall with gorgeous waistcoats and patriotic enthusiasm.
* * * * *
“Noble fellows! God bless ’em!” they cried, and shed tears and waved their pocket-handkerchiefs. They slopped over with patriotic sentiments as the champagne slopped over their glasses; while they told each other how soon those steadily-marching legs would bring their owners back. The whole thing was extravagantly simple. The British Army had but to proceed to the East--quite an enviable trip now the spring-time was approaching--show itself--conquer by the mere show; and return to be thanked and praised.
They were to return so soon, and the climate of Eastern Europe was believed, even in March, to be so warm and genial, that nothing in the way of extra covering had been issued to England’s darling sons. Sire my Friend, had equipped the French Army with a complete outfit of serviceable winter clothing. Stout and easy-fitting boots protected its feet, great-coats of heavy waterproofed material were supplied it against the nip of cold or the exigencies of wet weather. Even the Infidel had purchased for his troops, fifty thousand ample capotes of leather lined with sheepskin; but Britannia relied exclusively upon the glow of martial ardor for the generation and preservation of caloric. Hence it came about that whole battalions of the legs that were presently to march away, marched in the trousers of white duck, in which they had returned from service in Bermuda, China, and the East Indies. And the rest in a shoddy summer cloth of dirty bluish gray.
It is odd how universal was that conviction that the Expedition to the East was to be nothing beyond a flying visit. When the cheering broke out at the Officers’ Mess House--the Rathkeale Ragamuffins being at that moment quartered at the Victoria Barracks, Dublin; my Aunt Julietta,--who dined with the children at one o’clock, and frugally supped upon cold mutton and the remains of the rice-pudding or custard in the petrified or gelid state, whilst her Golightly was enjoying his seven courses, cheese, and dessert in the society of his peers--my Aunt, learning that the dreaded summons had come, greeted the reappearance of her lord with an outburst of hysterical emotion. Upon which Captain Goliath, whom you may suppose well primed with Mess Port, and subsequent whisky-toddy; jested at her wifely tears, and made light of her tender terrors.
“I tell ye there’s no danger!--they’ll simply send us out and order us back again. We’ll never get a _shass_ at them--more’s the pity!--much less a prod. They’re cowards, rank cowards! They’ll turn tail and run at the first British cheer we’re after giving them. We’re simply being sent out--do you hear me?--to be sent back again. Sure, now, when ye married me, Juley, me own darling!--you didn’t suppose ye were taking anything but a soldier, did ye now? Killed is it? _Killed!_... Nonsense, ma’am!--there’ll be no killin’ at all, at all! Compose yourself, Mrs. McCreedy--for your own sake and the baby’s! Don’t you hear me saying that they’ll simply send----Will You Be Quiet And Listen to What I’m Telling You!” bellowed Captain Goliath, at the full pitch of a remarkably powerful pair of lungs.
But my Aunt Julietta, unwilling to lose so favorable an opportunity, here went into hysterics after the latest recipe published in the pages of _The Ladies’ Mentor_, and screamed, cried, and laughed so vigorously, that--had not the alarmed and flustered Captain seized and applied the Cayenne pepper-castor in mistake for my Aunt’s silver vinaigrette of Red Lavender--unfavorable results to the expected olive-branch of the McCreedy stem might have supervened.
But my Aunt--in paroxysms of sneezing--recovered sufficiently to scold her clumsy hero; and the Captain departed; to return towards the small-hours in a condition which his military body-servant erroneously described as “fresh.”
Ah, poor gentlewoman! how my Aunt winced at the coarse pleasantries of the man, and the hiccupping genialities of the master! How many times since she pledged to the _idol of her soul_ the _fondest vows_, etc., had not that idol proved himself a mere lump of sodden, heavy clay.
She dismissed Private Fahy, ungratified in the wish--audibly expressed--for a hair of the dog that had bit the Captain--and herself undressed her prone and wallowing warrior; got him to bed, and while he snored, knelt beside the pillow his hoggishness defiled, and prayed to Heaven--pure, simple, loving creature!--that War might spare him to his wife and children, for many a long year to come!...
For the rest she was as “callum as you please, and as brave as a _liness_” to quote the Captain; when he gave her his parting hug on Kingstown Harbor Quay.
The month’s installment of a Serial Tale then running in _The Ladies’ Mentor_ contained a harrowing description of a similar leave-taking between husband and wife. But it seemed to my Aunt Julietta that the _gallant_ and _high-souled_ Colonel Reginald de la Vaux and his _young_ and _sensitive_ bride said too much--and said it too coherently to be quite real.