XV…

XV

Arrived at his dingy little office in The Poultry, halfway up the narrow, shady alley of low-browed, drab-faced houses near the Banking House of Lubbock, you saw Thompson Jowell, recruited by a solid luncheon, bending severe brows upon a pale-faced, weak-eyed clerk, who had grievously offended, and was up for judgment.

“What’s this? Now, what’s this, Standish?” the great man blustered. “You have been doing overtime and ask to be paid for it? Lawful claims are met with prompt settlement in this office, as you have good cause to know. But, lookee here!” The speaker puffed out his pendulous cheeks in his characteristic way, and held up a stout, menacing finger before the wincing eyes of the unfortunate Standish. “Don’t you, or any other man in my employment get trying to make money out of ME! Because you won’t, you know!” said Mr. Thompson Jowell. “D’ye see?” and jabbed at the thorax of the unfortunate Standish with the finger, and then rubbed his own nose smartly with it, and thrust it, with its fellows, into his large, deep trousers-pocket as the livid victim faltered:

“You were good enough, previously to the Christmas holidays, sir, to send for me, and say that if I cared to----”

Thompson Jowell solemnly shook his little pear-shaped head, and goggled with his large, round brown eyes upon the scared victim, saying:

“Not ‘cared to,’ Standish. Be accurate, my good fellow, in word as in deed!”

“You hinted to me, sir----” stammered the unfortunate.

Thompson Jowell swelled to such portentous size at this that the clerk visibly shrank and dwindled before the awful presence.

“I am not accustomed to hint, Standish!”

“You intimated, sir, that if I was willing”--gulped the pallid Standish--“to devote my evenings to making up the New Year’s accounts and checking the files of duplicate invoices against the office-ledgers, you--you would undertake--or so you were good enough to give me to understand--that I should be the better for it!”

“But if I mentioned overtime,” returned his employer, thrusting his short fat hands under his wide coat-tails, and rocking backwards and forwards on the office hearthrug, a cheap and shabby article to which the great man was accustomed to point with pride as illustrative of the robust humility of his own nature, “I’ll eat my hat!” He glanced at the low-crowned, shiny beaver hanging on a wooden peg beside his private safe, in company with the shaggy box-coat and a fur-lined, velvet-collared cloak of sumptuous appearance, adding, “and that’s a meal would cost me thirty shillings. For there’s no such a thing as overtime. It don’t exist! And if you proved to me it did I wouldn’t believe you!” said Thompson Jowell, thrusting his thick right hand deep into the bosom of the gorgeous waistcoat, and puffing himself out still more. “For your time, young man! in return for a liberal salary of Twenty Shillings per week, belongs to Me--to Me, Standish, whenever I choose to employ it! As for being the better for having done the work you say you have, you are the better morally, in having discharged your duty to a generous employer; and if you choose to injure your constitution by stopping here o’ nights until eleven p.m. it’s no affair of mine. John Downright my name is!--besides the one that’s on the brass doorplate of these offices, and what I say is--it’s no affair of mine! Though, mind you! in burning gas upon these premises up to I don’t know what hour of the night, you’ve materially increased the Company’s quarterly bill, and in common justice ought to defray their charges. I’ll let you off that!--so think yourself lucky! and don’t come asking me to remunerate you for overtime again. Now, get out with you!”

Unlucky Standish, yellow and green with disappointed hopes and secret fury, and yet admiring, in spite of himself, the clever way in which he had been defrauded, backed towards the narrow door, and in the act collided with a visitor, who, entering, straightway impregnated and enlivened the dead and musty atmosphere with a heterogeneous mixture of choice perfumes, in which super-fine Macassar and bear’s grease, the fashionable Frangipani and Jockey Club; Russia-leather, a suspicion of stables, and more than a hint of malt liquor, combined with the fragrance of the choice Havana cheroot which the newcomer removed from his mouth as he entered, to make way for the filial salutation:

“Halloa, Governor! All serene?”

You then saw young Mortimer Jowell, only surviving sapling of the sturdy stem of tough old British oak ticketed Thompson Jowell, received in that fond father’s arms, who warmly hugged him to his bosom, crying:

“Morty! My own boy!”

“How goes it, Governor?” responded Morty, winking tremendously, and patting his parent on his stout back with a large-sized hand, gloved with the most expensive lemon kid. “Hold on, you!” he hailed, as the ghastly Standish, seeing Distress for Rent written large across the page of the near future, was creeping out. “Come back and help us out of this watchbox, will yer?” Adding, as the clerk assisted him out of a capacious driving-coat of yellow cloth, with biscuit-sized mother-o’-pearl buttons:

“You look uncommon green, Standish, my boy--Standish’s your name, ain’t it?”

“Yes, Mr. Mortimer, sir. And--I am quite well, sir, thank you, sir. There’s nothing the matter with me beyond ordinary.”

He hung up the son’s coat on the peg beneath the low-crowned, curly-brimmed beaver of the parent, and went out. Morty, retaining his own fashionable, shaggy headgear upon a skull of the bullet rather than the pear-shaped order, had forgotten the clerk and his sick face before the door closed behind him.

“Don’t you worry about Standish and his looks, my boy!” said Thompson Jowell. “That’s the way to spoil a good clerk, that is. Cock ’em up with an idea that they’re overworked, next thing is they’re in bed, and their wives--and why the devil they should have wives, when at that fellow’s age I couldn’t afford the luxury, beats me!--their wives are writing letters begging me not to stop the substitute’s pay out of the husband’s salary, because he, and she, and the children--and it’s like their extravagance and presumption to have children when they can’t afford to keep ’em!--will have to go to the Workhouse if you do. And why shouldn’t they go to the Workhouse? What do we ratepayers keep it up for, if it ain’t good enough for you, ma’am, and the likes of you and yours? My name being Tom Candid--that’s what I say to her.”

He had, in fact, said it to a suppliant of the proud, presumptuous class he complained of, only that morning. And now, as he blew out his big, pendulous cheeks and triple chin above their stiff circular frill of iron-gray whisker, his tall son took him by the shoulders and shook him playfully backwards and forwards in the grip of the great hands that were clothed with the extra-sized lemon kids, saying, as he regarded his affectionate parent with a pair of brown round eyes, that, with the narrow brain behind them, were a trifle bemused with liquor even at this early hour, yet wonderfully frank and honest for a son of Thompson Jowell’s:

“You knowin’ old File! You first-class, extra-ground, double-edged Shylock, you! You jolly old Fee-Faw-Fum, smellin’ the blood of Englishmen, and grindin’ their bones to make your bread--or the flour you sell to the British Government, and take precious jolly good care to sell dear!--you’re lookin’ in the prime of health and the pink of condition, and that’s what I like to see!”

“Really, Morty! Truly, now, my dear boy?”

Morty nodded, with a cheerful grin, and Thompson Jowell’s heart glowed with fatherly pride in this big young man with the foolish, good-natured face and the round, somewhat owlish eyes, that resembled his own, though not in their simplicity. But Morty’s invariable and characteristic method of expressing frank admiration of those invaluable business qualities of unscrupulousness, greed, and cunning, which the author of his being, while fattening upon them, preferred to disown--was a venomed dart rankling in the fleshy ribs that were clothed by the gorgeous waistcoat. His narrow slanting forehead, that was like the lid of a Noah’s Ark--furrowed as he heard. He said, with hurry and effort:

“Yes--yes! Well--well! And how did you come, dear boy?”

“Tooled the Tilbury with the tandem over from Norwood,” Morty responded, “on purpose to have a good look at you. Lord Adolphus Noddlewood, my friend and chum at the Reverend’s, came along too. Lots of fun on the way! Tre-menjous row with tollgate-keeper’s wife at Camberwell Gate--Tollman, gone to bed, after bein’ up all night, stuck his head out of upper-window in a red nightcap to tell us, if we ain’t too drunk to remember it!--we’re talkin’, for once in our lives, to a decent woman.... (And you ought to ha’ heard the names she’d called us!) ... ‘Dolph, my boy,’ says I to Lord Adolphus when we got into the Borough Road--and plenty of excitement there, with a leader that kep’ tryin’ to get into the omnibuses after the old ladies!... ‘Dolph, my buck,’ says I, ‘I’m goin’ to show you where the Guinea Tree grows.’ ‘Ha, ha, ha! That means,’ says he to me, ‘you’re goin’ to fly a kite among the Jews.’ ‘You’re dead out there, Dolph!’ says I. ‘For one thing, the Gov’ bleeds free. A touch of the lancet, and he brims the basin. For another--there isn’t a Hebrew among the Ten Tribes, from Dan to Beersheba, ’ud dare to lend me a penny-piece on my tidiest signature for fear of what my father’d do when he found out they’d been gettin’ hold of his precious boy! For, deep as they are, my father’s deeper,’ says I, ‘and artful as they are, he’s more artful still; and grinding and grasping extortioners as it’s their nature to be, there’s not a Jew among ’em that the Governor wouldn’t give ninety points out of a hundred to, and beat at Black Pool--with the nigger in the pocket and a general shell-out all round! Ha, ha, haw! Whew!...” Morty whipped out a handkerchief of brilliant hue, diffusing odors of Araby, and applied it to his nose: “Piff! this here jolly old rat-hole of yours stinks over and above a bit. Why don’t you burn it down?--you’re inspired to the hilt, or I don’t know you, dad! And take a smart, snug, comfortable office in Cheapside or Cornhill?”

“It wouldn’t do! I began in this place, and have grown up here, as one might say, and have got too used to it to fancy another. And--be a little careful, Morty, my boy!” urged the father of this shining specimen, admiring the son’s high spirit and volubility, yet suffering at his well-earned praise. He felt so keen a pride in this tall, bullet-headed, broad-shouldered, loosely-jointed son, that the tears stood in his round eyes as they goggled at him; and the upright gray hair upon his pear-shaped head bristled more stiffly. “Somebody outside there might be listening,” he pleaded, “and that kind of joke’s dangerous if repeated. Be careful, my dear boy!”

“If you mean careful of those tallow-faced, inky, chilblain-fingered chaps in the office outside this, and the room on the other side of the passage,” said Morty, jerking up his coat-tails, and seating himself upon the large, important blotting-pad that lay upon the stained leather of the kneehole writing-table, that, with the iron safe previously mentioned; an armchair with loops of horsehair stuffing coming through the torn leather covering of its arms, and bulging through the torn leather covering of its back; a wooden stool adorned with a fantastic pattern of perforations; a dusty set of wooden pigeon-holes stuffed with dustier papers, and a bookcase containing Shipping-Lists, References, Handy Volumes, Compendiums, Ready Reckoners, and Guides, such as are commonly used by business men who chase the goose that lays the golden egg of Profit through the tortuous ways of Finance;--with a few more, likely to be of use to an Auxiliary-Transport Agent and Forage Contractor--comprised, with a blistered little yellow iron washstand, furtively lurking in a shady corner, the furniture of the office,--“if you mean those clerks of yours, you’re joking when you talk of them repeating anything they hear. They know you too well, Gov! They’ve sold themselves to you, body and soul. For you’re the Devil, Governor--the very Devil! Ain’t you? Gaw! Don’t tell me you ain’t! I don’t believe you!” said Morty, with a tinge of the paternal manner. “I won’t believe you! I wouldn’t believe you if you took a pair of wings (detachable patent), like what the Pasbas--there’s a stunnin’ creature!--sports in the new Opera Bally as the ‘Sylph of the Silver Sham’--no, dammy!--that ain’t it! ‘Sylph of the Silver Strand’--out of your safe, and a harp and a crown out of the corner-cupboard by the fireplace”--a rusty, narrow fireplace, with a bent poker thrust in between the bars of the niggardly grate that had a smoking lump of coal in it--“and showed me,” said Morty, with a gleam of imagination, “your first-class diploma as a qualified practicing Angel! And so you know!”

He poked Thompson Jowell in the meaty ribs that were covered by his gorgeous waistcoat, and though the hidden thorn rankled more and more, and though allusions to the personage mentioned seemed to savor of irreligion, the great man’s brow relaxed, and he chuckled, as he rattled the money in the tills of his big trouser-pockets.

“And how goes the learning, Morty, with the reverend gentleman at Norwood? Does he seem to have his trade as Tutor at his fingers’ ends? Does he push you on and prepare you? coach you and generally cram you with the things you ought to be master of? As a young fellow of means and expectations--who will shortly (or great people break promises!)--hold a Commission in Her Majesty’s Foot Guards?”

“Oh, Lord!” groaned Morty. “Don’t he, though?”

“This friend of yours you’ve brought with you is a swell, it seems?” resumed his father.

“Lord Adolphus Noddlewood ... I believe you, Gov!” returned the son, screwing up his round, young, foolish face into an expression of portentous knowingness. “Eldest son of the Marquess of Crumphorn--ain’t that the tip-top thing?”

“Eldest son of the Marquess of Crumphorn! We’ll look him up in the Peerage presently, or your mother shall--that’s the sort of thing a woman enjoys doing,” said Thompson Jowell, rather viciously, “and that keeps her from grizzling and groaning, and thinking herself an invalid.”

“How is my mother, sir?” asked the son, with a shade of resentment at the other’s slighting tone.

“She’s pretty much the same as usual,” said Thompson Jowell sourly, and ceased to puff himself out to double his natural size, and left off rattling the tills in his trousers, “or she was when I left her early this morning. A decent, worthy sort of woman, your mother,” he added, snorting, “without any spirit or go in her. And as for setting off fine clothes and jewels, as the wife of a man in My position ought to--you might as well hang ’em on a pump. Indeed, you’d show ’em off to more advantage, because a pump can’t retire into the background with a Dorcas work-basket and a Prayer-Book, and generally efface itself. It stops where it is,--and if it ain’t a rattler as regards conversation, people do get some kind of response from it, if they’re at the trouble of working the handle. Now, your mother----”

“My mother, sir, is as good company and as well worth looking at--in fine clothes or shabby ones--as any lady in the land!” said Morty. “I’m dam’ if she ain’t!” And so red and angry a light shone in the round brown eyes that were generally dull and lusterless, and so well-developed a scowl sat on the rather pimply forehead, from which the tall shaggy white beaver stove-pipe of the latest fashion was jovially tilted back, that Thompson Jowell changed the conversation rather hurriedly.

“Well, well! perhaps she is!” he agreed, in rather a floundering manner. “And if her own son didn’t think so, who should? Run down to Market Drowsing and see her as soon as you’re able. She won’t come up to Hanover Square before the beginning of May. Give her compliments, along with mine, to the Honorable and Reverend Alfred de Gassey and Lady Alicia Brokingbole. There’s a thorough-paced nob for you, the Honorable and Reverend! And his wife! The genuine hallmarked Thing, registered and stamped--that’s what she is!”

He referred in these terms of unqualified admiration to a needy sprig of nobility who had held a commission in a Cavalry regiment; and, having with highly commendable rapidity run through a considerable fortune, had exchanged, some years previously, at the pressing instance of his creditors, the Army for the Church, and a family living which fell vacant at a particularly appropriate moment. And, having married another slip of the aristocracy as impecunious as himself, the Reverend Alfred had hit upon the philanthropic idea of enlarging his clerical stipend and benefiting Humanity at large, by receiving under his roof two or three young gentlemen of backward education and large fortune, who should require to be prepared for the brilliant discharge of their duty to their Sovereign and their country, as subaltern officers of crack regimental corps.

* * * * *

Not that preparation was essential in those days, when Army Coaches were vehicles as rare as swan-drawn water-chariots; and the cramming-establishments that were some years later to spring up like mushrooms on Shooter’s Hill or Primrose Hill, or in the purlieus of Hammersmith or Peckham, were unknown. Ensigns of Infantry, or cornets of Cavalry Regiments, joined their respective corps without having received the ghost of a technical military education; often without possessing any knowledge whatever beyond a nodding acquaintance with two out of the three R’s.... Mathematics, Fortification, French and German, were not imparted by the Honorable and Reverend Alfred to his wealthy pupils, for the simple reason that he, the instructor, was not acquainted with these. But in Boxing, Fencing, Riding, the clauses of the Code of Honor regulating the Prize Ring and the dueling-ground, not to mention the rules governing the game of Whist, at which the Reverend Alfred always won; he was a very fully-qualified tutor. And his wife, the Lady Alicia Brokingbole, youngest daughter of the Earl of Gallopaway, initiated the more personable of the young gentlemen into the indispensable art of handing chairs, winding Berlin wools, giving an arm to a lady, copying sweet poems from the Forget-Me-Not or The Keepsake into her album, and generally making themselves useful and agreeable. Nor was the Lady Alicia averse to a little discreet flirtation, or a little game of piquet, or a little rubber of whist, at which, like the Reverend Alfred, she invariably won. It will be comprehended that, provided the bear-cub who came to Norwood to be licked into shape were rich, the said cub might spend a fairly pleasant time; and be regaled with a good deal of flattery and adulation, mixed with chit-chat, gossip, and scandal, of the most aristocratic and exclusive kind.

* * * * *

“She’s a spankin’ fine woman, is Lady Alicia,” agreed Morty, with the air of a connoisseur, “though a dam’ sight too fond of revokin’ at whist with pound points to suit my book!” he added, with a cloud upon the brow that might have been more intellectual.

“But she’s an Earl’s daughter!--an Earl’s daughter, Morty, my boy!” urged Thompson Jowell; “and moves in high Society, the very highest--or so I have been given to understand.”

“Correct, too. Knows everybody worth knowin’--got the entire Peerage and Court Circular at her finger-ends,” declared simple Morty. “I drove her four-in-hand from Norwood to the Row only yesterday. Gaw! You should have seen us! Bowin’ right and left like China Manda--what-do-you-call-’ems?--to the most tre-menjous nobs (in coroneted carriages, with flunkeys in powder and gold lace) you ever clapped your eyes on! And you ought to hear her tell of the huntin’ supper she sat down to at her cousin’s castle in Bohemia--the chap’s an Austrian Prince with a name like a horse’s cough. Four-and-forty covers, two Crowned Heads, five Hereditary Grand-Dukes with their Duchesses, a baker’s dozen of Princes, and for the rest, nothin’ under a Count or Countess, ‘until, Mr. Jowell,’ she says, ‘you arrived at Alfred, who would grace any social circle, however lofty, and poor little humble Me!’ And they played a Charade afterwards, and Lady Alicia had no jewels to wear in the part of Cleopatra, ‘having chosen,’ she says, ‘to wed for Love rather than Ambition.’ And the Prince had an iron coffin brought in--or was it a copper?--cram-jam-full of diamonds and rubies as big as pigeons’ eggs, and told her ladyship to take what she chose. ‘Gaw! those sort of relatives are worth havin’! Shouldn’t mind a few of ’em myself!’ says I to Lady A.”

“That’s the sort of woman to cultivate, Morty, my boy!” advised Thompson Jowell, smiling and rubbing his hands. “With a little managing and cleverness, she ought to get you into the swim. The Goldfish Tank, I mean, where the titled heiresses are. You represent Money, solid Money!--but what we want--to set our Money off, is Rank! And the men of the British Aristocracy are easy enough to get at, and easy enough to get on with, provided you don’t happen to tread on their damned exclusive corns. But their women, confound ’em!--their high-nosed, long-necked women--they’re as hard to get on a level of chatty equality with as Peter Wilkins’ flying females were; and the mischief of it is, my boy, you can’t do without their good word. So cultivate Lady A! Wink at her cheating at cards--it’s in the blood of all these tip-top swells--and get her to take you about with her. And one of these days we may be hearing how Lady Rosaline Jowell, second daughter of the Earl, or the Marquess, or the Duke of Something-or-other, was Presented, on her marriage with Mr. Mortimer Jowell, of the Foot Guards; and what sort of figure her husband cut at the Prince’s Levée. And, by Gosh! though I don’t keep a coffer full of diamonds as big as pigeons’ eggs in my safe, we’ll see what Bond Street can do in the way of a Tiara for the head, and a Zone for the waist, and a necklace and bracelets of the biggest shiners that can be got, for her Ladyship, Thompson Jowell’s daughter-in-law! And what I say I’ll do, I do! My name’s Old Trusty, ain’t it, Morty boy?”

His round eyes goggled almost appealingly at his son.

“And if I’m--what you say--a bit of a Squeezer as regards making people pay; and a bit of a Grinder--though that I don’t admit--at driving hard bargains; and Mister Sharp of Cutters’ Lane when it comes to getting the best of So-and-So, and Such-and-Such--who’d cheerfully skin me alive, only give ’em the chance of it--you’re the last person in the world, Morty, who ought to throw it in my face.”

He spoke with almost weeping earnestness; there were blobs of moisture in the corners of his eyes; his blustering Boreas-voice was almost soft and pleading as Thompson Jowell bid for the good opinion of his son. “Not that I reproach you,” was the refrain of his song, “but you ought to be the last!”

“Old Gov!” The large young man repeated his previous action of taking Thompson Jowell by his fleshy shoulders with the extra-sized hands, encased in the lemon kid gloves, and pleasantly shaking him backwards and forwards, as though he had been a large, plain, whiskered doll.

“There’s the Commission in the Guards, Morty. You wouldn’t believe--having set my heart on making a first-class gentleman of my boy--what an uncommon sight of trouble I’ve taken to bring that sealed paper with Her Majesty’s signature on it, down from the sky-high branch it hangs on! His Honor the Commissary-General kept his word in presenting me to my Lord Dalgan, His Grace the Commander-in-Chief’s confidential Secretary, yesterday, and after a little general chit-chat, I felt my way to a hint, for we must be very humble with such great folks,” said Thompson Jowell, rattling the tills, “and watch for times and opportunities. My Lord was very high and lofty with me, as you may suppose.... ‘So you have a son, Mr. Thompson Jowell,’ says he. ‘I congratulate you, my dear sir, on having done your duty to Posterity. And it is your ambition that this young man should enjoy the privilege of wearing Her Majesty’s uniform? Well, well! We will see what we can do with His Grace, Mr. Thompson Jowell, towards procuring the young gentleman an ensigncy in some regiment of infantry.’ ‘Humbly thanking you, my Lord,’ says I, ‘for the gracious encouragement you have given to a man who might be called by persons less grand, and noble, and generous-minded than your Lordship, an ambitious tradesman;--since you permit me to speak my mind’--and he bows over his stock in his stiff-necked, gracious way--‘I dare to say I fly higher for my boy,’ says I, ‘than a mere marching regiment. And what I have set my heart upon, and likewise my son his, is, plainly speaking, a Commission in the Foot Guards, White Tufts or Cut Red Feathers.’ Up go his eyebrows at that, Morty, and he taps with his shiny nails--a real nobleman’s nails--on the carved arm of his chair, smiling. ‘Really, Mr. Thompson Jowell’--and he leans back and throws his foot over his knee, showing the Wellington boot with gold spurs and the white strap of the pearl-gray trouser--‘ambition is, to a certain extent, laudable and to be encouraged. But at the same time, permit me to say that you do fly high!’ ‘Begging your Lordship’s leave once more,’ says I, ‘to speak out--and Plain’s my name and nature!--I have come to beg the greatest nobleman in the land to make a hay-and-straw-and-flour merchant’s son a gentleman. A word in the ear of His Grace, the Duke, and a stroke of your pen will do it, my Lord,’ I says; ‘and when I find myself in the presence of a power as lofty and as wide as yours, and am graciously encouraged to ask a favor, I don’t ask a little one that a lesser influence could grant. I plump for the Guards, and your Lordship can but refuse me!’”

“You clever old Codger! Rubbin’ him down with a wisp of straw, and ticklin’ him in all the right places.... But look here, you know!” objected Morty, with a darkening brow, “I don’t half cotton to all that patter about making a gentleman of a merchant’s son. Egad, sir, I’m dam’ if I do like it!”

He sat upon the knee-hole table and folded his arms upon his waistcoat, a garment of brown velvet embroidered with golden sprigs, worn in conjunction with a satin cravat of dazzling green, peppered with scarlet horseshoes and adorned with pins of Oriental pearl; and blew out his round cheeks quite in the paternal manner as he shook his bullet head.

“You mustn’t mind a bit of humble-pie, my boy!” pleaded Thompson Jowell, “seeing what a great thing is to be got by eating it, and looking as if you liked it. You don’t suppose I’m any fonder of the dish than you are--but it’s for my son’s sake; and so, down it goes! These stately swells will have you flatter ’em, stiff-necked, and fawn upon ’em, and lick their boots for ’em. They were born to have men cringe to ’em, and by Gosh, sir! can you stand upright and milk a cow at the same time? You can’t, and you know it!--so you squat and whistle to her, and down comes the milk between your fingers, squish!”

“I ain’t a dairymaid,” asserted Morty sulkily.

“Not you!” said Thompson Jowell, beaming on him fondly. “And when your old Governor’s willing to do the dirty work, why should you soil your hands?” His thick voice shook, and the tears stood in his goggle-eyes. “I’d lie down in the gutter so that those polished Wellingtons I spoke of just now should walk upon me dryshod--by Gosh, I would!” said Thompson Jowell--“if only I might get up again with golden mud upon me, to be scraped off and put away for you! Look here! You told your swell friend, Lord ’Dolph, your Governor was a generous bleeder. Well, so I am! I’ll fill your pail to-day.”

He whipped out his check-book, large and bulky like himself, and--Morty having condescendingly removed himself from the blotter--drew what that scion of his race was moved to term “a whacker” of a check. And sent him away gorged with that golden mud to which he had referred, and correspondingly happy; so that he passed through the larger, outer office, where seven pallid clerks were hard at work under the direction of a gray-faced elderly man who inhabited a little ground-glass-paneled sentry-box opening out of their place of bondage, with “Manager” in blistered letters of black paint upon the door,--like a boisterous wind tinged with stables, cigars, and mixed perfumery, and shed some drops of his shining store on them in passing.

“Look here, you chaps! See what the Old Man’s stood me!” Morty flourished the pink oblong, bearing the magic name of Coutts’. Six of the seven pairs of eyes ravished from ledgers and correspondence, flared with desperate longing and sickened with impotent desire. Standish still kept his sea-green face downbent. And the gray Manager, peeping out of his glass case, congratulated as in duty bound.

“You’re in luck again, Mr. Mortimer!... May I hope we see you well, sir?”

“First rate, Chobley! Topping condition!” Morty stuffed the check with lordly carelessness into a pocket in the gold-sprigged velvet vest, withdrawing a little ball of crackly white paper, which he jovially displayed between a finger and thumb attired in lemon kid.

“Twig this, hey? Well, it shall mean a dinner at the Albion in Drury Lane for the lot of you ... and an evenin’ at the Play--if you ain’t too proud for the Pit? Leave your wives at home!” the young reprobate advised, with a wink; “you’re all too much married by a lot, hey, Chobley? And half-a-bottle of fizz apiece it ought to stand you in.... And see that beggar Standish drinks his share!... Catch!... Gaw!--what a butter-fingered beggar you are, Standish!”.... The paper insult, flipped at ghastly Standish’s lowered nose, smartly hit that feature, and rebounded into a letter-basket as Morty blustered out. The clerks looked at each other as the swing-doors banged and gibbered behind the young autocrat. They heard him hail Lord ’Dolph, heard the trampling and slipping of the tandem-horses’ hoofs upon the uneven pavement; heard Morty cheerfully curse the groom,--heard, too, the final “Gaw!” with which the heir of the house of Jowell clinched the news of his good luck with his Governor; the hiss and smack of the tandem-whip, and the departing clatter of the tilbury westwards, to those regions where golden-haired sirens smile upon young men with monkeys in their pockets; and white-bosomed waiters dance attendance on their pleasure in halls of dazzling light.

Then said the gray-faced Manager, breaking the silence:

“I suppose, gentlemen, we had better do as Mr. Mortimer so kindly suggested? I presume that no one here is averse to theatrical exhibitions, or objects to a good dinner, washed down with the half-bottle of champagne the young gentleman liberally mentioned?”

“I prefer port!” said the hitherto silent Standish, in so strange a voice it seemed as though another man had spoken.

“Do you, egad?” said a fellow-clerk sniggeringly. “Perhaps you’ll tell us why?”

“Because it is the color of blood,” the pale drudge answered. He dipped his pen in the red ink as he spoke, and dived into his ledger again, and the face he bent over the closely-figured pages was yellow and sharp as a wedge of cheese.

Chobley, the Manager, had looked sharply at Standish when he had given voice to that strange reason for preferring the thick red wine. He had respectfully smoothed out the crumpled five-pound note, and folded it into a broad flat spill, and he scraped the pepper-and-salt bristles of his chin with it thoughtfully as he took his eyes away from the downcast, brooding face; and very shortly afterwards took himself, upon a sufficient business-excuse, into Thompson Jowell’s room. And next morning Standish did not appear at the office in The Poultry, and thenceforwards the place upon the short-legged, horsehair-covered stool that had been his was occupied by another white-gilled toiler; and his frayed and ragged old black office coat vanished for good from its hook behind the door.

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XVI

The mental picture Dunoisse had formed of the surroundings of Miss Smithwick turned out to be pleasantly remote from the reality.

The Hospice for Sick Governesses was a tall, prim, pale-faced family mansion in Cavendish Street, London, West, whose neat white steps led to a dark green door with a bright brass plate and a gleaming brass knocker, through a wide hall hung with landscape-paintings of merit and fine old engravings in black frames, up a softly-carpeted staircase to an airy, cheerful bedroom on the second floor, where with birds and fragrant flowers, and many little luxuries about her to which poor Smithwick in her desperate battle with adversity had for long been a stranger, the simple gentlewoman, grown a frail, white-haired, aged woman, lay in a pretty chintz-curtained bed, whose shining brasswork gave back the ruddy blaze of a bright wood fire, listening to the quiet voice of a capped, and caped, and aproned nurse, who sat on a low chair beside her, reading from a volume that lay upon her knee.

Dunoisse, from the doorway, to which he had been guided by an elderly woman, similarly capped, and caped, and aproned, and evidently prepared for the arrival he had announced by letter to his poor old friend, took in the scene before patient or nurse had become aware of his presence.

The voice that read was one of the rare human organs that are gifted to make surpassing melody of common ordinary speech. Soft, but distinct, through the dull roar of London traffic in the street below, every syllable came clearly. And the shabby leather-bound volume with the tarnished gilt clasps brought back old memories of Dunoisse’s childhood. From its sacred pages he had been taught the noble English of Tyndale, following the traveling crochet-hook of simple Smithwick from Gospel text to text; and the words that reached him now had thus been made familiar; and they told of Heavenly pity and love for sorrowful, earth-born, Divinely-endowed humanity, and counseled brave endurance of the sufferings and sorrows of this world, for the sake of One all-sinless, Who drank of its bitter cup and wore its crown of thorns long, long before our stumbling feet were set upon its stony ways....

Dunoisse’s elderly guide had turned away at the urgent summons of a bell, after knocking at the partly-open door and signing to the visitor to step across the threshold. He had waited there, listening to the soft, melodious cadences of the voice that read, for some moments before his presence was perceived. Then, his poor old friend cried out his name in a tremulous flutter of delight and agitation, and Dunoisse crossed the soft carpets to her bedside, and took her thin hand, and kissed her wrinkled forehead between the scanty loops of her gray hair. And the capped, and caped, and aproned nurse who had been reading, and had risen and closed the Book, and laid it noiselessly aside upon a table at the first moment of Miss Smithwick’s recognition, said to him:

“The patient must not be over-excited, sir. You will kindly ring for assistance should she appear at all faint.”

Then she went, with an upright carriage and step that rather reminded the visitor of the free, graceful gait of Arab women, out of the room, soundlessly shutting the door behind her.

“I did not tell her you were coming.... I so much wished that you should see her!... Dearest Hector! My own sweet Madame Dunoisse’s beloved boy!” poor Smithwick tittered, and Hector kindly soothed her, being nervously mindful of the nurse’s warning, the while she held his strong, supple, red hand in both her frail ones, and gazed into the man’s face, wistfully looking for the boy.

He was not conscious of the old uncomfortable shrinking from poor Smithwick. Her nose was not so cold; her little staccato, mouselike squeaks of emotion were missing. Most of her sentimentalities and all of her affectations had fallen away from her with her obsolete velvet mantles and queer old trinkets, fallals of beads, and hair, and steel, and the front of brown curls that deceived nobody, and never even dreamed of trying to match the scanty knob behind. The honest, genuine, affectionate creature that she was and had always been, shone forth now.... For Death is a skillful diamond-cutter who grinds and slices flaws and blemishes away, and leaves, although reduced in size, a gem of pure unblemished luster, worthy to be set in Heaven’s shining floor.

And now he was to learn the reason of her harsh dismissal, and to respect her worth yet more. She charged him with her affectionate humble duty to his father....

“Who, I trust, has long since pardoned me for what he well might deem presumption in venturing to judge his actions, and question his”--Smithwick hemmed--“strict adherence to the--shall I call it compact?--made with your dear mother, at the time when she conceived it her duty to resume the religious habit she had discarded under the influence of--of a passion, Hector, which has made many of my sex oblivious to the peculiar sacredness of vows.” She added, reading no clear comprehension of her meaning in the brilliant black eyes that looked at her: “I refer to the Marshal’s unsuccessful attempt to obtain from His Serene Highness the Hereditary Prince of Widinitz recognition, and”--she hesitated--“acceptance of--yourself, dear boy, as the--in point of fact--the legitimate heir to his throne!”

“Can my father have conceived such a thing possible?” said Dunoisse, doubting if he had heard aright. “Can he have courted insult, rebuff, contempt, by making such an approach? Think again, dear friend! Is it not possible you may be mistaken? No hint of any such proceeding on my father’s part has ever been breathed to me. I beg you, think again!”

Miss Smithwick shook her head and sighed, and said that there was no mistake at all about it. She had received her dismissal for--it might be presumptuously--venturing to expostulate, when the public prints made the matter a subject for discussion. It had been going on for some time previously; the comments of the principal newspapers of Widinitz, and of the leading Press organs of Munich and Berlin were largely quoted in the Paris journals which had enlightened Smithwick on the subject of her patron’s plans. The cuttings she had preserved. They were in her desk, there upon the little table. Hector might see them if he would.... Her thin fingers hunted under the velvet-covered flaps of the absurd little old writing-box that her old pupil handed her; she followed the movements of the well-made manly figure in the loosely-fitting gray traveling-suit, with fond, admiring eyes. A blush made her old cheeks quite pink and young as she said:

“Forgive me, dear Hector!--but you have grown so handsome.... Has ... has no beautiful young lady told you so? With her eyes, at least, since verbally to commend the personal appearance of a gentleman would be unmaidenly and unrefined.”

“You have lived too long out of France to remember, dear friend,” said Hector, showing his small, square white teeth in a laugh of heart-whole amusement, “that young ladies, with us, are not supposed to have eyes at all!”

He forgot meek Smithwick for a moment, remembering an Arab girl at Blidah who had seemed to love him.... Adjmeh had been very pretty, with the great blue-black dewy eyes of a gazelle, and the hoarse cooing voice of a dove, despite the little indigo lilies and stars tattooed on her ripe nectarine-colored cheeks; on the backs of her slender, red-tipped hands, and upon the insteps of her slim arched feet, dyed also with henna; their ankles tinkling with little gold and silver coins and amulets, threaded on black silk strings similar to those bound about her tiny wrists, and plaited into the orthodox twenty-five tresses of her night-black hair....

Ah, yes! though at twenty she would be middle-aged, at thirty a wrinkled hag, Adjmeh was very pretty--would be for several years to come.... Who might be telling her so at that particular moment?... Dunoisse wondered, and then the conjured-up perfumes of sandal and ambergris grew faint; the orange glow of the African sunset faded from the flat, terraced roof of the little house at Blidah, the tinkle of the Arab tambur was nothing but the ring of a London muffin-man’s bell--and Miss Smithwick was tendering him a little flat packet of yellowed clippings from the Monarchie, the National, the Presse, the Patrie....

Taking these with a brief excuse, Dunoisse moved to the window, and the cold gray light of the February morning fell upon the face that--conscious of the mingled anger and humiliation written upon it--he was glad to hide from the invalid. Recollections were buzzing in his ears like angry wasps, roused by the poking of a stick into their habitation, and each one had its separate sting. It is not agreeable to be compelled to despise one’s father, and the last shred of the son’s respect fell from him as he read.

The chief among the Paris newspapers from which the cuttings had been taken, bore the date of a day or two previous to that old boyish duel at the Technical School of Military Instruction. The conversation occurring between the Duke and his guests, which, as repeated by de Moulny, had produced the quarrel, had undoubtedly arisen through discussion of these.

Press organs of Imperial convictions upheld the action of the Marshal, denounced the policy of the reigning Prince of Widinitz, in rejecting the pretensions of his daughter’s son, as idiotic and unnatural in an elderly hereditary ruler otherwise destitute of an heir. Legitimist journals sneered. Revolutionary prints heaped scorn upon the man, sprung from homely Swiss peasant-stock, who sought to aggrandize himself by degrading his son. The satirical prints had squibs and lampoons ... the Charivari published a fearful caricature of the Marshal, in his gorgeous, obsolete, Imperial Staff uniform, tiptoe on the roof of the Carmelite Convent of Widinitz in the attempt to reach down the princely insignia dangling temptingly above him, whilst the aureoled vision of Ste. Térèse vainly expostulated with the would-be marauder from clouds of glory overhead. The Monarchie quoted at length an article from a leading Munich newspaper. Judge whether or no the reader went hot and cold.

“We cannot sufficiently pity the son of the high-bred, misguided, repentant lady, doomed in the green bough of inexperienced youth to be the tool of an unprincipled and unscrupulous adventurer, the handful of mud flung in the face of a Bavarian Catholic State, whose rulers have for centuries rendered to Holy Mother Church the most profound respect, and the most duteous allegiance.”

“Nom d’un petit bonhomme!...”

The old, boyish, absurd expletive hissed impotently on the glowing coals of the man’s fierce indignation, quenching them not at all. The writer continued:

“He who thought little of dragging the pallet from under the dying peasant, whose greed has locked and bolted the doors of the Carmelite House of Mercy in the faces of the sick and suffering poor, now lays desecrating hands upon the princely mantle, covets the hereditary and feudal scepter for his base-born son, adding to the impudent dishonesty of the Swiss innkeeper the vulgar braggadocio and swaggering assurance of the paid hireling of the Corsican usurper, who dared to mount the sacred throne of St. Louis; who presumed to adulterate with the plebeian blood of a Beauharnais the patrician tide flowing in the veins of a daughter of the reigning House of Wittelsbach.”

Dunoisse’s face was not pleasant to see, as, perusal ended, he set his small white teeth viciously upon his lower lip, and, breathing vengeance upon unknown offenders through his thin, arched nostrils, scowled menacingly at the smug-faced, genteel houses on the opposite side of Cavendish Street. His father’s boast about the “blood royal” came back to him, and that “fine Serene Highness” the Marshal had promised those good people of Widinitz. Ah! what an infamy the whole thing had been! But at least one might count it buried; forgotten like these perishing strips of discolored, brittle paper. That was something to be thankful for.

He cleared his forehead of its thunder-clouds, and turned back towards the bed, but something of the ordeal of shame he had passed through was written on his face for Smithwick, in spite of the smile with which he dressed it, as he silently laid the yellowed fold of cuttings on the coverlet near her hand.

“They--they have given you pain?” faltered the poor lady.

“It is past and over, dear friend. These paragraphs have cleared up something that was obscure to me before,” said Dunoisse--“conveyed a hint of his that was never again made. One cannot pretend to judge him. He has always been a law unto himself.”

The bitterness of the words, and the ironical smile that curved the speaker’s lips as he uttered them, were lost upon the simple woman who answered:

“I have always felt that. There are characters so highly elevated above the crowd of ordinary individuals, that one can hardly expect them to be influenced by the ordinary considerations, the commonplace principles that guide and govern the rest of us----”

“Fortunately for ourselves!” interpolated Dunoisse.

“--That, my dear, we who know ourselves their inferiors in intellect, as in personal advantages, cannot pretend to judge them,” finished the poor lady.

“And in proportion with the baseness of their motives and the mean selfishness of their aims,” said Dunoisse, “the admiration of their more moral and upright fellow-creatures would appear to be lavished upon them.”

“Too true, I fear, my dear Hector,” admitted Miss Smithwick, flushing inside the neat frills that bordered her cap. “But had you beheld your father in the splendor of his earlier years, you would”--she coughed--“have perhaps regarded the devotion with which it was his fate to inspire persons of the opposite sex, with greater leniency and tolerance.”

“How did his path cross my mother’s?” asked Dunoisse, amused, in spite of himself, at the unremitting diligence with which the Marshal’s faithful votary availed herself of every opportunity that presented itself, to spread a brushful of gilding on her battered idol. “I have often wondered, but never sought to learn.”

“During the last years of the Emperor Napoleon’s sequestration at St. Helena, my dear, your father, chafing at the lack of public appreciation which his great talents should have commanded, and his distinguished martial career certainly had earned, found distraction and interest in traveling as a private gentleman through the various countries he had visited in a less peaceful character. And, during a visit to the country estate of a Bavarian nobleman, whose acquaintance he had made during--unless I err--the second campaign of Vienna, as the result of one of those accidents which so mold our after-lives, Hector, that one cannot doubt that Destiny and Fate conspire to bring them about, he crossed your mother’s path.”

“To her most bitter sorrow and her son’s abiding shame!” commented Dunoisse, but not aloud.

“There is, or was, in the neighborhood of Widinitz--I speak of the capital of the Bavarian Principality of that name,” went on Miss Smithwick, “a House of Mercy--under the management of nuns of the Carmelite Order, whose Convent adjoins the Hospital--now closed in consequence of the withdrawal from its Endowment Fund of a sum so large that the charitable institution was ruined by its loss.”

Hector knew well who had brought about the ruin. He sat listening, and kept his eyes upon the carpet, lest the fierce wrath and scathing contempt that burned in them should discompose the Marshal’s faithful partisan.

“One day in the autumn of 1820,” said Miss Smithwick--“the Prince having ridden out early with all his Court and retinue to hunt--a gentleman was brought to the Widinitz House of Mercy on a woodman’s cart. He had been struck upon the forehead and thrown from his saddle by an overhanging branch as he rode at full speed down a forest road. The Hunt swept on after the boar-hounds--the insensible man was found by two peasants and conveyed to the Hospital, as I have said. The nun in charge of the Lesser Ward--chiefly reserved for the treatment of accidents, my dear, for there were many among the peasants and woodcutters, and quarrymen, and miners--and to meet their great need the House of Mercy, had been founded by a former Prioress of the Convent--the nun in charge was Sister Térèse de Saint Francois....”

“My mother. Yes?...”

Dunoisse had spoken in a whisper. His eyes shunned gentle Smithwick’s. He sat in his old, boyish attitude leaning forwards in his chair, his clasped hands thrust downwards between his knees; and those hands were so desperately knotted in the young man’s fierce, secret agony of shame and anger, that the knuckles started, lividly white in color, against the rich red skin.

“There is no more to tell, my dear!” said Miss Smithwick. “You can conceive the rest?”

“Easily!” said Dunoisse. “Easily! And, knowing what followed, one is tempted to make paraphrase of the Scripture story. Had the Samaritans passed by and left the wounded man to what you have called Fate and Destiny, the cruses of oil and wine would not have been drained and broken, the House of Mercy would not have been ransacked and gutted; its virgin despoiled--its doors barred in the faces of the dying poor.” He laughed, and the jarring sound of his mirth made his meek hearer tremble. “It is a creditable story!” he said, “a capital story for one to hear who bears the name he so willingly makes stink in the nostrils of honorable men. For if I have Carmel in my blood--to quote his favorite gibe--I have also his. And it is a terrible inheritance!”

“Oh! hush, my dear! Remember that he is your father!” pleaded poor Smithwick.

“I cannot forget it,” said Dunoisse, smiling with stiff, pale lips. “It is a relationship that will be constantly brought home. When I see you lying here, and know what privations you must have endured before the charitable owners of this house opened its doors to you, and realize that his were shut because you strove to open his eyes to the precipice of shame towards which his greed and ambition were hurrying him, blindly, I ask myself whether, with such Judas-blood running in my own veins, and such a heritage of gross desires and selfish sensuality as it must bring with it!--whether it be possible for me, his son, to live a life of cleanliness and honor? And the answer is----”

“Oh! yes, my dear!” cried the poor creature tearfully. “With the good help of God! And have you not been honorable and brave, Hector, in refusing any portion of--that money?” She added, meeting Dunoisse’s look of surprise: “Do you wonder how it is I know? Your father wrote and told me--it is now years ago--I hope you will not blame him!--though the letter was couched in terms of reproach that wounded me cruelly at the time....” Smithwick felt under her pillow for her handkerchief and dried her overflowing eyes.

“What charges did he bring against you?” Dunoisse asked, controlling as best he could the contempt and anger that burned in his black eyes, and vibrated in his voice.

“He said I had revenged myself for the withdrawal of his patronage, and my removal from his service,” gulped poor Smithwick, “by poisoning the mind of his only child! He complained that you refused to touch a franc of his money--preferring to work your way upwards under heavy disadvantages, rather than accept from him, your father, any portion of the fortune he had always meant should be yours. And”--she put her handkerchief away and nodded her head in quite a determined manner--“I wrote back and told him, Hector--that I esteemed your course of conduct, though my counsels had not inspired it; and that your mother, when she learned of your determination, would be proud of her noble son!”

Dunoisse would have spoken here, but Smithwick held up her thin hand and stopped him.

“For it seems to me, dear child of my dearest mistress, that to take what has been given to God, is the way to call down the just judgment of Heaven upon the heads of those who are guilty of such deeds,” said Smithwick, nodding her mild gray head emphatically. “And, rather than live in gilded affluence upon those funds, wrested from the coffers of the Carmelite House of Charity at Widinitz, I would infinitely prefer to carry on existence--as I have done, dear Hector--until my health failed me in my attic room at Hampstead, on a penny roll a day. And she would uphold me and agree with me.”

“Who is she, dear friend?” asked Hector, smiling, though his heart was sore within him at the picture of dire need revealed in these utterances of the simple lady.

“I speak of our Lady Superintendent.... A remarkable personality, my dear Hector, if I may venture to say so.... It was she who, finding this benevolent charity suffering from mismanagement and lack of funds, endowed it with a portion of her large fortune, induced other wealthy persons to subscribe towards endowing the foundation with a permanent income, and, finding no trustworthy person of sufficient capacity to fill the post, herself assumed the duties of Resident Matron. Imagine it, my dear!” said gentle Smithwick. “At her age--for she is still young--possibly your senior by a year or two, certainly not more--to forego Society and the giddy round of gilded pleasure to be found in London and dear, dear Paris!-- for the humdrum routine of a Hospital; the training and management of nurses; the regulation of prescriptions, diets, and accounts!”

“Indeed! A vocation, one would say!” commented Dunoisse.

“She would ask you,” returned Miss Smithwick, “must one necessarily be a nun to work for the good of others?”

The words stirred a dim recollection in Dunoisse of having heard them before. But the image of the Lady Superintendent of the Hospice for Sick Governesses formed itself within his mind. He saw her as a plain, sensible, plump little spinster, well advanced towards the thirties, resigned to exchange hopeless rivalries with other young women, not only rich, but pretty, for undivided rule and undisputed sway over a large household of dependents.... preferring the ponderous compliments of Members of Visiting Committees to the assiduities of impecunious Guardsmen and money-hunting detrimentals. He said, as the picture faded:

“This lady who has been so kind to you----”

“‘Kind.’... The word is feeble, my dear Hector, to express her unbounded goodness,” declared Miss Smithwick. “I can but say that in the midst of sickness, and dire poverty, and other distresses that I will not further dwell on, she came upon me like an Angel from the Heaven in which I firmly believe. And when I lay down my head, never to lift it up again--and I think, my dear, the time is not far off now!--that great and solemn hour that comes to all of us will be cheered and lightened, Hector, if she stands beside my pillow and holds my dying hand.”

The simple sincerity of the utterance brought tears into the listener’s eyes. He winked them back, and said:

“I pray the day you speak of may not dawn for years! My leave, procured with difficulty owing to threatening national disturbances which the Army may be employed in quelling, extends not beyond three days. I shall hope to see this lady, and thank her for her goodness to my friend before I go.”

“I trust she will permit it. She is very reticent--almost shrinking--in her desire to avoid recognition of her....”

Miss Smithwick broke off in the middle of her sentence. She leaned back upon her pillows, lividly pale, breathing hurriedly; her blue lips strove to say: “It is nothing. Don’t mind!”

Alarmed for her, repentant for having forgotten the nurse’s warning, Dunoisse grasped at the bell-rope by the fireplace, and sent an urgent summons clanging through the lower regions of the tall house. Within a moment, as it seemed, the door opened, admitting the capped, and caped, and aproned young woman who had been reading to the patient upon his arrival. A glance seemed to show her a condition of things not unexpected. She went swiftly to the bedside, answering, as Dunoisse turned to her appealingly, the words shaping themselves upon his lips that asked her: “Shall I go?”

“It will be best!... Wait at the end of the passage, near the window on the landing.... This looks alarming,” she answered--“but it will not last long.”

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XVII

She had forgotten him before the still pure air of the sick-room had ceased to vibrate with her spoken words. She saw nothing but the patient in need of her, and had passed her arm beneath the pillow and was raising the gray head, and had reached a little vial and a measuring-glass from a stand that was beside the bed, before Dunoisse had gained the door. It might have been five minutes later, as he contemplated a vista of grimy, leaded roofs, and cowled, smoke-vomiting chimney-pots, from the staircase-window at the passage-end, that he heard a light rustling of garments passing over the thick soft carpets, and she came to him, moving with the upright graceful carriage and the long, gliding step that had reminded him of the gait of the tall supple Arab women, whose slender, perfect proportions lend their movements such rhythmic grace. He said to her eagerly, as she stopped at a few paces from him:

“Mademoiselle, you see one who is gravely to blame for forgetfulness of your wise warning. I beg you, hide nothing from me!... Is my dear old friend in danger? Her color was that of Death itself.”

“There is always danger in cases of heart-disease.”

“Heart-disease.... She said no word to me upon the subject. But it is like her,” said Dunoisse, “to conceal her sufferings rather than distress her friends.”

“She has needed friends, and the help that prosperous friendship could have well afforded to bestow, believe me, sir, in these late years of uncomplaining want and bitter privation.”

The voice that spoke was sweet; Dunoisse had already recognized in it that quality. Barely raised above an undertone--presumably for the sake of other sufferers within the neighboring rooms that opened on the landing, from behind the shut doors of which came the murmur of voices, or the clinking of cups and saucers, or the sound of fires being poked,--this voice had in its clear distinctness the ring of crystal; and the fine edge of scorn in it cut to the sensitive quick of the listener. He started as he looked at her, meeting the calm and clear and steady regard of eyes that were blue-gray as the waters of her own English Channel, and seemed as cold....

For they condemned him and judged him, the rich man’s son, who had left the old dependent to the charity of strangers. His shamed blood tingled under his red-brown skin, as he said, with a resentful flash of his black eyes:

“That this good woman, the faithful guardian of my motherless boyhood, has suffered want, is to my bitter regret, to my abiding poignant sorrow, but not to my shame. A thousand times--no!”

He was so vivid and emphatic, as he stood speaking with his back to the window, that, with his foreign brilliancy of coloring, the slightness of form that masked his great muscular strength, the supple eloquence of gesture that accompanied and emphasized his clear and cultivated utterance, he seemed to glow against the background of rimy February fog, and London roofs and chimney-pots, as a flashing ruby upon gray velvet; as a South American orchid seen in relief against a neutral-tinted screen. His “No!” had a convincing ring; the lightning-flash of his black eyes was genuine fire, not theatrical; the woman who heard and saw had been born with the rare power of judging and reading men. Her broad white forehead cleared between the silken folds of her hair, pale nut-brown, with the gleam of autumn gold upon the edges of its thick waved tresses; the lowered arches of her brown eyebrows lifted and drew apart, smoothing out the fold between them; the regard of her blue-gray eyes ceased to chill; the delicate stern lines of her sensitive mouth relaxed. She knew he spoke the truth.

He saw a tall, slight, brown-haired woman in a plain and, according to the voluminous fashion of the time, rather scanty gown of Quakerish gray, protected by a bibbed white apron with pockets of accommodating size. A little cape of stuff similar to that of the gown covered her shoulders. Their beauty of line, like the beauty of the long rounded throat that rose above her collar of unadorned white cambric, the shapeliness of the arms that were covered by her plain tight sleeves, the slender rounded hips and long graceful proportions of the lower limbs, were enhanced rather than hidden by the simplicity of her dress; as the admirable shape and poise of the small rounded head was undesignedly set off by the simple, close-fitting, white muslin cap, with its double frill and broad falling lappets.

* * * * *

Her calmness seemed immobility, her silence indifference to Dunoisse. Her hands were folded upon her apron, her bosom rose and fell to the time of her deep even breathing, her steady eyes regarded him as he poured himself out in passionate denial, fierce repudiation of the odious stigma of ingratitude, but she gave no sign of having heard. She looked at him, and considered, that was all. He said, galled and irritated by her unresponsiveness:

“I should ask pardon of you, Mademoiselle, for my vehemence, incomprehensible to you and out of place here. What I seek is a private audience of the lady who is Directress of this charitable house. Would she favor me by granting it? I would promise not to detain her. Could you graciously, Mademoiselle----”

She said, with her intent eyes still reading him:

“I should tell you it is the rule of this house that no attendant in it should be addressed as ‘Mademoiselle,’ ‘Miss,’ or ‘Mrs.’ ... ‘Nurse’ is the name to which we all answer, and we try to deserve it well.”

Her smile wrought a radiant, lovely change in her that evoked his unwilling admiration. The pearl-white teeth it revealed shone brilliant in the light of it, and the dark blue-gray eyes flashed and gleamed like sapphires between their narrowed lids. But the next moment she stood before him as pale and grave as she had seemed to him before, with her white hands folded on her white apron.

“You do deserve that title, I am sure,” said Dunoisse, “if you minister to all your patients as kindly and as skillfully as to my poor friend there.” He added: “Forgive me, that I detain you here, when you may be needed by her bedside!”

He motioned towards the door of the room he had quitted, receiving answer:

“Do not be alarmed. Another nurse is with her. She was in the adjoining room; I called her to take charge before I came to you. And--you were desirous of an interview with our Superintendent here.... She sees few people, the nature of her responsibilities permitting little leisure.... I cannot bring you any nearer to her than you are now. But if you could trust me with the message you desire to send, or the explanation you wish to make, I will give you my promise that your exact words shall be conveyed to her. Will that do?”

Dunoisse bowed and thanked her, with some shadow of doubt upon his square forehead, a lingering hesitation in his tone.

“If you were older, Mademoiselle----” he began, forgetful of her injunction, as he hesitated before her. She looked at him, and her lips curved into their lovely smile again, and her blue-gray eyes were mirthful as she said:

“I am older than you are, M. Dunoisse. Does not that fact give you confidence?”

“It should,” returned Dunoisse, “if it were possible of credence.”

“Compliments are a currency that does not pass within these doors,” she answered, with a fine slight accent of irony and a tincture of sarcasm in her smile. “Keep yours for Society small-change in the salons of Paris or the drawing-rooms of Belgravia. They are wasted here.”

“I know but little,” said Dunoisse, “of the salons of London and Paris. Circumstances have conspired to shut the doors of Society, generally open to welcome rich men’s sons, as completely in my face as in that of any other ineligible. You will learn why, since you are so kind as to undertake to convey a message from me to the Superintendent of this house. It shall be as brief as I can make it. I would not willingly waste your time.”

She bent her head, and the high-bred grace perceptible in the slight movement appealed to him as exquisite. But he was too earnest in his desire for justification to be turned aside.

“Say to this lady whose charitable hand has lifted my dear old friend--from what depths of penury I only now begin to realize--that if she comprehends that I was a boy at a Military School, and ignorant, thoughtless, and selfish as boys are wont to be, when my good old governess was driven from the house that had been for years her home, and that her dismissal was so brought about that she seemed but to be leaving us upon a visit of condolence to a sick relative, she will judge me less harshly, regard me with less contempt than it may seem to her, now, I deserve!----”

His hearer stopped him:

“You should be told, M. Dunoisse, that all that can be said in your favor has been already said by Miss Smithwick herself. It never occurred to her to reproach you. Nor for her dismissal can you be blamed at all. But it has seemed to me that where there was ability to provide for one so tried and faithful, some effort should have been made in her behalf by you as you grew more mature, and the ample means that are placed at the disposal of a rich man’s son were yours to use. She never told you of her cruel need, I can guess that. But oh! M. Dunoisse! you might have read Hunger and Cold between the lines of the poor thing’s letters.”

There were tears in the great sorrowful blue-gray eyes. Her calm voice shook a little.

“If you had seen her as she was when I was sent to her,” she said, “you would feel as I do. True, a letter with a remittance from you came when she was nearly past needing any of the help it contained for her. But long, long before, you might have read between the lines!”

“Ah!--in the Name of Heaven, Mademoiselle, I pray you hear me!” burst out Dunoisse, catching at the carved knob of the baluster at the stair-head, and wringing it in the energy of his earnestness. “All that you suppose is true! Even before I came of age a large sum of money was placed at my disposal by my father. Over a million of our francs, forty-five thousand of your English sovereigns, lie to my credit in the bank, have so lain for years. May the hour that sees me spend a sou of that accursed money be an hour of shame for me, and bitterness and humiliation! And should ever a day draw near, that is to see me trick myself in dignities and honors stolen by a charlatan’s device, and usurp a power to which I have no more moral right than the meanest peasant of the State it rules--before its dawning I pray that I may die! and that those who come seeking a clod of mud to throw in the face of a Catholic principality, may find it lying in a coffin!”

He had forgotten that he addressed himself to a stranger, so wholly had his passion carried him away. He awakened to her now, seeing her recoil from him as though repelled by his vehemence, and then conquer her impulse and turn to him again.

“Pardon!” He held up his hand to check her as she was about to speak. “I speak, in my forgetfulness, of things incomprehensible to you. I employ names that are unmeaning. These have no part in the message I entreat you of your goodness to bear to the Superintendent of this house. Could it not be made clear to this lady, without baring to the vision of a stranger the disgrace of one whom I am bound to respect, and would that it were possible! Could it not be understood that this money was gained in a discreditable, vile, and shameful way? Could it not be understood that I shall never rest until it has been returned to the original source whence it was unjustly plundered and wrung? Could it not be made clear that while I was yet a boy I swore a solemn oath before Almighty God, at the instance of a friend--who afterwards cast me off and deserted me!--that this restitution should be made?... Might it not be explained that I have had nothing, since I took that oath, that was not earned by my own efforts? That I could take no holidays from the Technical School where I was a cadet, because I could not afford to buy civilian clothes, and that, until by good fortune I earned rewards and prizes and a period of free tuition at the Training Institute for Officers of the Staff--that many of my comrades deserved better, I do not doubt!--I was very, very poor, Mademoiselle! Would it not be possible?”

“Yes, yes!”--she answered him, and her pale cheeks had grown rosy as apple-blossoms, and her great gray-blue eyes were full of kindness now. “It shall all be explained. You shall be no longer blamed where you are praiseworthy, and reproached where you should be honored. And--two breaches of faith--a double perjury--are worse than one, though a lower standard of honor than yours would have taken your false friend’s desertion as a release. You have done well to keep your oath, M. Dunoisse, though he may have broken his.”

“I deserve no praise,” said Dunoisse, “and I desire none. I ask for justice--it is the right of every human soul; I beg you to repeat to this benevolent lady what I have said, and to tell her that I will be answerable for whatever charges she has been put to, for the medical attendance and support of my dear old friend, from to-day. It is a sacred duty which I will gladly take upon myself.”

“Forgive me,” said the listener, and her voice was very soft, “but would not this be a heavy tax on your resources?--a heavy drain upon your slender means?”

He listened, with his black eyes seeming to study an engraving that hung upon the staircase wall. She ended, and he looked at her again.

“It would be a tax, and a drain under ordinary circumstances, but I think I can insure a way to meet the difficulty.... Is it possible that I may be permitted to say Adieu to my old friend before I leave this house? It will be necessary--now!--that I should return to France by the packet that sails to-night.”

He was more than ever like a slender ruddy flame as he glowed there against the dull background of marble-papered wall and foggy window-panes. His virile energy, the hard clear ring of his voice, the keen flash of his black eyes won her rare approval, no less than his reticence and his delicacy. Her own eyes were more than kind, though in the respect of his seeing Miss Smithwick again that day her decision was prohibitory. He bowed to the decision.

“Then you shall say Adieu and Au revoir to her for me,” he said, and held out his hand with a smiling look and a quick, impulsive gesture. “And for yourself, Mademoiselle, accept my thanks.”

He added, retaining the hand she had placed in his:

“You will not fail of your promise to repeat to Madame the Superintendent all that I have confided to you?”

“You have my word,” she answered him. “But of one thing I must warn you--if you send any money, she will send it back!”

“Name of Heaven!--why?” exclaimed Dunoisse.

“Because,” she said, with a slight fold between her arched brown eyebrows, “your friend has been accepted by the Committee as a permanent inmate here, and there is no lack of funds. I must really go now if you will be so good as to release me!”

Dunoisse was still jailer of the hand she had given, and his grip, unconsciously strenuous, was responsible for that fold of pain between the nurse’s eyebrows. He released the hand with penitence and distress, saying:

“I entreat you to forgive me if I have hurt this kind hand, that has alleviated so much pain, and smoothed the pillows of so many death-beds.” But his lips, only shaded by the little upward-brushed black mustache, had barely touched her fingers before she drew them gently from his, saying with a smile:

“There is no need for atonement, M. Dunoisse. As for this kiss upon my hand, I will transfer it with your message of farewell to your dear old governess. My good wishes will follow you with hers, wherever you may go!”

She was gone, moving along the passage and vanishing into a room half way down its length before a bell rang somewhere in the lower regions of the house, a voice spoke to Dunoisse, and he brought back his eyes, that had been questing in search of another, to see the capped and caped and aproned elderly woman, who had a round, brown smiling face, somewhat lined and wrinkled, smooth gray hair, and pleasant eyes of soft dark hazel, waiting to lead him downstairs as she had guided him up. To her he said, as she opened the street-door upon the foggy vista of Cavendish Street:

“Be so good, Madame, as to tell me the name of the Lady Superintendent here?”

The elderly attendant answered promptly:

“Merling, sir! Miss Ada Merling.”

Where had Dunoisse heard that name before? He racked his brain even as he said, with the smile that showed his small, square white teeth and made his black eyes gleam more brightly:

“I must be once more troublesome, if you will allow me. What is the name of the lady to whom I was talking just now?”

The elderly attendant answered, in precisely the same form of words:

“Merling, sir: Miss Ada Merling.”

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XVIII

The front-door of the Hospice for Sick Governesses in Cavendish Street had not long closed behind the retreating figure of a swarthy, black-eyed young foreign gentleman when the pleasant-faced elderly woman whose duty it was to answer its bell brought to the Lady Superintendent a card upon a little inlaid tray. She took the card and smiled.

“Tell Mr. Bertham that I will come down in a few minutes. And I hope you did not call him ‘Master Robert’ this time, Husnuggle?”

“I did, Miss Ada, love, as sure as my name’s a queer one, and him a Secretary of State at War.”

“He is not Secretary at War now, Husnuggle, though he may be again. Who can tell, when Governments are always changing and Cabinets being made and remade?”

“A-cabinet-making he went as a boy, and cut his fingers cruel, and the Wraye Abbey housekeeper fainted dead away at the sight of the blood, they said!--and the head-house-maid gave notice at being asked for cobwebs, which she vowed and declared not one were to be found in the place, though answer for attics how can you? And he had my name pat, Miss Ada, so soon as I answered the door. ‘Halloa, Husnuggle!’ he says; ‘so you’ve come up from Peakshire to help nurse the sick governesses?’ And I says: ‘Yes, Master Robert, and it’s like the good old times come back, to see your handsome, smiling face again.’ And you’ll come to him in a few minutes?”

“The minutes have passed, Husnuggle, while you have been talking. I am going down to Mr. Bertham now.”

She found him in a little ground-floor parlor, sacred to accounts and the semi-private interviews accorded by the Lady Superintendent to shabby-genteel visitors with hungry faces (growing still more wan as the tale of penury was told) and smartish visitors with impudent faces, apt to flush uncomfortably under the keen scrutiny of those blue-gray eyes. It was plainly but comfortably furnished, and a red fire glowed in its grate of shining steel, and a plump and sleek and well-contented cat dozed happily upon its hearthrug.

You saw Bertham as a tall, lightly-built man of barely thirty, with a bright, spirited, handsome face and a frank, gay, cordial manner. No trace of the pompousness of the ex-Secretary of State either in his appearance, voice or handshake: a warm and cordial grip was to be had from Bertham; or, in default of this, a brusque nod that said: “You are objectionable, and I prefer to keep clean hands!”

He was striding lightly up and down the little parlor, with the loose ends of his black satin cravat--voluminous, according to the fashion of the time--floating behind him; and each time he covered the distance from the hearthrug to the muslin-blinded window he would stop, look impatiently at his watch, and recommence his walk.

She said, standing in the doorway, watching him do this:

“You are not in a genuine hurry, or you would not be here at all.”

“Ada!” He turned with a look of glad relief, and as she noiselessly closed the door and came to meet him, he took both the womanly cordial hands she held out to him, and pressed them in his own. “It does one good to see you. It does one good even to know you anchored here in Cavendish Street, and not flying from Berlin to Paris, from Paris to Rome, from Rome to Heaven-knows-where--comparing foreign systems of Hospital management and sanitation with our own, and finding ours everywhere to be hopelessly out of date, and inferior, and wrong....”

“As it is!” she said--“And is it not time we knew it? so that we can prove those mistaken who say, ‘To be insular is to be strong, perhaps, but at the same time it is to be narrow-minded.’”

“Ah! Ada, Ada!” he said, and his sweet and mellow voice had sadness in it. “If we all lived up to your standard, the Millennium would have come, and Governments would cease from troubling, and War Secretaries would be at rest.”

“Are you not at rest just now?” she asked, and added, even before he shook his head: “But no! You are overworked; your face shows it.”

“Mary said so this morning,” he answered; “but if my looks pity me, as Peakshire folk would say, I feel fit and well.”

“Where is my Mary?” she asked. “Why have you not brought her?”

“Mary has flown down to Hayshire,” he said, “on the wings of the Portsmouth Express. One of the crippled children at the Home was to be operated on, under chloroform, for the removal of a portion of diseased hip-bone; and though my wife shrank from the ordeal of seeing pain, even dulled by the anæsthetic, she felt it was her duty to be upon the spot.”

“Dear Mary!” she said, and if Dunoisse had seen her face he would no longer have thought it lacking in warmth and color: “True, good, noble woman.”

Bertham answered, with feeling in his own face and voice:

“The dearest, living!... the noblest I ever knew--but one, Ada!”

She passed the words as though she had not heard, and said, with the soft, clear laugh that had music in it for the ears of those who loved her, and this man was one of the many:

“Husnuggle was made so happy by your not forgetting her, poor good soul!”

“Her face conjured up Wraye Rest,” he said, “and the yew-tree gateway between the park and the garden; and the green terraces with the apple-espaliers and the long borders of lavender-bushes; and Darth down at the bottom of the deep valley, foaming over her bed of limestone rock, and the steep paths down to the trout-pools that were easier to tread than the slippery ways of Diplomacy.”

“One can always go back!” she returned, though her sigh for all the distant sweetness had echoed his, “either to my dear Wraye Rest or your own peculiar Eden of Wraye Abbey.”

“Taking our respective loads of aims and ambitions and responsibilities with us,” said Bertham. “My badly-housed Military Invalid Pensioners for whom I want tight roofs, and dry walls, and comfortable beds. My Sandhurst Cadets, trussed up in absurd trappings, and harassed with rules as trumpery--hide-bound with conditions quite as detrimental to health as their cut-and-dried discipline, and innumerable supererogatory belts, straps, and buckles. My Regimental Schools, where illiterate soldiers and their wives are to learn to read and write and cipher; and my Infants’ Classes, where the soldier’s children may be taught as well. My Improved Married Quarters, which should--but do not, more’s the pity!--occupy a separate block in every Barracks in the Kingdom, where the women and their men may live in decent privacy, and not under conditions not at all distantly recalling--to our shame! and the Red Tapeism that preserves these conditions in their unadorned and ancient ugliness ought to blush the redder for it!--the primitive promiscuities of the Stone Age. With a distinct bias in favor of that period!”

* * * * *

His handsome face was bitter and dark with anger; his voice, though barely raised above the level of ordinary fireside chat, rang and vibrated with passionate indignation.

“It has been borne in on me, Ada, in God knows how many hours of weariness and bitter disappointment, that our Peninsular triumphs--achieved in what we are accustomed to call the good old days--are a heavy clog upon our advancement as a nation now, and a cloud upon our eyes. They were not good old days, Ada, as windbaggy orators like to call them; they were bad old days, inhuman old days, cruel old days, when Napoleon Bonaparte possessed France upon a bridal bed of bloody corpses; and ragged, underfed, untaught, unsheltered soldiers upheld, in what neglect, what misery and suffering, you and I can barely realize, amidst Famine and Slaughter and Pestilence and Devastation hideous and indescribable, the traditional glory of the British nation, the strength and fire and power of British Arms. Let us have done with the pride of those days! Let us cease to boast of them! Let us prove our advancement in Civilization, Humanity, and Science by no longer treating these our fellow-creatures as human pawns in a devilish game of chess, or as thoughtless children treat toy-soldiers; to be moved hither and thither at will, swept off the board when necessary, and jostled promiscuously into dark and stuffy boxes until we are pleased to call for them again! Since Great Britain owes so much to her Army and her Navy, let her treat the men who serve her by land and sea with respect, and decent consideration. And in so far as Governments and Administrations of the old days ignored their rights to honest, humane, and Christian usage, let us have done with those damned old days forever, and while the life is red in us, hurry on the new!”

“They cannot come too quickly!” she said, giving back his earnest look. “Surely by raising the moral tone, cultivating the mental faculties, and improving the social condition of the private soldier, he is nerved and tempered, not softened and unstrung.”

“As it is we owe him honor,” said Bertham, “that, with so many disadvantages as he labors under to-day, and in the face of the bad example too often set him as to moral conduct and neglect of duty by his superiors, he is what we know him to be!”

“Ah, that is true--most true!” she answered, breaking the silence in which she had sat listening to the silvery voice of which even Bertham’s enemies admitted the singular charm. “May the day soon dawn when we shall see him what we hope he will become!”

“There will be a dark night before its dawning,” Bertham returned, and his smile had sadness in its very brilliancy. “For England must lose much to win that more, be assured.”

He added as his look met hers, seeing the slight bewildered knitting of her eyebrows:

“There is a grand old white head nodding at the upper end of the Green Council Board at the War Office, or soundly sleeping, in the inner sanctum at the covered passage-end that has always been known as the office of the Commander-in-Chief,--that Britain, in her gratitude and loyal regard and tender reverence for its great owner,--and God forbid that I should rob him of one jot or tittle of what has been so gloriously won!--has left there long years since the brain within it became incapable, by the natural and inevitable decay of its once splendid faculties, of planning and carrying out any wholesome, needful reform in our Army’s organization--even of listening to those who have suggestions to offer, or plans to submit, with anything but an old man’s testy impatience of what seems new. This is deplored by personages nominally subordinate, really wielding absolute power. ‘Sad, sad!’ they say, ‘but the nation would have it so.’ Yet little more than a year ago, when, as by a miracle, the strength and vigor of the old warrior’s prime seemed, if only for an instant, to have returned to him--when the dim fires of the gray eagle-glance blazed out again, and the trembling hand, strung to vigor for the nonce, penned that most electrifying letter,--published a few weeks back by what the New England Party regard as a wise stroke of policy, and Officialdom as an unpardonable indiscretion,--that letter declaring the country’s defenses to be beggarly and inadequate, its naval arsenals neglected, its dockyards undermanned, its forts not half-garrisoned.... What sort of criticism did it evoke? Those who were openly antagonistic declared it to be preposterous; those who were loyal treated its utterances with contemptuous, galling indulgence.... To me it was as though a prophetic voice had spoken in warning from the tomb! And even before the graven stone sinks down over the weary old white head, Ada, and the laurels are withered that lie above, the country he loved and served so grandly may be doing pennance in dust and ashes for that warning it despised!”

“And if the War-call sounded to-morrow,” she said, with her intent look upon him, and her long white fingers knitted about her knee, “and the need arose--as it would arise--for a man of swift decision and vigorous action to lead us in the field--upon whom would we rely? Who would step into the breach, and wield the baton?”

“A man,” returned Bertham, “sixty-six years old, who served on the Duke’s staff and lost his left arm at Waterloo; who has never held any command or had any experience of directing troops in War, and whose life, for forty years or so, has been spent in the discharge of the duties, onerous but not active, devolving upon a Military Secretary. The whole question as to fitness or not fitness turns upon an ‘if.’”

The speaker spread his hands and shrugged his shoulders slightly, and a whimsical spark of humor gleamed in the look he turned upon the listener, as a star might shine through the wild blue twilight of a day of gale and storm, as he resumed:

“If the possession of the Wellingtonian manner,--combined with an empty sleeve--all honor to the brave arm that used to be inside it!--a manner full of urbanity and courtesy--nicely graduated and calculated according to the rank and standing of the person addressed; and admirable command of two Continental languages, and a discreet but distinct appreciation of high company and good living, unite to make an ideal Commander-in-Chief, why, Dalgan will be the man of men!...”

“But surely we need something more,” she said, meeting Bertham’s glance with doubt and questioning.

“Something indeed!” he returned dryly. “But be kind to me, and let me forget my bogies for a little in hearing of all the good that you have done and mean to do.... Tell me of your experiences at Kaiserswerke amongst the Lutheran Deaconesses--tell me about your visit to the Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul at the Hospital of the Charité, or your sojourn with the dames religieuses of St. Augustine at the Hôtel Dieu. Or tell me about your ancient, super-annuated, used-governesses. I should like to know something of them, poor old souls!...”

* * * * *

“They are not all old,” she explained, “though many of them are used-up, and all, or nearly all, are incapable; and Bertham, with a very few exceptions, sensible and ladylike as most of them are, they are so grossly ignorant of the elementary principles of education that one wonders how the poor pretense of teaching was kept up at all? And how it was that common honesty did not lead them to take service as housemaids? and how the parents of their pupils--Heaven help them!--could have been blind enough to confide the training of their children to such feeble, incompetent hands?”

“It is a crying evil,” said Bertham, “or, rather, a whimpering one, and needs to be dealt with. One day we will change all that.... As to these sick and sorrowful women, the generation that will rise up to take their places will be qualified, I hope, to teach, by having learned; and the quality of their teaching will, I hope again, be guaranteed by a University diploma. And, superior knowledge having ceased to mean the temporary possession of the lesson-book, children will learn to treat their teachers with respect, and we shall hear fewer tales of the despised governess.”

She returned, glancing at Bertham’s handsome, resolute face, and noting the many fine lines beginning to draw themselves about the corners of the eyes and mouth, the worn hollows of the temples and cheekbones, and the deepening caves from which the brilliant eyes looked out in scorn, or irony, or appealing, ingratiating gentleness.

* * * * *

“All governesses are not despised or despicable. There are many instances, Robert, where the integrity and conscientiousness of the poor dependent gentlewoman has held up a standard of conduct for the pupil, well or ill taught, to follow which has borne good fruit in after-years. We have a worthy lady here, a governess long resident in Paris, against whose exquisite French I polish up my own when I have time--a rather scarce commodity in this house!... Miss Caroline Smithwick has been cast on the mercy of the world in her old age, after many years of faithful service, because she dared tell her wealthy employer that a claim he pursued and pressed was dishonest and base. The man’s son thinks with her, and has chosen to be poor rather than profit by riches--and, I gather, rank--so gained. It is a wholesome story,” she said, “and when he told me to-day of his intention to support the gentle old soul who was so true to him, out of his pay as an officer of the French Army,--I could have clapped my hands and cried aloud--but I did not,--for the Superintendent of a Governesses’ Home must be, above all, discreet;--‘Bravo, M. Hector Dunoisse!’”

“‘Dunoisse, Dunoisse’?” He turned the name upon his tongue several times over, as though its flavor were in some measure familiar to him. “Dunoisse.... Can it be a son of the dyed and painted and padded old lion, with false claws and teeth and a name from the wigmaker’s, who was Bonaparte’s aide at Marengo and cut a dashing figure at the Tuileries in 1804? The Emperor created him Field-Marshal after Austerlitz, and small blame to him!... He ran away with a Bavarian Princess after the Restoration--a Princess who happened to be a professed nun, and somewhere about 1828, when the son of their union may have been seven or eight years old,--when the Throne of St. Louis was rocking under that cumbersome old wooden puppet Charles X.,--when the tricolor was on the point of breaking out at the top of every national flagstaff in France,--when you got a whiff of violets from the button-hole of every Imperialist who passed you in the street,--when the Catholic religion was about to be once more deprived of State protection and popular support, Marshal Dunoisse, swashbuckling old Bonapartist that he is, reclaimed the lady’s large dowry from her Convent, and with the aid of De Martignac, Head of the Ministry of that date, succeeded in getting it.”

“It is the son of the very man you describe,” she told him; “who visited his old governess here to-day.”

Bertham shrugged his shoulders, and, leaning down, silently stroked the sleek cat, white-pawed and whiskered, and coated in Quaker gray, that lay outstretched at ease upon the hearthrug. But his eyes were on the woman’s face the while.

“So that was it!” she said, leaning back in the low fireside chair she had taken when Bertham wheeled it forwards. Her musing eyes were fixed upon the red coals glowing in the old-world grate of polished steel. Perhaps the vivid face with the black eyes burning under their level brows rose up before her; and it might have been that she heard Dunoisse’s voice saying, through the purring of the cat upon the hearthrug and the subdued noises of the street:

“May the hour that sees me spend a sou of that accursed money be an hour of shame for me, and bitterness and humiliation! And should ever a day draw near that is to see me trick myself in dignities and honors stolen by a charlatan’s device and assume a power to which I have no more moral right than the meanest peasant of the State it rules--before its dawning I pray that I may die! and that those who come seeking a clod of mud to throw in the face of a Catholic State may find it lying in a coffin!”

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XIX

She must have remembered the words, for she shivered a little, and when Bertham asked her: “Of what are you thinking?” she answered:

“Of young Mr. Dunoisse, and the struggle that is before him. He is courageous.... He means so well.... He is so earnest and sincere and high-minded and generous.... But one cannot forget that he has not been tried, or that fiercer tests of his determination and endurance will come as the years unfold, and----”

“He will--supposing him a man of flesh and blood like other men!” said Bertham--“find his resolution--if it be one?--put, very shortly, very thoroughly to the proof. For--the Berlin papers of last Wednesday deal voluminously with the subject, and the Paris papers of a later date have even condescended to dwell upon it at some length--his grandfather, the Hereditary Prince of Widinitz, who practically has been dead for years, is at last dead enough for burying; and the question of Succession having cropped up, it may occur to the Catholic subjects of the Principality that they would prefer a Catholic Prince--even with a bar-sinister, badly erased, upon his ’scutcheon--to being governed by a Lutheran Regent. And that is all I know at present.”

“It is a curious, almost a romantic story,” she said, with her grave eyes upon the glowing fire, and a long, fine, slender hand propping her cheek, “that provokes one to wonder how it will end?”

“It will end, dear Ada,” smiled Bertham, “in this young fellow’s putting his Quixotic scruples in his pocket, taking the goods the gods have sent him--with the Hereditary diadem, when it is offered on a cushion!--marrying some blonde Princess-cousin, with the requisite number of armorial quarterings; and providing,--in the shortest possible time, the largest possible number of legitimate heirs to the throne. I lay no claim to the prophetic gift; but I do possess some knowledge of my fellow-men. And--if your prejudice against gaming does not preclude a bet, I will wager you a pair of gloves, or half a dozen pairs, against the daguerreotype of you that Mary and I are always begging for and never get;--that M. Dunoisse’s scruples and objections will be overcome in the long-run, and that the whole thing will end as I have prophesied.”

She listened with a little fold between her eyebrows, and her thoughtful eyes upon the speaker’s face.

“I fear you may be right. But I shall be glad if you prove wrong, Bertham. One thinks how bravely he has borne the pinch of poverty, and the dearth of the pleasantnesses and luxuries that mean so much to young men of his age----”

“‘Of his age?’.... You talk as though you were a sere and withered spinster, separated from the world of young men and young women by a veritable gulf of years!” cried Bertham, vexed.

* * * * *

She did not hear. She was looking at the fire, leaning forwards in her low chair with her beautiful head pensively bent, and her slender strong hands clasped about the knee that was a little lifted by the resting of one fine arched foot--as beautiful in its stocking of Quakerish gray and its plain, unbuckled leather slipper as though it had been covered with silk, and shod with embroidered kid or velvet--upon the high steel fender.

“One would like to be near him sometimes unseen--in one of those moments of temptation that will come to him--temptations to be false to his vow, and take the price of dishonor, for the devil will fight hard, Bertham, for that man’s soul! Just to be able to give a pull here, or a push in that direction, according as circumstances seek to mold or sway him, to say ‘Do this!’ or ‘Do not do that!’ at the crucial moment, would be worth while!...”

“‘Faith, my dear Ada,” Bertham said lightly, “the rôle of guardian angel is one you were cut out for, and suits you very well. But be content, one begs of you, to play it nearer home!... I know a worthy young man, at present in a situation in a large business-house at Westminster, who would very much benefit by a push here and a pull there from a hand invisible or visible--visible preferred! And to be told ‘Do this!’ or ‘Don’t do that!’ in a moment of doubt or at a crisis of indecision, would spare the Member for West Wealdshire a great many sleepless nights.”

They laughed together; then she said, with the rose-flush fading out of her pale cheeks and the light of merriment in her blue-gray eyes subdued again to clear soft radiance:

“I do not like those sleepless nights. Can nothing be done for them?”

“They are my only chance,” he answered, “of gaining any acquaintance with the works of modern novelists.”

“You do not take Sir Walter Scott, or Mr. Thackeray, or Mr. Dickens, or the author of Jane Eyre, as sleeping-draughts?”

“No,” returned Bertham, “for the credit of my good taste. But there are others whose works Cleopatra might have called for instead of mandragora. As regards the newspapers, if it be not exactly agreeable or encouraging to know exactly how far Misrepresentation can go without being absolute Mendacity--it is salutary and wholesome, I suppose, to be told when one has fallen short of winning even appreciation for one’s honest endeavor to do one’s duty--or what one conceives to be one’s duty--tolerably well?”

He rose, pushing his chair aside, and took a turn in the room that carried him to the window.

“One has made mistakes,” he said, keeping his face turned from her soft kind look; “but so have other fellows, without being pilloried and pelted for them! And two years back, when the office of Secretary At War seemed to have been created for the purpose of affording His Grace the Secretary For War and other high officials, unlimited opportunities of pulling down what the first-named had built up, and of building up what he, with hopes of doing good, had pulled down, the pelting bruised. But--Jove! if that part of my life were mine to live all over again, with Experience added to my youthful enthusiasms, I might reasonably hope to achieve much! Happy you”--he came and stood beside her chair, looking down at the calm profile and plainly-parted, faintly-rippling brown hair with a certain wistfulness--“most happy are you, dear Ada, who have so nobly fulfilled the high promise of your girlhood, and have no need to join in useless regrets with me!”

She smiled, and lifted her warm, womanly hand to him, and said, as he enclosed it for a second in his own:

“Wrong leads and false ideals are the lot of all of us. And you were of so much use in your high office, Robert, and wielded your power so much for others’ good; you strive so chivalrously now, in thankless, unpopular causes; you make your duty so paramount above your ambition in all things,--that I am tempted to paraphrase your words to me, and tell you that you have gloriously contradicted the promise of your Eton boyhood, when everything that was not Football, or Boating, or Cricket, was ‘bad form.’”

* * * * *

“To my cousin de Moulny’s annoyance and disgust unspeakable,” he returned, with a lighter tone and a lighter look, though he had glowed and kindled at the praise from her. “I did indulge--at those periods when he was staying at Wraye Abbey--in a good deal of that sort of bosh. But--quite wrongly, I dare say!--he seemed to me a high-falutin’, pompous young French donkey; and it became a point of importance not to lose an opportunity of taking him down. By the way, I heard from him quite lately. He gave up the idea of entering the Roman Catholic priesthood after some clash or collision with the Rules of the Fathers Directors, and is now an Under-Secretary at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.”

“He should have a notable career before him!” she commented.

“The Legitimist Party, at this present juncture, possess not one featherweight in the scale of popularity or influence. France is on the eve,” said Bertham, “or so it seems to me, of shedding her skin, and whether the new one will be of one color or of Three, White it will not be; I’ll bet my hat on that! So possibly it may be fortunate for de Moulny that the harness he pulls in has an Imperial Crown upon it. I need hardly say a pretty hand is upon the reins.”

Her laugh made soft music in the cosy, homely parlor, and amusement danced on her sweet firelit eyes....

“Whose is the hand?”

“It appertains, physically, to a certain Comtesse de Roux, and legally to a purple-haired, fiercely-whiskered, fiery-featured Colonel Comte de Roux--by whose original creation Comte is a little uncertain--but a brave and distinguished officer, commanding the 999th of the Line.”

She said, with a memory stirring in her face:

“That is the regiment--according to his old governess, for he did not tell me--to which M. Hector Dunoisse is attached.”

Bertham might not have heard. He said:

“I regret not having met Madame de Roux. One would like to see de Moulny’s reigning goddess.”

“She is most beautiful in person and countenance. Your term of ‘goddess’ is not inappropriate. She walks as though on clouds.”

Her ungrudging admiration of another woman’s beauty was a trait in her that always pleased him.

“Where did you meet?”

“I saw her in Paris a twelvemonth back, on the steps that lead to the vestibule of the Théâtre Française, one night when Rachel was to play in ‘Phédre.’”

“I thought you had forsworn all public entertainments, theaters included?”

“If I had I should not have endangered my oath by seeing Madame de Roux pass from her carriage and walk up the steps leading to the vestibule.”

“You were not in the streets of Paris alone, and on foot, at night?”

She answered simply, looking directly at him:

“I was in the Paris streets that evening, on foot, certainly, but not alone. Sister Saint Bernard was with me.”

“Who is Sister Saint Bernard?”

“She is a nun of the Order of St. Vincent de Paul. You know, the nursing-community. I stayed some time with them at their Convent at Paris, studying their good, wise, enlightened methods, visiting their hospitals with them, helping to tend their sick. We were returning with a patient that night I saw Madame de Roux. It was a case of brain-fever, a young girl, an attendant at one of the gaudy, disreputable restaurants of the Palais-Royal, delirious and desperately ill. No conveyance could be got to take her to the Charité; the Sisters’ van was otherwise engaged. We hired a vegetable-truck from a street fruit-seller, on the understanding that it should be whitewashed before being returned to him, wrapped the poor girl in blankets, and wheeled her to the Hospital ourselves.”

“By--George!” said Bertham softly and distinctly. His forehead was thunderous, and his lips were compressed. She went on as though she had not heard:

“And so, as we went through the Rue de Richelieu, and Sister Saint Bernard and I, and the truck, were passing the Théâtre Français, into which all fashionable Paris was crowding to see the great actress play ‘Phédre,’ a beautiful woman alighted from a carriage and went in, leaning on the arm of a stout short man in uniform, with some decorations.... I pointed his companion out to Sister Saint Bernard. ‘Tiens,’ she said, ‘voilà Madame la Comtesse de Roux. Une grande dame de par le monde.’ And that is how I came to know M. de Moulny’s enchantress by sight.... I wonder whether M. Dunoisse has met her?”

“It is more than probable, seeing that the lady is his Colonel’s wife. And,” said Bertham, “if he has not yet had the honor of being presented, he will enjoy it very soon. A Hereditary Prince of Widinitz is a personage, even out of Bavaria. And whether the son of the Princess Marie Bathilde and old Nap’s aide-de-camp likes his title, or whether he does not, it is his birthright, like the tail of the dog. He can’t get away from that!”

“He does look,” said Ada Merling, with a smile, “a little like what a schoolgirl’s ideal of a Prince would be.”

“Àpropos of that, a Prince who is not in the least like a schoolgirl’s ideal of the character dines with us at Wraye House on Tuesday. The Stratclyffes are coming, and the French Ambassador, with Madame de Berny.”

He added, naming the all-powerful Secretary for Foreign Affairs, with a lightness and indifference that were overdone:

“And Lord Walmerston.”

“Lord Walmerston!...”

Her look was one of surprise, changing to doubtful comprehension. He did not meet it. He was saying:

“It was his wish to come. His friendship for Mary dates from her schoolroom-days, and she cherishes the old loyal affection for her father’s friend in one of her heart’s warmest corners. He is charming to her, always ... and I have hopes of his weight in the balance for my Improved Married Quarters; and he really sees the advantage of the Regimental Schools.... But it is not to bore you with shop that I propose you should make one of us at dinner!” His voice was coaxing. “Do! and give Mary and me a happy evening!”

She shook her head with decision, though regret was in her face.

“I cannot leave my post. Remember, this is not only a Home.... It is also a Hospital. And what it pleases me to call my Staff”--she smiled--“are not experienced. They are willing and earnest, but they must be constantly supervised. And their training for this, the noblest profession that is open to women--as noble as any, were women equally free to follow all--is not the least of my responsibilities. We have lectures and classes here for their instruction in elementary anatomy, surgical dressing and bandaging, sanitation, the proper use of the thermometer and temperature-chart, and so on, almost daily. Mr. Alnwright and Professor Tayleur”--she named a famous surgeon and a celebrated physiologist--“are good enough to give their services, gratuitously; and I must be present at all times to assist them in their demonstrations. So you will understand, there is more to do here than you would have supposed.”

“Good gracious!” rejoined Bertham; “I should say so! And your band of trained attendants who are to supersede--and may it be soon!--the gin-sodden harridans and smiling, civil Incompetents who add to the discomforts and miseries of sickness, and lend to Death another terror--are they---- I suppose some of them are ladies?”

“The ideal nurse ought to be a lady,” she answered him, “in the true sense of the word. Many of these girls are well born and well bred, if that is--and of course it is--the meaning of your question. Some of them are frivolous and selfish and untrustworthy, and these must be weeded out. But the majority are earnest, honest, and sincere; and many of them are noble and high-minded, unselfish, devoted, and brave....”

There was a stately print of the Sistine Madonna of Raffaelle hanging above the fireplace. She lifted her face to the pure, spotless womanhood of the Face that looked out from the frame, and said:

“I try to keep up with these last-named ones, though often they put me to the blush.”

“You put to the blush! Don’t tell me that!” He spoke and looked incredulously.

“They have to learn to save their strength of mind and body, and not put out too much, even in the Christ-blessed service of the sick and suffering,” she said, “lest they should find themselves bankrupt, with no power of giving more. And sometimes the more ardent among them rebel against my rules, which enforce regular exercise, observance of precautions for the preservation of their own health, even the relaxation and amusement which should break the monotony of routine; and then I long to kiss them, Robert, even when I am most severe!”

There were tears in the man’s bright eyes as he looked at her. Her own eyes were on the Raffaelle print; she had forgotten him.

“What I should like best would be to endure long enough to see them outstripping and outdoing the poor example of their humble fellow-student and teacher, developing nursing as a higher Art, and spreading the knowledge of the proper treatment of the sick, until not one of the poorest and the roughest women of what we are content to call the Lower Classes, shall be destitute of some smattering of the knowledge that will save the lives of those she loves best in bitter time of need.”

Her face was rapt. She went on in a clear, low, even tone: “I should like to live to be very old, so old that I was quite forgotten, and sit quietly in some pleasant corner of a peaceful English home seeing the movement grow. For it will grow, and spread and increase, Robert, until it reaches every corner of the world! And to that end every penny that I possess; every ounce of strength that is mine; every drop of blood in my veins, would be cheerfully spent and given.... Do I say would?... Will be! if it please God!” Her eyes left the picture and went to Bertham’s absorbed face. “I have been holding forth at merciless length, have I not?” she said. “But you and I, with Mary, constitute a Mutual Society for the Talking-Over of Plans; and, though I sometimes tax your patience, I am always ready to lend ear. As for your dinner, it is a delightful temptation which I must resist. Beg Mary to tell me all about it afterwards!”

“Your would-be host and hostess will not be the only disappointed ones,” Bertham said, and rose as though to take leave. “Lord Walmerston is one of your admirers, and”--there was a gleam of mischief in the hazel eyes--“Prince Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte was urgent for an opportunity of meeting you again.”

“Indeed! I am very much honored.” Her calm eyes and composed face told nothing. But her tone had a clear frosty ring of something colder than mere indifference, and the curve of her lips was a little ironical. Seeing that touch of scorn, the twinkle in Bertham’s eyes became more mischievous. He said:

“The Prince’s lucky star might shine on such a meeting, Ada. A beautiful, wealthy, and wise Princess would be the making of the man.”

“That man!” she said, and a shudder rippled through her slight body, and her calm, unruffled forehead lost its smoothness in a frown of repulsion and disgust. She rose as though escaping from actual physical contact with some repellent personality suddenly presented before her, and stood beside Bertham on the hearthrug, as tall as he, and with the same look of high-bred elegance and distinction that characterized and marked out her companion. The spark of mischief still danced in his bright eyes. His handsome mouth twitched with the laughter he repressed as he said:

“So you do not covet the Crown Imperial of France, and tame eagles do not please you? Yet the opportunities an Empress enjoys for doing good must be practically unrivaled.”

Her blue-gray eyes were disdainful now. She said:

“The position of a plain gentlewoman is surely more enviable and honorable than would be hers who should share the throne of a crowned and sceptered adventurer.”

Said Bertham:

“You do not call the First Napoleon that?”

“There was a terrible grandeur,” she returned, “about that bloodstained, unrelenting, icy, ambitious despot; a halo of old, great martial deeds surrounds his name that blinds the eyes to his rapacity and meanness, his selfishness, sensuality, and greed. But this son of Hortense! this nephew, if he be a nephew?--this charlatan trailing in the mire the sumptuous rags of the Imperial purple; this gentlemanly, silken-mannered creature, with phrases of ingratiating flattery upon his tongue, and hatred glimmering between the half-drawn blinds of those sick, sluggish eyes.... God grant, for England’s sake, that he may never mount the throne of St. Louis!”

“Ah! Ada--Ada!” Bertham said again, and laughed, awkwardly for one whose mirth was so melodious and graceful as a rule. For the little dinner at Wraye House, at which the Secretary for Foreign Affairs and the French Ambassador were to meet the Pretender to the Imperial Throne of France, was really a diplomatic meeting of somewhat serious political importance, in view of certain changes and upheavals taking place in that restless country on the other side of the Channel, and divers signs and tokens, indicative to an experienced eye that the White Flag, for eighteen years displayed above the Central Pavilion of the Palace of the Tuileries, might shortly be expected to come down.

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XX

However, being a skillful diplomat, Bertham gave no sign: though Lord Walmerston, Minister for Foreign Affairs, and the Pretender to the Throne-Imperial of France, were to spend in the Persian smoking-room over the ground-floor billiard-room of Wraye House--a half-hour that would change every card in the poor hand held by that last-named gamester to a trump.

“Who is good enough for you, Ada?” he said, with his hazel glance softening as he turned it upon her, and sincerity in his sweet, courtly tones. “No one I ever met!”

Her rare and lovely smile illuminated her.

“Has it never struck you, Robert, how curious it is that the demand for entire possession of a woman’s hand, fortune and person, should invariably be prefaced by the candid statement that the suitor is not good enough to tie her shoes? As for being good enough for me, any man would be, provided he were honest, sincere, chivalrous in word and deed----”

“And not the present Head of the House of Bonaparte?” ended Bertham.

“You are right,” she said quickly. “Were I compelled to make choice between them, I should infinitely prefer the butcher!”

“‘The butcher!’” Bertham’s face of utter consternation mingled with incredulity drew her laugh from her. And it was so round and sweet and mellow that the crystal lusters of the Sèvres and ormolu candlesticks upon the mantel-shelf rang a little tinkling echo when it had stopped.

“The butcher who supplies us here,” she explained.

Bertham said, speaking between his teeth and with the knuckles showing white in the strong slender hand he clenched and shook at an imaginary vendor of chops and sirloins:

“What consummate and confounded insolence!”

“No, no!” she cried, for his tall, slight, athletic figure was striding up and down the little parlor, and the fierce grind of his heel each time he turned within the limit of the hearthrug threatened the cat’s repose. “You shall not fume, and say hard things of him! He knows nothing of me except that I am the matron here. And he thinks that I should be better off in the sitting-room behind his shop in Oxford Street, keeping his books of accounts and ‘ordering any nice little delicate joint’ I ‘happened to fancy for dinner....’ And possibly I should be better off, from his point of view?”

Bertham’s heel came sharply down upon the hearthrug. The outraged cat rent the air with a feline squall, and sought refuge under the sofa.

“Come out, Mr. Bright!” coaxed his mistress, kneeling by the injured one’s retreat. “He is very sorry! He didn’t mean it! He will never do it again!” She added, rising, with Mr. Bright, already soothed and purring, in her arms, “And he is going away now, regretful as we are to have to send him. For it is my night on duty, Robert, and I must rest.”

“You will always send me away,” said he, “when you choose. And I shall always come back again, until you show me that I am not wanted.”

“That will be never, dear friend!”

She gave him her true, pure hand, and he stooped and left a reverent kiss upon it, and said, as he lifted a brighter face:

“Do you remember three years ago, before you went to Kaiserswerke--when you sent me away, and forbade me to come back until I had sought and found my Fate in Mary?”

“A beautiful and loving Fate, dear Robert.”

“She is, God bless her!” he answered, with a warm flush upon his face and a thrill of tenderness in the charming voice that so many men and women loved him for.

She went with him into the hall then, and said as he threw on his long dark cloak lined with Russian sables:

“Those Berlin and Paris papers of Wednesday last.... It would interest me to glance through them in a spare moment, if you did not object to lend?”

“One of my ‘liveried menials with buttons on his crests,’ as a denunciatory Chartist orator put it the other day--shall bring them to you within half an hour. I wish you had asked me for something less easy to give you, Ada!”

She answered with her gentle eyes on his, as her hand drew back the latch of the hall door:

“Give me assurance you will never help to forge the link that shall unite Great Britain’s interests with her enemy’s.”

“Why, that of course!” He answered without heartiness, and his eyes did not meet hers. “I am not the master blacksmith, dear Ada. There are other hands more cunning in the welding-craft than mine!”

He bent his handsome head to her and threw on his hat and passed out into the rimy February fog. But he walked slowly, pondering as he went, and his face wore a moody frown. For Lord Walmerston’s influence and weight upon that pressing question, separate accommodation for married soldiers, and Military Schools for the men and their wives and children, was not to be had for nothing, he well knew....

She shut the door, and then the tea-bell rang, and she passed on to the dining-room, and took her place before the capacious tray at the matron’s end of the long, plainly-appointed, wholesomely-furnished table.

She had declined to dine in the society of a Prince because she doubted his motives and disapproved of his character. She played the hostess now to her staff of nurses and probationers, dispensing the household tea from the stout family teapot with a liberal hand, and leading the conversation with a gentle grace and an infectious gayety that drew sparks from the homeliest minds about the board and made bright wits shine brighter.

The Berlin and Paris papers came by Bertham’s servant as she went to her room to prepare, by some hours of rest, for the night-watch by a dying patient. She gave half-an hour of the time to reading the articles and paragraphs Bertham had considerately marked in red ink for her.

When she set about preparing for repose came a gentle knock at her door, and in answer to her soft “Come in!” the gray-haired, olive-skinned, pleasant-faced woman, who had admitted Dunoisse and shown him out again, appeared, saying:

“You never rang, Miss Ada, love, but I made bold to come.”... She added in tones of dismay, “And to find you brushing your beautiful hair yourself when your old Husnuggle’s in the house and asking nothing better than to do it for you!...”

“Thank you, dear!” She surrendered the brush, and sat down and submitted to the deft hands that set about their accustomed task, as though it were soothing to be so ministered to. Even as she said: “For this once, kind Husnuggle, but you must not do it again!”

“Don’t say that, Miss Ada! when night’s the only time of all the livelong day that I get my Wraye Rest talk with you.”

Entreated thus, she reached up a hand and patted the plump matronly cheek of the good soul, and said, with soft, considerate gentleness:

“Let it be so, since it will make you happy. But those who have chosen for their life’s task the duty of serving others should do without service themselves. Try to understand!”

The woman kissed the hand with a fervor contrasting incongruously with her staid demeanor and homely simple face, as she answered:

“I’ll try, my dear. Though to see you in this bare, plainly-furnished room, with scarce a bit of comfort in it beyond the fire in the grate, and not a stick of furniture beyond the bed and the wardrobe, and washstand and bath, and the chintz-covered armchair you’re sitting in, and a bookshelf of grave books, scalds my heart--that it do! And your sitting-room nigh as skimping. When either at Wraye Rest or at Oakenwode, or at the house in Park Lane, you have everything beautiful about you, as you ought; with paintings and statues and music, and carpets like velvet for you to tread upon, and flowers everywhere for you that love them so to take pleasure in them, and your dogs and horses, and cats and birds!... Eh! deary me! But I promised I’d never breathe a murmur, not if you let me come, and here I am forgetting!....”

“We will overlook it this time. And I will help you to understand why I am happier here, and more at peace than at Wraye or Oakenwode, or at the Park Lane house, dear to me as all three are. It is because, wherever I am, and whether I am walking or sleeping, I seem to hear voices that call to me for help. Chiefly the voices of women, weak, and faint, and imploring.... And they appeal to me, not because I am any wiser, or better, or stronger than others of my sex, but because I am able, through circumstances,--and have the wish and the will to aid them, I humbly believe, from God! And if I stayed at home and yielded to the desire for pleasant, easy, delightful ways of living, and bathed my eyes and ears in lovely sights and sounds, I should hear those voices over all, and see with the eyes of my mind the pale, wan, wistful faces that belong to them. And I should know no peace!... But here, even if the work I do be insignificant and ineffective, I am working for and with my poor sisters, sick and well. And on the day when I turn back and leave my plow in the furrow, then those voices will have a right to cry to me without ceasing: ‘Oh, woman! why have you deserted us?--you who might have done so much!’”

She ceased, but the rush and thrill of the words as they had come pouring from her, vibrated yet on the quiet atmosphere of the room.

“You had a pleasant talk, Miss Ada, with Master Robert?” the woman asked her, turning down the snowy sheet from the pillows, and preparing to leave the room.

“A long, grave talk, Husnuggle, even a little sad in places, but pleasant nevertheless. Now go down to supper, for it is eight o’clock.”

Husnuggle went, having bound up the wealth of hair into a great silken twist, and her mistress knelt at a prie-Dieu beneath an ebony and olive-wood crucifix that hung upon the wall, and said her prayers, and sought her rest. When she slept, less easily and less soundly than usual, she dreamed; and the figure and face of the slight, ruddy-skinned, black-eyed man who had visited the Hospice that day, moved with others across the stage of her vision, and his voice echoed with other voices in the chambers of her sleeping brain.

* * * * *

The Havre packet had not sailed that evening, by reason of a boisterous gale and a great sea, and Dunoisse was spending the evening dismally enough at the T. R. Southampton, where “As you Like It” was being given for the benefit of Miss Arabella Smallsopp, advertised as of the “principal London theaters,” upon the last night of a Stock Season which had been “a supreme artistic success.”

Mr. Hawkington Bulph and a Full Company--which collectively and individually looked anything but that,--supported the star; and to the fatal sprightliness of the hapless Smallsopp, disguised as the immortal page, in a lace collar, drop-earrings, and a short green cotton-velvet ulster, dadoed with catskin, and adorned down the front with rows of brass buttons not distantly resembling coffin-nails (worn in combination with a Spanish hair-comb and yellow leather top-boots), must be ascribed the violent distaste which one member of the audience did then and there conceive for England’s immortal Bard. But ere long his attention strayed from the dingy, ill-lit Forest Scene, with a cork-and-quill nightingale warbling away in the flies, as Miss Smallsopp interpolated the pleasing ditty, “O Sing Again, Sweet Bird of Eve!” and he ceased to see the dirty boards, where underpaid, underfed, and illiterate actors gesticulated and strutted, and he went back in thought to Ada Merling, and her pure earnest face rose up before his mental vision, and the very sound of her crystal voice was in his ears.

* * * * *

Even as in her troubled dreams, she saw Hector Dunoisse standing before her, with that swift play of his emotions vividly passing in his face; and heard him passionately saying that the hour that saw him broach those tainted stored-up thousands should be for him an hour of branding shame; and that he prayed the dawning of the day that should break upon his completed barter of Honor for Wealth, and Rank and Power, might find him lying in his coffin.

And then he yielded--or so it seemed to her, and took the shining money, and the princely diadem offered him by smooth strangers with persuasive courtly voices, and she saw the fateful gold scattered from his reckless hands like yellow dust of pollen from the ripe mimosa-bloom when the thorny trees are bowed and shaken by the gusty winds of Spring.

And then she saw him going to his Coronation, and no nobler or more stately figure moved onwards in the solemn procession of Powers and Dignities, accompanying him through laurel-arched and flower-wreathed and flag-bedecked streets to the Cathedral, where vested and coped and mitered prelates waited to anoint and crown him Prince. And where, amidst the solemn strains of the great organ, the chanting of many voices, and the pealing of silver trumpets, the ceremony had nearly reached its stately close, when the jeweled circlet that should have crowned his temples slipped from the aged Archbishop’s venerable, trembling hands and rolled upon the inlaid pavement, shedding diamonds and pearls like dewdrops or tears.... And then she saw him lying, amidst wreaths of flowers and tall burning tapers, in a black-draped coffin in the black-hung nave. And a tall man and a beautiful woman leaned over the death-white face with the sealed, sunk eyes, smiling lustfully in each other’s. And she awakened at the chime of her silver clock in her quiet room; and it was dark, and the lamp-lighter was kindling the street-lamps, and she must rise and prepare for her night’s vigil.

It taxed her, for her dream-fraught sleep had not refreshed. But she ministered to her fevered, pain-racked patient with gentle unwearying patience and swift, noiseless tenderness, through the hours that moved in slow procession on to the throning of another day....

Her patient slept at last, and woke as the dawn was breaking, and the watcher refreshed the parched lips with tea, and stirred the banked-up fire to a bright flame, and went to the window and drew up the blinds.

Drab London was mantled white with snow that had fallen in the night-time. And above her roofs and chimneys, wrapped in swansdown mantles, glittering with icicles, the dawn came up all livid and wild and bloody, with tattered banners streaming through the shining lances of a blizzard from the East that shook the window-panes like a desperate charge of cavalry, and screamed as wounded horses do, frenzied with pain and terror amidst the sounds and sights of dreadful War.

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XXI

Between Dullingstoke Junction and the village town of Market Drowsing in Sloughshire, lay some ten miles of hard, level highway, engineered and made in the stark days of old by stalwart Romans who, ignorant of steamrollers and road-engines as they were, knew as little of the meaning of the word Impossibility.

One of those ancient road-making warriors might have approved the fine height and shapely form of a soldier who marched at ease along the highway, wearing, with a smart and gallant air, the blue, white-faced full-dress uniform of a trooper in Her Majesty’s Hundredth Regiment of Lancers, without the sword, and the plumed head-dress of blue cloth and shiny black leather, which a forage-cap--of the muffin pattern more recently approved by Government--replaced.

He walked at a brisk marching pace, and, in spite of the tightness of his clothes, broke into a run at times to quicken his circulation. For, though greatcoats were supplied at the public expense to Great Britain’s martial sons; so many penalties, pains, and stoppages attended on the slightest damage to the sacred garment, that in nine cases out of ten the soldier of the era preferred to go without. Therefore the short tight coatee of blue cloth, with the white plastron and facings, being inadequate to keep out the piercing cold of the frosty February day, this soldier beat his elbows against his sides, as he ran, and thumped his arms upon a broad chest needing no padding. But even as he did this he whistled a cheery tune, and his bright eyes looked ahead as though something pleasant lay waiting at the end of the bleak, cold journey from the military depôt town of Spurham, thirty miles away; and the handsome mouth under the soldierly mustache, that was, like its owner’s abundant curly hair, of strong, dark red, and curled up on either side towards such a pair of side-whiskers as few women, at that hirsute period, could look upon unmoved--wore a smile that was very pleasant.

“It’s not a pretty view!” he said aloud, breaking off in the middle of “Vilikins and his Dinah” to criticise the landscape. “A man would need have queer taste to call it even cheerful, particularly in the winter-time! and yet I wouldn’t swop it for the Bay o’ Naples, with a volcano spurting fire, and dancing villagers a-banging tambourines--or anything else you could offer me out of a Panorama. For why, damme if I know!”

Perhaps the simple reason was that this homely spread of wood and field and fallow stretching away into the hazy distance, its trees still leafy in the sheltered hollows, bare where the fierce winds of winter had wreaked their bitter will, had been familiar to the soldier from his earliest years. Upon his left hand, uplands whereon the plow-teams were already moving, climbed to a cold sky of speed-well-blue; and couch-fires burned before the fanning wind, their slanting columns of pungent-smelling smoke clinging to the brown furrows before they rose and thinned and vanished in the upper atmosphere. Sparrows, starlings, jackdaws, finches and rooks followed the traveling plowshare, settled in flocks or rose in bevies, their shrill cries mingling with the jingle of the harness or the crack of the plowman’s whip. And upon the right hand of the man to whom these sights and sounds were dear and welcome, rolled the Drowse; often unseen; returning into vision through recurring gaps in hedges; glimpsed between breasting slopes of park-land, silently flowing through its deep muddy channel between immemorial woods where England’s Alfred hunted the boar, speared the wolf, and slew the red deer.... Silvery-blue in Summer, turbidly brown in Autumn, in Winter leaden-gray, in Spring jade-green, as now: when, although the floods of February had in some degree abated, wide, shallow, ice-bordered pools remained upon the low-lying river-meadows, and rows of knee-deep willows, marking the course of unseen banks, lifted bristling hands to the chilly skies, while cornricks on the upper levels were so honeycombed with holes of rats that had abandoned their submerged dwellings, that in contemplation of them the tramping soldier ceased to whistle, and pushed along in silence for at least a quarter of a mile before his whistle, “Vilikins and his Dinah,” got the upper hand, and broke out again.

The popular melody was in full blast when the piercing screech of a distant train, accompanied by a clatter that grew upon the ear, stopped short, began again after a pause, and thinned out into silence; told the wayfarer that the London down-train had entered the junction he had left behind him, disembarked its load of passengers, and gone upon its way.

And presently, with a rattle and clatter of iron-shod hoofs, and a jingle of silver-mounted harness, a scarlet mail-phaeton of the most expensive and showy description, attached to a pair of high-stepping showy blacks, overtook the military pedestrian, bowled past; and suddenly pulled up at the roadside, at an order from a burly, red-faced, turn-up-nosed, gray-haired and whiskered elderly man, topped with a low-crowned, curly-brimmed, shiny beaver, and enveloped in a vast and shaggy greatcoat, who sat beside the smug-faced, liveried groom who drove, and whom you are to recognize as Thompson Jowell.

“Now then, Josh Horrotian, my fine fellow!” The great Contractor, being in a genial mood, was pleased to bend from his high pedestal and condescend, with this mere being of common clay, even to jesting. “How goes the world with you? And how far have you got, young man, on the road that ends in a crimson silk sash and a pair o’ gold-lace epaulettes?”

“Why, not yet so far, Mr. Jowell, sir,” returned the cavalryman with cheerful equanimity, “that I can show you even a Corporal’s stripe upon my sleeve.”

“And damme! young Josh, you take it uncommonly coolly!” said Thompson Jowell, puffing out his large cheeks over the upturned collar of the shaggy coat, and frowning magisterially. “Where’s your proper pride, hey? Where’s your ambition? What’s become of your enthusiasm, and eagerness, and ardor for a British soldier’s glorious career? I’m ashamed of you, Horrotian! What the devil do you mean?”

“You ask me three questions, Mr. Jowell, sir, that I can but answer in one way; and a fourth,” returned the red-haired trooper, looking frankly up out of a pair of very clear blue eyes at the large face of disapproval bent upon him from the lofty altitude of the mail-phaeton’s front seat, “that I can’t answer in any way at all.”

“I hope I don’t understand you, Joshua Horrotian,” said Thompson Jowell loftily. “But go on, go on! Damn you, don’t fidget!” He addressed this exhortation to the more restive of the champing blacks, who had switched his flowing tail over the reins, and was snorting with his scarlet nostrils spread, and his wild eye cocked at the hedgerow, as though to be detained upon the road to the home-stable for the purpose of conversing with a common soldier was a thing past bearing by a high-bred horse.

“Whoa!” said the driving groom.

“Whoa, then, my beauty! That curb be a link too tight, Mr. Jowell,” said Joshua Horrotian, betraying for the first time, by a lingering smack and twang of the broad local accent, that the county of Sloughshire might claim him as its son. “Shall I let it out a mite? He’ll stand like a rock then.”

Thompson Jowell nodded in answer, and the thing was done in a moment, and Horrotian back in his old place by the side-step, saying:

“You wanted to know just now, Mr. Jowell, where I’d left my proper pride, and my enthusiasm and eagerness and ardor for a soldier’s career? I’ve left ’em yonder, sir.” He lifted his riding-whip and pointed across country. “Over to the Cavalry Barracks at Spurham, where Ours have been quartered best part o’ three years. With your leave, sir!”

He spat in a soldierly, leisurely way upon the sandy road, and hitched his pipeclayed pouch-belt, and shoved a finger of a white-gloved hand within the edge of his sword-belt of gilt lace with a white stripe, and went on speaking:

“It seems to me, sir, when I’ve casted round to think a bit--having done a bit o’ gardening for mother in old days when I wasn’t busy on the farm--that pride and enthusiasm and ardor and eagerness for a soldier’s career are like hardy plants that will grow and put out leaf and bloom even in a soil that’s as poor as ours at Upper Clays, if they’re but wedd a bit and the snails and slugs picked off of ’em, and a drop o’ water given in drought, and hobnailed boots, and wheelbarrows, turned aside from crushing of ’em down!”

“Well, well, my man! Where does this bring us to?” demanded the autocrat of the cocked inquisitive nose, and puffy cheeks, and goggling, greedy eyes, from his lofty perch upon the front seat of the scarlet mail-phaeton.

“It brings us to this, Mr. Jowell,” said the trooper, with a fold coming between his thick broad smear of dark red eyebrows, and an angered narrowing of the blue eyes that were so clear, “that if you want a dog to respect himself, let alone his superiors, you’ll give him a clean kennel to sleep in, and decent food to eat; and if he’s to do a dog’s work for you, you’ll not curse and bully him so as to break and cow his spirit. Nay! and if you respect yourself, you’ll give him, whether he’s been a good dog or only a tolerable sort o’ one--some sort o’ nursing and care when he lies sick, if it’s only the roughest kind, before he kicks his last on his straw bed. Then throw him out on the dung-heap if it’s your liking; he can’t feel it, poor brute! He be past all that. But where’s the use of a Soldier’s Funeral with a Firing Party and a Bugler, if,--when the man was living, you branded his soul with as many lines of anger and resentment and rage as there are stripes in the Union Jack, God bless it! that, him being dead, you lay as a pall of honor on his coffin? That’s what I want to know!”

“You want to know too much for your rank and station, Josh Horrotian--that’s what you do!” said Thompson Jowell, frowning displeasure upon him. “You’re one of the Malcontents, that’s what you are. If you were to tell me on your oath you weren’t, I wouldn’t believe you. I’ve met your breed before!”

“If you have, Mr. Jowell, my answer is that it’s not a bad breed,” retorted the trooper, with a hot flush and a bright direct look of anger. “Without trying to use finer language than my little education warrants, it’s a breed that will fight to the death for Queen and Country, and hold that man a damned and despicable cur that hangs back in the hour of England’s need. But when the same bad usage is meted out by the Authorities in Office to the willing and the unwilling, the worthless and the worthy, let me tell you, sir, a man loses heart. For Drill and Discipline and Confinement to Cells for defaulters, and Flogging for the obstropulous; with Ration Beef and cabbage, and suet-balls, tight clothes and tight belts, and a leather stock that saws your ears off, can’t make a machine of a human being all through. There’s got to be a living spot of flesh left in him somewhere that feels and tingles and smarts.... And the sooner the great gentlemen in authority find that out, the better for England and her Army,” said Joshua Horrotian, with a straightforward, manly energy of voice and look and gesture that would have gone far to convince, if the right man had been there to hear him.

“Now, look you here, Trooper Joshua Horrotian,” said the wrong man, “it’s confounded lucky for you that these opinions of yours--and the private soldier with opinions is a man we don’t want in the Army and would a great deal rather be without!--have been blown off to a person who--having a regard for that decent woman your mother--who I’m not above acknowledging, in a distant sort of way, as a relation of my own--isn’t likely to report them in quarters where they would breed trouble for you, and maybe a taste of the Black Hole.” The speaker held up a large fur-gloved hand as the trooper seemed about to speak. “Don’t you try my patience, though! I’ve listened to you long enough.... Discontented, that’s what you are! And Discontent leads to Murmuring, and Murmuring to Mutiny. And Mutiny to the Gallows--in your case I hope it won’t!--but I shouldn’t be at all surprised if it did. So beware of being discontented, Joshua!”

“I may be what you say, a grumbling soldier, though I don’t recognize myself in the picture you draw of me,” returned the trooper; “but if the time came to prove whether I’d be willing to lay down my life for the Old Shop, I’d be found as ready as any other man. And I have cause for discontent outside the Army, Mr. Jowell.” And the speaker squared his broad shoulders and drew himself to his full height, looking boldly in the bullying eyes of the great man. “While I have been a-sogering my mother’s farm has been going to rack and ruin. Some little-knowing or ill-meaning person has advised her, Mr. Jowell, for these three years past, to turn down the low-lying gore meadow-lands of hers beside the Drowse in clover and beans and vetch. Grazing cows is all they’re good for, being flooded regularly in November and February, and Aprils extra-wet. And what with the cold, rainy summers we’ve had, and the rainy, cold summer we may look to, sure my mother has suffered in pocket, and worse she will suffer yet! For if her having borrowed money on mortgage to throw after what has already been lost beyond recall is going to bring her any good of--I’m a Dutchman!”

“Now, I’ll tell you what, Trooper Horrotian,” said Thompson Jowell, purple to the rim of his sporting parson’s hat with something more stinging than the bitter February wind, “I don’t pretend not to know what you’re driving at, because Aboveboard is my name. If my distant relation, Mrs. Sarah Horrotian, is pleased to drive over from Market Drowsing sometimes on her egg-and-butter days, for the purpose of asking advice from a man who, like myself, is accustomed to be looked up to and consulted, supposing I happen to be at home at my little place”--which was a huge, ornate and showy country mansion, with a great deal of avenue, shrubbery, glass, and experimental garden-ground about it--“I am not the man to gainsay her, to gratify her long-legged puppy of a son.”

“I’m obliged to you, I’m sure!” said Josh, reddening to his red hair, and angrily gnawing, in his desire to restrain himself from incautious speech, the shiny black strap by which the idiotic little muffin-shaped forage-cap of German pattern approved by Government, was sustained in a perilously slanting position on the side of his head.

“My name being Plump and Plain,” said Thompson Jowell, once more extracting the large fur-gloved hand from under the leather apron of the phaeton, “I’m damned if I care this snap of my fingers”--he clumsily snapped them--“whether you are obliged to me or whether you ain’t! Is that clear to you?”

The groom who occupied the driving seat beside his master laughing dutifully at this, Thompson Jowell’s righteous indignation was somewhat appeased, as he proceeded:

“If the river flooded those gore-lands of your mother’s, and the rainy season finished what the river began, I’m not the Clerk of the Weather Office, I suppose? Call Providence to account for the bad season, if you must blame somebody.... Though, if you do, and should happen to be struck dead by lightning as a punishment for your wickedness, don’t expect Me to pity you, that’s all! Granted I gave a pound or so for Sarah Horrotian’s mildewed clover and stinking beans, and barley that had sprouted green in the ear, to burn for top-dressing; and let her have a bit of money at easy interest on her freehold of Upper Clays;--I suppose, as it’s her property, having been left her for her sole use and benefit by her father (who was an uncle of my own, and don’t my admitting that prove to you how little proud I am?), she’s free to borrow on it if it pleases her. You are not the master yet, my good fellow!”

“And won’t be, please God!--for many a year to come!” said Mr. Jowell’s good fellow, with unaffected sincerity. “Nor will be ever, Mr. Jowell, supposing my mother not able to pay off your interest. You’ve foreclosed on too many of the small freeholders in this neighborhood, for me to believe that you’ll be more generous and mercifuller with your poor relation, than you’ve been with them you’ve called your good friends!”

The groom who drove, forgetting himself so far as to chuckle at this, Thompson Jowell damned his impertinence with less of dignity and more of flustered bumptiousness than an admirer of the great man’s would have expected.

“And poor as my mother is, and hard as she has been put to it,” went on the trooper, pursuing his sore subject, “if she had dreamed that the spoiled fodder she sold you for the price such unwholesome rubbish was worth, was not to be burned for top-dressing, but dried in them kilns that are worked in another name than yours at Little Milding--and mixed with decent stuff, and sold as first-class fare for Army horses, poor beasts!--she’d have seen you at Jerusalem beyond the Jordan before she’d ha’ parted with a barrow-load of the rot-gut stuff, or she’s not the woman I take her for!”

“You insolent blackguard!” said Thompson Jowell, blowing at the speaker, and swelling over the apron of the phaeton until the soundness of its leather straps must have been severely tested. “You’ve heard of the Lock-up and Treadmill for proved defamers and slanderers, haven’t you, in default of the damages such vermin are too poor to pay?”

“I’ve heard of lots o’ things since I joined the Army, Mr. Thompson Jowell,” retorted Joshua Horrotian, who had regained his coolness as the other had lost self-command, “and I’ve seen a few more! I’ve seen such things come out of the middle of Government hay-and-straw trusses as nobody, except the Contractor who sold and the Forage Department Agents who took ’em over, and the Quartermaster-Sergeant who served ’em out, and the soldiers who got ’em, would expect to find there. Not only cabbage-stumps and waste newspapers,” said Josh forcibly, “which in moderation may be good for Cavalry troop-horses. But ragged flannel petticoats, empty jam-tins, and an old hat with a litter o’ dead kittens inside of it, form too variegated and stimulating a diet to agree with anything under an ostrich; and I’m none too sure that such wouldn’t be too much for the bird’s digestion in the long-run.”

The groom covered himself with disgrace at this juncture by exploding in a guffaw, which Thompson Jowell, mentally registering as to be expiated next pay-day by a lowering of wages, loftily ignored. He realized his own over-condescension in arguing with the worm that dared to lift up its head from the ground beneath his chariot-wheels, and argue with and denounce him. He changed his tone, now, and, instead of bullying, pitied the crawling thing.

“You don’t understand what you’re talking about, Horrotian,” he said patronizingly, “and being a poor uneducated, common soldier, who’s to be astonished at it? The British Government is too great and powerful and glorious and grand a Power to trouble itself about rags and jam-tins, or a hatful of dead kittens, shoved for a joke inside a truss of Army forage by some drunken trooper. Possibly next time you’re in liquor, my man, you’ll remember that you put them there yourself? As for any person being unprincipled enough to sell sprouted grain and mildewed hay, mixed up with sound stuff, as you suggest some persons do; what I say to you is that such people don’t exist, such wickedness couldn’t be possible; and if you undertook to prove to me that it is--I shouldn’t be convinced! And, further, understand this; and what I say to you is what I said to an impudent, meddlesome whelp of a young foreigner I met in the train t’other day betwixt Dullingstoke and Waterloo--the British Government will BE the British Government, in spite of all the fault-finding and grumbling of mutinous and impudent upstart Rankers or their betters! And the iron wheels of Administration will keep on a-rolling, and so sure as heads are lifted too high out of the dust that is their proper element, those iron wheels I speak of will roll over ’em and mash ’em. Mash ’em, by Gosh! D’ye understand me?”

“Quite well, Mr. Jowell,” returned the other composedly. “But I’ve good hopes of being able to roll or crawl or wriggle out of reach before those iron wheels you speak of roll my way. Mother having come round at last, I’m to be bought out of the Army come next Michaelmas, having served with the Colors--I humbly hope without a single act that might be calculated to dishonor them, or soil the reputation of an honest man and a loyal soldier!--rising five years out of the twelve I ’listed for; and, once being free, I mean to put my shoulder to the wheel in the farming-line in good earnest; and leave the officer’s sash, and the pair o’ gold-lace epaulets you spoke of, hanging at the top of the tree for some other fellow fortunater than I have been, to reach down.”

“Go your way, ungrateful and obstinate young man,” said Thompson Jowell, sternly, expanding his cheeks to the rotundity of a tombstone cherub’s, and snorting reprehension. “I hope for your respectable mother’s sake it mayn’t end in ruin and disgrace, but--my name being Candid--I shouldn’t wonder if it did!” He shook his pear-shaped head until he shook his hat over his goggle eyes, and so took it off, and blew his large cocked nose sonorously upon a vast silk handkerchief he whisked out of the crown, adding: “I suppose you are on furlough, and were bound for the Upper Clays when I overtook you marching along the Queen’s Highway with your riding-whip in your hand?”

“Why, a cane might be better, for a man on leave to carry,” returned Joshua Horrotian, meditatively running his eye from the stout handle of the riding-whip to the strong lash at its tip. “But though I came by the railway, I mean to go back by road. My Captain, being a rich gentleman, and having a good opinion of my judgment in horseflesh”--he said this with a flush and sparkle of honest pride--“has bought my young horse--‘Blueberry’--for the troop. And I’m to ride him. He won’t look so fat and shiny on the Government forage as he does on what he gets at home, but he’ll do credit to the Regiment yet, or I’m no judge. Good-afternoon, sir!”

He saluted and wheeled, setting his handsome face ahead, and Thompson Jowell, in surly accents, bade the groom drive on. And as the spirited blacks broke at once into a trot, carrying their owner from the scene so rapidly that the spick-and-span mail-phaeton became behind their lively heels a mere flying streak of scarlet, he directed towards Blueberry and his owner the fervent aspiration: “And I hope your brute may come a downer when you’re charging in close order, and break your infernal neck for you!” But he did not utter the words aloud.

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XXII

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.

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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.

“And naked shall you go, Joshua, save for the clothes upon your back, and not a penny of my money shall be lavished upon the accursed of God and of his mother, for whom Hell gapes, and eternal punishment is most surely waiting.”

“Hem!--hem!” coughed the Reverend Pooker, getting alarmed. But Mrs. Horrotian was wound up, and, as Josh knew, would go till she ran down.

“There shall you gnash your teeth in torment,” boomed the awful voice of the widow. “There shall the Worm that dieth not gnaw your vitals----”

“Oh!--dang the dod-gassed Worm!” broke in the lost one, and at this hideous blasphemy the Reverend Mr. Pooker set down his refilled teacup with a bump that spilled half its contents over the saucer’s edge, and the minister’s wife and daughter fairly cowered in their chairs.

“I be sick to death of hearing about worms and gnashings and torment. And as for going forth o’ your doors, I’ll go now. So good-by, mother, for good and my parting respects to you, Mr. Pooker and Mrs. Pooker! Don’t ’e cry, Miss Jenny! I shan’t go to Hell a day sooner for all my mother’s cursing. A pretty mother!” said Josh in boiling indignation, “to be calling down damnation on her only son across her Sunday tea-tray. Why, one o’ they Cannibal Islanders she throws away good money on converting ’ud make a better shift at being civil to her own flesh and blood!”

Sarah did not recover her power of sonorous speech for some minutes after the best parlor door had slammed behind her departing prodigal, and his swift heavy steps had traversed the stone-flagged passage, and his manly voice, still vibrating with anger, had been heard telling the old mastiff Roger to go back to his kennel in the yard. Then she offered Mr. Pooker a fresh cup of tea, and when the pastor declined, suggesting application at the Mercy Seat for a better frame of mind for somebody unparticularized by name, the stark little woman gave no more sign of consciousness of the intimate and personal nature of the supplication, than if she had been asked to join in prayer for an obdurate Fiji Islander, determined on not parting with a favorite fetish of carved cocoanut-wood adorned with red sinnet and filed sharks’ teeth.

But when the farmhouse was silent, and its few inmates, all save the mistress, wrapped in slumber, Sarah Horrotian sat upon a hard, uncompromising, uncomfortable chair by the dying embers of the farm-kitchen fire; and wept, as might have wept a wooden manikin, on some stage of puppets; wrenched with grotesque spasms and wiry throes of grief, holding her blue-checked apron squarely before her reddened eyes.

* * * * *

Ah! pity these isolated ones, stern of nature, obdurate of heart, who yearn to yield but are not fashioned for yielding. All they crave is the opportunity to relent and be tender, but it never, never comes! If someone had the courage to cling about those iron necks of theirs and pray them with tears and kisses, to be kind, they believe in their secret hearts that they could; but the waters of tenderness are dried up in them, or lost, as are forgotten and buried fountains in the great Desert, doomed never to spring to the light in crystal radiance and cool a thirsty traveler’s lip. What tragic agonies are theirs, who can even see their dear ones die, unreconciled and unforgiven.... Ah! pity them, the obdurate of heart!

* * * * *

As for the Prodigal, who had tramped it into Market Drowsing, and bribed the under-ostler at the Saracen’s Head Inn with sixpence to let him sleep in the hayloft appertaining to that hostelry after a supper of bread-and-cheese and ale, he had had a clinching interview with the tall Sergeant of Lancers at the Recruiting Office, before that stately functionary’s palate had lost the flavor of his post-breakfast quart of beer.

Josh chose the Hundredth Lancers for the reason that he liked horses; and because the Sergeant, whom he hugely admired, belonged to that dashing Light Cavalry regiment. Also because there were knights in plate-armor tilting with lances in the half-obliterated fourteenth-century frescoes that rainy weather brought out in ghostly blotches through the conscientious Protestant whitewash of Market Drowsing Parish Church; and he had, from early boyhood, achieved patience throughout the Vicar’s hydra-headed sermons, by imagining how he, Josh Horrotian, would wield such a weapon, bestriding just such another steed as Sir Simon Flanderby’s war-horse with the steel spiked nose-piece and breast-piece, the wide embroidered rein, and the emblazoned, parti-colored housing sweeping the ground like a lady’s train....

* * * * *

The Railway had not yet reached Dullingstoke. But the Sergeant, with his plentifully-be-ribboned captives, six other youths of Josh’s own age, had marched into the town--with frequent washings-out of thirsty throats with pots of beer upon the way--and had whisked them off by the “Wonder” coach for Spurham before to Sarah Horrotian of The Upper Clays Farm came the news that her only son had joined in his lot with the shedders of blood.

Erelong, to that hopeful recruit, learning the goose-step at Spurham Baracks with the other raw-material under process of licking into shape, arrived a goodly chest containing comfortable provender of home-cured bacon, home-made cheese and butter, a stone bottle of The Upper Clays home-brewed ale, and a meat-pie with a crust of almost shell-proof consistency. In conjunction with a sulphurous tract, a bottle of horehound balsam for coughs, and a Bible containing a five-pound note pinned within a half-sheet of dingy notepaper, inscribed in the widow’s stiff laborious handwriting: “For my son. From his affectionate Mother. S. Horrotian.”

* * * * *

Do you know stern Sarah a little better now? Do you comprehend the craving need of strong excitement, the powerfully-dramatic bent that found a relieving outlet in the provocation of those passionate scenes that left the simpler and less complex nature of her offspring suffering and unstrung?

He was the gainer, she the loser, by that breach of theirs. Her terrible voice, her freezing glare would never overawe his soul and paralyze his tongue again. He would always have an answer for her thenceforth; her quelling days were over....

For to Josh, who had been bred in the belief that the word of Sarah was as little to be disputed as the Word between the black stamped-leather covers of the great Family Bible on the best parlor side-table, had come the revelation that his mother was merely a woman after all. She had always promised him that he would be blasted by a lightning-stroke from Heaven did he presume to defy her awful mandates and dispute her sovereign will. He had done both these things, and what is more, had done them on a Sunday, and the effect upon the weather had been absolutely nil. One of the balmiest, rosiest, and brightest of summer evenings he could recall had smiled upon the exile’s tramp into Market Drowsing. He had thrown his curly red head back, and squared his strong shoulders as he went, looking up at the pale shining splendor of the evening star....

Full revelation of her loss of power to sway the imagination of her son did not come to Sarah Horrotian until two years later, when Josh, a full-blown trooper in Her Majesty’s Hundredth Regiment of Lancers, came home, upon her written invitation, to spend a furlough at The Upper Clays.

He had acquired a power of smart repartee, a military sangfroid which Sarah found disconcerting.... His way of smiling as he pulled at a recently-acquired red whisker betokened self-consciousness and vanity, that damning sin.... It was in vain she urged him to confess himself a worm, and no man....

“That’s your opinion o’ your son, maybe!...” Josh played with the hirsute ornament, which his mother secretly admired, in the dandified way she abhorred, adding; “But I should call my father’s son a decent sort o’ beggar, taking him all round!”

“Pride goeth before a fall,” said Sarah, in her deep chest-notes of warning, “and the pit is digged deep for the feet of the vainglorious.”

“Ay, ay!” assented the soldier. “Perhaps I be vainglorious, a bit. But you have so poor an opinion o’ me, mother, that I’m driven to have a better o’ myself than I should in ordinary. Try praising me, if you want me to run myself down!”

Sarah was silenced. She shut up her mouth like a trap, and went about her work in rigid dumbness, while the voice of her soul cried out in bitterness, wrestling with Heaven for the soul of her son.

Whom to praise, whom to take pride in, whom to favor and indulge were to damn to all eternity, according to the Book from which some souls draw milk and honey, and others corroding verjuice and bitterest gall.

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XXIV

This February noon, while the early sunset reddened the west and the son made love in the barn, the mother prepared stewed rabbit in the kitchen. She sliced cold potatoes into a pie-dish, with severe brows and compressed lips. And a young rabbit, disemboweled and skinned, ready for dismemberment and interment, leaned languidly over the edge of a blue plate, waiting the widow’s will.

There was a heavy step upon the flagstones outside the closed half-door that kept the expectant group of fowls assembled at the outer threshold from intruding into the kitchen. The upper part of a tall man’s body appeared over the half-door, blocking out the sunset. Its long shadow fell over the chopping-board and the widow’s active hands. She knew whose was the step, and her hands were arrested in mid-movement. Had her grim nature permitted it, she could have cried out with joy. As it was, a dimness obscured her vision, and the roaring of the blood in her ears drowned out the click of the latch as he came in.

“Joshua!...”

“How are you, mother?”

The tall, manly, soldierly figure, towering in the oblong of open doorway against its background of flaming sunset sky, farmyard, and stubble sloping to the jade-green river crawling between its frosted sedges, stepped to her and took her large, hard hand, and kissed her underneath the high, sallow cheekbone, with a duteous peck of lips.

“I am well, thanks be to the Lord!” said Sarah, regarding him unflinchingly. He was so like her dead husband, his father, that a wild surge of emotion strained the hooks and eyes of the brown wincey gown and swelled her lean throat to choking anguish.

“That’s right. But you always are well, ain’t you, mother? Bobbish, if not tol-lol? And Miss Nelly?” For she had entered at the moment, bringing the radiance of youth and happiness to illumine the somewhat gloomy farm-kitchen. “No need to ask how she is, if looks speak for anything! How do you do, Miss Nelly? Let me hope as you’ve not quite forgotten an old friend?”

“No, for sure! and I be nicely, Mr. Joshua, kindly thanks to ’e!”

With her quilted sunbonnet shading a face that the February wind, or some more ardent lover had kissed to glowing rosiness, from the widow’s hard black eyes, she put her pink hand in the hypocritical fellow’s large brown one, and gave him modest welcome.

So modest and discreet, even in those rigorous eyes of Sarah Horrotian, that the extraordinary snorting sound emanating from Jason Digweed, who, heralded by his characteristic perfume of pigsties in combination with unwashed humanity, had appeared outside the half-door, startled the widow as though a geyser, suddenly opening in the brick kitchen-floor, had been responsible for the utterance.

“Bain’t you ashamed, man?” she tartly demanded of the offender, “to make noises like the beasts that perish?”

“No-a!” retorted Jason. He stepped boldly across the kitchen threshold, permeating its slightly onion-flavored atmosphere with a potent suggestion of pigs, and planted his huge and dirty boots defiantly upon the spotless floor-bricks, in defiance of the mute appeal made by the rope-mat to the entering visitor. He scratched himself leisurely, within the open bosom of a shirt of neutral hue, and as he scratched he looked from one to the other of the three faces that bore degrading testimony to the daily and thorough use of water, soap, and flannel, and his little eyes burned redly under their populous thatch. It is not often that to a piggy man who has been wounded by the dart of Amor and roused to resentful frenzy by the fair one’s contemptuous rejection of his love, comes so complete an opportunity for vengeance upon a triumphant rival as Jason savored now.

The soldier’s rashness hastened the descent of the sword....

“Why, ’tis Jason,” he began, with a tingling in the muscles of his strong arms prompting him to punch a head, and an urgent impulse concealed within the toes of his spurred Wellingtons, that had ended before now in somebody being kicked. “No need to inquire after your health, I see. A perfect picture.... Isn’t he, Miss Nelly?--if so be as a chap could see the picture for the dirt upon it!”

“Let Digweed be. He is as the Lord made him!” boomed the deep rebuking voice of Sarah, “and a burning and a shining light of holiness such as I have prayed in vain the son of my womb might be!”

“The Lord made him as clean as the rest of us at the start, I reckon,” retorted the soldier, rushing on his fate, “and a burning and a shining light in a mucky lantern is no better than a bad ’un at the best. Eh, Miss Nelly?”

At this homely piece of wit Nelly laughed out merrily, and Sarah, turning her long narrow face and stern black eyes on the blushing offender, bade her be silent in so harsh a tone that she began to cry.

Mightily relishing Nelly’s tears and confusion, Jason perpetrated a whinnying imitation of the silly little laugh that had drawn down her mistress’s rebuke upon her. But upon a sudden forward movement of the angry-eyed trooper, he hastily turned the whinny into a groan of the prolonged and gusty kind, wherewith searching pulpit utterances were ordinarily greeted at the Market Drowsing Bethesda.

“Now, look ye here, Digweed,” began the trooper, upon whose rising anger the groan had anything but a mollifying effect, “if so be as you’re a man, and have anything upon your tongue’s end, out with it in human language, and ha’ done wi’ bellocking and gruntling,--or betake yourself where the company are more likely to understand ye.”

* * * * *

The speaker slightly jerked his thumb towards the littered yard, in shape an irregular square; the long straggling mass of the farmhouse occupying the upper side, the stables, sheds, and cattle-byres enclosing it upon the right hand; a goodly row of populous pigsties flanking it upon the left, where a hollow depression was occupied, during ten months of the year, by a brown pond of gruel-like consistency, much patronized of paddling ducks and a large black maternal sow, at that moment engaged in rootling investigations upon its plashy borders.

“Let be!” sounded in the deep tones of the widow. She checked her son’s impulse towards continued speech with a semaphore-like movement of the lean little arm with the great bony hand at the end of it. “If you have anywhat to say, say it!” she commanded, seeing her unwashed factotum to be in labor with speech.

“Mis’ess,” said Jason, getting out the word with a violent wrench and twist, “since Babylonish luxury and scarlet doings be ’lowed on this here varm, my time ’ooll be up come Mickenmass--and I’ll be ready to up-stick and bundle!” He wagged his shaggy head at his mistress, but his piggy eyes were on her son.

“Silence!” boomed the great voice of Sarah Horrotian. She put up her large hand as the soldier opened his mouth to speak. She set back the rabbit on the blue plate from which it had lapsed as though overwhelmed by the secession of the fogger. Then she folded her lean arms upon her triangular apron-bib, and confronted the shining light with judicial severity.

“Who speaks of luxury and wickedness doing on this place,” she proclaimed, “must make his charge good. Out with yours, man!... Let us hear what you have to say!”

“I were gettin’ my nuncherd o’ bread an’ chaze up to th’ owd barn,” said Jason, with another spasmodic effort, “leanin’ my back agen th’ boards to th’ wind’erd zide of ’n, as I chudd, when I heern a nise-like inzide. Like so!”

The pigman primmed his lips, and brought out a long-drawn, chirping kiss. The sound plopped into the silence as a stone plops into a pond, creating rings of consternation. Two of the three faces the narrator scanned with the bilious little savage eyes under his heavy brake of eyebrow were flaming crimson. The third was pale with wrath, as Sarah exclaimed indignantly:

“Trapesers again!”

“A male man and a female woman,” continued Jason, “kissing and cuddling as though the begetting of bastards were th’ only biznurds they med ha’ come into the world to tend.”

He turned up his eyes and groaned again. The soldier’s leathern stock grew strangling in its embrace. The milk-maid’s bosom lifted on a gasp for air. Josh and Nelly, each in their different way, prayed that the ordeal might be soon over....

Meanwhile thunderclouds gathered upon the high sallow forehead of Mrs. Horrotian, between the scanty loops of her black hair. A suspicion sharpened and yellowed her. She reviewed possible offenders in her narrow mind a moment, then said:

“Be you swearing-certain they sinners were tramping bodies?”

Jason returned, plunging two hearers into a hot and cold bath of perspiration:

“Noa, I bain’t!”

“Med-be,” said Sarah, with a vinegar face of disgust, “that to-yielding girl of Abey Absalom’s has been straying with some bachelor-mankind hereabouts. Both Joe Chinney and Tudd Dowsall be sinners prone to fall.”

She waited for no answer:

“And to them and all such, Judgment will be meted out hereafter!”

She took the rabbit from the plate, disposed its limbs upon the chopping-board, balanced the chopper above the victim, and brought down the blade. Nelly squeaked as though the rabbit had been capable of utterance, as the mangling steel fell. The awful voice went on, as its owner with dreadful dexterity finished chopping up the victim:

“For there is a hell for chamberers and wantoners!” She solemnly laid the remains of the sacrifice in the pie-dish, strewed cold vegetables above, poured a cupful of gravy upon the whole, and added, with the salt and mace and pepper: “Nor shall fornicators fail of their place therein. Girl, open the oven door!”

Pale Nelly totteringly obeyed, showing a cavernous interior of coaly blackness, radiating fierce heat, illuminated by red and leaping reflections of awfully-suggestive flame. Both the son and the daughter-in-law knew themselves guiltless, their endearments chaste and lawful as those of Zacharias and Elizabeth. But when the high-priestess of the mysteries advanced, knelt, and with a powerful shove of her bony arm drove in the pie-dish to deepest perdition, and clashed the oven-door as though it shut upon the lost for all eternity, their knees trembled and their eyes clung together behind the widow’s narrow back. Even Jason gulped and shuddered. But he recovered as the widow turned upon him, demanding:

“Was it Joe Chinney wi’ Nance Absalom?”

“Noa!” returned the piggy man. And drove home the negative with a vigorous headshake.... Horror stiffened Sarah’s facial muscles. Her great voice deepened to a blood-curdling whisper as she said:

“Dew and Randy be both wedded men.... Betsy Twitch the weeder be only half a widow.... Jason Digweed, do you mean to tell me the Seventh Commandment has been broken in my barn?”

For answer Jason raised a gnarled and stubby forefinger and made a malignant jab with the digit in the direction of the tall, martial figure in the blue, white-faced uniform.

“Best ask your soger son, Widder Horrotian. Med-be he’d took unto his’seln’ a praper missus som’ers before he made ’e mother-in-laa to your own milkin’-wench?”

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XXV

There was a moment’s horrible silence in which the white-faced clock was drowned, or so it seemed to the married lovers, by the thumping of their hearts. Then the dreaded voice boomed forth:

“Joshua Horrotian!”

“Here!” said the soldier, as if the roll were being called.

“Your miserable mother has a question to ask. Are you, the son I bore, a villain, or an honest man? Is this girl whom I have sheltered under my roof, and fed o’ my charity, a virtuous woman or a weak, to-yielding trollop?”

“I should ha’ knocked down the chap who’d asked me them two questions,” said Josh, turning a blazing crimson countenance, illumined with a pair of indignant candid eyes, upon the widow. “But I suppose, being my mother, and a professing Christian, it’s your privilege to think the worst o’ your own flesh and blood, no less than other folks. And so far as I can remember, you always have, I’ll say that for you! And though such usage goes far to the making of a decent young fellow into a villain and a blackguard as well, I am neither of these things, I declare before my Maker!” He added, with a clinching vigor that drove home belief in him: “And this young wife o’ mine is as clean of sin, if not as innocent--before Him I say it again!--as when she came into this charitable-thinking world a naked baby!”

The strangling sensation behind the leather stock had lessened, the ripe-tomato hue that had swamped Joshua Horrotian’s open, florid countenance had faded to a more normal tinting. The flaming sunset of the cold, clear evening showed up his stately height and vigorous handsome proportions to rare advantage. He was only a private trooper in Her Majesty’s Hundredth Regiment of Lancers, but in the eyes of the stern mother, whose love of him was intense in proportion to her rigorous concealment of it, no less than in those of his shy, worshiping wife, he seemed a king among men. But while the wife rejoiced in his beauty, his mother loathed it as a snare. She had no words in which to hid the soldier take not the Holy Name in vain. She turned her hollow eyes away from him, lest she should offend the grim Moloch she worshiped by excess of pride in this perishable shape of clay, formed from her own body. And the resonant manly voice went on:

“Here’s the extent o’ my defaulter’s sheet where you’re concerned. I’ve married your milkmaid wi’out asking leave of you or anybody. Why? I’ll save you the trouble of asking the question I see on the end o’ your tongue. Because I love her and she me! Come here-along, my Pretty!”

He held out, with his dead father’s well-remembered gesture, the strong arm in the blue-cloth sleeve, and the masterful look of affection and the becoming air of pride he did this with, the widow of George Horrotian well knew. An insufferable pang pierced her when Nelly, with a little, eager cry, ran into the welcoming circle of the embrace. It closed upon the rounded waist as if it never meant to let go. And a spasm of rageful, despairing jealousy clutched Sarah as she saw; and her heart fluttered and clawed and pecked in her lean bosom like a starling burrowing in a crumbling wall. She closed her haggard eyes to shut out the sight of the hateful creature who had robbed her....

And yet, although she did not realize it, to the rigid woman who had yearned for a maid-child and been denied one, this creamy, rose-tinted, hazel-eyed orphan of a ruined farmer and his fagged-out young wife, was dear. Nelly had come into grim Sarah’s life too late to bring about a softening change in it, and garland it with flowers. Indeed, she shrank with loathing from the widow’s bony touch, and shivered with secret hatred at the sound of the railing voice that had driven her Josh from home before she knew him.... But such affection as Mrs. Horrotian had to spare from the son whom in her own characteristic and uncomfortable manner she idolized, was bestowed upon the girl who was now his wife.

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!”

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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!”

Thus sang Jason, solemnly gamboling in the muck and litter, close to the edge of the oleaginous and strongly-smelling brown duck-pond previously described, which, reinforced by the oozings from many pigsties, and diluted by the melting of recent snows, filled the hollow it occupied to the very brim.

Changing the case, but not the meaning, the pigman chanted as he now advanced, and now retreated, doing wonderful things with his bandy legs, and achieving marvels with a set of features which, naturally grotesque, lent themselves with indiarubber-like adaptability to the exigencies of grimace:

“Her--be--an--Arr!”

And with a final, fatal inspiration followed up with:

“Soger’s--Arr!...”

The epithet hit like a lump from the dungheap. The clumsy pirouette that accompanied it brought the pigman within the reach of retribution.

The gaunt eyes of Sarah saw the stalwart arm of her son shoot forth suddenly. The iron hand belonging to the arm seized the pigman by the rearward combination of matted hair, unwashed skin, and slack smock that served him as a scruff. As a rat in the mouth of a bulldog was Jason Digweed shaken, then hurled away with a rotatory motion, a human teetotum spinning against its will....

Splash! the brown pond received the gyrating one in its oozy yielding bosom. A horrible wallowing succeeded, accompanied by a smell of such terrific potency, that Adam and Eve, as they retreated from their forfeited Paradise, were forced, after homespun rustic fashion, to hold their noses.

Suppose you have heard the whitewashed gate with the carrier’s wisp of rag tied on it, clash to behind the horse, the man, and the woman.... Even so, you have not done with them yet;--not quite yet....

Nor with Sarah, praying in the empty farm-kitchen, clamorously justifying herself before the Face of her Maker, as the white-faced clock ticked sorrowfully by the wall. Old Time has seen so many of us drive away the being we most loved and longed for. When has he ever seen that banished joy return in answer to our desperate prayer?

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