Part 15
“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.
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: