Part 16

“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.

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!”