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 activehands. 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-eyedtrooper, 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 thevictim, 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?”