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 ofThe Ladies’ Mentora 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’scorsagesince the happy morn that united her for ever with thebeing 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!” hesaid. “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 stepson 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 himhow 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 thatshewill, 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 toprove 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?