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.