“Another speech like that, Joshua, and if you was ten times the son of my womb, you should go forth motherless from these doors. What! Shall the Name of the Lord be taken in vain at my table, and I not drive forth the blasphemer from my roof!”
“Dear sister in grace ...” began placid Mrs. Pooker, possibly foreseeing regrettable contingencies. But Sarah was fairly launched.
“And naked shall you go, Joshua, save for the clothes upon your back, and not a penny of my money shall be lavished upon the accursed of God and of his mother, for whom Hell gapes, and eternal punishment is most surely waiting.”
“Hem!—hem!” coughed the Reverend Pooker, getting alarmed. But Mrs. Horrotian was wound up, and, as Josh knew, would go till she ran down.
“There shall you gnash your teeth in torment,” boomed the awful voice of the widow. “There shall the Worm that dieth not gnaw your vitals——”
“Oh!—dang the dod-gassed Worm!” broke in the lost one, and at this hideous blasphemy the Reverend Mr. Pooker set down his refilled teacup with a bump that spilled half its contents over the saucer’s edge, and the minister’s wife and daughter fairly cowered in their chairs.
“I be sick to death of hearing about worms and gnashings and torment. And as for going forth o’ your doors, I’ll go now. So good-by, mother, for good and my parting respects to you, Mr. Pooker and Mrs. Pooker! Don’t ’e cry, Miss Jenny! I shan’t go to Hell a day sooner for all my mother’s cursing. A pretty mother!” said Josh in boiling indignation, “to be calling down damnation on her only son across her Sunday tea-tray. Why, one o’ they Cannibal Islanders she throws away good money on converting ’ud make a better shift at being civil to her own flesh and blood!”
Sarah did not recover her power of sonorous speech for some minutes after the best parlor door had slammed behind her departing prodigal, and his swift heavy steps had traversed the stone-flagged passage, and his manly voice, still vibrating with anger, had been heard telling the old mastiff Roger to go back to his kennel in the yard. Then she offered Mr. Pooker a fresh cup of tea, and when the pastor declined, suggesting application at the Mercy Seat for a better frame of mind for somebody unparticularized by name, the stark little woman gave no more sign of consciousness of the intimate and personal nature of the supplication, than if she had been asked to join in prayer for an obdurate Fiji Islander, determined on not parting with a favorite fetish of carved cocoanut-wood adorned with red sinnet and filed sharks’ teeth.
But when the farmhouse was silent, and its few inmates, all save the mistress, wrapped in slumber, Sarah Horrotian sat upon a hard, uncompromising, uncomfortable chair by the dying embers of the farm-kitchen fire; and wept, as might have wept a wooden manikin, on some stage of puppets; wrenched with grotesque spasms and wiry throes of grief, holding her blue-checked apron squarely before her reddened eyes.