Ah! pity these isolated ones, stern of nature, obdurate of heart, who yearn to yield but are not fashioned for yielding. All they crave is the opportunity to relent and be tender, but it never, never comes! If someone had the courage to cling about those iron necks of theirs and pray them with tears and kisses, to be kind, they believe in their secret hearts that they could; but the waters of tenderness are dried up in them, or lost, as are forgotten and buried fountains in the great Desert, doomed never to spring to the light in crystal radiance and cool a thirsty traveler’s lip. What tragic agonies are theirs, who can even see their dear ones die, unreconciled and unforgiven.... Ah! pity them, the obdurate of heart!
As for the Prodigal, who had tramped it into Market Drowsing, and bribed the under-ostler at the Saracen’s Head Inn with sixpence to let him sleep in the hayloft appertaining to that hostelry after a supper of bread-and-cheese and ale, he had had a clinching interview with the tall Sergeant of Lancers at the Recruiting Office, before that stately functionary’s palate had lost the flavor of his post-breakfast quart of beer.
Josh chose the Hundredth Lancers for the reason that he liked horses; and because the Sergeant, whom he hugely admired, belonged to that dashing Light Cavalry regiment. Also because there were knights in plate-armor tilting with lances in the half-obliterated fourteenth-century frescoes that rainy weather brought out in ghostly blotches through the conscientious Protestant whitewash of Market Drowsing Parish Church; and he had, from early boyhood, achieved patience throughout the Vicar’s hydra-headed sermons, by imagining how he, Josh Horrotian, would wield such a weapon, bestriding just such another steed as Sir Simon Flanderby’s war-horse with the steel spiked nose-piece and breast-piece, the wide embroidered rein, and the emblazoned, parti-colored housing sweeping the ground like a lady’s train....
The Railway had not yet reached Dullingstoke. But the Sergeant, with his plentifully-be-ribboned captives, six other youths of Josh’s own age, had marched into the town—with frequent washings-out of thirsty throats with pots of beer upon the way—and had whisked them off by the “Wonder” coach for Spurham before to Sarah Horrotian of The Upper Clays Farm came the news that her only son had joined in his lot with the shedders of blood.
Erelong, to that hopeful recruit, learning the goose-step at Spurham Baracks with the other raw-material under process of licking into shape, arrived a goodly chest containing comfortable provender of home-cured bacon, home-made cheese and butter, a stone bottle of The Upper Clays home-brewed ale, and a meat-pie with a crust of almost shell-proof consistency. In conjunction with a sulphurous tract, a bottle of horehound balsam for coughs, and a Bible containing a five-pound note pinned within a half-sheet of dingy notepaper, inscribed in the widow’s stiff laborious handwriting: “For my son. From his affectionate Mother. S. Horrotian.”
Do you know stern Sarah a little better now? Do you comprehend the craving need of strong excitement, the powerfully-dramatic bent that found a relieving outlet in the provocation of those passionate scenes that left the simpler and less complex nature of her offspring suffering and unstrung?
He was the gainer, she the loser, by that breach of theirs. Her terrible voice, her freezing glare would never overawe his soul and paralyze his tongue again. He would always have an answer for her thenceforth; her quelling days were over....