For to Josh, who had been bred in the belief that the word of Sarah was as little to be disputed as the Word between the black stamped-leather covers of the great Family Bible on the best parlor side-table, had come the revelation that his mother was merely a woman after all. She had always promised him that he would be blasted by a lightning-stroke from Heaven did he presume to defy her awful mandates and dispute her sovereign will. He had done both these things, and what is more, had done them on a Sunday, and the effect upon the weather had been absolutely nil. One of the balmiest, rosiest, and brightest of summer evenings he could recall had smiled upon the exile’s tramp into Market Drowsing. He had thrown his curly red head back, and squared his strong shoulders as he went, looking up at the pale shining splendor of the evening star....
Full revelation of her loss of power to sway the imagination of her son did not come to Sarah Horrotian until two years later, when Josh, a full-blown trooper in Her Majesty’s Hundredth Regiment of Lancers, came home, upon her written invitation, to spend a furlough at The Upper Clays.
He had acquired a power of smart repartee, a military sangfroid which Sarah found disconcerting.... His way of smiling as he pulled at a recently-acquired red whisker betokened self-consciousness and vanity, that damning sin.... It was in vain she urged him to confess himself a worm, and no man....
“That’s your opinion o’ your son, maybe!...” Josh played with the hirsute ornament, which his mother secretly admired, in the dandified way she abhorred, adding; “But I should call my father’s son a decent sort o’ beggar, taking him all round!”
“Pride goeth before a fall,” said Sarah, in her deep chest-notes of warning, “and the pit is digged deep for the feet of the vainglorious.”
“Ay, ay!” assented the soldier. “Perhaps I be vainglorious, a bit. But you have so poor an opinion o’ me, mother, that I’m driven to have a better o’ myself than I should in ordinary. Try praising me, if you want me to run myself down!”
Sarah was silenced. She shut up her mouth like a trap, and went about her work in rigid dumbness, while the voice of her soul cried out in bitterness, wrestling with Heaven for the soul of her son.
Whom to praise, whom to take pride in, whom to favor and indulge were to damn to all eternity, according to the Book from which some souls draw milk and honey, and others corroding verjuice and bitterest gall.
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.