“No-a!” retorted Jason. He stepped boldly across the kitchen threshold, permeating its slightly onion-flavored atmosphere with a potent suggestion of pigs, and planted his huge and dirty boots defiantly upon the spotless floor-bricks, in defiance of the mute appeal made by the rope-mat to the entering visitor. He scratched himself leisurely, within the open bosom of a shirt of neutral hue, and as he scratched he looked from one to the other of the three faces that bore degrading testimony to the daily and thorough use of water, soap, and flannel, and his little eyes burned redly under their populous thatch. It is not often that to a piggy man who has been wounded by the dart of Amor and roused to resentful frenzy by the fair one’s contemptuous rejection of his love, comes so complete an opportunity for vengeance upon a triumphant rival as Jason savored now.
The soldier’s rashness hastened the descent of the sword....
“Why, ’tis Jason,” he began, with a tingling in the muscles of his strong arms prompting him to punch a head, and an urgent impulse concealed within the toes of his spurred Wellingtons, that had ended before now in somebody being kicked. “No need to inquire after your health, I see. A perfect picture.... Isn’t he, Miss Nelly?—if so be as a chap could see the picture for the dirt upon it!”
“Let Digweed be. He is as the Lord made him!” boomed the deep rebuking voice of Sarah, “and a burning and a shining light of holiness such as I have prayed in vain the son of my womb might be!”
“The Lord made him as clean as the rest of us at the start, I reckon,” retorted the soldier, rushing on his fate, “and a burning and a shining light in a mucky lantern is no better than a bad ’un at the best. Eh, Miss Nelly?”
At this homely piece of wit Nelly laughed out merrily, and Sarah, turning her long narrow face and stern black eyes on the blushing offender, bade her be silent in so harsh a tone that she began to cry.
Mightily relishing Nelly’s tears and confusion, Jason perpetrated a whinnying imitation of the silly little laugh that had drawn down her mistress’s rebuke upon her. But upon a sudden forward movement of the angry-eyed trooper, he hastily turned the whinny into a groan of the prolonged and gusty kind, wherewith searching pulpit utterances were ordinarily greeted at the Market Drowsing Bethesda.
“Now, look ye here, Digweed,” began the trooper, upon whose rising anger the groan had anything but a mollifying effect, “if so be as you’re a man, and have anything upon your tongue’s end, out with it in human language, and ha’ done wi’ bellocking and gruntling,—or betake yourself where the company are more likely to understand ye.”
The speaker slightly jerked his thumb towards the littered yard, in shape an irregular square; the long straggling mass of the farmhouse occupying the upper side, the stables, sheds, and cattle-byres enclosing it upon the right hand; a goodly row of populous pigsties flanking it upon the left, where a hollow depression was occupied, during ten months of the year, by a brown pond of gruel-like consistency, much patronized of paddling ducks and a large black maternal sow, at that moment engaged in rootling investigations upon its plashy borders.