“Noa!” returned the piggy man. And drove home the negative with a vigorous headshake.... Horror stiffened Sarah’s facial muscles. Her great voice deepened to a blood-curdling whisper as she said:
“Dew and Randy be both wedded men.... Betsy Twitch the weeder be only half a widow.... Jason Digweed, do you mean to tell me the Seventh Commandment has been broken in my barn?”
For answer Jason raised a gnarled and stubby forefinger and made a malignant jab with the digit in the direction of the tall, martial figure in the blue, white-faced uniform.
“Best ask your soger son, Widder Horrotian. Med-be he’d took unto his’seln’ a praper missus som’ers before he made ’e mother-in-laa to your own milkin’-wench?”
XXV
There was a moment’s horrible silence in which the white-faced clock was drowned, or so it seemed to the married lovers, by the thumping of their hearts. Then the dreaded voice boomed forth:
“Joshua Horrotian!”
“Here!” said the soldier, as if the roll were being called.
“Your miserable mother has a question to ask. Are you, the son I bore, a villain, or an honest man? Is this girl whom I have sheltered under my roof, and fed o’ my charity, a virtuous woman or a weak, to-yielding trollop?”
“I should ha’ knocked down the chap who’d asked me them two questions,” said Josh, turning a blazing crimson countenance, illumined with a pair of indignant candid eyes, upon the widow. “But I suppose, being my mother, and a professing Christian, it’s your privilege to think the worst o’ your own flesh and blood, no less than other folks. And so far as I can remember, you always have, I’ll say that for you! And though such usage goes far to the making of a decent young fellow into a villain and a blackguard as well, I am neither of these things, I declare before my Maker!” He added, with a clinching vigor that drove home belief in him: “And this young wife o’ mine is as clean of sin, if not as innocent—before Him I say it again!—as when she came into this charitable-thinking world a naked baby!”