The strangling sensation behind the leather stock had lessened, the ripe-tomato hue that had swamped Joshua Horrotian’s open, florid countenance had faded to a more normal tinting. The flaming sunset of the cold, clear evening showed up his stately height and vigorous handsome proportions to rare advantage. He was only a private trooper in Her Majesty’s Hundredth Regiment of Lancers, but in the eyes of the stern mother, whose love of him was intense in proportion to her rigorous concealment of it, no less than in those of his shy, worshiping wife, he seemed a king among men. But while the wife rejoiced in his beauty, his mother loathed it as a snare. She had no words in which to hid the soldier take not the Holy Name in vain. She turned her hollow eyes away from him, lest she should offend the grim Moloch she worshiped by excess of pride in this perishable shape of clay, formed from her own body. And the resonant manly voice went on:
“Here’s the extent o’ my defaulter’s sheet where you’re concerned. I’ve married your milkmaid wi’out asking leave of you or anybody. Why? I’ll save you the trouble of asking the question I see on the end o’ your tongue. Because I love her and she me! Come here-along, my Pretty!”
He held out, with his dead father’s well-remembered gesture, the strong arm in the blue-cloth sleeve, and the masterful look of affection and the becoming air of pride he did this with, the widow of George Horrotian well knew. An insufferable pang pierced her when Nelly, with a little, eager cry, ran into the welcoming circle of the embrace. It closed upon the rounded waist as if it never meant to let go. And a spasm of rageful, despairing jealousy clutched Sarah as she saw; and her heart fluttered and clawed and pecked in her lean bosom like a starling burrowing in a crumbling wall. She closed her haggard eyes to shut out the sight of the hateful creature who had robbed her....
And yet, although she did not realize it, to the rigid woman who had yearned for a maid-child and been denied one, this creamy, rose-tinted, hazel-eyed orphan of a ruined farmer and his fagged-out young wife, was dear. Nelly had come into grim Sarah’s life too late to bring about a softening change in it, and garland it with flowers. Indeed, she shrank with loathing from the widow’s bony touch, and shivered with secret hatred at the sound of the railing voice that had driven her Josh from home before she knew him.... But such affection as Mrs. Horrotian had to spare from the son whom in her own characteristic and uncomfortable manner she idolized, was bestowed upon the girl who was now his wife.
Unimaginative as the woman was, her bitter love for both of them had brought its cruel gift of clairvoyance. The premonition of a growing tenderness between the two had sat by her sleepless pillow many a night past. The secret conviction that it was not to see his mother, but this bright-eyed, silken-haired interloper, had made, for months past, a whispering-gallery of her poor tormented heart. She had been driven by the nagging dread, against her better nature, to favor Jason’s piggy wooing by tacit assent rather than by words....
And now—the thing she feared had come upon her. She was never, never to be beloved by her son as her great love deserved! and the girl she had taken in and protected had proved herself a traitress. For her she had no curse; but was not Scripture fruitful in denunciation of children who disavowed a parent’s right? And yet “a man shall quit his father and mother and cleave to his wife.” When she, the maid, Sarah Doddridge, daughter of a well-to-do yeoman-farmer of the county, had eloped with her penniless young lover, the couple had salved their smarting consciences with this text. Now, behold punishment meted out.... As she had served her mother, this son of her womb had served his.
Inexorable, awful justice of that grim idol her own imagination had made, set up on high, worshiped, and misnamed God! She weakened at the blow her memory dealt her. A harsh sound that was barely human came from her dry throat. She took hold of it as savagely as though it had been an enemy’s, and rocked upon her flat, slippered feet as she wrestled with herself. Her son and her son’s wife eyed her anxiously. They saw her moved in that strange inarticulate way, and a faint little hope awoke in both their hearts, and babbled that she might even melt and bless them—as parents, at first relentless, usually ended by doing in story-books and theater-plays.
But it was not to be. The bilious eye of the piggy man was upon the widow. And Jason, with extra garnishing of words, repeated that he was ready to go at Michaelmas. Such was his spirit, he added, that he’d be dalled if he served under a soger-master, on The Upper Clays or any other farm!
“Swear not!” trumpeted Sarah, turning her long chalk-white face and resentfully-flaming black eyes upon the factotum. She plucked herself from a brief descriptive verbal chart of the particular place in the Lake of Fire specially reserved for profane persons, to add: