“That I never!... Stop, though!...”
His mouth primmed itself into a whistle of dismay, so ludicrous that Nelly tittered through her tears. He felt in the single pocket permitted by Government, patted himself all over the blue covering of his big chest and solid ribs in the hope of drawing forth a paper crackle, finally bellowed with the full strength of his vast lungs:
“Right, by the Lord Harry! So I did; there’s no denying!”
His eyes grew circular and bulging, his healthy, florid, intelligent countenance was stricken into the very idiocy of consternation, his bushy flaming whiskers seemed to droop, grow limp, and fade in color as he stuttered:
“And never thought about it after or since!... And the chap belonging to the Rifle Corps—that lent me the plain-clothes suit—if you can tack on ‘plain’ to a chessboard check in half-a-dozen colors—it being as many sizes too big for him! offered me the togs as a bargain, him being ordered out to Bermuda on Foreign Service.... And I hadn’t the money—and he sold the chessboards to a Jew.... Whew! My eye and Betty Martin!... Who’s got those pants on now?”
“Then,” said his mother, in tones that cut like broken ice-edges, “you that are a married couple have no lines to show me?” She paused and delivered sentence, woman-like wreaking vengeance first upon the daughter of Eve....
“You poor, to-yielding wench, this man has deceived and ruined ’e! A woman without her marriage-lines be no wife at all!”
XXVI
Do you who read cry “Bosh!” at the preposterous notion?... Not so these unlettered, homespun Early Victorians, who never dreamed of its being possible, by the payment of a few silver pieces, to obtain a copy of the original entry in the Marriage Register pertaining to the sacred edifice where the matrimonial knot had been tied. Go, search through the literature of the period. You will find shelves of musty novels, piles of foxy old dramas reeking with this very situation. The cry:
“Where are my lines?... Lost—lost!...” meets invariably with the pertinent, potent answer, making Edwin beat his brow in despair, sending Angelina into syncope or convulsions: “Then also lost, unhappy one, art thou!”