He thought he spoke to Dunoisse, but Dunoisse had already left the Rue de Sèvres behind him. With despair eating at his heart, and Remorse and Shame for traveling-companions, he had resumed his interrupted journey—he was speeding to the Pestilential Places of South-Eastern Europe to carry out the secret mission of Monseigneur.
LXVII
Have you forgotten a trooper of Her Majesty’s Hundredth Regiment of Lancers, who, being secretly married to his mother’s milkmaid, and detected by a pigman in the administration of divers conjugal endearments—sanctioned by Church and State, but unpardonable in the hollow eyes of Sarah Horrotian—was, by maternal decree, incontinently driven—with his young bride and his good horse Blueberry—forth from the gates of Upper Clays Farm?
The wedded pair supped and slept that night at Market Drowsing, in a garret of the Saracen’s Head Inn. So many thirsty callers were attracted to the bar of this hostelry by the news—disseminated as soon as told—of the rupture between Sarah Horrotian and her son, that the landlord, for the accommodation above-named, refused payment.
“For—my part I praise ’e for the step you’ve taken! All same,” the landlord added, with a touch of the Sloughshire caution, “theer be no need for ’e to go telling Widow Horrotian as much. For her puts up her shay and pony here regularly on market-days—and custom is custom, be it large or small.”
At dawn, fortified by slaps on the back and a good many handshakes, as well as cold bacon, bread and butter, tea for the bride and ale for the groom; man, woman, and horse took the road for Dullingstoke Junction, whence Mrs. Joshua Horrotian was to proceed by rail to the cavalry depot town of Spurham, and await at an address supplied by her husband, his slower arrival by road.
It was a raw, cold, weeping day. A numbing wind blew between its sleety showers. As they paused on the bridge that spanned the swollen river to look their last at the farm perched on the high bleak ridge of the sixty-acre upland, a scarlet mail-phaeton rattled past behind the flying heels of its pair of spirited blacks. The trooper, recognizing the squat and bulky figure buttoned in beside the driving groom under the phaeton’s leather apron, wrapped in a dreadnought cloak and sheltered under the vast green silk umbrella dutifully held over him by the servant who occupied the back seat; reddened to the rim of the idiotic little muffin-shaped forage-cap of German pattern approved by Government, but Thompson Jowell gave no sign.
“Damn my tongue!” had come from Josh in almost a mellow tone of retrospective ruefulness.
“Whatever for, dear Josh?”