Nelly turned on her love rounded eyes of alarmed astonishment. He answered, wiping with the back of his sinewy hand a splash of Jowell’s mud from his sunburnt cheek.
“Because I doubt I ha’ made me another enemy with it, and that’s one too many, Pretty—as things are just now.” He whistled a stave of “The Ratcatcher’s Daughter” with defiant melodiousness, then broke off to say with a broad, irrepressible smile:
“To think of my having twitted of him wi’ buying spoiled hay and mildewed barley, and pitched them kilns that are worked in a name that isn’t his’n at Little Milding—along of the empty jam-tins and dead kittens and so on that ha’ been sarved out to us chaps in the Government Forage trusses—at his head. Egad! I can hardly believe it o’ myself!”
With her bonnet thrust back and falling on her shoulders, and the sweet rosiness hunted from her cheeks by the revelation of his terrible presumption, she panted softly:
“Dear Josh, you never!...”
“Ay! but I did though,” the soldier retorted, “as true as I live!”
“And him that great and rich and powerful,” she breathed. “Whatever will he do to ’e? By way o’ revenge, I mean—come he gets the chance.”
“Why, he med make more bad blood between me and mother—if so be as that’s to be done,” said Josh, meditatively tapping Blueberry’s shining neck with the end of the bridle he held—“or drop a word at Headquarters that ’ud sow salt in my bed.” He added: “By jingo! if—as seems likely—I be doomed to spend my long life sogering, I’ve done none too well by myself. Or you, poor girl, I doubt!”
His tone of pity hung bright drops on her dark eyelashes. She murmured, stroking the blue cloth that covered the broad shoulders:
“How can e’ fare to say that? Haven’t ’e married me? And the long life you talk of will be ours, dear love!—not yours to live alone.”