But of course Josh knew Pink Bonnet—with the peculiarly intimate knowledge that is entertained by the soldier for the garrison prostitute. He pitied himself for the rough cross-chance that had brought her to the theater—with the man who had taken the place he had indifferently vacated—and set her down, blazing with gin and jealousy, on the bench, cheek-by-jowl with the man who had thrown her over to marry a cleanly maid.
Ah, poor young wives! How little they dream of the muddy secrets hiding behind the clear, candid eyes they gaze in so trustfully—how little they suspect what lips the beloved lips have kissed! If you told them: “This hand that strays in your hair has tangled in the tresses of the harlot,” they would laugh you to scorn, or scorch you with their burning indignation; so unshaken is their faith in the manly hearts of whose swept and garnished chambers none ever held the key before them—whose most hidden secrets they believe they have been told. Alas! the poor young wives!
As for the husbands of the wives, by a law immutable as the foundations of the world we tread on, Pink Bonnets must be paid for in the end. Find me a smart to outdo that of lying to the dearest who never dreams of doubting you! thought the trooper, in homelier phrase than this. Sickly heats coursed through his thick veins, and the taste in his mouth was bitter as Dead Sea waters. The big, tawdry theater, packed full with eager pleasure-seekers, gave a sense of emptiness that frightened him.... Nelly nestling by his solid side, seemed miles and miles away.... For the shadow of an old, wellnigh forgotten sin had come between them, and was pushing them apart. To counteract the mental conviction of guiltiness he repeated to himself all the trite clauses of the Code of Manhood, and employed, in imaginary defense of conduct denounced by an unspecified accuser—all the clinching arguments he knew.
“Ye wouldn’t have a man live aught but a man’s life would ye?”
Followed by:
“’Tis true I ha’ run wild a bit—drank a bit,—betted a bit—frequented loose women, and the rest of it!—but so have all the young chaps I ever knew or heard of. Why should I set up to be better than the rest?”
Then:
“Women ye see—they be made different from men! ’Tis easy for them to run straight—that is, for the good ones. They can resist temptation better than us—being so much weaker and less sensible than we!”
The Curtain went up as the unseen person with whom Josh argued—and who never answered any of his arguments,—was getting the best of it, to the trooper’s mind, Mrs. Joshua clutched the big blue cloth-covered arm with a little squeal, as the Interior of the Robber’s Cave amongst the Rocks was revealed by the combined light of a calcium moon and a brazier with rags dipped in spirits-of-wine blazing in it. Anon, to his band of cloaked, bearded and villainously slouch-hatted myrmidons, entered—to tremulous music from the fiddles, down the rocks, Giraldi Duval the Ruffian Boy.
Never was such an out-and-out scoundrel. For certain unspecified reasons it was comforting to Joshua Horrotian to have somebody to disapprove of just then. The light and trivial sins of a whole regiment of British soldiers, would, if piled into the balance against the crimes of the Ruffian, have certainly kicked the beam.