A copy of this talisman being forwarded by Josh’s friendly Captain to Sarah Horrotian, with a request for a written testimony to the respectability of the young woman who had married her son, elicited from the widow an inky chart indicating vanity, light-mindedness, lack of religious fervor, ingratitude to benefactors, and carelessness in making-up the market-butter, as the principal rocks and shoals upon which the esteem of an employer would be most likely to suffer wreck. Beyond these categorized failings, in Christian justice (since the young woman was proven virtuous and no to-yielding trollop) Sarah had no more to add.
Perusing her epistle, Josh’s troop-Captain whistled plaintively. For the crime of getting married “off the strength” was in those days, as it is in these, the blackest sin upon the soldier’s list of minor offenses. Confronted with a problem of no ordinary toughness, the Captain betook himself and his difficulty to the Adjutant, an elderly officer of astuteness and experience, who, while maintaining a well-earned reputation as a rigid disciplinarian, had a heart in the right place. Over cigars and brandy-and-water the case was thrashed out....
“’Man is, as I understand you, in the very devil of a tight hole,” said the Adjutant, knocking a two-inch ash off a long, dry, deadly-looking Trichinopoly cheroot. “Only thing possible for you to do for him under the circumstances would be impossible—for a conscientious officer—you quite understand? So I take it you’ll simply wash your hands of Horrotian and his love-affairs—instead of sending in the mother’s letter as testimony of character—and applying to Headquarters for permission for your beggar to get spliced. Having obtained that, you would—supposing you to be the kind of man I quite understand you not to be—put in the Certificate of Marriage—previously being careful to upset the ink-bottle over the place where the parson filled in the date!... Understand, I speak unofficially, when I say that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the mild deception would pass muster. Specially in the present case—the C. O. being uncommonly groggy about the eyesight; and objecting to spectacles on the grounds of their giving away a man’s age. Officially speaking, if such a course of conduct were brought to my knowledge, I should instantly report it—do you understand me? And the consequences would be serious—consumedly serious, my dear fellow! For Rule and Routine are not skittles to be bowled over by privates who have kicked over the Regulations and married without the permission of their Commanding Officer. And Favoring is a thing to be avoided—I’m sure you’ll understand!”
The Captain understood perfectly; and, though he rather overdid it with the ink-bottle—causing not only the date, but the names of the contracting parties to vanish under a sable lagoon of carefully dried writing-fluid—the charitably-conceived plot was successful, from beginning to end.
Those iron wheels of Administration—sorely hampered, even in these modern days, with that entangling medium known as Red Tape—did at last revolve without crushing the last hope of an ill-clad, hungry girl who was soon to be a mother. The hand of Official Authority was extended to Mrs. Joshua Horrotian with a weekly stipend of fifteen pence. By grace of the Officer Commanding the Squadron, Nelly—no longer of the depressed sisterhood of dowdy Paris yearning outside the sentried gate of that grim Paradise, the Cavalry Barracks—was admitted; privileged to bear her remunerated part in the getting-up of officers’ linen, the lavation and mending of troopers’ undergarments, as in the sweeping and scrubbing of passages and floors. Yet another day dawned that saw her an inmate of the long, bare barrack-room, where Mrs. Geogehagan—in virtue of her social status as Corporal’s lady—resided with her husband and her young family, in a neat three-sided villa of patchwork quilt, at the upper, fireplace end....
When the pale-faced, shabbily-dressed, shy young woman was brought in with her light box and her meager bundles, by her husband, the room seemed already full of soldiers and their wives and children. The din of voices beggared description. Moggy Geogehagan was crying herrings at the top of all.
It is not to be supposed that the herrings were actually in evidence; but the raucous shriek with which Moggy—ere wooed and won by her Corporal—had vaunted these marine delicacies—fresh and saline—was justly famed throughout her native city of Dublin. It leaped three streets, to waken shattering echoes in the alleys beyant them—the suburbs knew it—you heard Moggy coming, leaving a trail of fish and headache behind her all the way from Donnybrook to Irishtown....
The troop-room was entered from the upper end of a long, slate-flagged, ground-floor passage, smelling of potato-peels and boiled cabbage, and with coal-bunkers at the more distant end, under the iron-shod, iron-railed staircase. The walls were whitewashed, with patterns of damp bricks showing through; and had no other ornament than iron shelves and hooks, from which depended shining arms and various soldierly accouterments and trappings; the floor was of bare boards, clean-scraped and well-scrubbed. Long rows of cot-bedsteads, made in telescopic fashion so as to occupy half the space during the day that they took up when expanded by night, were ranged along the walls, with rolled and strapped up mattresses upon them; and not all the beds were screened off by rope-suspended counterpanes, or cast-off horse-rugs, from the rake of the public eye. Down the middle of the room ran heavy wooden tables on iron trestles, affording accommodation—on the backless benches that appertained to them—for eight married men with their wives and children; and the two bachelors who occupied opposing couches at the draughty end nearest the door.