“Hutt!” said Moggy scornfully, hushing and rocking the baby. “’Tis as well to get used to the worrust at firrust. What’s natheral can’t be desprit,” she added, quoting a favorite proverb of her land. “And she has sinse, and pith in her, begob she has! ‘Scrame out!’ I sez to her in the nick of the danger—‘if ye’d ever rise from that bed, scrame out, and not in!’ And scrame she did till the hearers blessed themselves. Pass me your arrums to rack, an’ take the child!”
But Josh, looking dubiously at the sleeve of his great-coat, whereon the lice of the guardroom crawled, hesitated to obey....
“Phyaugh!” said Moggy, with a toss of the head—adorned with the red-spotted handkerchief—that brought a quantity of coarse black hair, mightily resembling the tail of her husband’s charger—tumbling down her back. “What matter for the like av thim ginthry! All the weeneen asks is an honust man for his dadda, and a dacent young crayther for his mammy—such as her widin there,”—she jerked her head towards the distant end of the troop-room—“wid a breast av milk to bate the Queen’s” (who was popularly understood just then to be rearing a royal bantling after the natural method). “Hould out your han’s, I bid ye,” commanded the golden woman, “and take and bless your son!”
Joshua obeyed, for she would have cried herrings upon him in another minute.... And as he took the squirming bundle, he sniffed, and something splashed upon the yellow flannel petticoat. But Moggy had turned her back on him, and was racking the arms away.
LXXII
At St. Paul’s Cathedral, beside the glorious bones of England’s elder idol, the Admiral of the empty eye-socket and the vacant sleeve, the grand old white head of England’s soldier-hero was laid to rest. The Army was Chief Mourner, the Nation followed him to the tomb. Britons had heartily hated him as Minister—as military leader they adored him. Nothing was remembered in that parting hour but what they owed to him. His funeral wreaths were hardly withered when,—with some noise of cheering from the Officers’ Mess at lunch-time, echoed from the Sergeants’—who were having dinner—caught up by a squad dismissed from drill, and vociferously joined in by heads that were thrust from troop-room windows, it was made known at the Barracks of the Hundredth Lancers that the gentleman who had got himself elected President of the French a year or so previously, had now proclaimed himself Emperor of that nation. Upon the subject Mrs. Geogehagan was as bitterly sarcastic as Mrs. Geogehagan alone could be.
“Hooroo, Jude!” said she. “Cook him up wid a crown on! Sure there will be no houldin’ him now—such will be the proide and consayt av the cobbler’s dog!”
“And will it do us any good—the gentleman’s being made an Emperor?” asked Mrs. Joshua Horrotian, who was sitting on her bed, nursing the infant Sarah, while little Josh, now a sturdy red-haired toddler of two years old, was dragging a headless wooden horse about the well-scrubbed floor.
“Why, none as I can think on,” somewhat moodily returned Mrs. Joshua Horrotian’s husband, who sat upon a bench not far off, engaged in doing what he would have technically termed “a bit of sogering”—represented in the polishing of divers chain-straps, buttons, badges, and belt-buckles to the brightest point of brilliancy attainable by the use of scraps of “shammy” and whitened rag.
“Unless,” he added, “being well-disposed towards our country and our people, he med-be were to ask us to go snacks with ’n in a European War. With the Pruskis or th’ Ruskis—that be showin’ their teeth just now at the Turkeys—there baint much to choose between Foreigners anyway,” said Joshua oracularly. “Not but what,” he continued, with an afterthought, “they French Frogs be foreigners, too. And us have fought ’em in the Duke’s day—and learned ’em the taste of a beating. ’Twould be oddish, now I come to think of it,” said the trooper musingly, “for we to take ’em for Allies at this time o’ day! And howsomever friendly this new Emperor may call hisself, there baint no gettin’ away from the truth of his being the nephew o’ the man as we boxed up in St. Helena—and his being, by reason o’ that, a poor, out-at-elbows, shabby kind o’ beggar—till his luck took the turn. ’Taint in Nature to suppose he’s as uncommon fond of us as he makes out. I’m dodgasted,” said Josh, employing the Sloughshire imprecation, “if I should be in his place! What be ye thinking of, my Pretty?”