Between two thieves

by Richard Dehan

We know, at this date, the name of the unseen demon to be Diphtheria. We exorcise it with trap-drains and Sanitary Precautions—we fight it with gargles of chlorine and Jeyes’ Fluid, moppings out of mercurial perchloride and—in the more serious cases—injections of the antitoxin. But in spite of all that Science has done for us, we cannot keep out the grim invisible intruder. And still it is the old story of the strangling clutch and the swift death that follows, although we have grown so wise....

This new Barracks—it was rumored, when the Route came for the Hundredth Lancers to remove to another Cavalry Depot—had had a bad name for ever so long. “Children did not thrive,” it was said—meaning that they died like poisoned flies there. So, before the remove, Joshua Horrotian and his wife had concocted, indited, and dispatched a letter to the widowed Sarah, his mother, asking her to give the babies shelter and house-room at The Upper Clays, at least until wholesome lodgings could be found.

When the answer came, it was a bald, bare, bleak refusal. You read the stiffness of the widow’s back in it, and the cramped clutch of the hard, bony fingers on the seldom-used pen. You saw the gaunt black eyes glooming in their hollow caves under Sarah’s tall, narrow forehead between the scanty loops of black hair that was growing gray.

What you never would have guessed was that Sarah’s mouth twisted with anguish as she penned the sentences of denial; and that her hard eyes were dim with tears. For the woman’s bowels yearned over her unseen grandchildren. She would have been kind—pardoning even as the parent of the Prodigal in Scripture. But the Prodigal should first have come and laid his hands between her hands, and said, “Mother, I have sinned!”

So the invisible spider-thing that spins a yellow web in the children’s throats, so that they are suffocated slowly under the eyes that love them, killed both the little ones in a few hours. Tracheotomy—resorted to by a few daring Continental operators at this date—the Regimental Surgeon had never heard of. So it was as I have told.

The girl was gone, with a gasp or so and a brief convulsion. The boy fought manfully for continued life. He thought he had a bone in his throat, and kept begging his mammy and his daddy to take it away because he was choking. When they die—believing that you could have helped it if you had only chosen—quite a special brand of vintage goes to the brimming of your Cup of Despair.

And the woman had loved with such excess of maternal passion these children begotten by the man her husband, that when they went they seemed to take with them his share of love as well as their own.

She had “gone numb” as Mrs. Geogehagan expressed it. The power to think, or feel, or see anything beyond the open grave with those two little white deal boxes at the bottom of it, was denied.... She grew thin, and dowdy, and slovenly; and her husband moodier and more sullen and lowering of aspect, as day succeeded day. No promotion had come to the trooper since his clandestine marriage with Sarah’s milkmaid—the single good-conduct badge now vanished from his sleeve of coarse blue cloth. For he drank now, in bouts, and by fits and starts. Drunkenness, the soldier’s common vice, would not have prejudiced him in the eyes of his commanding officers, in those days, when the nightly feat of topping up the regulation three bottles of Mess Port with copious libations of whisky-toddy, and staggering back in jovial curves to quarters, was accomplished by many a brave and honorable son of Mars. But in his cups Joshua was betrayed by his countenance and his unrulier tongue.

According to Mrs. Geogehagan, the Oracle of Troop Room No. 4, it was the big black scowl Horrotian did be having on the face av him, no less than the unsaysonable spaches he’d let fly when he was carryin’ a dhrop too much—that prejudiced the non-commissioned officers, and caused so many sable entries to be made on the Troop Defaulter’s Sheet, to bear fruit in Extra Fatigue Duty, C.B., and Punishment Drill.

A hint from Moggy Geogehagan was a slog from a cabbage-stump. Roused from her stupor of bereavement by such an application, Mrs. Joshua ventured—during the course of a Sunday walk with her husband—to repeat this utterance to him.