“My face!” the trooper echoed bitterly. “You found no fault with it when ye married me five years ago. What has happened to it since? The bit o’ glass in the lid o’ your workbox shows it much the same, I reckon.... And if ’tis sullen and rebellious as you say—and makes me enemies among the officers and men—who stamped that look upon it? Med-be you’ll tell me you don’t know! Ay! but I know! I have the name on my tongue’s end this minute. And speak it I would, if I was to be shot the next! ’Tis Jowell!—Thompson Jowell, and may the Almighty damn him for it!—that can take his pleasure in grinding, and hazing, and trampling of me down!”
“Oh, hush!” cried Nelly in terror, and below them the lips of the sea said “Hus’s’sh!” against the shingle—for the Garrison town that boasted the insanitary Cavalry Barracks being situated on the Chalkshire South Coast, their Sunday stroll had led them to the low white cliffs that overhung the beach. There were fortifications here, and the grassy slope they sat on was fragrant with wild thyme, and short-stalked June clover, and gay with yellow dandelions and coltsfoot, and the air breathed salt from the heaving bosom of the sea. The sky was clear fresh blue, with floating scarfs of gossamer mist upon it. Sheep grazed near, and, with pyramidal heaps of whitewashed forty-pound shot between them—three great iron cannon of the Coast Defense—imposing enough outside, but rusty-throated as that old clamorous Fear of Invasion by the Bonaparte on the other side of the Channel—looked between the rounded breasts of their weather-worn embrasures—placidly out to sea.
“Believe it or not, as you like,” the trooper went on with increasing heat and indignation, “since I married ye I have kept a guard upon my hasty temper—and often bitten my tongue nigh through, rather than speak words that might ha’ been hurtful to us both. I ha’ lived decent, and cleanly, and orderly, and sober——” He flushed a dark red and boggled at the last word, but the faded prettiness of Nelly’s face was turned from him seawards, looking wistfully beyond the white horses that rose and fell upon the horizon, towards the grayish haze that people said concealed the Coast of France.
“Till lately,” the trooper amended, “neither officer nor non-commissioned officer o’ mine has had just cause to complain o’ me. But I am breaking under what I have to bear, an’ maddening under it fast. I am hounded, and drove and put upon—I say it afore the Face of my Maker, as no Christian man should be!”
His pent-up wrath made him choke and stammer. He unhooked his stiff collar with a shaking hand, and loosened his stock, and threw it on the grass. His wife gave him her handkerchief, and he mopped his streaming forehead with it, and went on talking, gesticulating with the great brown fist in which he held it—and sometimes pounding the fist upon the sod.
“Do ye ask me how I know ’tis Jowell that’s my enemy—that’s undermined my credit and blackened my good name—and lighted this furnace of hate in me that burns without quenching day and night? Can I doubt it when I never take my turn to draw troop-rations without being asked by that black dog Mullett,” (a Squadron Quartermaster Sergeant who was particularly responsible for many of those sable entries in the Troop Defaulters’ Book) “to look and make sure the Government hasn’t cheated me in the quality o’ the Commissariat flour and meat, and so on?—when I can’t feed my horse without being asked whether I’ve found any empty jam-tins, old hats, or dead kittens trussed up in the Forage Contractor’s hay?”
One may here endorse the trooper’s statement, Mullett being really one of Thompson Jowell’s merry men. Mullett soared to be Regimental Quartermaster-Sergeant presently, and would have retired, and opened a snug public-house immediately after the War of the Crimea, but that another kind of opening presented itself, and he was tumbled in, in company with honester men, and covered up; to wait the Great Reveille.
“Lord knows,” pursued the angry speaker, “as how I wish my silly tongue had been cut out, before I taunted a man powerful enough to ruin me—with what my betters are too sensible even to hint at—the fact that for the Nation’s honest money, Mr. Jowell, and others like him, sell bad, poor, rotten goods! But the vengeance he’ve took—and still takes—is mean, and low, and cowardly!” said the trooper, emphasizing each adjective with a tremendous blow of the huge brown fist upon the mild green face of Mother Earth. “And if some day I be drove to tie a loop of whipcord to the trigger o’ my carbine an’ hitch my toe in it—Jowell will be the man as blew my brains out—though the Military Commission of Inquiry and the Jury of the Coroner’s Inquest may call it Suicide!”
“Oh! my dear husband—no!”
Nelly shut her eyes, and shuddered at the ghastly picture the rough words conjured up before her. Her numb heart beat a little quicker at the discovery that she still had something dear to lose that Death might rob her of.