It was a Neapolitan descendant of his—one Thompsono Jowelli—who washed the oats destined for the Artillery horses of the Italian Army in Tripoli, who filled up the Commissariat cattle with dry hay and coarse salt—drove them to the weighing-machines past those water-tanks in the Via Angioina—kept back part of the shipments of coffee and sugar intended for the troops—carried it back to its original starting-point, and re-sold it to the Government. And of these, as in the case of their distinguished forerunner, the inevitable lesson must be learned in the long-run.
No man can plunder and defraud the community without injuring and despoiling himself.
XCIX
When Sarah Horrotian heard of the strange and terrible ending of Thompson Jowell, she found it hard to believe that she was never to see his coarse red face again, never to be uprooted and ruined by him.... Even when weeks passed without foreclosure, she was still expectant of his turning up suddenly, big and gross and greedy as ever.... When at length she realized that he was dead, she forbade herself to hope.
For the man had a son, and the son would be no more pitiful than the father, thought Sarah Horrotian. When the legal representatives of Jowell’s widow wrote, saying that the interest and principal of her debt would be remitted—when the deed of mortgage was returned to her with “Canceled” written across it—the widow faintly wondered, having gone too numb to be joyfully surprised.
Nothing now was needed to set the farm upon its legs again but a little money and a certain amount of energy.... The money she might have found, but the springs of vitality had dried up. Though there were hours, when, sitting in the gaunt, bare farm-kitchen towards nightfall, staring at the handful of coals that burned in the capacious fire-grate, she knew that the desert of her heart might grow green things again, if only Josh and his wife came home.
And, though she told herself they never would, something in her secret heart gave the lie to her. She would have died rather than admit it to herself—but for fear lest they should come, after all, and miss her, and go away to return no more—she ceased to leave the house. Presently the news spread that Widder Horrotian had come down in the world, and gone crazy-like, and never even crept outdoors to look for eggs in the tenantless sheds and empty pigsties—and that you could range over the whole place wi’out coming athirt the woman at all.
Gangs of marauding boys ventured first, after ungathered apples and unharvested turnips; and then their seniors began to take a fearful joy in nocturnal visits from which they returned, bending under mysterious loads.
The fowls disappeared—the wood-stack melted—the farm and garden tools took to themselves wings, and the vegetable shed was broken into one night, and gutted. Discovering this, the widow realized that when the flour in the garret, and the potatoes in the cellar; the sides of bacon hanging in the kitchen, and the cheese under the press in the dairy should be eaten, Want would come knock at the door of Upper Clays Farm.
Yet when the threshold was approached by ragged tramps with mendacious stories of misfortune, or lean and hairy men with scurvy-marked faces, who said simply that they were invalided soldiers who had been sent home from the Front—Sarah gave of what she had, without reproach or girding. To these last, especially when they came limping on crutches, or showed bandaged wounds, or sleeves empty of arms, she was almost gentle. None of them could tell her anything of Joshua Horrotian, except that two squadrons of the Hundredth Lancers had ridden in the Charge of the Light Brigade.