“As my girl pleases, be it. I’m hers for life or death! You know that, don’t you, Nell?”
She pressed against the blue jacket, nibbling a bright brass button.
“Speak up and answer!”
No answer.
“Nelly!”
She vibrated at the low, persuasive call. You could see the waves of roseate color chasing each other from the edge of the print neckerchief upwards to the creamy nape of the soft dove’s neck, where the silky little curls clustered under the sunbonnet. And then she yielded to him all at once, and he led her in under the high lintel of the great barn-door, and the wedded lovers vanished in the kindly, fragrant hay-scented gloom of the upper threshing-floor, where were the great golden mounds of tenfold wheat that Zeus and Demeter might have couched on.
XXIII
Meanwhile Sarah Horrotian, a small, determined, flat-bosomed woman of curiously heavy footsteps and rigorously determined aspect, attired in a narrow gown of rasping wincey and a blue-checked apron with a wedge-shaped bib, made plaint, groaning over the hideous wickedness of this world as she pounded with the roller at the dough upon the pastry-board. It helps the picture to add that the widow’s pastry was of a consistence so tough and lasting that no human being, save one, partaking thereof, had ever been known to venture on a second helping, the exception being Digweed, the pigman.
When Sarah’s only child, Joshua, then a white-skinned, red-curled, burly youngster of eighteen, already standing nearly six feet high in his deceased father’s solid mahogany-topped boots and old-fashioned cords, and the baggy velveteen coat with the huge horn buttons, even when the hard, shiny, low-crowned hat hung on its peg against the passage wall—when Josh took the Queen’s Shilling, it may have been an undigested slice of the widow’s Spartan pie-crust, innocent of mollifying medium or shortening of any kind, that spurred him to the act, combined with Sarah’s railing.
For the Lili and the Lilith, that ceaselessly chide, with shrill, weird, human-seeming voices, amongst the ruins of dead and long-forgotten cities on Babylonian plains, were as piping bullfinches compared with Sarah Horrotian.