Her mind had taken its old mechanical bent, the trend of long habit as she looked out from that low window. How often she had stood there, and thought, “If only we might have had a child.” And now by sheer force of habit she thought it yet again. And then a slow rapture took possession of her whole being, mounted, mounted till she leaned against the window-sill faint with joy. She was to have a child after all. She had hardly dared believe it at first, but as time had gone on a vague hope, quickly suppressed as unbearable, had turned to suspense, suspense had alternated with the fierce despair that precedes certainty. Certainty had come at last, clear and calm and exquisite as dawn. She would have a child in the spring. What was the winter to her now! Nothing but a step toward joy. The world was all broken up and made new. The prairie, its great loneliness, its deathlike solitude, were gone out of her life. She was to have a child in the spring. She had not dared to tell her husband till she was sure. But she would tell him this evening when they were sitting together over the fire.
She stood motionless in the deepening dusk, trying to be calm. And at last in the far distance she saw a speck arise, as it were, out of a crease in the level earth — her husband on his horse. How many hundreds of times she had seen him appear over the rim of the world, just as he was appearing now! She lit the lamp and put it in the window. She blew the log fire to a blaze. The firelight danced on the wooden walls, crowded with cheap pictures, and on the few precious daguerreotypes that reminded her she too had brothers and sisters and kin of her own, far away in one of those southern cities where the war was still smouldering grimly on.
Her husband took his horse round and stalled him. Presently he came in. They stood a moment together in silence as their custom was, and she leaned her forehead against his shoulder. Then she busied herself with his supper, and he sat down heavily at the little table.
“Had you any difficulty this time in getting the money together?” she asked.
Her husband was a tax collector.
“None,” he said abstractedly, “at least — yes — a little. But I have it all, and the arrears as well. It makes a large sum.”
He was evidently thinking of something else. She did not speak again. She saw something was troubling him.
“I heard news today at Phillip’s,” he said at last, “which I don’t like. If I had heard in time, and if I could have borrowed a fresh horse, I would have ridden straight on. But it was too late in the day to be safe, and you would have been anxious what had become of me if I had been out all night with all this money on me. I shall go tomorrow as soon as it is light.”
They discussed the business which took him to the nearest town thirty miles away, where their small savings were invested — somewhat precariously, as it turned out. What was safe, who was safe while the invisible war between North and South smouldered on and on? It had not come near them, but as an earthquake which is engulfing cities in one part of Europe will rattle a teacup without oversetting it on a cottage shelf half a continent away — so the Civil War had reached them at last.
“I take a hopeful view,” he said, but his face was overcast. “I don’t see why we should lose the little we have. It has been hard enough to scrape it together, God knows. Promptitude and joint action with Reynolds will probably save it. But I must be prompt.” He still spoke abstractedly, as if even now he were thinking of something else.
He began to take out of the leathern satchel various bags of money.
“Shall I help you to count it?”
She often did so.
They counted the flimsy dirty paper money together, and put it all back into the various labeled bags.
“It comes right,” he said.
Suddenly she said, “But you can’t pay it into the bank tomorrow if you go on to—”
“I know,” he said, looking at her; “that is what I have been thinking of ever since I heard Phillip’s news. I don’t like leaving you with all this money in the house, but I must.”
She was silent. She was not frightened for herself, but it was state money, not their own. She was not nervous as he was, but she had always shared with him a certain dread of those bulging bags, and had always been thankful to see him return safe — he never went twice by the same track — after paying the money in. In those wild days when men went armed with their lives in their hands, it was not well to be known to have large sums about you.
He looked at the bags, frowning.
“I am not afraid,” she said.
“There is no real need to be,” he said after a moment. “When I leave tomorrow morning it will be thought I have gone to pay it in. Still—”
He did not finish his sentence, but she knew what was in his mind: the great loneliness of the prairie. Out in the white night came the short, sharp yap of a wolf.
“I am not afraid,” she said again.
“I shall only be gone one night,” he said.
“I have often been a night alone.”
“I know,” he said, “but somehow it’s worse leaving you with so much money in the house.”
“No one knows it will be here.”
“That is true,” he said, “except that everyone knows I have been collecting large sums.”
“They will think you have gone to pay it in as usual.”
“Yes,” he said with an effort.
Then he got up, and went to his tool box. She watched him open it, seeing him in a new light, which encompassed him with even greater love. “If I tell him tonight,” she thought, “it will make him even more anxious about leaving me. Perhaps he would refuse to go, and he must go. I will not tell him till he comes back.”
The resolution not to speak was like taking hold of a piece of iron in frost. She had not known it would hurt so much. A new tremulousness, sweet and strange, passed over her — not cowardice, not fear, not of the heart nor of the mind, but a sort of emotion of the whole being.
“I will not tell him,” she said again.
Her husband got out his tools, took up a plank from the floor, and put the money into a hole beneath it, beside their small valuables, such as they were, in a biscuit tin. Then he replaced the plank, screwed it down, and she drew back a small fur mat over the place. He put away the tools and then came and stood in front of her. He was not conscious of her transfiguration, and she dropped her eyes for fear of showing it.
“I shall start early,” he said, “as soon as it is light, and I shall be back before sundown the day after tomorrow. I know it is unreasonable, but I shall go easier in my mind if you will promise me one thing.”
“What is it?”
“Not to go out of the house, or to let anyone else come in on any pretense whatever, while I am away,” he said. “Bar everything, and stay inside.”
“I shan’t want to go out.”
He made an impatient movement.
“Promise me that come what will you will let no one in during my absence,” he said.
“I promise.”
“Swear it.”