The girl, too, was never any cause of joy to her, with her poor eyes half blind. Still the child did her patient best and she complained no more now as she once did, and now that the younger boy could walk and run and loved best to be in the street brawling and playing with others like him, the girl would come sometimes to the field where the mother and the lad worked. But even there she was more care than help, especially if it were in some field of small weak seedlings, for she was so blind that when she would have pulled the weeds she did not see them well and many a time she pulled a seedling, thinking it a weed, so that the boy called out in anger, “Go home, you girl, for I do swear you are no use to us here. Go and sit beside the old grandmother!”
And when she rose at this, half smiling but deeply hurt too, he cried at her again shrilly, “Now see where you tread, you clumsy thing, for you are walking on the seedlings now!”
So she made haste to get out of the field then, too proud to stay, and the mother was torn between these two, her son and the poor half blind girl, and she felt the hearts of both, the lad’s heart weary with labor too bitter for his age, and the girl’s too patient with her pain, and she said sighing, as the girl went away, “It is true, poor thing, you are very little use, nor even can you sew with those eyes as they are. But go you home and sweep the floor and set the food ready and light the fire. Such things you do well enough. Watch the little one and see he does not fall in the pond, for he is the boldest, wilfulest of you all, and pour a little tea sometimes for the old one. There your duty is and you are help to me there. And when I have a little time I will go and seek a balm of some kind for your eyes.”
So she comforted the girl, but the girl was little comfort to her, sitting silent hour after hour and wiping her wet aching lids, and smiling in her fixed and patient way. And looking at her sometimes and hearing her lad’s angers and seeing the younger one’s eagerness to be away at play, the mother wondered bitterly how it could be that when they were babes they were so fair and pleasant to her, and now no comfort.
Yes, oftentimes in the evening this mother looked across the way to her cousin’s house and envied it most sorely. There was the good and honest husband, a plain and earth-soiled man, not clean and pretty as her man had been, but still well enough and going to his daily work and coming home to be fed and to sleep as men should, and there were his children he begot regularly and well, and there the mother sat, easy and merry and well content with her last babe upon her knees, a shallow merry soul and her mouth always open and her tongue clacking, but kindly and a good neighbor. Often she ran to share some bit of meat with the mother, or gave the children a handful of fruit, or a little paper flower she made for the girl to thrust into her hair. It was a good, full, contented house, and the mother envied it, and in her the longing grew, deep and sullen and unsatisfied.
IX
IF SHE COULD HAVE forgotten the man and so finished with him, if he were dead and she had seen him buried in the earth and still and gone forever, if she could have been a widow and known her life with the man ended, it would have been easier for her. If the hamlet had known her widowed and if she could have kept before her pure and strong that true widowhood, and if she could have heard people say, when she passed or where she knew it said, “A very good true widow is that wife of Li, now dead. There he lies dead and buried and she goes steadfast and true to him, such a one as in the old days would have had a marble arch put up or at least an arch of stone for her honor.” If she could have heard talk like this it would have been a strength to her and a thing to stay herself by, and to this shape that people made of her she might have set her heart and so lived better than she was because men thought her so.
But widow she was not, and often must she answer those who called to ask her how her man did and ever must she lie and cheerfully and keep him in constant mind through her very lies. They would call, “There you are, goodwife, and have you had a letter of late or message by some mouth to say how your man is?”
And she, passing by with a load for market across her shoulder or coming slowly home with empty baskets must answer often out of deathly weariness, “Yes, by word of mouth I hear he does right well, but he only writes me once a year.”
But when she was come to her own house she was torn in two with all her lies. Sometimes she was filled with sadness and loneliness and she cried to her own heart, “How sorrowful and lone a woman am I whose only man is one I must make for myself out of words and lies!”
At such times she would sit and stare down the road and she would think heavily, “That blue robe of his would show a long way off, if he had a mind to turn to home again, so clear and fine a blue it was!”
And indeed if ever she saw a bit of blue anywhere in the distance her heart would leap, and if a man passed in the distance wearing a blue robe she could not but stop what she did and hold her breath to see how he came, shading her eyes against the sun if she were in the field, her hoe dropped from her hand, while she watched if he came this way or that or if he passed or if he went a long way off. And always it was not he who passed, for blue is a very common color and any man might wear a blue robe, if he be a poor and common man.
But there were times when her lies made her angry at him and she told herself the man was not worth it and if he had come home at one such time as this she would have burst her anger full upon him and cursed him soundly while she loved him because he made her suffer so. Times there were when this deep anger lasted over days, so that she was sullen and short with the children and with the grandmother and pushed the dog away roughly with her hoe, although she grieved her own heart the more when she was so.
At one such time as this it came about that it was time for the rice to be measured after harvest. Once more she had struggled through the harvest and alone except for such help as the lad could give, and a day or two from the good cousin, and the day came for the division of the threshed grain. It seemed to the woman that day as though her longing and her anger had made her heart like raw flesh, so that everything she saw fell on it sorely as a blow, and things she did not see of common times she saw and felt this day.
And while she longed, there upon her threshing-floor beside the heaped grain the agent stood, the landlord’s agent, and he was a tall man dressed in a silk robe of gray, and his face square and large and handsome in its bold way. He had his old manner she remembered, a manner of seeming courtesy, but his eyes were full and the lids heavy and half closed over them, and the woman knew from the way he stared at her from under those heavy drooping lids that he had heard her tale and how her husband was gone out to other parts and never had come back. Yes, there was something today in her full heart that caught this knowledge in him, and the truth was he was such a man as could not look at any woman left alone and not wonder secretly what she was and how her heart was made and how her body was shaped. There was a dog’s heart in him, for all his big, good frame and his square full face and his voice he made so hearty and frank. But in spite of his forced courtesy and his free words the tenants hated him, and they feared him because he had a high hard temper and this big body and two large, swift fists that he clenched and held hard against his thighs if any argued against what he said. Yes, and then he lifted the lids he drooped over his eyes, and his eyes were terrible, shining and black and cruel. Yet often they laughed at him, too, for if they gave him his fee without quarrel, he made a joke or two to salve the taking, and they could not but laugh at what he said, although with rue, for he had a way about him somehow.