So did he make a little merry on this day when he came to the mother’s house where she lived alone without her man and he knew she did, and he called out heartily to the lad, “I see your mother does not need your father with such a man as you to tend the fields!”
Then the boy swaggered his little lean body and boasted, shy and bold at once, he was so pleased, “Oh, aye, I do my share,” and he spat as he had seen men do, and set his arms upon his little bony thighs and felt himself grown and fully man.
Then the agent laughed and looked at the mother as though to laugh kindly with her over this lad of hers, and the woman could not but smile, and she handed him a bowl of tea she had poured out in common courtesy as to any passing guest. And being so near his laughing eyes she could not but look into them, and there was that great, greedy, starving heart of hers showing in her own eyes without her knowledge that it did. The man stared at her and scented her heat and he turned hot and grave and when he took the bowl he touched his hand to hers as though not knowing her hand was there. But the woman felt the touch and caught its meaning in her blood like flame.
Then she turned herself away shamed and would not hear what her own heart said. No, she busied herself with the grain and while she did it she grew suddenly afraid of her own self and she said to the lad in a low voice, “Run to our cousin and ask him to come hither and help me,” and to her heart she said, to still its wildness, “If he is here — if our good cousin is here—”
But the lad was proud and wilful and he argued, “I am here, mother, and I will help you. What other do you need? See, I am here!”
Then the agent laughed loudly and slapped his thick thigh and he took secret advantage of the innocent lad and he cried, “So you are, my lad, and true enough your mother needs no other man!”
Then the lad grew the more bold being so encouraged and when his mother said again, half faintly, “It would be better if our cousin were here,” the boy caught the faintness and he cried, “No, I will not call him, mother! I am man enough!” and he took up the scales and strutted to fill the measure with the grain and the woman laughed uneasily and let him be, and the truth was there was something in her, too, that pulled at her to let him be.
When the grain was measured out and she had made a measure full again to give the agent for himself, that agent put it from him in a lordly way and he smoothed his long straight upper lip and looking ardently into the woman’s face — for who was there save these children and that old woman nodding in her sleep under the eaves by the door? — he said, “No, I will not have it! You are a lone woman now and your man gone from home and all this is your own labor. I will take no more of it than my landlord must have, or blame me if he does not. I will take no fee from you, goodwife.”
Then was the woman suddenly afraid in the midst of the sweet sick heat that was upon her and she grew confused and pressed the fee upon him. But he would not have it. He pushed the measure away, his hand on hers while he did, and at last when he took the measure from her he poured the grain back into the basket where she kept it stored, and he would not have it.
Nor had she strength to beg him any more. Under this man’s smooth face and smiling ways, under that gray costly robe of his, there was some strange and secret force that poured out of him into the shining autumn sun and clung to her and licked about her like a tongue of fire. She fell silent then and hung her head like any maid and when he poured the grain back and bowed and went his way, laughing and bowing and smoothing his long lip where there was no hair, she could not say a word. She stood there in silence, her bare brown feet thrust into broken shoes, one hand twisting the corner of her patched cotton coat.
When he was gone she lifted her head and looked after him and at that same instant he turned and caught her look and bowed and laughed again. Yet, in such a way he went, and afterwards she wished a thousand times she had not looked after him like that and yet she could not help it when she did it. Then the boy cried out gladly, “A good man, mother, not to take his fee! I never heard of such a good agent not to take his fee!” And when she went into the kitchen silently, half in a dream with what had passed, he following crying at her, “Is he not a good man, mother, who wanted nothing for himself?” And when still she answered nothing he cried peevishly, “Mother — mother!”
Then the mother started suddenly and she answered in strange haste, “Oh — aye, son—” and the lad prattled on, “So good a man, mother — you see, he would take nothing from you at all, knowing how you are poor now that my father is gone.”
But the mother stood still of a sudden, the lid of the cauldron lifted and still in her hand. She stared at the boy fixedly and her heart echoed strangely, shamed and yet filled with that sick sweet fever, “Did he want nothing of me?” Though to the lad she answered nothing.
Nor could the man forget the woman’s heat. For this excuse and that he came back to the hamlet and now it was to make sure of some account which he thought he had written wrong, and now it was to complain that such a one had given a measure short and the landlord was angry with him. Most often of all he went to the cousin’s house, which stood near the woman’s, and he went to see of this and that, and now he brought some new seed of a kind of cotton that was held very fine in other parts or he brought a man with him carrying a load of lime or some such thing to make the fields more fertile, and the cousin was dazed with so much coming. At first he was afraid the agent had some evil purpose toward him and then he grew anxious when nothing came out for him to see, and he said to his wife, “It must be he has some very deep and evil purpose if it is so long leaking out of him,” and he watched the man anxiously and sat and stared at him, yet impatient, too, to be at his work again that waited for him, and yet afraid to be lacking in courtesy to one who could do him evil if he would.
But neither cousin nor cousin’s wife saw how the secret eyes of the agent went sliding under his lids toward the woman across the way, and how if she were not there upon her threshold, he stayed but a little while, and how if she were there he sat on and on, facing her, and often he cried in loud and false good nature, “No, good fellow, I have no errand other than this. I am but a common man, too, and I like nothing better than to sit in an honest man’s dooryard and feel the autumn sun upon me.” But all the while he stared across the way where the woman sat spinning or sewing.
Now this was the season when the land was sinking into quiescence for the winter. The wheat was planted in the dry earth and waiting for a rain to sprout it, and the mother took a little leisure and sat in her doorway and mended the winter garments and made new shoes, for the girl’s sight was not enough for this, and never would be. She sat there in the full sun for warmth, half listening to the old woman’s talk and what her children had to say to her, and half dreaming, and her lips were tranquil and her skin warm and golden brown with the sun and her hair shiny black with health and newly combed now she had the time to do it every day, and these days she looked younger than she was, although she was yet not thirty and five years old.
Well she knew that man sat there across the few feet of roadway but she would not look up and sometimes when she felt his look press her too hard she rose and went into the house and stayed there until she had seen him go. But she knew why he came and she knew he looked at her for a cause, and she could not forget him.
All through that winter she could not forget him somehow. At last it grew too cold for him to come even for his purpose. When the snow fell and when the winds came down bitter and dry out of the northwest, she might have forgotten him. But she did not.