When the morning came she rose weary with her sleeplessness, and again she could be hard. When she rose and he did not come and she had turned the beasts out and fed the children and the old woman, she hardened herself and over and over she muttered half aloud, “He will come when his money is gone—very well I know he will come then!”
When the boy stared at the emptiness of the bed and when he asked astonished, “Where is my father still?” she replied sharply and in a sudden loud voice, “I say he is away a day or two, and if any asks you on the street you are to say he is away a day or so.”
Nevertheless on that day when the children were off to play here and there she did not go to the fields. No, she set her stool so that she could see through the short single street of the hamlet if any came that way, and while she made answer somehow to the old mother’s prattling she thought to herself that the blue robe was so clear a blue she could see it a long way off and she set herself to spinning, and with every twist she gave to the spindle she looked secretly down the road. And she counted over in her mind the money he had taken and how many days it might last, and it seemed to her it could not last more than six or seven days, except he had those nimble lucky fingers of his to game with and so he might make more and stay a little longer, too, before he must come back. Times there were as the morning wore on when she thought she could not bear the old mother’s prattling voice any more, but she bore it still for the hope of seeing the man come home perhaps.
When the children wandered home at noon hungry and the boy spied the cabbage bowl set aside for his father and asked for some, she would not let him have it. She cuffed him soundly when he asked again and she answered loudly, “No, it is for your father. If he comes home tonight he will be hungry and want it all for himself.”
The long still summer’s afternoon wore on, and he did not come, and the sun set in its old way, heavy and full of golden light, and the valley was filled with the light for a little while, and the night came and it was deep and dark and now she refused no more. She set the bowl before the children and she said, “Eat what you will, for it will spoil if it is left until another day, and who knows—” and she dipped up some of the sweet and sour sauce and gave it to the old woman saying, “Eat it, and I will make fresh if he comes tomorrow.”
“Will he come tomorrow then?” the old woman asked, and the mother answered sombrely, “Aye, tomorrow perhaps.”
That night she laid herself down most sorrowful and afraid upon her bed and this night she said openly to her own heart that none knew if he would ever come back again.
Nevertheless, there was the hope of the seven days when his money might be gone. One by one the seven days came, and in each one it seemed to her in the midst of her waiting as though the day was come for his return. She had never been a woman to gad about the little hamlet or chatter overmuch with the other women there. But now one after another of these twenty or so came by to see and ask, and they asked where her man was, and they cried, “We are all one house in this hamlet and all somehow related to him and kin,” and at last in her pride the mother made a tale of her own and she answered boldly, from a sudden thought in her head, “He has a friend in a far city, and the friend said there was a place there he could work and the wage is good so that we need not wear ourselves upon the land. If the work is not suited to him he will come home soon, but if it be such work as he thinks fit to him, he will not come home until his master gives him holiday.”
This she said as calmly as she ever spoke a truth, and the old woman was astounded and she cried, “And why did you not tell me so good a lucky thing, seeing I am his mother?”
And the mother made a further tale and she answered, “He told me not to speak, old mother, because he said your tongue was as loose in your mouth as any pebble and all the street would know more than he did, and if he did not like it he would not have them know it.”
“Did he so, then!” cackled the old mother, leaning forward on her staff to peer at her daughter’s face,
