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.
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
