The crowd stared to hear these words and looked wondering at each other, but the elder lad said quickly, “I know what she wants, mother. She wants her third shroud new to lie in, the one my father said he would send, and she ever said she would outlive this one she has now.”
The old woman’s face lit faintly then and they all cried out who heard it, “How stout an old soul is this!” and they said, “Well, here is a very curious brave old woman, and she will have her third shroud as she ever said she would!”
And some dim, dying merriment came on the old woman’s owlish sunken face and she gasped once more, “I will not die till it is made and on—”
In greatest haste then was the stuff bought, and the cousin went to buy it and the mother told him, “Buy the very best you can of stout red cotton stuff and tomorrow I will pay you if you have the silver by you now.” For she had determined that the old woman would have the very best, and that night when the house was still she dug into the earth and got the silver out that she had hid there and she took out what was needful to send the old mother to her death content.
And indeed, it seemed as if the thing she would not think of now, the memory of an hour she drove into her secret places, busying herself and glad to be so busy, it seemed as if this waiting memory made her kind and eager to be spent for these who were hers. Somehow it eased her of that secret hour to do her scrupulous best now. For these two nights she slept none at all, wearying herself eagerly, nor was she ever angry at the children, and she was most gentle to the old and dying woman. When the cousin fetched the cloth she held it to the old dying eyes and she said, speaking loudly now, for the old woman grew deaf and blind more quickly every hour, “Hold hard, old mother, till I have it made!”
And the old soul said, bravely, “Aye—I will not die!” though she had not breath for any speech now and scarcely any breath at all, so that every one she drew came screeching through her lungs pitifully, very hard to draw.
Then the mother made haste with her needle, and she made the garments of the bright good stuff, red as a bride’s coat, and the old woman lay watching her, her dim eyes fixed upon the stuff where it glowed in the mother’s lap. She could not eat now or swallow any food or drink, not even the warm human milk one kindly woman milked from her own breast with a bowl, since sometimes this good milk will save an old dying man or woman. She clung but to this scanty bit of air, waiting.
And the mother sewed and sewed, and the neighbors brought in food so that she need not stop for anything but could sew on. In one day and a part of the night it was done, and the cousin and the cousin’s wife stood by to see it and a neighbor or two, and indeed the whole hamlet did not sleep, but stayed awake to wonder if the mother would win that race, or death.
But it was done at last, the scarlet burial robes were done, and the cousin lifted the old body and the mother and the cousin’s wife drew on the fine new garments on the old and withered limbs, brown now and dry as old sticks of some dead tree. But the old soul knew when it was finished. Speak she could not, but she lay and drew one last rattling breath or two, and opened wide her eyes and smiled her toothless smile, knowing she had lived through to her third shroud, which was her whole desire, and so she died triumphantly.
Yet when the burial day was over and the need for being busy was past, still the mother busied herself. She labored as she never had upon the land and when the lad would do a thing she had begun she cried roughly, “Let me do it—I miss the old mother sorely and more sorely than I thought I could, and I blame myself that I did not go home that day and see if she were warm when the storm came up and covered the sun.”
And she let it be thought through the hamlet that she sorrowed for the old woman gone, and blamed herself, and many praised her for her sorrow and said, “How good a daughter-in-law to mourn like this!” And they comforted her and said, “Do not mourn so, goodwife. She was very old and her life ended, and when the hour is come that has been set for each of us before ever we can walk or talk, then what need of mourning? You have your man alive yet, and you have your two sons. Take heart, goodwife.”
But it was an ease to her too to have every cause to cover up her fear and melancholy. For she had cause to be afraid, and she had time now, even while she worked upon her land, to take out of her heart that fear which had been hiding there ever since the hour in the rising storm. Glad she was all these days that she had been in such haste, glad even for the
