Suddenly in the midst of the confusion a loud howl arose and a noisier weeping than the mother’s, and it was the gossip’s, who was suddenly overcome with all the sorrow round about her, and the great oily tears ran down her cheeks and she sobbed loudly, “Look at me, poor soul—I am worse off than you, for I have no son at all—not one! I am more piteous than you, goodwife, and worse than any woman I ever saw for sorrow!” And her old sorrow came up in her so fresh and new that all the women were astonished and they turned to comfort her, and in the midst of the fray the mother went home, her two sons after her, weeping silently as she went, for she could not stay her weeping. Yes, she sat herself down and wept at her own door, and the elder lad wept silently a little too, now, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand, and the little boy wept on, not understanding what it meant to have his father dead, since he could not remember what the father was, and the girl wept and pressed her hands against her eyes and moaned softly and she said, “I must weep because my father is dead—my tears burn me so—yet must I weep for my dead father!”
But the mother could not weep to any end, and she knew she could not until she had done what she must do. So for the time she ceased her weeping and comforted them somewhat with her own silence while she thought what she would do.
She would have said there was no path for her to turn, unless to death, but there was one way, and it was to tear from out her body this greedy life she felt there growing. But she could not do it all alone. There must be one to aid her, and there was none to turn to save her cousin’s wife. Much the mother wished she need not tell a soul what she must do, and yet she did not know how to do it alone. And the cousin’s wife was a coarse good creature, too, one who knew the earth and the ways of men and knew full well the earthy body of a woman that is fertile and must bear somehow. But how to tell her?
Yet the thing came easily enough, for in a day or so thereafter when the two women stood alone upon a pathway talking, having met by some small accident or other, the cousin’s wife said in her loud and kindly way, “Cousin, eat and let your sorrowing cease, for I do swear your face is as yellow as though you had worms in you.”
And the thought rose in the mother’s mind and she said it, low and bitterly, “So I have a worm in me, too, that eats my life out.”
And when the cousin’s wife stared, the mother put her hand to her belly and she said, halting, “Something does grow in me, cousin, but I do not know what it can be unless it is an evil wind of some sort.”
Then the cousin’s wife said, “Let me see it,” and the mother opened her coat and the cousin’s wife felt her where she had begun to swell, and she said astonished, “Why, cousin, it is like a child there, and if you had a husband, I would say that it was so with you!”
Then the mother said nothing but she hung her head miserably and could not lift her eyes, and the cousin saw a stirring in her belly and she cried out in a terror, “It is a child, I swear, yet how can it be except it be conceived by spirit, since your man is gone these many years? But I have heard it said it does happen sometimes to women and in olden times it happened often, if they were of a saintly sort, that gods came down and visited them. Yet you be no great saint, cousin, a very good woman, it is true, and held in good respect, but still angry and sudden sometimes and of a lusty temper. But have you felt a god about?”
Then the mother would like to have told another lie and she longed to say she did feel a god one day when she stood in the wayside shrine to shelter in a storm, but when she opened her lips to shape the lie she could not. Partly she was afraid to lie so blackly about the old decent god there whose face she covered, and partly she was so weary now she could lie no more. So she lifted her head and looked miserably at the cousin’s wife and the red flowed into her pale cheeks and spotted them; she would have given half her life now if she could have told a full deceiving lie. But she could not and there it was. And the good woman who looked at her saw how it was and she asked no question nor how it came about, but she said only, “Cover yourself, sister, lest you be cold.”
And the two walked on a while and at last the mother said in a very passion of bitterness, “It does not matter who begot it and none shall ever know and if you will help me through this, cousin and my sister, I will care for you as long as my life is in me.”
And the cousin’s wife said in a low voice, “I have not lived so many years as I have and never seen a woman rid herself of a thing she did not want.”
And for the first time the mother saw a hope before her
