At first the mother would not listen and she said loudly, “I can tend my own blind maid, goodwife!”
This afterwards she told her cousin’s wife and the cousin too, but the cousin looked grave a while and he said at last, “So could you tend her if you lived forever, sister, but when you are dead, and we dead too, perhaps, or very old and not masters any more before our children save in name, then who will tend her? And what if bad years come and parents must think first of their own children, and you gone?”
Then the mother was silent.
But soon she saw the truth that she could not live forever, at any time her life might end, the sooner, too, perhaps, because she had never had her own old vigor since that secret night.
In the summer of that year a flux came out of the air and laid its hold upon her. Ever she had loved to eat and eat heartily and all she wanted of what there was. But that summer came more than usually hot and there was a mighty pest of flies, so many everywhere that the winds blew them in the food and flies were mingled whether one would have it so or not, and the mother cried out at last to let them be, for there was no use in killing them and it was but a waste of time so many more came after. It was a summer, too, of great watermelons that when they were split showed darkly red or clear and yellow as their sort was, and never had there been a better year for melons than was that.
Now well the mother loved this fruit, and she ate heartily of all such as could not be sold or such as grew too ripe suddenly beneath the sun, and she ate on and on and when she was filled, she ate yet more to keep the things from being wasted. Whether it was the many melons or whether some wicked wind caught her or whether someone laid a curse upon her, although she did not know of one who really hated her unless it were that little goddess who had guessed her sin, or what it was she did not know. But the flux came on her and it dragged her very inwards out and she lay ill for days, purged and retching up so much as a mouthful of tea she swallowed to stay herself if she could.
In these days when she was so racked and weak the son’s wife did all well and everything she knew to do for her husband’s mother’s sake, nor was she lacking in any small duty. The blind maid strove to do her poor best too for her mother, but she was slow and could not see a need in time, and often the son’s wife pushed the maid aside and said, “Do you sit down somewhere, good sister, and out of my way, for I swear you are the most help so!”
Even against her will then did the mother come to lean, in all her weakness, on this quick and careful younger woman, and she was too weak to defend her blind maid, and the younger son these days came but sometimes to see how she did and went away again somewhere because his mother was too weak to say a word for him against his brother. In such weakness it was a strength to the mother to feel the young wife deft and careful about her bed. When at last the flux passed out of her and to some other person destined for it, and the mother rose at last, she leaned hard upon her son’s wife, though she did not love her either, but only needed her.
It took the mother very long to come somewhat to herself again, and she was never wholly sound again. She could not eat the rough cabbages she loved, nor any sort of melon nor the peanuts she had liked to chew raw from the ground when they were dug, and ever after this she had to think what she ate, to see how it suited itself to her inwards, and if she grew impatient with such finicking and cried out that she would eat what she would and liked and her belly must bear it, why, then the flux came back again. Or even if she worked too hard or sat in any small cold wind that evil illness waited for her and made her helpless for a while again.
Then in her helplessness she saw the blind maid must be wed into some house of her own, for it was true she was not welcome here. When the mother was too weak to cry against it, she saw the maid was ill at ease there and felt herself unwanted, and one day the maid came herself at a moment when her mother was alone and she said, “Mother, I cannot
