Thus the two went to the house and into that room where the new mother lay upon her bed. The room was full of women from the hamlet who had come to hear the news and even that old gossip, the oldest woman of them all now, and very deaf and bent nigh double with her years, she must come too and when she saw the old mother she cackled out, “A lucky woman you are, goodwife—I thought the end of your luck was come, but here it is born again, son’s son, I swear, and here be I with nothing but my old carcass for my pains—”
But the old mother said not one word and she saw no one. She went into the room and to the bed and looked down. There the child lay, a boy, and roaring as his father said he did, his mouth wide open, as fair and stout a babe as any she had ever seen. She bent and seized him in her arms and held him and felt him hot and strong against her with new life.
She looked at him from head to foot and laughed and looked again, and at last she searched about the room for the cousin’s wife and there the woman was, a little grandchild or two clinging to her, who had come to see the sight. Then when she found the face she sought the old mother held the child for the other one to see and forgetting all the roomful she cried aloud, laughing as she cried, her eyes all swelled with her past weeping, “See, cousin! I doubt I was so full of sin as once I thought I was, cousin—you see my grandson!”
Colophon
The Mother
was published in 1934 by
Pearl S. Buck.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Brendan Fattig,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2022 by
Tim Lindell, David E. Brown, and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans from the
HathiTrust Digital Library.
The cover page is adapted from
A View in China: Cultivating the Tea Plant,
a painting completed circa 1810 by
William Daniell.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
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