Thus she sat and lamented all day, and in the evening, when the potter drove up to his door and cried out “Wife, wife,” she wouldn’t go out to receive him. And when he came in to their little sitting-room, he found her with tears in her eyes, sitting lamenting and complaining. When he went up to her to take her in his arms and kiss her, she turned away from him and would not let him touch her, and the potter, who had never seen his wife cross or angry, knew that there must be something wrong. She must be ill, he thought; tomorrow or the next day she will be well again. So he urged her to rest well, and took no notice of her angry words; but the next day, and the next, there was no change, and things were growing from bad to worse. For now the wife wouldn’t speak to him at all, and when she came nigh him she looked at him with anger, and would not even suffer him to touch the hem of her dress. Then the potter began to think of the little brown cup, and he looked up at the shelf and saw that it was not there, and he began to feel very much alarmed.
“Why,” he said, “what has become of my little old brown cup that used to stand up on the shelf?”
“I gave it to a gipsy man,” she answered scornfully. “He seemed to like it, and I didn’t see that I was obliged to keep all the rubbish that you had in the house.”
Then the potter groaned within himself and said,
“But did you just take it off the shelf and give it to him, and did he ask you for it? Why did he want it?”
“Of course he asked for it,” said the wife very angrily, “and I just gave it him when I had drunk his health out of it, as he wished me to.”
Then the potter was stricken with deadly fear, and remembered the words of the gipsy. “The first draught she will drink to your love, and the second draught she will drink to your hate,” and he knew in his heart that the words were true, and that the cup carried with it a charm.
He sat and thought and thought, and waited many days, hoping that his wife would change, and love him as before, but she remained cold and hard. Then the potter packed a wallet full of clothes, and put some money in his pocket, and he went to his wife and said, “Wife, there is a man somewhere who has done me a great wrong, and perhaps he did it unwittingly. I am going out to find him, and to make him right it, and though you do not love me, you will bide here quietly with your baby till I come back. And I do not know if that will be in months or in years.” Then the potter’s wife fell a-crying.
“I do not love you, nay, I hate you, and shall be glad when you have gone, but perhaps it may be because I am a wicked woman; and I do not know what has come over me, that now I want to fly away from you, when I used to think that I had the best husband on all this earth.” The potter sighed bitterly, but he kissed her cheeks, which felt as cold as ice, and then he said goodbye to his baby, and started on his way with the tears filling his eyes.
When the potter had gone the wife cried sorely, but still she was glad that she had not to see him, and for some time she lived with her baby happily enough. She kept the house, and mended and swept and cleaned as before, and thought little of the potter or where he had gone; but by and by all her money began to be spent, and she knew that unless the potter returned she would soon be very poor, and the winter was coming on, and she feared cold and hunger for her little one. So she went into a garret where she kept her old weaving loom, and she brought it out, and she bought flax, and sat down to weave just as she used to, when she went round the country with her sister who spun the flax. And she found that she could still weave her cloths very skilfully, and she began to sell them to the passers by, and in this way she earned her bread.
The winter set in very cold and hard, and the potter’s wife felt very sad. “But perhaps,” she said, “it is thinking of the poor things who are starving around with no homes,” for she never thought of her husband at all. And the flax began to be very dear, and she had difficulty in buying it. “Instead of doing all these cheap clothes,” she said, “it would be better to get very fine flax, and do a very very fine cloth; it will be the finest cloth I have ever woven, and I will sell it to some very rich lady.” So she bought the finest flax that money could bring her, and when she had woven a little bit of it, she sat and looked at it in her room, and she saw a tress of her own golden hair lying upon it, and she thought how beautiful it looked. Then she said—
“There is no one now who loves
