The Mother: A Novel (22 page)

Now this was the wildest talk the mother had ever heard, for well she knew heaven wills who shall be rich and who shall be poor, and men have naught to say but take their destiny and bear it, and she cried out afraid, “I hope you are not in some wicked company, my son, not with thieves or some such company! It sounds the way robbers talk, my son! There is no other way for poor to be rich than that, and it is ill to be rich and lose your life if you be caught at it!”

But the young man grew angry at this and said, “Mother, you do not understand at all! I am sworn to silence now, but some day you shall know. Yes, I shall not forget you on that day. But only you. I will not share with any who have not shared with me.” This last he said so loudly that she knew he felt against his brother and so she was silent for a while, fearing to rouse his wrath.

But she could not let him be. She sat as bid upon the ass and clung to the beast’s hairy skin and thought about this son and looked at him secretly. There he walked ahead of her, the beast’s halter in his hand, and now he was singing again, some song she had never heard, some beating fiery song whose words she could not catch, and she thought to herself that she must know more of his life. Yes, and she must bind him somehow more closely to his home and to them all. She would wed him and have his wife there in the house. Then would he often come and even live there, perhaps, for the wife’s sake. She would seek and find a pretty, touching maid whom he could love, for the elder son’s wife could do the work, and she would find another sort for this son. And as she thought of this her heart was eased because it seemed a good way and she could not keep it back and so she said, “Son, you are more than twenty now, and near to twenty-one, and I think to wed you soon. How is that for a merry thing?”

But who can tell what a young man’s heart will be? Instead of smiling silence, half pleased and half ashamed, he stopped and turned and said to her most willfully, “I have been waiting for you to say some such thing—it is all that mothers’ heads run upon, I do believe! My comrades tell me it is the chiefest thing their parents say—wed—wed—wed! Well then, mother, I will not wed! And if you wed me against my will, then shall you never see my face again! I never will come home again!”

He turned and went on more quickly and she dared not say a word, but only sat amazed and frightened at his anger and that he did not sing again.

Yet she forgot all this now in what was to come. The path along which they had come since early dawn grew narrower and more narrow toward noon, and those hills which around their own valleys were so gently shaped, so mild in their round curves against the sky and so green with grass and bamboo, rose now as they went among them into sharper, bolder lines. At last when noon was full and the sun poured its heat down straight the gentle hills were gone, and in their place rose a range of mountains bare and rocky and cruelly pointed against the sky. They seemed the sharper too because the sky that day was so cloudless, bright and hard and blue, above the sand color of the bare mountains.

Beneath great pale cliffs the path wound, the stones not black and dark, but pale as light in hue and very strange, and nothing grew there, for there was no water anywhere. So the path wound up and yet more up and when noon was passed an hour or two, they came suddenly into a round deep valley in the mountain tops, and there some water was, for there was a small square village enclosed about with a rocky wall, and about it the green of a few fields. But when the mother and her son stopped at the gate to that village and asked of the place they sought, one who stood there pointed yet higher to a ridge and said, “There where the green ends on that lower edge there are the two houses. It is the last edge of green, and above it there are only rocks and sky.”

Now all this time the mother had stared astonished at these mountains and at their strange wild shapes and paleness, and at the scanty green. She had spent her life in the midst of valleys, and now as the path wound up from the enclosed village she stared about aghast to see how mortally poor the land was here and how shallow on the pale rocks the soil was and how scanty all the crops, even now when harvest drew on, and she cried out to the youth, “I do not like the looks of this place, son! I doubt it is too hard a place for your sister. Well, we will take her home, then. Yes, if it is too hard for her here I can walk and we will put her on the ass, and let them say what they will. They paid nothing for her, and I will ask nothing but her back again.”

But the young man did not answer. He was weary and hungry, for they had eaten but a bit of cold food they had brought with them, and he longed to reach his sister’s house, for there they thought to spend the night. He pulled at the ass’s bridle until the mother could not bear it and was about to brave his anger and reprove him.

Suddenly they came upon that house. Yes, there the two houses were, caught upon the side of the ridge and stuck there somehow to the rocks, and the mother knew this was where her maid was, for there the ill-looking old man stood at the door of one of the two houses, and when he saw her he stared as if he could not believe it was she, and then he ran in and out came more people, another man, dark and lean and wild in looks, and two women and a slack-hung youth, but not her blind maid.

The mother came down from her ass then and went near, and all these stared at her in silence, and she looked back and was afraid. Never had she seen such looks as these, the women’s hair uncombed and full of burrs and their faces withered and blackened with the sun, their garments never washed, and so were they all. They gathered there and out of the other house came a sickly child or two, yellowed with some fever, their lips parched and broken, and their bodies foul with filth, and they all stared silently, and gave no greeting, their eyes as wild and reasonless as beasts’ eyes are.

Then did the mother’s heart break suddenly with fear and she ran forward crying, “Where is my maid? Where have you hid my maid?” And she ran into their midst, but the young man stood doubting and holding to the ass.

Then a woman spoke sullenly, and her speech was not easily understood, some rude northern speech it was, and the sounds caught between her broken teeth and nothing came out clear and she said, “You have come well, goodwife. She has just died today.”

“Died!” the mother whispered and said no more. Her heart stopped, her breath was gone, she had no voice. But she pushed into the nearest hut and there upon a bed of reeds thrown on the ground her blind maid lay. Aye, there the maid was lying quietly and dead, dressed in the same clothes she had when she left her home, but not clean now nor mended. Of those new things there was no trace, for the room was empty save for the heap of rushes and a rude stool or two.

Then the mother ran and knelt beside her maid and stared down at the still face and sunken eyes and at the patient little mouth and all the face she knew so well. And suddenly she burst out crying and she fell upon the maid and seized her hands and pushed the ragged sleeves back and looked at her little arms and drew the trousers up her legs and looked to see if they were bruised or beaten or harmed in any way.

But there was nothing. No, the maid’s soft skin was all unbroken, the slender bones whole, and there was nothing to be seen. She was pale and piteously thin, but she was thin always and death is pale. Then did the mother stoop and smell at the child’s lips to see if there was any smell of poison, but there was no smell, nothing now except the faint sad scent of death.

Yet somehow the mother could not believe that this was any good and usual death. She turned on those who stood about the door watching her in silence, and she looked at them and saw their wild rude faces, not one of which she knew, and she shouted at them through sudden great weeping, “You have killed her—well I know you have—if you did not, then tell me how did my maid die so soon, and she left me sound and well!”

Then the evil old man whom she had hated from the first time she saw him grinned and said, “Be careful how you speak, goodwife! It is not a small thing to say we killed her and—”

But the sullen, rough-haired woman broke in screaming, “How did she die? She died of a cold she caught, being so puny, and that is how she died!” And she spat upon the ground and said again, screeching as she said, “A useless maid she was, too, if there was one, and knowing nothing—no, she could not even learn to fetch the water from the spring and not stumble and fall or lose her way!”

Then the mother looked and saw a narrow stony path leading down the mountain to a small pool and she groaned and cried, “Is that the way you mean?” But no one answered her and she cried out in further agony, “You beat her—doubtless every day my maid was beaten!”

But the woman answered quickly, “Search and see if there be bruises on her! Once my son did beat her for she came to him too slowly, but that is all!”

The mother looked up then and said faintly, “Where is your son?” And they pushed him forward, that son they had, and there he stood, a gangling, staring lad, and the mother saw he was nearly witless.

Then did the mother lay her head down upon her dead maid and weep and weep most wildly, and more wildly still she wept when she thought of what the maid had suffered, must have suffered, at such hands as these. And while she wept the anger grew about her in those who watched her. At last she felt a touch upon her and looking up she saw it was her son, and he bent and whispered to her urgently, “Mother, We are in danger here—I am afraid—we must not stay. Mother, she is dead now and what more can you do? But they look so evil I do not know what they will do to us. Come and let us hasten to the village and buy a little food and then press on home tonight!”

The mother rose then unwillingly, but as she looked she saw it was true those people stood together close, and there was that about them to make her fear, too, and she did not like their muttering nor the looks they cast at her and at the youth. Yes, she must think of him. Let them kill her if they would, but there was her son.

She turned and looked down once more at her dead maid and put her garments neat and laid her hands to her side. She went out into the late afternoon. When they saw her calmer and that she made ready to mount the ass again, the man, who had not spoken yet, and who was father to the witless son, said, “Look you, goodwife, if you do not think us honest folk, look at the coffin we have bought your child. Ten pieces of silver did it cost us, and all we had, and do you think we would have bought a coffin if we had not valued her?”

The mother looked then, and there beside the door a coffin truly was, but well she knew there were not ten pieces of silver in it, for it was but the rudest box of unpainted board, and thin well-nigh as paper and such a box as any pauper has. She opened her lips to make angry answer and to say, “That box? But my maid’s own silver that I gave her would have paid for that!”

But she did not say the words. It came upon her like a chill cloud across the day that she had need to fear these people. Yes, these two evil men, these wild women—but there her son was tugging at her sleeve to hasten her and so she answered steadily, “I will say nothing now. The maid is dead and not all the angers in the world nor any words can bring her back again.” She paused and looked at this one and at that and then she said again, “Before heaven do you stand and all the gods, and let them judge you, whatever you have done!”

She looked at this one and that, but no one answered, and she turned then and climbed upon the ass and the son made haste and led the ass down the rocky path and turned shivering to see if they were followed and he said, “I shall not rest until we are near that village once again and where many people are, I am so fearful.”

But the mother answered nothing. What need to answer anything? Her maid was dead.

C
RAZED WITH HER WEARINESS
was the mother when she came down from the halting gray ass that night before her own door. She had wept all the way home, now aloud and now softly, and the young man had been beside himself again and again with his mother’s weeping. He cried out in an agony at last, “Cease your wailing, mother, or I shall not be able to bear it!”

But when she calmed herself a little for his sake she broke forth again and at last the young man ground his teeth together and he muttered wildly, “If the day were come, if we were not so miserably poor, if the poor were given their share and could defend themselves, then might we sue for my sister’s life! But what use when we are so poor and there is no justice in the land?”

And the mother sobbed out, “It is true there is no use in going to law since we have no money to pay our way in to justice,” and then she wept afresh and cried, “But all the money and the justice under heaven would not bring my blind maid back again.”

At last the young man wept too, not so much for his sister nor even for his mother, but because he was so footsore and so worn and his world awry.

Thus they came at last to their own door and when she was down from the ass the mother called her elder son piercingly and so sharply that he came running out and she cried, “Son, your sister is dead!” And while he stared at her scarcely comprehending, she poured out the tale, and at the sound of her voice others came quickly to hear the tale until there in the dusk of night nearly all the hamlet stood to hear it. The younger son stood there half fainting, leaning on the ass, and when his mother talked on he went and threw himself upon the ground and lay there dazed with what had come about this day, and he lay silent while his mother wept and cried aloud and in her weeping said, looking with her streaming eyes to this face and to that, “There my little maid was, dead and gone, and I hate myself I ever let her go, and I would not have let her go if it had not been for this cold-hearted son’s wife of mine who begrudged the little maid a bit of meat and a little flower on her shoe and so I was fearful if I died and the maid was afraid, too—a little tender child who never would have left me of her own will! What cared she for man or marriage and a child’s heart in her always, clinging to her home and me? Oh, son, it is your wife who has brought this on me—I curse the day she came and no wonder she is childless with so hard a heart!”