Edith was a quiet little creature, with a soft voice, and a pale, sweet
face, and frail figure. She came up to Anson English when she entered
the house, and put her hands timidly upon his arms.
"I want you to love me," she said; "I have had no father or mother since
I can remember. I want to call you father, and I want to make you happy
if I can."
"Well, I'll tell you how," the old man retorted. "Discharge the hired
girl, and make good bread. That'll make me happy,"--and he laughed
harshly.
Edith shrank from his rough words, so void of the sympathy and love she
longed for. But she discharged the girl within a week, and tried to make
good bread. It was not a success, however, and the old man was not slow
to express his dissatisfaction. Edith left the table in tears.
"Another dribbler--'Liz'beth was always cryin' just that way over every
little thing," sighed the old man.
Edith eventually conquered the difficulties of bread making, and became
a famous cook. But she did not please her husband's father any the
better by this achievement.
"You're always a-fixin' up some new sort of trash for the table," he
said to her one day. "_Dessert_ is it, you call it? 'Nuff to make a
man's patience _desert_ him to see sugar and flour wasted so. 'Liz'beth
liked your fancy cooking, but I cured her of it."
"Yes, and you killed her too," cried Edith, for the first time since her
marriage losing control of her temper and answering back. "Everybody
says you worried her into the grave. But you won't succeed so well with
me. I will live just to defy you, if no more. And I'll show you that
I'll not bear everything, too."
It was all over in a moment, and it was not repeated. Indeed, Edith was
kinder and gentler and more submissive in her manner after that for
days, as sweet natures always are when they have once broken over the
rules which govern their lives.
Yet the old man always spoke of Edith as a virago after that.
"She's worse'n 'Liz'beth," he said, "and she had a temper of her own at
times that would just _singe_ things."
Ben passed most of his evenings and a good part of his days at the
village "store." He came home the worse for drink occasionally, and he
was absolutely indifferent to all the work and care of the farm and
family.
"She's just like 'Liz'beth," the old man said to his neighbors; "she
don't make home entertainin' for her husband. But Ben isn't balanced
like me, and he goes wrong. He's excitable. I never was. The right kind
of a woman could keep him at home."
After a child came to them matters seemed to mend for a time. So long as
the infant lay pink and helpless in its mother's arms or in its crib, it
was a bond to unite them all.
So soon as it began to be an active child, with naughty ways which
needed correction, it was another element of discord.
The old man did not think Edith capable of controlling the child, and
Ben was hasty and harsh, and he did not like to hear the baby cry. So he
stayed more and more at the store, and was an object of fear to the
child and of reproach to the mother when he did return.
They drifted farther apart, and the old man constantly widened the
breach between them. They had been married six years, and the baby girl
was four years old, when Ben struck Edith a blow, one day, and told her
to take her child and leave the house.
In less than an hour she had gone, no one knew whither.
"She'll come back, more's the pity," the old man said. "'Liz'beth, she
started off to leave me once, but she concluded to come back and try it
over again."
But Edith did not come back. Months afterward they heard of her in a
distant part of the State teaching school and supporting her child.
Ben applied for a divorce on the plea of desertion. Edith never appeared
against him, and he obtained it.