When Sim Burns woke the next morning he felt a sharper twinge of
remorse. It was not a broad or well-defined feeling--just a sense that
he had been unduly irritable, not that on the whole he was not in the
right. Little Pet lay with the warm June sunshine filling his baby eyes,
curiously content in striking at flies that buzzed around his little
mouth.
The man thrust his dirty, naked feet into his huge boots, and, without
washing his face or combing his hair, went out to the barn to do his
chores.
He was a type of the average prairie farmer, and his whole surrounding
was typical of the time. He had a quarter-section of fine level land,
bought with incredible toil, but his house was a little box-like
structure, costing, perhaps, five hundred dollars. It had three rooms
and the ever-present summer kitchen at the back. It was unpainted and
had no touch of beauty,--a mere box.
His stable was built of slabs and banked and covered with straw. It
looked like a den, was low and long, and had but one door in the end.
The cow-yard held ten or fifteen cattle of various kinds, while a few
calves were bawling from a pen near by. Behind the barn, on the west
and north, was a fringe of willows forming a "wind-break." A few broken
and discouraged fruit trees, standing here and there among the weeds,
formed the garden. In short, he was spoken of by his neighbors as "a
hard-working cuss, and tol'ably well fixed."
No grace had come or ever could come into his life. Back of him were
generations of men like himself, whose main business had been to work
hard, live miserably, and beget children to take their places when they
died.
His courtship had been delayed so long on account of poverty that it
brought little of humanizing emotion into his life. He never mentioned
his love-life now, or if he did, it was only to sneer obscenely at it.
He had long since ceased to kiss his wife or even speak kindly to her.
There was no longer any sanctity to life or love. He chewed tobacco and
toiled on from year to year without any very clearly defined idea of the
future. His life was mainly regulated from without.
He was tall, dark, and strong, in a flat-chested, slouching sort of way,
and had grown neglectful of even decency in his dress. He wore the
American farmer's customary outfit of rough brown pants, hickory shirt,
and greasy wool hat. It differed from his neighbors' mainly in being a
little dirtier and more ragged. His grimy hands were broad and strong as
the clutch of a bear, and he was a "terrible feller to turn off work,"
as Councill said. "I'd ruther have Sim Burns work for me one day than
some men three. He's a linger." He worked with unusual speed this
morning, and ended by milking all the cows himself as a sort of savage
penance for his misdeeds the previous evening, muttering in
self-defence:--
"Seems 's if ever' cussid thing piles on to me at once. That corn, the
road-tax, and hayin' comin' on, and now _she_ gits her back up--"
When he went back to the well he sloshed himself thoroughly in the
horse-trough and went to the house. He found breakfast ready, but his
wife was not in sight. The older children were clamoring around the
uninviting breakfast table, spread with cheap ware and with boiled
potatoes and fried salt pork as the principal dishes.
"Where's y'r ma?" he asked, with a threatening note in his voice, as he
sat down by the table.
"She's in the bedroom."
He rose and pushed open the door. The mother sat with the babe in her
lap, looking out of the window down across the superb field of timothy,
moving like a lake of purple water. She did not look around. She only
grew rigid. Her thin neck throbbed with the pulsing of blood to her
head.
"What's got into you _now_?" he said, brutally. "Don't be a fool. Come
out and eat breakfast with me, an' take care o' y'r young ones."
She neither moved nor made a sound. With an oath he turned on his heel and
went out to the table. Eating his breakfast in his usual wolfish fashion,
he went out into the hot sun with his team and riding-plough, not a
little disturbed by this new phase of his wife's "cantankerousness." He
ploughed steadily and sullenly all the forenoon, in the terrific heat
and dust. The air was full of tempestuous threats, still and sultry, one
of those days when work is a punishment. When he came in at noon he
found things the same--dinner on the table, but his wife out in the
garden with the youngest child.
"I c'n stand it as long as _she_ can," he said to himself, in the
hearing of the children, as he pushed back from the table and went back
to work.
When he had finished the field of corn it was after sundown, and he came
up to the house, hot, dusty, his shirt wringing wet with sweat, and his
neck aching with the work of looking down all day at the corn-rows. His
mood was still stern. The multitudinous lift, and stir, and sheen of the
wide, green field had been lost upon him.
"I wonder if she's milked them cows," he muttered to himself. He gave a
sigh of relief to find she had. But she had done so not for his sake,
but for the sake of the poor, patient dumb brutes.
When he went to the bedroom after supper, he found that the cradle and
his wife's few little boxes and parcels--poor, pathetic properties!--had
been removed to the garret, which they called a chamber, and he knew he
was to sleep alone again.
"She'll git over it, I guess." He was very tired, but he didn't feel
quite comfortable enough to sleep. The air was oppressive. His shirt,
wet in places, and stiff with dust in other places, oppressed him more
than usual; so he rose and removed it, getting a clean one out of a
drawer. This was an unusual thing for him, for he usually slept in the
same shirt which he wore in his day's work; but it was Saturday night,
and he felt justified in the extravagance.
* * * * *
In the meanwhile poor Lucretia was brooding over her life in a most
dangerous fashion. All she had done and suffered for Simeon Burns came
back to her till she wondered how she had endured it all. All day long
in the midst of the glorious summer landscape she brooded.
"I hate him," she thought, with a fierce blazing up through the murk of
her musing. "I hate t' live. But they ain't no hope. I'm tied down. I
can't leave the children, and I ain't got no money. I couldn't make a
living out in the world. I ain't never seen anything an' don't know
anything."
She was too simple and too unknowing to speculate on the loss of her
beauty, which would have brought her competency once--if sold in the
right market. As she lay in her little attic bed, she was still sullenly
thinking, wearily thinking of her life. She thought of a poor old horse
which Sim had bought once, years before, and put to the plough when it
was too old and weak to work. She could see her again as in a vision,
that poor old mare, with sad head drooping, toiling, toiling, till at
last she could no longer move, and lying down under the harness in the
furrow, groaned under the whip,--and died.
Then she wondered if her own numbness and despair meant death, and she
held her breath to think harder upon it. She concluded at last, grimly,
that she didn't care--only for the children.
The air was frightfully close in the little attic, and she heard the low
mutter of the rising storm in the west. She forgot her troubles a
little, listening to the far-off gigantic footsteps of the tempest.
_Boom_, _boom_, _boom_, it broke nearer and nearer, as if a vast cordon
of cannon was being drawn around the horizon. Yet she was conscious only
of pleasure. She had no fear. At last came the sweep of cool, fragrant
storm-wind, a short and sudden dash of rain, and then in the cool, sweet
hush which followed, the worn and weary woman fell into a deep sleep.