THE FIRST DAY OF RICHARD'S ABSENCE
The gray light of a November morning was breaking over the prairies when
Richard stooped down to kiss his wife, who did not think it worth her
while to rise so early even to see him off. She felt that she had been
unjustly dealt with, and up to the very last maintained the same cold,
icy manner so painful to Richard, who would fain have won from her one
smile to cheer him in his absence. But the smile was not given, though
the lips which Richard touched did move a little, and he tried to
believe it was a kiss they meant to give. Only the day before Ethie had
heard from Aunt Van Buren that Frank was to be married at Christmas,
when they would all go on to Washington, where they confidently expected
to meet Ethelyn. With a kind of grim satisfaction Ethelyn showed this to
her husband, hoping to awaken in him some remorse for his cruelty to
her, if, indeed, he was capable of remorse, which she doubted. She did
not know him, for if possible he suffered more than she did, though in a
different way. It hurt him to leave her there alone feeling as she did.
He hated to go without her, carrying only in his mind the memory of the
white, rigid face which had not smiled on him for so long. He wanted her
to seem interested in something, for her cold apathy of manner puzzled
and alarmed him; so remembering her aunt's letter on the morning of his
departure, he spoke of it to her and said, "What shall I tell Mrs. Van
Buren for you? I shall probably see more or less of them."
"Tell nothing; prisoners send no messages," was Ethelyn's reply; and in
the dim gray of the morning the two faces looked a moment at each other
with such thoughts and passions written upon them as were pitiable
to behold.
But when Richard was fairly gone, when the tones of his voice bidding
his family good-by had ceased, and Ethelyn sat leaning on her elbow and
listening to the sound of the wheels which carried him away, such a
feeling of utter desolation and loneliness swept over her that, burying
her face in the pillows, she wept bitterer tears of remorse and regret
than she had ever wept before.
That day was a long and dreary one to all the members of the prairie
farmhouse. It was lonely there the first day of Richard's absence, but
now it was drearier than ever; and with a harsh, forbidding look upon
her face, Mrs. Markham went about her work, leaving Ethelyn entirely
alone. She did not believe her daughter-in-law was any sicker than
herself. "It was only airs," she thought, when at noon Ethelyn declined
the boiled beef and cabbage, saying just the odor of it made her sick.
"Nothing but airs and ugliness," she persisted in saying to herself, as
she prepared a slice of nice cream toast with a soft-boiled egg and cup
of fragrant black tea. Ethie did not refuse this, and was even gracious
enough to thank her mother-in-law for her extra trouble, but she did it
in such a queenly as well as injured kind of way, that Mrs. Markham felt
more aggrieved than ever, and, for a good woman, who sometimes spoke in
meeting, slammed the door considerably hard as she left the room and
went back to her kitchen, where the table had been laid ever since
Ethelyn took to eating upstairs. So long as she ate with the family Mrs.
Markham felt rather obliged to take her meals in the front room, but it
made a deal more work, and she was glad to return to her olden ways once
more. Eunice was gone off on an errand, and so she felt at liberty to
speak her mind freely to her boys as they gathered around the table.
"It is sheer ugliness," she said, "which keeps her cooped up there to be
waited on. She is no more sick than the dog; but law, I couldn't make
Richard b'lieve it."
"Mother, you surely did not go to Richard with complaints of his wife,"
and James looked reproachfully across the table at his mother, who
replied: "I told him what I thought, for I wa'n't going to have him
miserable all the time thinking how sick she was, but I might as well
have talked to the wind, for any good it did. He even seemed
putcherky, too."
"I should be more than putcherky if you were to talk to me against my
wife if I had one," James retorted, thinking of Melinda and the way she
sang that solo in the choir the day before.
It was a little strange that James and John and Andy all took Ethelyn's
part against their mother, and even against Richard, who they thought
might have taken her with him.
"It would not have hurt her any more than fretting herself to death at
home. No, nor half so much; and she must feel like a cat in a strange
garret there alone with them."
It was John who said this--quiet John, who talked so little, and annoyed
Ethelyn so much by coming to the table in his blue frock, with his pants
tucked in his boots and his curly hair standing every way. Though very
much afraid of his grand sister-in-law, he admired her beyond
everything, and kept the slippers she brought him safely put away with a
lock of Daisy's hair and a letter written him by the young girl whose
grave was close beside Daisy's in the Olney cemetery. John had had his
romance and buried it with his heroine, since which time he had said but
little to womankind, though never was there a truer heart than that
which beat beneath the homespun frock Ethelyn so despised. Richard had
bidden him to be kind to Ethie, and John had said he would; and after
that promise was given had the farmhouse been on fire the sturdy fellow
would have periled life and limb to save her for Dick. To James, too,
Richard had spoken a word for Ethie, and to Andy also; so that there
were left to her four champions in his absence--for Eunice had had her
charge, with promises of a new dress if faithful to her trust; and thus
there was no one against poor Ethelyn saving the mother-in-law, who made
that first dinner after Richard's absence so uncomfortable that John
left the table without touching the boiled Indian pudding, of which he
was so fond, while James rather curtly asked what there was to be gained
by spitting out so about Ethelyn, and Andy listened in silence, thinking
how, by and by, when all the chores were done, he would take a basket of
kindlings up for Ethie's fire, and if she asked him to sit down, he
would do so and try and come to the root of the matter, and see if he
could not do something to make things a little better.