Now the mother was no longer young. She was in her forty and third
year, and when she counted on her fingers sometimes in the night how
many years her children’s father had been gone, she used the fingers
of her two hands and two more over again, and even the years that she
had let the hamlet think him dead were more than all the fingers on one
hand.
Yet she walked straight and slight as ever, and no flesh grew on her
frame. Others might begin to shrivel or grow fat as the cousin’s wife
did each year, and the old gossip, too, yet this woman stayed lean and
strong as she had been when she was young. But her breasts grew small
and dry, and in the strong sunlight where one saw her face full, there
were lines about the eyes from working in the bright hard sunshine, and
the skin was dark with the burning of the many years in the fields.
She moved somewhat more slowly than she did, too, without the old
lightness, for she had never been as she was before she tore that wild
life out of her. When she was called for childbirth in the hamlet as
she often was now, seeing she was widowed and counted as among the
ones not young, she found it hard to move so quickly as she must
sometimes, and once or twice a young mother caught the child herself,
and once she even let a newborn babe fall to the brick floor and bruise
its head, and it was a boy, too, but still no harm was done in the end
most luckily, for the lad grew up sturdy and with all his senses in him.
As her children grew, to them their mother seemed old. The eldest was
forever urging her to rest herself and not to heave so at the hard
great clods when the land was ploughed but let him do it, for he did it
easily now in the strength of his young manhood, and he strove to have
her do the lesser lighter things, and nothing pleased him better than
to see her sit quietly upon her stool in the shade on a summer’s day
sewing, and let him go to the land alone.
Yet the truth was she was not after all as old as her son would have
her. She ever loved the field work better than any and she loved to
work there on the land and then come home, her body wet with her clean
sweat and the wind blowing cool on that wetness, and her flesh weary
but sweetly so. Her eyes were used to fields and hills and great
things, and they did not narrow easily to small fine things like
needles.
Indeed, in that house they sorely missed a woman young and with sound
eyes, for they all knew now the girl’s eyes were blind. She knew,
too, poor maid; ever since that day when she had gone to town with
her mother she knew it secretly, even as her mother did, and neither
had any great faith in the goddess, somehow, the mother from what she
feared of that old sin of hers, and the maid because her blindness
seemed to her a destiny.
One day the mother cried, “Have you used that stuff all gone from the
goose quill?” and the girl answered quietly from the doorstep where she
sat, for there was this one good she had, the light hurt her no more
because she could not see it, and she said, “I have used it to the end
long since.”
And the mother said again, “I must buy you more--why did you not say it
sooner?”
But the young girl shook her head, and the mother’s heart stopped to
see her look, and then these words came wildly from those gentle lips,
“Oh, mother, I am blind--well I know I am blind! I cannot see your
face at all now, and if I went out from our own dooryard across the
threshing-floor, I could not see the way to go. Do you not see I never
go away from the house now, not even to the field?” And she fell to
weeping, wincing and biting her lips, for it was still painful to her
to weep, and she would not unless she could not help herself.
The mother answered nothing. What was there to answer to her blind
child?... But after a while she rose and went into the room and from
the drawer where once the trinkets lay she fetched out the little gong
she bought and she said to the girl, going to her, “Child, I bought
this thing against the day--” She could not finish but she pressed
the thing into the girl’s hand and the girl took it, feeling quickly
what it was, and she held it fast and said in her plaintive way, quiet
again, “Yes, I need it, mother.”
When the elder son came home that evening his mother bade him cut a
staff from some hard tree and smooth it to his sister’s hand, so that
with her little sounding signal in one hand and in the other the staff
she might move about more freely and with something less of fear, as
the blind do, and so if any harm came to her, or one pushed against her
carelessly or knocked her so she fell, the mother would not be blamed
because she had set the sign of blindness plain upon the maid for all
to see.
Thereafter the young girl carried with her when she went outside the
door at all these two things, her staff and her small gong, and she
learned to tinkle the gong softly and clearly and she moved in a quiet
sure way, a pretty maid enough, her face small and plaintive and on it
that still look that blindness sets upon a face.
Yet this blind maid was wonderfully clever, too, in her own way about
the house. There she needed no sign or staff, and she could wash the
rice and cook it, save that her mother would not let her light the fire
any more, but she could sweep the room and the threshing-floor, and
she could draw water from the pool, and search for eggs if the fowls
laid them in some usual place, and she knew by scent and sound where
the beasts were and how to set their food before them, and almost
everything she could do, except to sew and work in the fields, and for
labor in the fields she was not strong enough, for her suffering from
babyhood had seemed to stunt her and hold back her growth.
Seeing the young girl move thus about the house the mother’s heart
would melt within her and she suffered for what fate might befall
this young thing when she must wed her somewhere. For wed she must be
somehow, lest after the mother died there be not one to care for the
maid nor one to whom she truly could belong, since a woman belongs
first to the husband’s house and not to that house where she was born.
Often and often the mother thought of this and she wondered who would
have a maid who was blind, and if none would have her then what would
happen to her in the end. If ever she spoke this matter out the elder
lad would answer, “I will care for her, mother, as long as she will
do her share,” and this would comfort the mother somewhat and yet she
knew a man cannot be fully known until it is seen what his wife is, and
she would think to herself, “I must find him such a wife as will take
good heed of my blind maid and be kind to her. When I go looking for
his wife I must find one who will take heed of two, her husband and his
sister.”
* * * * *
It was time, too, the mother found a wife for this elder son of hers.
Nineteen years old he had got to be and almost without her knowing it.
Yet he had never asked her for a wife nor shown her his need of one.
Ever he had been the best and mildest son a mother could have, working
hard and never asking anything and if he went to the teashop sometimes
or rarely on a holiday in town, although that he never did unless he
had some business to put with it, he never took share in any ribaldry,
nor even in a game of chance except to watch it from afar, and he was
always silent where his elders were.
A very perfect son he was and with but one fault left now that he had
passed the little faults of childhood and it was that he would not
spare his younger brother. No, it was the strangest thing, but this
elder son of hers, who was so even and gentle with all the world and
even with the beasts, so silent he would scarcely say what color he
would have the next new coat his mother bought him, when he was brother
he was hard upon the younger lad and railed against the boy if he grew
slack and played, and he held the boy bitterly to every sort of labor
on the land. The house was full of quarreling, the younger lad noisy
and full of angry words, and the elder brother holding himself silent
until he could bear no more and then he fell upon his brother with
whatever he had by him or with his bare hands and he beat the boy until
he ran blubbering and dodging in and out among the trees and seeking
refuge in his cousin’s house. And truly it came to such a pass as this,
that the whole hamlet blamed the elder brother for his hardness and
ran to save the younger lad, and so encouraged, the lad grew bold and
ran away from work and lived mostly at his cousin’s house, lost there
among the many lads and maids who grew there as they would, and he came
home freely only when he saw his brother gone to work.
But sometimes the elder brother grew so bitter in his heart he came
home out of time and found his younger brother and then he caught the
lad’s head beneath his arm and cuffed him until the mother would come
running and she cried, “Now let be--let be--shame on you, son, to
strike your little brother so, and frighten your sister!”
But the young man answered bitterly, “Shall I not chastise him, being
older brother to him and his father gone? He is an idle lazy lout,
gaming already every time he can, and well you know it, mother, but you
have ever loved him best!”
It was true the mother did love this youngest son the best, and he
moved her heart as neither of the others did. The eldest son grew man
so soon, it seemed to her, and silent and with naught to say to anyone,
and she did not know this was because he was so often weary and that
she thought him surly when he was only very weary. As for the girl, the
mother loved her well but always with pain, for there the blind eyes
were always for a reproach and she never could forget that the goddess
had not heard her prayer nor had the mother ever heart to pray again,
fearing now that it was her own sin come down in some way worse than
she could bear because it fell upon her child. So it was that while her
heart was ever soft with pity still the maid was never any joy to her.
Even when the maid came loving and near and smiling and sat to listen
to her mother’s voice, the mother rose with some excuse and busied
herself somehow, because she could not bear to see those closed and
empty eyes.
Only this youngest son was sound and whole and merry and oftentimes he
seemed his father over again, and more and more the mother loved him,
and all the love she ever had for the man now turned itself upon this
son. She loved him and often stood between him and the elder brother
so that when the young man seized the boy she rushed between them and
caught the blows and forced her son to cease for shame because he might
strike his mother, and then the lad would slip away.
It came to be that after a while the lad slipped often thus away and
from his hiding in his cousin’s house he went to wandering here and
there and even to the town and he would be gone perhaps a day or two,
and then he would run back to his cousin’s house and come out as if he
had been there all the time, his eyes upon his elder brother’s mood
that day. And if he did not come, the mother would wait until the elder
son was gone and she went to the cousin’s house and coaxed him home
with some dainty she had made. But she half feared her elder son too
these days and sometimes she would start with him to the field or
leave soon and come and give the lad his meal first before his brother
came, and he picked the best from every dish and she let him, for she
loved him so well. She loved him for his merry words and ways and for
his smooth round face and for the same supple, lissome body that his
father had. The elder lad went bent already with his labor, his hand
hard and slow, but this lad was quick and brown and smooth-skinned
everywhere and light upon his feet as a young male cat, and the mother
loved him.
And the slow elder son felt this warm love his mother had for his
brother, and he brooded on it. Every day of labor he had done, and all
the labor that he spared her he remembered now and it seemed to him
his mother was the crudest soul that ever lived and she never recked
it anything that he had striven from childhood for her sake. So the
bitterness gathered slow and deep within his heart, and he hated his
brother.