The Mother: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

all would her anger rise if he struck one of the children or shouted at one if it cried. Then she could not bear it, and she flew against him if it were to save a child and ever the child was right and he was wrong, and this angered him more than anything, that she put the children before him, or he thought she did.
    Yes, on days like this he held as nothing even the good few holidays he took, the feast days and the long idle winter days when he did nothing but sleep, and when he could not sleep he gambled. A lucky gambler he was, too, and he always came home with more than he took, and it seemed an easy way to live, if he were a lone man and had but himself to feed. He loved the chance of gambling and the excitement and the merriment of the game and all the men crowded together to see what lucky play he made. Truly luck was in his nimble fingers, which even the plough and the hoe had not made stiff, for he was young yet, only twenty and eight years of age, and he had never worked more than he must.
    But the mother never knew what was in the heart of the father of her children. That he loved play she knew, but what matter that if he did not lose at play? It was in truth a pride to her that when other women complained aloud of their own men and how the scanty earnings of the land were lost at that table in the inn, she need not complain, and when one cried out to her, “If my poor wretch were but like that pretty man of yours, goodwife, his fingers are faery somehow, so that the money crawls to them of its own accord, seemingly, upon the gaming table—a very lucky woman be you, goodwife!” she smiled complacently and she did not often blame him for his play unless it served as excuse for some other cause of quarrel.
    And she did not blame him deeply that he could not work steadily hour after hour in the fields as she did, though at the moment she might lay about him sharply with her tongue. She knew that men cannot work as women do, but have the hearts of children always in them, and she was used now to working on in her steady way while he flung down his hoe and laid himself upon the grass that grew on the footpath between this field and the next and slept an hour or two. But when she said aught to him in her scolding way, which was but the way, after all, her tongue was used to speak, for secretly she loved him well, he would answer, “Yes, and sleep I may for I have worked enough to feed myself.”
    She might have said, “Have we not the children then and shall not each do what he is able to make more for them?” But this she did not say because it was true the children seemed ever hers and hers alone, since he did nothing for them. Besides, her tongue was not so adroit as his to find an answer.
    But sometimes her wrath would come up hotly and then it would come with more than her usual scolding speech. Once or twice in a season a quarrel would go deep with her and give an unused bitterness to her tongue. When the man bought some foolish trinket in the market with the silver he had taken for the cabbage there, or when he was drunken on a day that was not a holiday, then she would grow angry and well-nigh she forgot she loved him in her heart. This was a deep fierce anger too, which smoldered and broke forth so many hours after his misdeed that the man had almost forgot what he had done, for it was his way to forget easily anything that did not please him, and when her anger came up in her like this she was helpless against it and it must out.
    On such a day one autumn he came home with a gold ring on his finger, or one he said was gold, and when she saw it her anger came up and she cried in the strangest, hottest way, “You—and you will not take your share of our common bitterness of life! No, you must needs go and spend the scant bit we have for a silly ring to put upon your little finger! And whoever heard of a good and honest poor man who wore a ring upon his finger? A rich man, he may do it and nothing said, but