The light flared out from the open door. “How on airth did he git across the river?” said Silas, querulously. “An' how am I goin' to git him back in this weather?”
There he stood, the noble old horse that her boy had raised from a colt, had ridden, had given to her when he went away. “Mother,” her boy had said, “be good to old Tige. If ever father wants to sell him, don't you let him. I'd come back from my grave if the old horse was abused—the only thing I loved, that loved me in this place I cannot call a home. Remember he has been so faithful.”
Ay, he had been faithful, in long, hot summer days, in wide, weary fields, in breaking the stony soil for others' harvest, in bringing wood from the far forest, in every way of burden and work.
He stood quivering with cold, covered with ice, panting after his wild gallop; but he was home, poor brute mind! That old farm was his home: he had frolicked in its green fields as a colt, had carried a merryvoiced young master, had worked and rested in that old place; he might be ill-treated and starved, he did not grieve, he did not question, for it was home! He could not understand why this time the old master had not taken him away; never before had he been left in Bath. In his brute way he reasoned he had been forgotten, and when his chance came, leaped from the barn, running as horse never ran before, plunged off the wharf into the black waves, swam across and galloped to his home.
“If there is a God in Heaven, that horse shall not go back!” cried the woman fiercely; “if you take him from here again it shall be over my dead body! Ay, you may well look feared; for thirty years I have frozen my heart, even to my own son, and now the end's come. It needed that faithful brute to teach me; it needed that one poor creature that loved me and this place, to open the flood-gates. Let me pass, and I warn you to keep away from me. Women go mad in this lonely, starved life. Ay, you are a man, but I am stronger now than you ever were. I've been taught all my life to mind men, to be driven by them, and to-night is a rising of the weak. Put me in the asylum, as other wives are, but tonight my boy's horse shall be treated as never before.”
“But M'ri,” he said, trembling, “there, there now, let me git the lantern, you're white as a sheet! We'll keep him if you say so; why hadn't you told me afore?”
She flung him aside, lit the lantern and then ran up to an attic chamber under the eaves. “M'ri, you hain't goin' to kill yourself?” he quavered, waiting at the foot of the stairs. She was back in a moment, her arms full of blankets.
“What on airth!”
“Let me alone, Silas Lowell, these were my weddin' blankets. I've saved 'em thirty years in the cedar chist for this. They was too good for you and me; they air too poor fur my boy's horse.”
“But there's a good hoss blanket in the barn.”