“I guess you’re right,” she said at last. “She seemed to be attached to them, but she don’t ask to go to see him since his wife’s death; and I should think now’s when her love for them would show out.”
“I wish to God she would ask to go anywhere. I’m tired of the kind of life we’re leading,” John said in a manner which supported his words.
The weariness of life was modified, or at least shifted from one shoulder to the other for John Hunter by the increasing burden of financial worries. In this also he was denied any comfort or assistance from Elizabeth; she asked no questions, and if he talked of notes which were falling due, or of interest soon to be paid, she listened without remark, and moved about her endless round of cleaning, cooking, or sewing apparently absorbed in the work in hand. If he complained about expenses, the only reply he received was for the food on the table to be of a plainer quality and a lessened grocery bill the next time he went to town. This he would not permit, being sensitive about the opinions of the men who worked for him. Elizabeth never remarked upon the matter of keeping three men through the winter as she would have done a year ago when there was little to do which counted in farm affairs. She left her husband free to do as he chose on all those matters. She did not sulk; she had lost hope, she was temporarily beaten. In that first hour after her return from Aunt Susan’s death chamber she had meditated flight. She longed to get away, to go anywhere where she would never see her husband’s face again, but there was Jack. Jack belonged to his father as much as to her, and Elizabeth was fair. Besides, she was helpless about the support of the child. Her health was quite seriously interfered with by the ache in her back which was always present since the baby’s coming. She had told her mother but two short years before that she would not live with a man who would treat her as her father treated his wife, and here she found herself in those few months as enmeshed as her mother had ever been. Aye! even more so. Hers was a position even more to be feared, because it was more subtle, more intangible, more refined, and John’s rule as determined and unyielding as that of Josiah Farnshaw.
Having failed to act in that first hour of her trouble, Elizabeth drifted into inaction. Even her thoughts moved slowly as she pondered on her situation; her thoughts moved slowly, but they moved constantly. Under all that quiet of manner was a slow fire of reasoning which was working things out. Gradually Elizabeth was getting a view of the real trouble. Two things absorbed her attention: one was the domination of men, and the other was the need of money adjustment. To live under the continual interference of a man who refused to listen to the story of one’s needs was bad enough, but to live without an income while one had a small child was worse. She would leave this phase of her difficulties at times and wander back to the character of the treatment she received and compare it to that accorded to her mother. It occasioned great surprise to find herself admiring her father’s manner more than that of her husband. Mr. Farnshaw had the virtue of frankness in his mastery, John used subterfuges; Mr. Farnshaw was openly brutal, John secretly heartless; her father was a domineering man, her husband even more determined, more inflexible. While considering the possibility of escape by running away, many things were clarified in Elizabeth’s mind regarding her position as a wife, and the position of all wives. She, for the first time, began to see the many whips which a determined husband had at his command, chief of which was the crippling processes of motherhood. She could not teach school—Jack was too young; neither could she take any other work and keep the child with her. As she meditated upon the impossibility of the various kinds of work a woman could do, another phase of her situation arose before her: even if the baby were older, and a school easily obtained, the gossip that would follow a separation would be unendurable. Having accumulated a reputation for snobbishness and aristocratic seclusion, people would not neglect so rare an opportunity to even old scores. She would be a grass widow, a subject for all the vulgar jest and loathsome wit of the community. Country people know how to sting and annoy in a thousand ways. However, the possibility of this sort of retribution was put entirely away by the baby’s illness. By the time Jack had recovered, the young mother was worn to a lifeless machine, compelled to accept what came to her. Her youth, her health, her strength were gone; worse than all that, her interest in things, in her own affairs even, had almost gone.
John wandered about the house disconsolate and dissatisfied, and made amends in curious little ways, and from John’s standpoint. He opened relations with Elizabeth’s family and insisted upon taking her home for a visit. Elizabeth went with him, and accepted the more than half-willing recognition of her father, who wanted to get into communication with the baby. He was offering for sale a young team and John, thinking to do a magnanimous thing, bought Patsie. Elizabeth accepted the visit and the horse without emotions of any sort, and left her husband annoyed and her family floundering in perplexity at her passive attitude toward life. At home that night he said to her sneeringly:
“No matter what a man does for you, you pout, and act as if you didn’t like it. If I don’t offer to take you you’re mad, and if I do you set around and act as if you were bored to death by having to go. What th’ devil’s a man to do?”
“I was perfectly willing to go,” was the reply, and she went on dressing Jack for bed without looking up.
John cast a baffled look at her as she carried the child out of the room, and returned to his uncomfortable thoughts without trying to talk of anything else when she returned and sat down to sew. The sitting room in which they spent their evenings was in perfect order; the whole house was never so orderly, nor their table better served, but John pined for companionship. The work he had worn her out in doing was never better performed, but there was no love in the doing, and when he addressed her, though her answer was always ready and kind, there was no love in it, and he was learning that our equity in the life of another has fixed and unalterable lines of demarkation.
Thus matters progressed till February, when Jake was called home to Iowa by the death of his mother. Jake had lived such a careless, happy-go-lucky sort of life that he was obliged to borrow a large part of his railroad fare from John Hunter, who was himself so badly in debt that he was wondering how he was to meet the interest which would fall due in May. John gave him the money with the understanding that Jake would come back in time for the early seeding, and prepared to take him into town. Jake was the only man left on the farm, and there was consternation in John’s heart at the prospect of having all the chores thrown upon his own shoulders in cold weather. Jake had been the only reliable man he had ever been able to hire. The more independent sort of hired men resented John Hunter’s interference in the farm work, which they understood far better than he, and seldom stayed long, but Jake Ransom liked Elizabeth, was close friends with Luther Hansen, and since he saw the mistress of the house drooping and discouraged, doubly appreciated the home into which he had fallen. Jake had been devoted to Elizabeth with a dog-like devotion since his first meeting with her in the little schoolhouse six years before. He was more than glad that he could secure his return to the Hunter home by the simple method of borrowing money. More nearly than any one else in her whole circle of acquaintances, Jake Ransom had Elizabeth’s situation figured out. He wanted to come back to her service, and it was with a satisfied security that he helped prepare the bobsled for the trip to town. They went early and took Mrs. Hunter with them to do some shopping for herself and Elizabeth. John hoped to find a man who could come back with them that afternoon and help with the work of watering and feeding the hundred and fifty head of cattle that made of their farm life a busy round of daily toil.