Mrs. Farnshaw was alarmed. Elizabeth had protested and tried to beg off from the yearly stipend before, but never in that manner. The tone her daughter had used frightened her and she quivered with an unacknowledged fear. Her husband’s wrath was the Sheol she fought daily to avoid. What would become of them if the interest were not paid?
Added to Mrs. Farnshaw’s personal desire to command her daughter’s funds there was the solid fear of her husband’s estimate of her failure. She could not look in his eye and tell him that she was unable to obtain their daughter’s consent. To live in the house with him after Lizzie had told him herself was equally unthinkable, for his wrath would be visited upon her own head.
“My child! My child!” she cried, “you don’t have to be told what he will do t’ me.”
There was a long pause while she sobbed. The pause became a compelling one; some one had to speak.
“I can’t help it, ma,” Elizabeth said doggedly after a time.
“Oh, but you don’t know what it means. Come on to th’ house. I can’t work no more, an’ I’ve got t’ talk this thing out with you.”
They picked up the pails and the hoe with which they had been covering the hills and went to the house, carrying a burden that made a potato-planting day a thing of no consequence.
The mother busied herself with the cob fire as she argued, and Elizabeth put away the old mittens with which she had protected her hands from the earth which never failed to leave them chapped, before she picked up the broom and began an onslaught on the red and fluffy dust covering the kitchen floor.
“You see, You’ll go off t’ teach an’ won’t know nothin’ about it, an’—an’—I’ll have it t’ bear an’——” The pause was significant.
Mrs. Farnshaw watched her daughter furtively and strained her ears for signs of giving up. At last Elizabeth said slowly: