“That’s just it!” Susan Hornby broke out, turning back, her eyes following the progress of the pair toward the crimson west, her thoughts running ahead to the unknown future where the progress of the soul would be helped or hindered; “that’s just it! He has a farm; now he’s going to need a wife to help run it—just as he needs a horse. If he’d only be fair about it, but he’s misleading her. She thinks he’ll always do things the way he’s doing them now, and he won’t; there’ll be an end to that kind of thing some day—and—and when they’re married and he’s got her fast, that kind of man won’t be nice about it—and—they’ll live on the farm—and life’s so hard sometimes! Oh! I can’t bear to see her broken to it!” she cried with such intensity that the man at her side caught his breath with a sort of sob.
“Anybody’d think to hear you talk, Susan, that marryin’ was a thing to be feared, an’ that I’d been mean t’ you.”
What had she done? There was a half-frightened pause as Susan Hornby struggled to bring herself back to the husband standing beside her who was broken by failure.
“Bless your old soul, Nate,” she answered quickly, and with the flush of confusion on her face strangely like the flush of guilt, “if he’s only half as good to her as you’ve been to me, She’ll never have anything to complain of nor need anybody’s sympathy.”
Susan understood that her assurance did not wholly reassure that bleeding heart, and to turn Nathan’s thoughts to other things she slipped one hand through his arm, and picking up the milk pails from the bench at her side with the other, said with a little laugh:
“There now! I’ll do your milking for that. You throw down the hay while I do it. There’s nothing the matter with you and me, except that I’ve done a washing to-day and you don’t sleep well of late. I haven’t one thing in all this world to complain of, and this would be the happiest year of my life if you weren’t a bit gloomy and under the weather. Come on—I’m nervous. You know I never am well in hot weather.”
Nathan knew that Susan was really worried over Elizabeth’s prospects, but her luckless remark upon the marriage of farmers cut into his raw, quivering consciousness of personal failure like a saw-bladed knife, torturing the flesh as it went. His failure to place her where her own natural characteristics and attainments deserved had eaten into his mind like acid. In proportion as he loved her and acknowledged her worth he was humiliated by the fact that she was not getting all out of life of which she was capable, as his wife, and it left him sensitive regarding her possible estimate of it.
“She always seems satisfied,” he said to himself as he turned his pitchfork to get a hold on the pile into which he had thrust it, “but here she is pityin’ this here girl that’s goin’ t’ be married as if she goin’ t’ be damned.”
The Adam’s apple in his wrinkled throat tightened threateningly, and to keep down any unmanly weakness it indicated he fell upon the hay savagely, but the suspicion stayed with him and left its bitter sting.