“Oh, please!” protested Rose, gathering the child closer. “Can't you see he's had a bitter enough lesson? His little heart is full.”
“He's got to learn, once and for all, not to meddle with the stock. Come here.”
“No! I won't have it. I'll see to it that he never does a thing like this again. He's too young to understand. He's never been struck in his life. You shan't.”
Martin's cold blue eyes looked icily into his wife's blazing gray ones. “Don't act like a fool. Suppose he had gotten in there himself, and had fallen down—do you think she'd have waited to kill him? Where'd he be now—like that?” and he pointed to the half-eaten carcass.
Rose shuddered. There it was again—the same, familiar, disarming plausibility of Martin's, the old trick of making her seem to be the one in the wrong.
“I wish I had an acre for every good thrashing I got when I was a boy,” he commented drily. “But in those days a father who demanded obedience wasn't considered a monster.”
“If you only loved him, I wouldn't care,” sobbed Rose. “I could stand it better to have you hit him in anger, but you're so hard, so cruel. You plan it all out so—how can you?”
Nevertheless, with a last convulsive hug and a broken “Mother can't help it, darling,” she put Billy on his feet, her tormented heart wrung with bitterness as Martin took the clinging child from her and carried him away, hysterical and resisting.
“What else could I do?” she asked herself miserably, stabbed by the added fear that Billy might not forgive her. Could he understand how powerless she had been?
When once more the child was cuddled against her, she realized that in some mystical way there was a new bond between them, and as the days passed, she discovered it was not so much the whipping, but the unnatural perfidy of Dorcas that had scarred his mind. With his own eyes he had seen a mother devour her baby. He woke from dreams of it at night. Even the sight of her in the pasture contentedly suckling the remaining nine did not reassure him. The modern methods of psychology were then, to such women as Rose, a sealed book, but love and intuition taught her to apply them.