The Green Bough

by E. Temple Thurston

It worried him as he ate his meal. It always worried him. Somehow it seemed to make the food taste dry in his mouth. It had no such succulence as when all was just right, and he had come in for his dinner after a hard morning's work. For never by conscious word had he hurt her. Never, in all the thirty-seven years they had been married, had there been an instant's intent in him to make her suffer.

It was in these unaccountable ways, in chance words, harmless enough in all conscience to him, in little things he did and little things he left undone, that this look she had, came in these sudden moments into her face.

"Women be queer cattle," he would say to himself. "There be no ways treatin' 'em alike. 'Ee might think 'ee'd got 'em goin' one way when round they'll come and go t'other."

As a rule this silent summary of the whole sex would satisfy him in regard to the one in particular he had in mind. With a sweep of his hand across his mouth after his meal was over, he would go back to his work and once his feet felt the fields beneath them, he would forget all about it.

Somehow this time he seemed to know there was little hope of forgetting. Whether it was his food tasted drier than usual; whether some meaning of what she had said about the sweat on his brow and the sweat of her who labored upstairs there with her child had reached with faint rays of illumination to his appreciative mind, whatever it was, the fields called in vain to him.

He was restless, uneasy. Without cause he knew of, he felt a little ashamed. Rising from the table, he moved about the room lighting his pipe. He felt like some child with a lie or a theft upon his conscience. When his pipe was well lit and hard rammed down, finding he had no patience to sit awhile as was his custom, he went in search of his wife.

From something she had said about making as little noise as possible, he knew she was not upstairs with her patient. If he asked her straight out, perhaps she would tell him what was the matter, what he had said, what possibly he had done.

She was not in the scullery. Softly he opened the door of the larder and looked in. She was not there. With his heart beating in unaccustomed pulses he crept upstairs to their bedroom, thinking to himself, "Plowed fields be better walking for the likes of me."

"Mother," he whispered, and opened the door.

She was not there.