The Green Bough

by E. Temple Thurston

"I'm milkmaid here," she said. "Any farm girl would keep on to the last. There'll be some days yet for my hands to lie in my lap. Let them touch something till then."

They let her have her way. Only the carter and the boy were there about the place to see her. She had no sense of shyness with them. Every now and again some cow was taken to a farm near by to profit. It was common talk, unhampered by any reticence, to comment upon the condition of each beast as she neared her calving time. The functions and operations of Nature were part of the vast plan of that ever-revolving cycle to them. They knew no coarseness in their attitude of mind; they knew no preciousness of modesty.

Before she had been at Yarningdale for long, Mary realized with the greater fullness of perception how vast a degree of false modesty there was in the world as people congregated in the cities and with brick walls and plaster shut themselves out from the sight of Nature.

It had all been false, that modesty which their mother had taught them. Love, pleasure and passion, if these were the fruits of the soul man had won for himself, what shame could there be in permitting them their just expression? Love was uplifting and in the ecstasy it brought were not the drops flung farther, higher from the wheel in the acceleration of its revolutions? Was not the stream in flood, those moments when love came in its torrent to the heart of a man? Once for a moment she had loved and knew now that ecstasy could never come to her again.

Pleasure, it was true, she had never known, but the deep passion of motherhood none could rob her of. All those days and weeks and months were hours of passionate joy to her. Never was she idle. Never was her passion still.

That moment, one night it was with the moonlight falling on her bed, when first she felt the movement of her child within her, was so passionate a joy of physical realization that she sat up in her bed and, with the pale light on her face, the tears swelled to overflowing in her eyes.

"What should I have done, what should I have been," she whispered to herself, "if this had never happened to me?"

Occasionally during those seven months there were letters reaching her from Bridnorth. Fanny wrote and Hannah wrote. Never was there a letter from Jane. At first they asked if they might come and see her, but when she replied she was happier alone, that seeing her as she was, they might the less be able to understand her happiness, they asked no more.

In further letters they wrote giving her Bridnorth news, the people who had come down that summer, the comments that were made upon her absence and later, when the actual truth leaked out.

"People have been very kind on the whole," wrote Hannah in a subsequent letter. "I think they are really sorry. Only yesterday the Vicar said, 'God has strange ways of visiting us with trouble. We must take it that He means it for the best, impossible though it is for us to see what good can come of it.' I had never realized," was Hannah's comment, "that he was as broad-minded as this, and it has given me much help. I hope you are taking every care of yourself and that the old farmer's wife is competent to give you good advice upon what you ought to do. You say you are still working on the farm. Is that wise? Mother used to go to bed every day for an hour or so before you were born. I remember it so well. Oh, Mary, why did you ever let it happen?"