“Making out—no more. He ain’t got a piece of skin on him that don’t appear to be fried, and he talks till your heart splits in your body.”
“It’s a good sign if he’s rebellious. My brother was fearful meek. He could hear a little, and the whole town had hopes, when one morning he turned his head in to the wall, and he says to poor Jarlsen, who was tending him, ‘You give that oatmeal and water where it’s wanted,’ he says; ‘you can give me a pleasure drink for the last I get.’ He didn’t drink much ever, and Jarlsen give him a drop of something, and then he lay still and was dumb dead before your poor feller could rinch the glass. So it goes!” Martha ended dismally.
Emma did not find this quite satisfactory, so she said nothing.
“And there is something you have to be thankful for,” said Martha further, forgetting that nothing causes man to hate his lot like telling him to be thankful for it; “you’ve got a good man to fall back on. That Quarry’s more to you in most ways nor your born mother would be. Yesterday he was saying as how risky it was to marry where the language was different. Two tongues like that in a house means secrets.”
Emma had started up. “That Quarry says more than his prayers,” she cried out fiercely; “I knew he’d been lyin’ ’round about me. I don’t hold by his ways; and I’m goin’ to stick by that husk of a husband in there, ef he don’t get better till the day I die. He ain’t talked kind about me, and worse talk is due, I know, but I’ll bide my rights, and have ’em.”
Martha felt admiration. Emma was not as Quarry had reported her. She recited a few more “incidents,” and strolled, without leave-making and still knitting, toward the door. “Come in some night when you’re lonesome,” was all she had left in her heart of the invitation she had meant to give the girl in Bowa’s interest. It was plain to her woman’s eye that Emma loved Jarlsen maimed better than a town full of men of sound members.
She wondered, however, why the girl hadn’t the sense to take Quarry, who was getting in with the factory hands like water through a leak.
Black came in a moment after Martha’s departure. He had a wallet in his hand, and his face was clothed in a bright kindliness that turned Emma’s heart toward him.
“I’m glad you’ve had lady’s company,” he said.
“You’re looking daft, dear,” Emma answered, when she had studied him.