“I want to tell you, you must. I think it would be wicked to leave the little baby in the world without a mother. No one would ever love her and no one would teach her to do things and how to be good, and she would be so lonely, and she wouldn't know how to come near people and say anything, no matter if her heart was bursting.”
And Nannie sank by the bed and wept as a woman does sometimes when her sobs break their way out and she can't stop them.
A flood seemed to pour upon Constance, and in it she saw the lonely, yearning, ignorant child-wife as she really was. She also saw how unjust she herself had been, and pity and remorse laid hold upon her.
“Nannie! dear Nannie—you poor little thing! Come here. I want to tell you that I love you. I never knew you before and Steve loves you if only you would let him.”
But Nannie was on her feet again. Her words had been spoken, and all the crudity that had been swept aside for a moment returned in full force and awkwardness. Without even a glance at Constance she abruptly left the room, and in a few moments she and Steve were walking homeward.
XIV
Sarah Maria was gone and baby Chance was thriving. There was bliss enough for any reasonable man, and Steve waxed almost light of heart. All this had come about with time, and other things might come, too, if time were not interfered with. The news of Sarah's rapid transit had hardly cost Nannie the lifting of an eyebrow. She was so absorbed in the baby that she could well afford to spare her amiable bovine.
Although it was quite late in the fall, Steve was actually contemplating the planting of another crop. Now that the main enemy had withdrawn her horns and heels from the garden, winter seemed a mere bagatelle in the way of opposition—an obstacle too small for reckoning.
But, as poets and prose writers have abundantly proven, Ill Fortune has an ugly habit of coming around a corner with a sudden demoniac swish when least expected and she certainly did this time. Steve was out in his garden drinking in the mellow stillness of an Indian summer twilight, and feeling not really happy perhaps—a man who has a home only in name can hardly be that—but rested and at peace at that particular moment, which is much more than could be asserted of his condition the next, for as he looked down the road he beheld Sarah Maria gamboling along, having in tow at the end of a rope a well-spent, perspiring darky.
“Dis yere yo' cow, massa?” asked the weary African as he came up.