"Looken to see all's well to the rear as to the front?" called Sam jovially. "That's a proper farmer's wife."
Senath started violently and dropped her hand, looking away before she did so. "It looks fine," was all she said, and went within doors, passing him. A small portent, so slight Sam did not even know it for what it was, and yet something in her look and manner seemed to chill him to the bones of him. Then, and after, he put anything unfathomable in her ways down to her condition, and so turned what might have been a source of discomfort to the account of his joy.
The blossom was thick upon the apple-trees when Senath's boy was born. He had a long fight of entry, and when the sky was paling and flushing with the reluctant dawn, Sam, who had spent the night alternately snoring on the settle and creeping upstairs in his stockinged-feet, heard the first wailing of his son. He heard, too, the clank of the milk-pails in the yard without, the lowing of an impatient cow, and the crowing—above all sounds the most melancholy to anyone upon a sleepless pillow—of a triumphant cock. As he heard all these common noises about his own place, he realized how much more dear they had all become to him by reason of what was in the room above. He knew that his wife had what is inadequately called a "bad time," but although the boards over his head had creaked for hours to the anxious tread of doctor and of nurse, not a cry had come until this one that heart and ear told him was from his child. He went upstairs once more, creeping less this time, and knocked timidly at the door, then coughed to show who it was. The nurse, a thin, yellow-haired London woman doing parish-nursing for her health—a woman he hated while he feared her—opened the door a slit and looked unsympathetically at him.
"I was wanten to knaw . . ." began Sam.
"None the better for hearing you," snapped the nurse. "She must have absolute quiet."
"I dedn't go for to mane that," explained Sam naively, "but the cheild? 'Tes a boy?"
"Oh, it's a boy, and doing all right," said the nurse, and shut the door in his face.
Sam went downstairs and put his head under the yard-pump, and laved his bare red arms in its flow, as men might bathe in the waters of perpetual youth. The great rejuvenation of a new birth had come upon him. For that is what it resolves itself into—the advent of a son to a middle-aged man. Sam felt his term of life taking immortal lease.
Later in the day, the news that his son was weakly was broken to him, but made very little impression. The child could not die, because it was his. To other men, the common lot of humanity, but not so near home.
The morning was at its height, all around romance and mystery had dissolved in the broad shining, when they told Sam his wife wished to see him, but that he must be careful not to excite her as she was not yet beyond the danger-point.