She never had felt it lonely in the old place before, for there was companionship even in the memory of her dead, but this evening as she sat on the porch, the familiar objects in the yard growing dim through the oncoming night, the hollowness of desolation was there. Joe was in prison. The neighbors had refused to believe the word of her boy. There was nobody to help him but her. The hand of everybody else was against him. She had delivered him into bondage and brought this trouble to him, and now she must stir herself to set him free.
“It’s all my own doin’s,” said she in unsparing reproach. “My chickens has come to roost.”
After nightfall she went into the kitchen where she sat a dreary while before her stove, leaning forward in her unlovely, ruminating pose. Through the open draft of the stove the red coals within it glowed, casting three little bars of light upon the floor. Now and then a stick burned in two and settled down, showering sparks through the grate. These little flashes lit up her brown and somber face, and discovered the slow tears upon her weathered cheeks. For a long time she sat thus, then at last she lifted her head and looked around the room. Her table stood as she had left 158 it in the morning, no food had passed her lips since then. But the frantic turmoil of the first hours after Joe had been led away to jail had quieted.
A plan of action had shaped itself in her mind. In the morning she would go to Shelbyville and seek her husband’s old friend, Colonel Henry Price, to solicit his advice and assistance. In a manner comforted by this resolution, she prepared herself a pot of coffee and some food. After the loneliest and most hopeless meal that she ever had eaten in her life, she went to bed.
In the house of Isom Chase, where neighbors sat to watch the night out beside the shrouded body, there was a waste of oil in many lamps, such an illumination that it seemed a wonder that old Isom did not rise up from his gory bed to turn down the wicks and speak reproof. Everybody must have a light. If an errand for the living or a service for the dead called one from this room to that, there must be a light. That was a place of tragic mystery, a place of violence and death. If light had been lacking there on the deeds of Isom Chase, on his hoardings and hidings away; on the hour of his death and the mystery of it, then all this must be balanced tonight by gleams in every window, beams through every crevice; lamps here, lanterns there, candles in cupboards, cellar, and nook.
Let there be light in the house of Isom Chase, and in the sharp espionage of curious eyes, for dark days hang over it, and the young widow who draws the pity of all because she cannot weep.
No matter how hard a woman’s life with a man has been, when he dies she is expected to mourn. That was the standard of fealty and respect in the neighborhood of Isom Chase, as it is in more enlightened communities in other parts of the world. A woman should weep for her man, no matter what bruises on body his heavy hand may leave behind him, or 159 what scars in the heart which no storm of tears can wash away. Custom has made hypocrites of the ladies in this matter the wide world through. Let no man, therefore, lying bloodless and repellent upon his cooling-board, gather comfort to his cold heart when his widow’s tears fall upon his face. For she may be weeping more for what might have been than was.
Isom Chase’s widow could not weep at all. That was what they said of her, and their pity was more tender, their compassion more sweet. Dry grief, they said. And that is grief like a covered fire, which smolders in the heart and chars the foundations of life. She ought to be crying, to clear her mind and purge herself of the dregs of sorrow, which would settle and corrode unless flushed out by tears; she ought to get rid of it at once, like any other widow, and settle down to the enjoyment of all the property.
The women around Ollie in her room tried to provoke her tears by reference to Isom’s good qualities, his widely known honesty, his ceaseless striving to lay up property which he knew he couldn’t take with him, which he realized that his young wife would live long years after him to enjoy. They glozed his faults and made virtues out of his close-grained traits; they praised and lamented, with sighs and mournful words, but Isom’s widow could not weep.
Ollie wished they would go away and let her sleep. She longed for them to put out the lamps and let the moonlight come in through the window and whiten on the floor, and bring her soft thoughts of Morgan. She chafed under their chatter, and despised them for their shallow pretense. There was not one of them who had respected Isom in life, but now they sat there, a solemn conclave, great-breasted sucklers of the sons of men, and insisted that she, his unloved, his driven, abused and belabored wife, weep tears for his going, for which, in her heart, she was glad. 160