“Glad to see him? Why, I was just as glad as I was when he used to come courting me down in Lebanon a half century ago! He always puts his arms around me and gives me a gentle embrace, and kisses me on the lips, just as he did when he was my lover and I was his girl sweetheart. And then he sits at the chimney and lights his pipe and smokes in silence, and I mend his clothes. By and by I fill his dinner pail, and before he starts away he asks me to the door, where he embraces me once more, and I hold up my lips for his farewell kiss; and then I stand there in the early morning light and watch him pass down the road and around the bend and disappear behind the bunch of laurels, just as I used to watch him long ago.”
“And your dreams make you feel happy during the next day, I suppose,” I remarked, for she was again looking dreamily towards the hills.
“Not always,” she sadly replied. “For when my dead baby comes back in the night and begins to feel with his dead hands all over my bosom, and with his dead mouth tries to find my breast, I then recall that many and many the time that same baby groped for my breast when he was starving for the want of proper food; for in those days John was drinking hard; and did not provide for his family, and my half-starved body furnished but poor watery food for my baby boy; and all night long his baby hands reached for the fountain that had run dry. The doctor said he was so nearly starved that he could not stand the pneumonia and recover, so he died.”
“Could you forgive your husband after baby died?” I asked.
“Yes, after a manner. You see he straightened up for a time after baby died, and wasn’t drinking so very hard when he was killed. And he is always young and sober and industrious in my dreams, the same as he was when we were married, but baby is always hungry and groping with his dead mouth for my shriveled breast.”
THE MORTGAGED MOTHER
The home was located in an isolated and lonely spot, with hills on two sides of it and a ragged woodland in the rear, and the front side leading into a deep ravine that grew wider as it neared the valley far below. The road came up the steep ravine, passed the house and wound over the hill in the rear. It was so steep that few people traveled the road unless going to call on the owner of the home, Jack Wier.
Jack was sitting on the porch as we drove up to the house, and looked the picture of despair. Children came running out of the house to see who was coming, and the open doorway was filled with frowsy heads, besides the bolder ones who hung over the rail of the porch and gazed at us like so many startled rabbits. We counted nine, and Jack said the youngest was sleeping in the cradle.
“Ten children, after a marriage of twelve years!” he said, with a melancholy tinge in his voice.