Alida made fresh coffee for Jim when the children had gone. She made it carefully; there was this morning, unconsciously, about each little thing that she did for him, the solemnity of a funeral rite. Struggle as she would, she could not divest her mind of the conviction that what she did this day she did for the dead. She would go to the door and listen to his breathing, and tell herself that she was a fool, then wring her hands at the remembrance of the dream.
As he tossed, half waking, she heard him groan and curse the cattle-men with oaths that made her glad she had sent the children from home. Then she bent over him and woke him from his uneasy slumber.
“Jim, don’t you want me to bathe your head? And here’s some nice, hot coffee all ready for you.”
Jim woke slowly to a realization of his troubles and his blessings. His wife was bathing his head with hands that trembled. Not always had she greeted his indiscretions with such loving forbearance. He noticed, though his waking faculties were not over-keen, that her face was pale and frightened, and that her eyes, meeting his, held a dumb, measureless affection.
“What th’ hell are you babying me for?” But his roughness did not deceive her woman’s wits. He was not getting the lecture he anticipated, and this was his way of showing that he was not embarrassed by her kindness. The morning sunlight was pitilessly frank in its exposure of the grim pinch of poverty in the mean little room, but the woman was unconscious of these things; what she saw was that Jim, the reckless, Jim, the dare-devil terror of the country, Jim, who had married and settled with her into home-keeping respectability, Jim, who had struggled with misfortune and fallen, had, young as he was, lost every look of youth; that hope had gone from his dull eyes, and that his face had become drawn until the death’s-head grinned beneath the scant padding of flesh. But he was to-day, as always, the one man in the world for her. In making a world of their own and reducing their parents to supplementary consideration, their children, whom she had sent away that she might be alone with him, had given a different quality to the love of this pair that had known so many curious vicissitudes. The responsibilities of parenthood had placed them on a tenderer, as well as a securer footing; and as she saw his age and weariness, he recognized hers, and both felt a self-accusing twinge.
“That’s a blamed good cup of coffee,” he said, by way of relieving the tension that had crept into the situation. “Any one would think you was settin’ your cap for me ’stead of us being married for years.”
Alida sighed. “It’s better to end than to begin like this,” she said, in the far-away voice of one who thinks aloud. The word “end” had slipped out before she realized what she was saying, and the knowledge haunted her as an omen. She glanced at him quickly, to see if he had noticed it.
“Why did you say end?” He saw that her eyes were full of tears and chafed her. “You ain’t thinking of divorcing me, like Mountain Pink done Bosky?”
“Oh, Jim,” she said, and her face was all aquiver, “I never could divorce you, no matter what you done.” And then the grim philosophy of the plains-woman asserted itself. “I never can understand why women feed their pride on their heart’s blood; it never was my way.”
He did not like to remember that he had given her cause for a way. “There’s a lot of women as wouldn’t exactly regard me as a Merino, or a Southdown, either;” he gulped the coffee to ease the tightness in his throat.