But the mother could not let her child go yet and she cast here and there desperately in her mind to think of some last thing to say and hold her yet a little longer, and she cried out to the old man, clinging to her maid, “My maid is not to feed the fire, old man,—she shall not feed the fire, for it hurts her eyes—the smoke—”
The old man turned and stared and when he understood he grinned and said, “Oh, aye, well, let it be so—I’ll tell them—” and kicked the beast again and walked beside it as it went.
So the maid went away, and she held her sign of blindness in her hand, and had her little roll of garments tied behind her on the ass’s back. The mother stood and watched her go, her heart aching past belief, tears welling from her eyes, and this although she did not know what else she could have done. So she stood still until the hill rose between and cut the child from her sight and she saw her no more.
XVI
NOW must the mother somehow make her days full to ease the fears she had and to forget the emptiness where once the blind maid had sat. Silent the house seemed and silent the street where she could not hear the clear plaintive sound of the small bell her daughter struck whenever she went out. And the mother could not bear it. She went to the land again, against her elder son’s will, and when he saw her take her hoe he said, “Mother, you need not work, it shames me to have you work in the field and others see you there when you are aged.”
But she said with her old anger, “I am not so aged—let me work to ease myself. Do you not see how I must ease myself?”
Then the man answered in his stubborn way, “To me you seem to grieve for what is not so, my mother, and there is no need to let your heart run ahead into evils that may never come.”
But the mother answered with a sort of heavy listlessness that did not leave her nowadays, “You do not understand. You who are young—you understand nothing at all.”
The young man looked dazed at his mother then, not knowing what she meant, but she would say no more, but went and took a hoe and plodded out across the fields in silence.