The master thought she looked sickly, and did not count much on her fitness for work. But somewhere the poor thing must be. And so she was allowed to stop.
There was something about her which made every one on the farm kind to her. She had come to a good place. The people were serious and reticent. Her mistress liked her; when she discovered that she could weave, they borrowed a loom from the vicarage, and the child’s mother worked at it the whole summer.
It never occurred to any one that she needed to be spared; she had to work like a peasant girl the whole time. She liked too to have much work. She was not unhappy. Life among the peasants pleased her, although she lacked all her accustomed conveniences. But everything was taken so simply and quietly there. Every one’s thoughts were on his or her work; the days passed so uniform and monotonous that one mistook the day and thought it was the middle of the week when Sunday came.
One day at the end of August there had been haste with the oat crop, and the child’s mother had gone out with the others to bind the sheaves. She had strained herself, and the child had been born, but too soon. She had expected it in October.
Now the farmer’s wife stood with the child in the living room to warm it by the fire, for the poor little thing was shivering in the August heat. The child’s mother lay in a room beyond and listened to what they said of the little one. She could imagine how the men and maids came up and looked at him.
“Such a poor little thing,” they all said, and then followed always, without fail:—
“Poor little thing, with no father!”
They did not complain of the child’s crying: they thought a child needed to cry; and, when everything was considered, the child was strong for its age; had it but a father, all would have been well.
The mother lay and listened and wondered. The matter suddenly seemed to her incredibly important. How would he get through life, the poor little thing?