The mother looked then, and there beside the door a coffin truly was, but well she knew there were not ten pieces of silver in it, for it was but the rudest box of unpainted board, and thin well-nigh as paper and such a box as any pauper has. She opened her lips to make angry answer and to say, “That box? But my maid’s own silver that I gave her would have paid for that!”
But she did not say the words. It came upon her like a chill cloud across the day that she had need to fear these people. Yes, these two evil men, these wild women — but there her son was tugging at her sleeve to hasten her and so she answered steadily, “I will say nothing now. The maid is dead and not all the angers in the world nor any words can bring her back again.” She paused and looked at this one and at that and then she said again, “Before heaven do you stand and all the gods, and let them judge you, whatever you have done!”
She looked at this one and that, but no one answered, and she turned then and climbed upon the ass and the son made haste and led the ass down the rocky path and turned shivering to see if they were followed and he said, “I shall not rest until we are near that village once again and where many people are, I am so fearful.”
But the mother answered nothing. What need to answer anything? Her maid was dead.
XVII
CRAZED WITH HER WEARINESS was the mother when she came down from the halting gray ass that night before her own door. She had wept all the way home, now aloud and now softly, and the young man had been beside himself again and again with his mother’s weeping. He cried out in an agony at last, “Cease your wailing, mother, or I shall not be able to bear it!”
But when she calmed herself a little for his sake she broke forth again and at last the young man ground his teeth together and he muttered wildly, “If the day were come, if we were not so miserably poor, if the poor were given their share and could defend themselves, then might we sue for my sister’s life! But what use when we are so poor and there is no justice in the land?”
And the mother sobbed out, “It is true there is no use in going to law since we have no money to pay our way in to justice,” and then she wept afresh and cried, “But all the money and the justice under heaven would not bring my blind maid back again.”
At last the young man wept too, not so much for his sister nor even for his mother, but because he was so footsore and so worn and his world awry.
Thus they came at last to their own door and when she was down from the ass the mother called her elder son piercingly and so sharply that he came running out and she cried, “Son, your sister is dead!” And while he stared at her scarcely comprehending, she poured out the tale, and at the sound of her voice others came quickly to hear the tale until there in the dusk of night nearly all the hamlet stood to hear it. The younger son stood there half fainting, leaning on the ass, and when his mother talked on he went and threw himself upon the ground and lay there dazed with what had come about this day, and he lay silent while his mother wept and cried aloud and in her weeping said, looking with her streaming eyes to this face and to that, “There my little maid was, dead and gone, and I hate myself I ever let her go, and I would not have let her go if it had not been for this cold-hearted son’s wife of mine who begrudged the little maid a bit of meat and a little flower on her shoe and so I was fearful if I died and the maid was afraid, too — a little tender child who never would have left me of her own will! What cared she for man or marriage and a child’s heart in her always, clinging to her home and me? Oh, son, it is your wife who has brought this on me — I curse the day she came and no wonder she is childless with so hard a heart!”
So on and on the mother cried and at first they all listened in silence or exclaiming something when they had pieced the tale from what she said between her weeping, and then they tried to comfort her, but she would not let herself be comforted. The eldest son said nothing but stood with downcast head until she cursed his wife and spoke against her child-bearing, and then he said in a reasonable and quiet voice, “No, mother, she did not bid you send my sister to that place. You sent her so quickly and did not say a word to anyone but fixed it so and we wondered even that you did not go and see how it was there for yourself,” and he turned to his father’s cousin and he said, “Did you not think so, cousin? Do you remember how I said we were surprised my mother was so quick in the matter?”
And the cousin turned his eyes away and muttered unwillingly, chewing a bit of straw, “Oh, aye, a little quick,” and his wife who stood holding a grandchild in her arms said mournfully to the mother, “Yes, it is true, sister, you be a very quick woman always, and never asking anyone if this or that is well to be done. No, before any of us know it or guess what it is you are about you have done all and it is finished, and you only want us to say you have done well. It is your nature all your life to be like this.”
But the mother could not bear blame this night and she cried out in anger, and so turned her working angry face upon her cousin’s wife, “You — you are used to that slow man of yours, and if we must be all judged too quick by such as he—”
And it looked for a time as though these two women who had been friends all their lives would fall to bitter words now, except that the cousin was so good and peaceable a man that when he saw his wife’s great face grow red and that she was gathering up her wits to make a very biting answer he called out, “Let be, mother of my sons! She is sore with sorrow tonight and well beside herself.” And after he had chewed a while upon his straw, he added mildly, “It is true that I am a very slow man and I have heard it many times since I was born, and you have told me so, too, mother of my sons. … Aye, I be slow.” And he looked around upon his neighbors and one called out earnestly, “Aye, goodman, you are a very slow-moving man for sure, and slow in wits and slow to speak!”
“Aye,” said the cousin sighing a little and spitting out the shattered straw he chewed and plucking out a fresh one from the stack of rice straw near which he stood.
So was the quarrel averted. But the mother was not eased and suddenly her eye fell on the old gossip standing in the crowd, her mouth ajar and eyes staring and all her old hanging face listening to what went on. Seeing her the mother’s anger and pain broke out afresh and it all came out mingled with her agony and she rushed at the gossip and fell on her and tore at her large fat face and snatched at her hair and screamed at her and said, “Yes, and you knew what those folk were and you knew the son was witless, and you never said a word of it but told a tale of how they were plain country folk like us, and you never said my maid must go up and down that rocky path to fetch water for them all — it is all on you and I swear I shall not rest myself until I have made you pay for it somehow—”
And she belabored the gossip who was no match for the distraught mother even at the best of times and there is no knowing how it might have come about at the end if the son had not flown to part them and if the younger son had not risen too and with his elder brother held their mother so that the old gossip could make haste away, although she must needs stand, too, for honor’s sake when she had gone a distance and far enough so there were those who stood between them, and then she stopped and cried, “Yes, but your maid was blind and what proper man would have her? I did you a very good turn, goodwife, and here be all the thanks I get for it.” And she beat her own breast and pointed to the scratches on her face and fell to weeping and working herself up for a better quarrel.