14. CHAPTER XIV.
THE FIRST DAY OF RICHARD'S ABSENCE.
THE gray light of a November morning was breaking
over the prairies when Richard stooped down
to kiss his wife, who did not think it worth her
while to rise so early to see him off. She felt that
she had been unjustly dealt with, and up to the very last
maintained the same cold, icy manner so painful to Richard,
who would fain have won from her one smile to cheer him
in his absence. But the smile was not given, though the
lips which Richard touched did move a little, and he tried
to believe it was a kiss they meant to give. Only the day
before Ethie had heard from Aunt Van Buren that Frank
was to be married at Christmas, after which they were
going on to Washington, where they confidently expected to
meet Ethelyn. With a kind of grim satisfaction Ethelyn
showed this letter to her husband, hoping to awaken in him
some remorse for his cruelty to her, if indeed he was capable
of remorse, which she doubted. She did not know
him, for if possible he suffered more than she did, though
in a different way. It hurt him to leave her there alone,
feeling as she did. He hated to go without her, carrying
only in his mind the memory of the white, rigid face which
had not smiled on him for so long. He wanted her to
seem interested in something, for her cold apathy of manner
puzzled and alarmed him; so remembering her aunt's
letter on the morning of his departure, he spoke of it to her
and said, “What shall I tell Mrs. Van Buren for you? I
shall probably see more or less of them.”
“Tell her nothing. Prisoners send no messages,” was
Ethelyn's reply; and in the dim gray of the morning the two
faces looked a moment at each other with such thoughts
and passions written upon them as was pitiable to behold.
But when Richard was fairly gone, when the tones of
his voice bidding his family good-by had ceased, and
Ethelyn sat leaning on her elbow and listening to the
sound of the wheels which carried him away, such a feeling
of desolation and loneliness swept over her that, burying
her face in the pillows, she wept bitterer tears of remorse
and regret than she had ever wept before.
That day was a long and dreary one to all the members
of the prairie farm-house. It was always lonely the first day
of Richard's absence, but now it was drearier than ever;
and with a harsh, forbidding look upon her face, Mrs.
Markham went about her work, leaving Ethelyn entirely
alone. She did not believe her daughter-in-law was any
sicker than herself. “It was only airs,” she thought,
when at noon Ethelyn declined the boiled beef and cabbage,
saying just the odor of it made her sick. “Nothing
but airs,” she persisted in saying, as she prepared a slice
of nice cream-toast with a soft-boiled egg and cup of fragrant
black tea. Ethie did not refuse these viands, and
was gracious enough to thank her mother-in-law for her
extra trouble; but she did it in such a queenly as well as
injured kind of way, that Mrs. Markham felt more aggrieved
than ever, and, for a good woman, who sometimes
spoke in meeting, slammed the door considerably hard as
she left the room and went back to her kitchen, where the
table had been laid ever since Ethelyn took to eating up-stairs.
So long as she ate with the family Mrs. Markham
felt rather obliged to take her meals in the front room, but
it made a deal more work, and she was glad to return to
her olden ways once more. Eunice was gone of an errand,
and so she felt at liberty to speak her mind freely to
her boys as they gathered around the table.
“It is sheer ugliness,” she said, “which keeps her
cooped up there to be waited on. She is no more sick
than I am; but I couldn't make Richard b'lieve it.”
“Mother, you surely did not go to Richard with complaints
of his wife,” and James looked reproachfully across
the table at his mother, who replied, “I told him what I
thought, for I wa'n't going to have him miserable all the
time thinking how sick she was; but I might as well have
talked to the wind, for any good it did. He even seemed
putcherky, too.”
“I should be more than putcherky if you were to talk
to me against my wife if I had one,” James retorted, thinking
of Melinda and the way she sang that solo in the choir
the day before.
It was a little strange that James and John and Andy
all took Ethelyn's part against their mother, and even
against Richard, who they thought might have taken her
with him.
“It would not have hurt her any more than fretting herself
to death at home. No, nor half so much; and she
must feel like a cat in a strange garret here alone with us.”
It was John who said this,—quiet John, who talked so
little and annoyed Ethelyn so much by coming to the table
in his blue frock, with his pants tucked in his boots, and
his curly hair standing every way. Though very much
afraid of his grand sister-in-law, he admired her beyond
everything, and kept the slippers she brought him safely put
away with a lock of Daisy's hair and a letter written to him
by the young girl whose grave was close beside Daisy's in
the Olney Cemetery. John had had his romance and
buried it with its heroine, since which time he had said
but little to womankind, though never was there a truer
heart than that which beat beneath the home-spun frock
Ethelyn so despised. Richard had bidden him be kind
to Ethie, and John had said he would; and after that
promise was given, had the farm-house been on fire the
sturdy fellow would have perilled life and limb to save her
for Dick. To James, too, Richard had spoken a word for
Ethie, and to Andy also; so there were left to her four
champions in his absence,—for Eunice had had her charge,
with promises of a new dress if faithful to her trust; and
thus there was no one against poor Ethelyn saving the
mother-in-law, who made that first dinner after Richard's
absence so uncomfortable that John left the table without
touching the boiled indian-pudding, of which he was so
fond, while James rather curtly asked what there was to be
gained by spitting out so about Ethelyn, and Andy listened
in silence, thinking how, by and by, when all the chores
were done, he would take a basket of kindlings up for
Ethie's fire, and if she asked him to sit down, he would do
so and try and come to the root of the matter, and see if
he could not do something to make things a little better.
