Part 9 (1/2)

And Ollie, over her smoking pan on the kitchen stove, was thinking that something might be established in the way of comrades.h.i.+p between herself and the bound boy, after all. It took him a long time to get acquainted, she thought; but his friends.h.i.+p might be all the more stable for that.

There was comfort in it; as she worked she smiled.

There was no question of the need in which Ollie stood of friends.h.i.+p, sympathy, and kind words. Joe had been in that house six months, and in that time he had witnessed more pain than he believed one small woman's heart could bear. While he was not sure that Isom ever struck his wife, he knew that he tortured her in endless combinations of cruelty, and pierced her heart with a thousand studied pangs. Often, when the house was still and Isom was asleep, he heard her moaning and sobbing, her head on the kitchen table.

These bursts of anguish were not the sudden gusts of a pettish woman's pa.s.sion, but the settled sorrow of one who suffered without hope.

Many a time Joe tiptoed to the bottom of the staircase in his bare feet and looked at her, the moonlight dim in the cheerless kitchen, her head a dark blotch upon the whiteness of her arms, bowed there in her grief. Often he longed to go to her with words of comfort and let her know that there was one at least who pitied her hard fate and sad disillusionment.

In those times of tribulation Joe felt that they could be of mutual help and comfort if they could bring themselves to speak, for he suffered also the pangs of imprisonment and the longings for liberty in that cruel house of bondage. Yet he always turned and went softly, almost breathlessly, back to his bed, leaving her to sob and cry alone in the struggle of her hopeless sorrow.

It was a harder matter to keep his hands from the gristly throat of grim old Isom Chase, slumbering unfeelingly in his bed while his young wife shredded her heart between the burr-stones of his cruel mill. Joe had many an hour of struggle with himself, lying awake, his hot temples streaming sweat, his eyes staring at the ribs of the roof.

During those months Joe had set and hardened. The muscles had thickened over his chest and arms; his neck was losing the long scragginess of youth; his fingers were firm-jointed in his broadening hands. He knew that Isom Chase was no match for him, man to man.

But, for all his big body and great strength, he was only a boy in his sense of justice, in his hot, primitive desire to lunge out quickly and set the maladjustments of that household straight. He did not know that there was a thing as old as the desires of men at the bottom of Ollie's sorrow, nor understand the futility of chastis.e.m.e.nt in the case of Isom Chase.

Isom was as far as ever from his hope of a son or heir of any description--although he could not conceive the possibility of fathering a female child--and his bitter reproaches fell on Ollie, as they had fallen upon and blasted the woman who had trudged that somber course before her into the grateful shelter of the grave. It was a thing which Ollie could not discuss with young Joe, a thing which only a sympathetic mother might have lightened the humiliation of or eased with tender counsel.

Isom, seeing that the book of his family must close with him, expelled the small grain of tenderness that his dry heart had held for his wife at the beginning, and counted her now nothing but another back to bear his burdens. He multiplied her tasks, and snarled and snapped, and more than once in those work-crowded autumn days, when she had lagged in her weariness, he had lifted his hand to strike. The day would come when that threatened blow would fall; of that Ollie had no consoling doubt.

She did not feel that she would resent it, save in an addition to her acc.u.mulated hate, for hard labor by day and tears by night break the spirit until the flints of cruelty no longer wake its fire.

Day after day, as he worked by the side of Isom in the fields, Joe had it foremost in his mind to speak to him of his unjust treatment of his wife. Yet he hung back out of the Oriental conception which he held, due to his Scriptural reading, of that relations.h.i.+p between woman and man. A man's wife was his property in a certain, broad sense. It would seem unwarranted by any measure of excess short of murder for another to interfere between them. Joe held his peace, therefore, but with internal ferment and unrest.

It was in those days of Joe's disquietude that Ollie first spoke to him of Isom's oppressions. The opportunity fell a short time after their early morning meeting in the path. Isom had gone to town with a load of produce, and Joe and Ollie had the dinner alone for the first time since he had been under that roof.

Ollie's eyes were red and swollen from recent weeping, her face was mottled from her tears. Much trouble had made her careless of late of her prettiness, and now she was disheveled, her ap.r.o.n awry around her waist, her hair mussed, her whole aspect one of slovenly disregard. Her depression was so great that Joe was moved to comfort her.

”You've got a hard time of it,” said he. ”If there's anything I can do to help you I wish you'd let me know.”

Ollie slung a dish carelessly upon the table, and followed it with Joe's coffee, which she slopped half out into the saucer.

”Oh, I feel just like I don't care any more!” said she, her lips trembling, tears starting again in her irritated eyes. ”I get treatment here that no decent man would give a dog!”

Joe felt small and young in Ollie's presence, due to the fact that she was older by a year at least than himself.

That feeling of littleness had been one of his peculiarities as long as he could remember when there were others about older than himself, and supposed from that reason to be graver and wiser. It probably had its beginning in Joe's starting out rather spindling and undersized, and not growing much until he was ten or thereabout, when he took a sudden shoot ahead, like a water-sprout on an apple-tree.

And then he always had regarded matrimony as a state of gravity and maturity, into which the young and unsophisticated did not venture. This feeling seemed to place between them in Joe's mind a boundless gulf, across which he could offer her only the sympathy and a.s.sistance of a boy. There was nothing in his mind of sympathy from an equality of years and understanding, only the chivalric urging of succor to the oppressed.

”It's a low-down way for a man to treat a woman, especially his wife,”

said Joe, his indignation mounting at sight of her tears.

”Yes, and he'd whip you, too, if he dared to do it,” said she, sitting in Isom's place at the end of the table, where she could look across into Joe's face. ”I can see that in him when he watches you eat.”

”I hope he'll never try it,” said Joe.

”You're not afraid of him?”

”Maybe not,” admitted Joe.