compel them to her will, rise superbly above them, toss them aside. Her life had been, and would be, shaped largely by others. Her mother’s death, the particular enterprise in which her father’s little capital had been invested, Martin’s peculiar temperament—these had moulded and were moulding Rose Wade. At the time she came to Martin’s shack, she was potentially any one of a half dozen women. It was inevitable that the particular one into which she would evolve should be determined by the type of man she might happen to marry, inevitable that she would become, to a large degree, what he wished and expected, that her thoughts would take on the complexion of his. Lacking in strength of character? In power of resistance, certainly. Time out of mind, such malleability has been the cross of the Magdalenes. Yet in what else lies the secret of the harmony achieved by successful wives?
And as, her nausea passing, Rose began to feel a glorious sensation of vigor, she decided that perhaps, after all, Martin had been right. Child-bearing was a natural function. People probably made far too much fuss about it. Nellie came to help her cook for the threshers and, for the rest, she managed very well, even milking her usual eight cows and carrying her share of the foaming buckets.
All might have gone smoothly if only she had not overslept one morning in late September. When she reached the barn, Martin was irritable. She did not answer him but sat down quietly by her first cow, a fine-blooded animal which soon showed signs of restlessness under her tense hands.
“There! There! So Bossy,” soothed Rose gently.
“You never will learn how to manage good stock,” Martin criticized bitingly.
“Nor you how to treat a wife.”
“Oh, shut up.”
“Don’t talk to me that way.”
As she started to rise, a kick from the cow caught her square on the stomach with such force that it sent her staggering backward, still clutching the handle of the pail from which a snowy stream cascaded.
“Now what have you done?” demanded Martin sternly. “Haven’t I warned you time and again that milk cows are sensitive, nervous? Fidgety people drive them crazy. Why can’t you behave simply and directly with them! Why is it I always get more milk from mine! It’s your own fault this happened—fussing around, taking out your ill temper at me on her. Shouting at me. What could you expect?”
For the first time in their life together, Rose was frankly unnerved. It seemed to her that she would go mad. “You devil!” she burst out, wildly. “That’s what you are, Martin Wade! You’re not human. Your child may be lost and you talk about cows letting down more milk. Oh God! I didn’t know there was any one living who could be so cruel, so cold, so diabolical. You’ll be punished for this some day—you will—you will. You don’t love me—never did, oh, don’t I know it. But some time you will love some one. Then you’ll understand what it is to be treated like this when your whole soul is in need of tenderness. You’ll see then what—”
“Oh, shut up,” growled Martin, somewhat abashed by the violence of her broken words and gasping sobs. “You’re hysterical. You’re doing yourself as much harm right now as that kick did you.”
“Oh, Martin, please be kind,” pleaded Rose more quietly. “Please! It’s your baby as much as mine. Be just half as kind as you are to these cows.”
“They have more sense,” he retorted angrily. And when Rose woke him, the following night, to go for the doctor, his quick exclamation was: “So now you’ve done it, have you?”
As the sound of his horse’s hoofs died away, it seemed to her that he had taken the very heart out of her courage. She thought with anguished envy of the women whose husbands loved them, for whom the heights and depths of this ordeal were as real as for their wives. It seemed to her that even the severest of pain could be wholly bearable if, in the midst of it, one felt cherished. Well, she would go through it alone as she had gone through everything else since their marriage. She would try to forget Martin. She would forget him. She must. She would keep her mind fixed on the deep joy so soon to be hers. Had she not chosen to suffer of her own free will, because the little creature that could be won only through it was worth so much more than anything else the world had to offer? She imagined the baby already arrived and visualized him as she hoped her child might be at two years. Suppose he were in a burning house, would she have the courage to rescue him? What would be the limit of her endurance in the flames? She laughed to herself at the absurdity of the question. How well she knew its answer! She wished with passionate intensity that she could look into the magic depths of some fairy mirror and see, for just the flash of one instant, exactly how her boy or girl really would look. How much easier that would make it to hold fast to the consciousness that she was not merely in pain, but was laboring to bring forth a warm flesh-and-blood child. There was the rub—in spite of her eagerness, the little one, so priceless, wasn’t as yet quite definite, real. She recalled the rosy-checked, curly-haired youngster her fancy had created a moment ago. She would cling to that picture; yes, even if her pain mounted to agony, it should be of the body only; she would not let it get into her mind, not into her soul, not into the welcoming mother-heart of her.
Meanwhile, as she armored her spirit, she built a fire, put on water to heat, attended capably to innumerable details. Rose was a woman of sound experience. She had been with others at such times. It held no goblin terrors for her. Had it not been for Martin’s heartlessness, she would have felt wholly equal to the occasion. As it was, she made little commotion. Dr. Bradley, gentle and direct, had been the Conroys’ family physician for years. Nellie, who arrived in an hour, had been through the experience often herself, and was friendly and helpful.
She liked Rose, admired her tremendously and the thought—an odd one for Nellie—crossed her mind that tonight she was downright beautiful. When at dawn, Dr. Bradley whispered: “She has been so brave, Mrs. Mall, I can’t bear to tell her the child is not alive. Wouldn’t it be better for you to do so?” She shrank from the task. “I can’t; I simply can’t,” she protested, honest tears pouring down her thin face.
“Could you, Mr. Wade?”
Martin strode into Rose’s room, all his own disappointment adding bitterness to his words: “Well, I knew you’d done it and you have. It’s a fine boy, but he came dead.”
Out of the dreariness and the toil, out of the hope, the suffering and the high courage had come—nothing. As Rose lay, the little still form clasped against her, she was too broken for tears. Life had played her another trick. Indignation toward Martin gathered volume with her returning strength.
“You don’t deserve a child,” she told him bitterly. “You might treat him when he grew up as you treat me.”
“I’ve never laid hand to you,” said Martin gruffly, certain stinging words of Nellie’s still smarting. When she chose, his sister’s tongue could be waspish. She had tormented him with it all the way to her home. He had been goaded into flaring back and both had been thoroughly angry when they separated, yet he was conscious that he came nearer a feeling of affection for her than for any living person. Well, not affection, precisely, he corrected. It was rather that he relished, with a quizzical amusement, the completeness of their mutual comprehension. She was growing to be more like their mother, too. Decidedly, this was the type of woman he should have married, not someone soft and eager and full of silly sentiment like Rose. Why didn’t she hold her own as Nellie did? Have more snap and stamina? It was exasperating—the way she frequently made him feel as if he actually were trampling on something defenseless.
He now frankly hated her. There was not dislike merely; there was acute antipathy. He took a delight in having her work harder and harder. It used to be “Rose,” but now it was always “say”
