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Page 84
`I asked her, of course, why she didn't insist on a civil marriage at
once-- that would have given her some hold on him. She leaned her head on
her hands, poor child, and said, "I just don't know, Mrs. Steavens. I
guess my patience was wore out, waiting so long. I thought if he saw how
well I could do for him, he'd want to stay with me."
`Jimmy, I sat right down on that bank beside her and made lament. I cried
like a young thing. I couldn't help it. I was just about heart-broke. It
was one of them lovely warm May days, and the wind was blowing and the
colts jumping around in the pastures; but I felt bowed with despair. My
Antonia, that had so much good in her, had come home disgraced. And that
Lena Lingard, that was always a bad one, say what you will, had turned out
so well, and was coming home here every summer in her silks and her satins,
and doing so much for her mother. I give credit where credit is due, but
you know well enough, Jim Burden, there is a great difference in the
principles of those two girls. And here it was the good one that had come
to grief! I was poor comfort to her. I marvelled at her calm. As we went
back to the house, she stopped to feel of her clothes to see if they was
drying well, and seemed to take pride in their whiteness--she said she'd
been living in a brick block, where she didn't have proper conveniences to
wash them.
`The next time I saw Antonia, she was out in the fields ploughing corn.
All that spring and summer she did the work of a man on the farm; it seemed
to be an understood thing. Ambrosch didn't get any other hand to help him.
Poor Marek had got violent and been sent away to an institution a good
while back. We never even saw any of Tony's pretty dresses. She didn't
take them out of her trunks. She was quiet and steady. Folks respected
her industry and tried to treat her as if nothing had happened. They
talked, to be sure; but not like they would if she'd put on airs. She was
so crushed and quiet that nobody seemed to want to humble her. She never
went anywhere. All that summer she never once came to see me. At first I
was hurt, but I got to feel that it was because this house reminded her of
too much. I went over there when I could, but the times when she was in
from the fields were the times when I was busiest here. She talked about
the grain and the weather as if she'd never had another interest, and if I
went over at night she always looked dead weary. She was afflicted with
toothache; one tooth after another ulcerated, and she went about with her
face swollen half the time. She wouldn't go to Black Hawk to a dentist for
fear of meeting people she knew. Ambrosch had got over his good spell long
ago, and was always surly. Once I told him he ought not to let Antonia
work so hard and pull herself down. He said, "If you put that in her head,
you better stay home." And after that I did.
`Antonia worked on through harvest and threshing, though she was too modest
to go out threshing for the neighbours, like when she was young and free.
I didn't see much of her until late that fall when she begun to herd
Ambrosch's cattle in the open ground north of here, up toward the big
dog-town. Sometimes she used to bring them over the west hill, there, and I
would run to meet her and walk north a piece with her. She had thirty
cattle in her bunch; it had been dry, and the pasture was short, or she
wouldn't have brought them so far.
`It was a fine open fall, and she liked to be alone. While the steers
grazed, she used to sit on them grassy banks along the draws and sun
herself for hours. Sometimes I slipped up to visit with her, when she
hadn't gone too far.
`"It does seem like I ought to make lace, or knit like Lena used to," she
said one day, "but if I start to work, I look around and forget to go on.
It seems such a little while ago when Jim Burden and I was playing all over
this country. Up here I can pick out the very places where my father used
to stand. Sometimes I feel like I'm not going to live very long, so I'm
just enjoying every day of this fall."
`After the winter begun she wore a man's long overcoat and boots, and a
man's felt hat with a wide brim. I used to watch her coming and going, and
I could see that her steps were getting heavier. One day in December, the
snow began to fall. Late in the afternoon I saw Antonia driving her cattle
homeward across the hill. The snow was flying round her and she bent to
face it, looking more lonesome-like to me than usual. "Deary me," I says
to myself, "the girl's stayed out too late. It'll be dark before she gets
them cattle put into the corral." I seemed to sense she'd been feeling too
miserable to get up and drive them.
`That very night, it happened. She got her cattle home, turned them into
the corral, and went into the house, into her room behind the kitchen, and
shut the door. There, without calling to anybody, without a groan, she lay
down on the bed and bore her child.
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