Page:The Bondman; A New Saga (IA bondmannewsaga00cain).djvu/28

 now that there was some one to keep the wolf from the door. His mother accepted with cheerfulness the duty of bread-winner to her son, but Rachel's helplessness chafed her. For all her fine fingering, the girl could finger nothing that would fill the pot. "A pretty wife you've brought me home to keep," she muttered morning and night.

But Rachel's abasement was not even yet at its worst. "Oh," she thought, "if I could but get back my husband to myself alone, he would see my humiliation and save me from it." She went a woman's way to work to have the old mother sent home to Stappen. But the trick that woman's wit can devise woman's wit can baulk, and the old mother held her ground. Then the girl bethought her of her old shame at living in a hovel close to her father's house, and asked to be taken away. Anywhere, anywhere, let it be to the world's end, and she would follow. Stephen answered that one place was like another in Iceland, where the people were few and all knew their story; and, as for foreign parts, though a seaman, he was not a sea-going man, farther than the whale-fishing about their coasts, and that, go where they might to better their condition, yet other poor men were there already. At that Rachel's heart sank, for she saw that the great body of her husband must cover a pigmy soul. Bound she was for all her weary days to the place of her disgrace, doomed she was to live to the last with the woman who hated her, and to eat that woman's bitter bread. She was heavy with child at this time, and her spirit was broken. So she sat herself down with her feet to the hearth, and wept.

There the old mother saw her as often as she bustled in and out of the house from the beach, and many a gibe she flung her way. But Stephen sat beside her one day with a shamefaced look, and cursed his luck, and said if he only had an open boat of his own what he would do for both of them. She asked how much a boat would cost him, and he answered sixty crowns; that a Scotch captain then in the harbour had such a one to sell at that price, and that it was a better boat than the fishermen of those parts ever owned, for it was English built. Now, it chanced that, sitting alone that very day in her hopelessness, Rachel had overheard a group of noisy girls in the street tell of a certain Jew, named Bernard Frank, who stood on the jetty by the stores buying hair of the young maidens who would sell to him, and of the great money he had paid to some of them, such as they had never handled before.