Page:The Bondman; A New Saga (IA bondmannewsaga00cain).djvu/33

 "This is my house," she said, "and I will keep shelter over your head no longer. You must pack and away—you and your brat, both of you."

That night the Bishop of the island—Bishop John Petersen, once a friend of Rachel's mother, now much in fear of the Governor, her father—came to her in secret to say that there was a house for her at the extreme west of the fishing quarter, where a fisherman had lately died, leaving the little that he had to the Church. There she betook herself with her child as soon as the days of her lying-in were over. It was a little oblong shed of lava blocks laid with peat for mortar, resembling on the outside two ancient seamen shoving shoulders together against the weather, and on the inside two tiny birdcages.

And having no one now to stand to her, or seem to stand, in the place of breadwinner, she set herself to such poor work as she could do and earn a scanty living by. This was cleaning the down of the eider-duck, by passing it through a sieve made of yarn stretched over a hoop. By a deft hand, with extreme labour, something equal to sixpence a day could be made in this way from the English traders. With such earnings Rachel lived in content, and if Jorgen Jorgensen had any knowledge of his daughter's necessities, he made no effort to relieve them.

Her child lived—a happy, sprightly, joyous bird in its little cage—and her broken heart danced to its delicious accents. It sweetened her labours, it softened her misfortunes, it made life more dear and death more dreadful; it was the strength of her arms and the courage of her soul, her summons to labour and her desire for rest. Call her wretched no longer, for now she had her child to love. Happy little dingy cabin in the fishing quarter, amid the vats for sharks' oil and the heaps of dried cod! It was filled with heaven's own light, that came not from above, but radiated from the little cradle where her life, her hope, her joy, her solace lay swathed in the coverlet of all her love.

And as she worked through the long summer days on the beach, with the child playing among the pebbles at her feet, many a dream danced before her of the days to come, when her boy would sail in the ships that came to their coast, and perhaps take her with him to that island of the sea that had been her mother's English home, where men were good to women, and women were true to men. Until then she must