He Fell In Love With His Wife | Page 5

There had been no need, so complete was the
understanding between them. A hint, a sentence, reveled to each other
their simple and limited processes of thought. To talk about her now to
strangers was impossible. He had no language by which to express the
heavy, paralyzing pain in his heart.
For a time he performed necessary duties in a dazed, mechanical way.
The horses and live stock were fed regularly, the cows milked; but the
milk stood in the dairy room until it spoiled. Then he would sit down at
his desolate hearth and gaze for hours into the fire, until it sunk down
and died out. Perhaps no class in the world suffers from such a terrible
sense of loneliness as simple-natured country people, to whom a very
few have been all the company they required.
At last Holcroft partially shook off his stupor, and began the
experiment of keeping house and maintaining his dairy with hired help.
For a long year he had struggled on through all kinds of domestic
vicissitude, conscious all the time that things were going from bad to
worse. His house was isolated, the region sparsely settled, and good
help difficult to be obtained under favoring auspices. The few
respectable women in the neighborhood who occasionally "lent a hand"
in other homes than their own would not compromise themselves, as
they expressed it, by "keepin' house for a widower." Servants obtained
from the neighboring town either could not endure the loneliness, or
else were so wasteful and ignorant that the farmer, in sheer desperation,
discharged them. The silent, grief-stricken, rugged-featured man was
no company for anyone. The year was but a record of changes, waste,
and small pilferings. Although he knew he could not afford it, he tried
the device of obtaining two women instead of one, so that they might
have society in each other; but either they would not stay or else he
found that he had two thieves to deal with instead of one--brazen,
incompetent creatures who knew more about whisky than milk, and
who made his home a terror to him.
Some asked good-naturedly, "Why don't you marry again?" Not only
was the very thought repugnant, but he knew well that he was not the
man to thrive on any such errand to the neighboring farmhouses.

Though apparently he had little sentiment in his nature, yet the memory
of his wife was like his religion. He felt that he could not put an
ordinary woman into his wife's place, and say to her the words he had
spoken before. Such a marriage would be to him a grotesque farce, at
which his soul revolted.
At last he was driven to the necessity of applying for help to an Irish
family that had recently moved into the neighborhood. The promise
was forbidding, indeed, as he entered the squalid abode in which were
huddled men, women, and children. A sister of the mistress of the
shanty was voluble in her assurances of unlimited capability.
"Faix I kin do all the wourk, in doors and out, so I takes the notion,"
she had asserted.
There certainly was no lack of bone and muscle in the big, red-faced,
middle-aged woman who was so ready to preside at his hearth and
glean from his diminished dairy a modicum of profit; but as he trudged
home along the wintry road, he experienced strong feelings of disgust
at the thought of such a creature sitting by the kitchen fire in the place
once occupied by his wife.
During all these domestic vicissitudes he had occupied the parlor, a
stiff, formal, frigid apartment, which had been rarely used in his
married life. He had no inclination for the society of his help; in fact,
there had been none with whom he could associate. The better class of
those who went out to service could find places much more to their
taste than the lonely farmhouse. The kitchen had been the one cozy,
cheerful room of the house, and, driven from it, the farmer was an exile
in his own home. In the parlor he could at least brood over the happy
past, and that was about all the solace he had left.
Bridget came and took possession of her domain with a sangfroid
which appalled Holcroft from the first. To his directions and
suggestions, she curtly informed him that she knew her business and
"didn't want no mon around, orderin' and interferin'."
In fact, she did appear, as she had said, capable of any amount of work,
and usually was in a mood to perform it; but soon her male relatives
began to drop in to smoke a pipe with her in the evening. A little later
on, the supper table was left standing for those who were