The Little Mother

by Edith Joan Lyttleton

The Little Mother.

By Keron Hale.

Illustrated by Kenneth Watkins.

The old rocking-chair creaked and groaned forlornly, and its loose arm rattled, as the little mother swayed backward and forward, singing a lullaby to Con in a strained, weary little voice. Her eyes looked strained and weary, too, as she gazed out of the open door away over the stiff yellow tussocks, bounded only by the horizon of deep blue sky.

A solitary cabbage-tree, with its dead streamers hanging dejectedly in the still air, alone broke the monotony of the view. The little mother had known it from childhood, and felt a vague sympathy for it, born of familiarity, for on this great silent plain, stretching into dim distance, they had both spent their whole lives.

The shimmering heat haze playing over the tussocks, dazzled her eyes, and she turned them again on Con; then she kissed him, tenderly and half remorsefully. He looked such a baby lying asleep there in her arms, with one little fat thumb in his mouth—through all his four years of placid life he had never gone to sleep without it—and his chubby limbs stretched out in an attitude of childish abandonment. The flies were tickling the scratches on his bare legs, bringing puckers of discontent into his funny little freckled face, so the little mother rose slowly and laid him on the rickety cot in the corner, covering him gently with the light quilt.

It was so hot in the small room with its galvanized iron roof, that she sat down listlessly on the door-step, where the shadow from the big wind-mill fell broadly, and leant her head against the door-post.

The sun streamed into the room behind her through the uncurtained window in the side of the house. It played over the smokestained walls where the coloured almanacs hung, and polished up the tin pans on the dresser; while the flies buzzed drowsily, and Con snored placidly in the shade of the rocking chair.

A small black speck appeared on the horizon beyond the cabbage-tree. Few eyes would have discerned in it a horse and its rider, fewer still, that the horseman was heading towards the cottage.

But the little mother knew. A soft light came into her brown eyes, and a sunny smile smoothed away the tiny anxious lines round her mouth and across her forehead, making her look as young as she really was. For the little mother was only twenty-two; but the cares and responsibilities of a large and unruly family of motherless brothers and sisters, had descended upon her too early, bringing a sedateness to the trim little figure, and a regrettable gravity to the sweet lips.

She was peeping in the cracked glass on the chimney-piece now, deftly arranging the soft fair hair which Con had tousled so ruthlessly, and smiling back at the happy blushing face she saw reflected there.

A large bush of golden gorse—the only flower within miles—grew near the doorway; she broke off a piece and slipped it in her waist-belt. Then she shook out the folds of her blue print dress, and glanced across at Con. She went over and stood beside the cot with her small roughened hands clasped tightly together, and a rebellious light in her brown eyes.

“Why should I?” she was asking herself bitterly. “I never promised to give up my whole life to them. My whole life! Annie is old enough now. Oh! I can’t do it. Mother wouldn’t have required it of me; I’m sure she wouldn’t.” And her eyes sought the figure in the distance, now looming larger against the speckless sky.

Con stirred in his sleep, and put up two fat arms as she stooped over him. “Mover,” he murmured drowsily, and the little mother’s face flushed.

“Annie can never be ‘mother’ to him. What would he do without me? Oh—Con—,” and then she was down on her knees beside the old cot which had served as cradle for them all; even for herself, in the time which now seemed to her so long ago, before woman’s years had brought with them woman’s joys and sorrows. She buried her face in his carroty hair, and with dry sobs choking in her throat, fought over again the battle which she had been fighting so unavailingly throughout the past week.

******

The little mother was standing in the shadowed door-way with one hand shading her eyes, when the rider at length drew rein before the cottage, and flung himself from his horse with a gay greeting.

He pushed back his soft felt hat, and his blue eyes were full of admiration as he seized both her toil-worn hands. She looked so ridiculously small and dainty, with that sunlit room in the back-ground outlining her form and turning the curling ends of her hair to gold.

“So you were on the look-out for me, Molly,” he cried, his sunburnt face glowing with the joy he felt. “I am not late, am I?”

“Late? Did you mean to come to-day? I had forgotten,” answered the girl indifferently, without even looking at him.

Sleeping Con might have told of the many, many times the little mother had looked at the clock that day, and of how her eyes had wandered, ever and again, to the blue horizon beyond the tussocks; but Len Harvey knew nothing of that, and the smile died away from his face.

“I said I would come, dear,” he began in reproachful and puzzled tones. “Surely you remember, Molly? You promised to tell me—I think I know what you will tell me, my little girl,” and his voice softened as he slipt one arm round her slim waist.

Did Con know, as he grunted uneasily in his sleep, and aimlessly slapped at a frolicsome fly sauntering over his wee snub nose, that he was deciding the destiny of two lives? The touch of that strong arm about her made the little mother’s heart beat quickly, but that baby movement from the room behind seemed to stop it altogether.

Then she pushed Len away and threw back her head indignantly. We can all act when necessity compels us, and Molly was acting bravely now to her audience of one.

“I think you forget yourself, Mr Len Harvey,” she said sharply. “And if you know what my answer will be, why don’t you get on your horse again and ride away at once?”

The young man flushed.

“That was not the way you spoke to me on Sunday, Molly, coming out of church. Don’t you remember? You said———”

Did she remember? Ah! So well that she dared not let him finish. So she laughed—laughed lightly and easily, as she pulled the sweet-scented blossoms from the gorse bush beside her, never heeding the pricks.

“Women are privileged to change their minds,” she said carelessly. “Didn’t you know that?”

“Some women may, but not one woman—not you, Molly.”

The confident boy-lover was gone, but this new stern manner of the man was harder—far harder, to meet. Molly felt the difference acutely, and tapped her foot nervously on the piece of hoop-iron that did duty for a door scraper.

“And why not I?” she asked, with a poor attempt at defiance. “Surely I’ve a right to my opinion as well as other folk?”

“Oh, certainly,” he retorted, stiffly; “but,” and then his voice broke, “I love you, Molly—I can’t tell you how much. Couldn’t you try to love me just a little, dear?”

There was silence over the hot plain for several minutes. The little mother was girding on her armour afresh. Then the horse, feeding amongst the tussocks with loose reins hanging over his neck, threw back his head with an accompanying jingle of steel, scaring an enterprising chicken which was warily watching him with an eye to the contents of a chance nose-bag. It squawked dismally as it fluttered away with outstretched wings and neck, and the little mother put her hands behind her head, and leaned back against the paint-blistered wall with a queer little smile.

The bitterest heart breaks often lie beneath the lightest smiles, and the greatest crises in a life seldom occupy more than a few minutes.

“I think I’ve changed my mind, Len,” she said, looking steadily at the strong hand grasping the riding whip, for she dared not meet the trouble in his eyes. “I—I shouldn’t care to spend all my life on the Canterbury Plains. Maybe I’ll get a place in town when the children are a bit bigger.”

A gleam of relief and comprehension lit up the brown face.

“The children, Molly, is that it? Is that why you won’t say yes?”

The little mother glanced into the room behind her, then she spoke scornfully.

“You think a deal of yourself, Len Harvey! I never said that I cared for you.”

“No,” he said slowly, “no, you never said so, but somehow, I thought you meant it. You were never one for carrying on like other girls, Molly, and—and I thought—well, I suppose I have made a mistake, that’s all. It’s good-bye for always now, Molly. I’ll not trouble you again,” and without looking up, she heard the clank of the stirrup-iron, and the impatient jerk of the horse’s head as he gathered up the reins.

When she lifted her head, the quivering heat was blurring the dark figure in the distance, and there was an expression in her eyes that Con would not have recognised. She was not his little mother just then. She had won her battle, she had acted her part, but the reward would be long in coming.

The fowls scratched and clucked round the cottage door, and the wind-mill shadow stretched longer and longer until it seemed as if chasing the far-off figure across the tussocks.

Then the noisy, hungry children came trooping home from the school-house in the distant clump of pine trees; and the little mother came back patiently to her duties, with the strained look deepened in her soft eyes, and her lips rather firmer set than was usual with her.

As she moved to and fro, setting out the tea things, her eyes fell on the solitary cabbage-tree, bending before the first breath of the nor’-west wind sweeping down from the hills, and a quaint little conceit grew in her mind. “We are both lonely, old cabbage-tree, you and I! We must be better friends in the days to come.”

Then she poured out the tea for her father, cut thick bread and butter, and attended to the wants of the clamorous children as usual.

But though Annie chattered conceitedly of what the school-master had said to her that day, and Con, down under the table, was making the kitten squeal pitifully, the little mother only heard the light brushing hoof beats of a horse’s quick canter over the springy tussocks, and the echoes of that sound never quite ceased to haunt the inmost recesses of her memory.