Stephen was as idle as ever, and less ashamed of his sloth now that there was someone 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 history; and, as for foreign parts, though a seaman he was not a seagoing man, farther than the whale-fishing lay 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 shame-faced 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 kroner; that a Scotch captain then in the harbor 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 of English build. Now it chanced that sitting alone that very day in her hopelessness, Rachel had overheard a group of noisy young 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.
And now, at this mention of the boat, and at the flash of hope that came with it, Rachel remembered that she herself had a plentiful head of hair, and how often it had been commended for its color and texture, and length and abundance, in the days (now gone forever) when all things were good and beautiful that belonged to the daughter of the Governor. So, making some excuse to Stephen, she rose up, put off her little house cap with the tassel, put on her large linen head-dress, hurried out, and made for the wharf.
There in truth the Jew was standing with a group of girls about him. And some of these would sell outright to him, and then go straightway to the stores to buy filigree jewelry and rings, or bright-hued shawls, with the price of their golden locks shorn off. And some would hover about him between desire of so much artificial adornment and dread of so much natural disfigurement, until, like moths, they would fall before the light of the Jew's bright silver.
Rachel had reached the place at the first impulse of her thought, but being there her heart misgave her, and she paused on the outskirts of the crowd. To go in among these girls and sell her hair to the Jew was to make herself one with the lowest and meanest of the town, but that was not the fear that held her back. Suddenly the thought had come to her that what she had intended to do was meant to win her husband back to her, yet that she could not say what it was that had won him for her at the first. And seeing how sadly the girls were changed after the shears had passed over their heads, she could not help but ask herself what it would profit her, though she got the boat for her husband, if she lost him for herself? And thinking in this fashion she was turning away with a faltering step, when the Jew, seeing her, called to her, saying what lovely fair hair she had, and asking would she part with it. There was no going back on her purpose then, so facing it out as bravely as she could, she removed her head-dress, dropped her hair out of the plaits, until it fell in its sunny wavelets to her waist, and asked how much he would give for it. The Jew answered, "Fifty kroner."
"Make it sixty," she said, "and it is yours."
The Jew protested that he would lose by the transaction, but he paid the money into Rachel's hands, and she, lest she should repent of her bargain, prayed him to take her hair off instantly. He was nothing loth to do so, and the beautiful flaxen locks, cut close to the crown, fell in long tresses to his big shears. Rachel put back her linen head-dress, and, holding tightly the sixty silver pieces in her palm, hurried home.
Her cheeks were crimson, her eyes were wet, and her heart was beating high when she returned to her poor home in the fishing quarter. There in a shrill, tremulous voice of joy and fear, she told Stephen all, and counted out the glistening coins to the last of the sixty into his great hand.
"And now you can buy the English boat," she said, "and we shall be beholden to no one."
He answered her wild words with few of his own, and showed little pleasure; yet he closed his hand on the money, and, getting up, he went out of the house, saying he must see the Scotch captain there and then. Hardly had he gone when the old mother came in from her work on the beach, and, Rachel's hopes being high, she could not but share them with her, and so she told her all, little as was the commerce that passed between them. The mother only grunted as she listened and went on with her food.
Rachel longed for Stephen to return with the good news that all was settled and done, but the minutes passed and he did not come. The old woman sat by the hearth and smoked. Rachel waited with fear at her heart, but the hours went by and still Stephen did not appear. The old woman dozed before the fire and snored. At length, when the night had worn on towards midnight, an unsteady step came to the door, and Stephen reeled into the house drunk. The old woman awoke and laughed.
Rachel grew faint and sank to a seat. Stephen dropped to his knees on the ground before her, and in a maudling cry went on to tell of how he had thought to make one hundred kroner of her sixty by a wager, how he had lost fifty, and then in a fit of despair had spent the other ten.
"Then all is gone—all," cried Rachel. And thereupon the old woman shuffled to her feet and said bitterly, "And a good thing, too. I know you—trust me for seeing through your sly ways, my lady. You expected to take my son from me with the price of your ginger hair, you ugly baldpate."
Rachel's head grew light, and with the cry of a bated creature she turned upon the old mother in a torrent of hot words. "You low, mean, selfish soul," she cried, "I despise you more than the dirt under my feet."
Worse than this she said, and the old woman called on Stephen to hearken to her, for that was the wife he had brought home to revile his mother.
The old witch shed some crocodile tears, and Stephen lunged in between the women and with the back of his hand struck his wife across the face.
At that blow Rachel was silent for a moment, trembling like an affrighted beast, and then she turned upon her husband. "And so you have struck me—me—me," she cried. "Have you forgotten the death of Patricksen?"
The blow of her words was harder than the blow of her husband's hand. The man reeled before it, turned white, gasped for breath, then caught up his cap and fled out into the night.
CHAPTER III.
The Lad Jason.
Of Rachel in her dishonor there is now not much to tell, but the little that is left is the kernel of this history.
That night, amid the strain of strong emotions, she was brought to bed before her time was yet full. Her labor was hard, and long she lay between life and death, for the angel of hope did not pull with her. But as the sun