Read Online Patience & Sarah (Little Sister's Classics) by Isabel Miller - Free Book Online

to tell her mine. Someone’s vigilance would lapse. An ally would appear. Something would happen in our favor, and when it did I would be ready.
    She couldn’t, of course, know that. Even as I couldn’t know that every day she was boldly and heroically and stupidly setting off on the road to my house, and being caught and beaten by her father. She would not beg or explain or discuss. She knew that if she lived, she would get to me. What he did was up to him. Her choice was fixed. No one but me could tell her to stay away from me.
    It is a sin to raise a girl to be a man, believing in strength and courage and candor. We can’t prevail that way. Of course her father caught her and beat her and dragged her back. She knew he would, but she counted on his finally tiring, and having other interests. Before that happened, she could be a ruin.
    There’d be that huge man pounding her, and Rachel wailing, “Pa! Pa! Don’t!” and all the little girls wailing too and the mother silent night and day. He came to hate Sarah, I think, for making him be a bully when he wasn’t one at heart, and making all his family silent at the sight of him where there’d been love before. And he couldn’t even explain. If he could have explained, they would have supported him. They thought (except Rachel) that he only wanted to keep Sarah forever and make her work for him. Maddening to be thought cruel, when you’re guided by nothing but the loftiest moral purpose.
    Then Sarah would get up and slowly go back into her house, the way to mine being furiously barred, shaking off Rachel’s efforts to support and guide and comfort her. Slowly she’d climb up to her pallet. It was the end of clearing the new field for that winter.
    “Sister, Sister, quit . He won’t let you!” Rachel whispered. She’d followed Sarah up.
    Sarah looked at her and then tried to turn away but couldn’t, being lame. So she shut her eyes dismissingly.
    “I can’t stand this every day,” Rachel said. It had been then ten days.
    “Pa’ll get so he can’t either,” Sarah said. “I don’t feel it at the time.”
    This was the first Sarah had spoken to her in the whole ten days, so Rachel was able to fetch snow for Sarah’s bruises. She carried the snow in a pan past her father, who was sulking by the fire and who said not a word.
    Then opening Sarah’s clothes, finding bruises (how not find them?), holding snow against them, Rachel murmured, “Bullhead, do you have to just put your horns down and run blind? He don’t want to hurt you. He don’t even want to keep you. He just wants an excuse now to stop. Can’t you see he’s just pleading with you to tell him a lie, so he can stop pounding you?”
    “I haven’t got one,” Sarah said.
    And then Rachel produced the selfsame plan I’d made myself, showing that female minds run in the same channel.
    “You just say it was all a lie, what you said before,” Rachel said.
    “But it wasn’t.”
    “ Say so. Say here’s your chance to get to the West where the men all are, at the expense of this well-to-do lady that wants the same but’s too scared to go alone.”
    “I already said I love her. Didn’t you tell him that?”
    “Well, now you say you didn’t think how that would sound. You thought it sounded better than being greedy for her money. But now you see the truth would’ve been better.”
    Sarah had never dreamed women could be so sly. “I won’t say that against my feeling,” she said and shut her eyes and soul and pushed the pan of snow away.
    Then, on second thought, she looked at Rachel again and asked, “Why did you tell him?”
    With tears, Rachel said, “I didn’t know he’d take on so. I thought maybe it was a common thing. We never know what’s common, living back here like this. I was worried and I thought maybe he’d say it was nothing to worry about. I never knew he’d take on so.”
    And even with an example of Rachel’s slyness so fresh in her mind, Sarah believed