"You little brats, are you trying to force your mother?" Old Lady Chen cried, tears and snot streaming down her face in grief.
"Mom, don’t cry, and don’t say we’re forcing you," Chen Da said unhappily. "Before you blame us, look at yourself, and look at our village. We won’t mention how poor everyone else is here, as it can’t be helped. But what about our family? Are we really poor? Do we really have no money? I’ve never seen a mother like you who refuses to let her son get married because of money."
Chen San also chimed in, "That’s right, if mom really could get Chen Er’s wife to be our bride, we wouldn’t have anything to say. After all, you’re our mother, and we have to listen to you. But what about now? Where is Chen Er’s wife? Who will come to marry me and my big brother?"
"You, you ungrateful little brats! Your mother painstakingly raised you, and this is how you repay me?" Old Lady Chen pointed at them one by one.
Seeing that Old Lady Chen was rambling and refusing to agree, Chen Da lost his patience.
He stood up and walked out, saying as he went, "If mother still refuses to agree, then I’ll go to Yangshu Village right now."
"You, you beast, stop right there!" Seeing that he was really leaving, Old Lady Chen hurriedly called out. She couldn’t really let her eldest son leave just like that.
"So do you agree or not?" Chen Da turned around and asked.
Old Lady Chen had no choice but to nod her head, "Fine, I agree, I will go to the marriage broker tomorrow." What else could she do? Even her son wasn’t on her side anymore.
Well, it didn’t matter, as the saying goes, the arm can’t twist the thigh. Since she had to give away the money anyway, it was better to use it to find a wife for her son rather than compensate the Yang family.
So Old Lady Chen went to town the next day and visited the marriage broker.
A maidservant cost seven or eight taels of silver, but Old Lady Chen was quite lucky. Two of the maidservants were from Jiangsu, where there was a flood, and their families were gone. They had to sell themselves, and the asking price was less – only five taels each. Old Lady Chen heard this and clenched her teeth, taking out an extra tael and buying both maidservants.
She gave four taels and five hundred coins to one and five hundred coins to the broker as commission. After paying the silver, she didn’t bring the girls to buy any new clothes or anything like that, let alone buy them wedding clothes. She simply took them back to the village.
Old Lady Chen couldn’t have been more stingy. She brought the two maidservants back to marry her sons, and she didn’t even prepare wedding clothes, let alone host a wedding banquet. Alright, even if she didn’t hold a banquet, she could at least invite the clan elders to have a meal together as a gesture since her sons now had wives.
But she didn’t invite them. In the end, you know what happened? The two sons and the two maidservants bowed before their father’s bed, then bowed to Old Lady Chen. After the couple bowed to each other, the matter was considered settled. There wasn’t even a simple family celebration.
Chen Er didn’t care about any of this. He thought that whether his mother held a banquet or not was up to her. What mattered to him was that he could bring his wife home the next day.
On the second day, before dawn, Chen Er got up. He looked at the mountain goods he had brought home a few days earlier, put some of each into a cloth pocket, took a dried rabbit from the house, and went to Yangshu Village with a grateful heart. He thought that he should thank the elder sister for helping him with this matter, as his family had nothing good to offer in return.