When spring came round again, Tacita was a mother, having given birth to
the tenth Dylar.
“And now we say a _Pater Noster_,” she said. “Is there more than a
decade without change?”
Becoming a mother, it seemed as if she had ceased to be anything else.
The most that the people saw of her was when she sat under the awning of
her little terrace with some work in her hand and her foot on the rocker
of the cradle, her eyes scarce ever straying beyond the one or the
other, and thinking, thinking.
Dylar had removed her decidedly from all outside duties. It was the
custom in San Salvador for the mother to leave all for her child; and
more depended on this sunny-faced infant than on any other. It was
enough for her to train the child, to note every manifestation of
character, to watch with dilating eyes every sign of intelligence, to
cry out with delight at every mark of sweetness, or tremble at what
might be a fault.
He was sometimes astonished at her far-sightedness, but never at her
strength. He had seen the steely fibre in her gentle nature even when, a
child, she had mistaken him for a beggar and called him “brother.”
That strength manifested itself now in the firmness with which she faced
the necessity of soon giving the child into the hands of others for the
greater part of his education. Dylar had not the courage to remind her
of this necessity in the first rapture and tremor of her motherhood.
There were times when he even asked himself if it might not be evaded.
It was Tacita who spoke first, one evening, as she sat with the child in
her arms.
“I have fought a battle, and conquered,” she said, smiling. “I looked
forward to the time when my son must go to school, and I was jealous. To
miss him all day, and know that others are listening while he lisps his
first little lessons! I counted the weeks and days. I searched for some
way of escape. His birthday is in April, and in April it is too early in
the year to have a grief.
“Then—would you believe it, dearest?—I meditated a dishonesty! The
school is dismissed, I said, for the harvest, and does not open again
till the last week of October. It would be a pity for him to begin study
and his little industries, his infant carpenter-work and his small
gardening, and then forget, and have to begin all over again. He had
better not go till after harvest-time. I had my excuses all planned,
when I discovered the little wriggling serpent in my mind. Oh, Dylar!
What if I should have given the boy a taint of that blackness which I
did not know was in me! I am not worthy to train him!”
She did not raise her eyes; but her husband knelt and surrounded both
mother and child with his arms.
“You say that you have conquered, Tacita. I had the same battle to fight
and had not conquered. Dear wife, how a spot shows on your whiteness!
What did you resolve upon?”
“This,” she said. “On the very morning of his birthday, instead of
making holiday at home, we will take him by the hand and lead him to the
school, and his _festa_ shall be to meet for the first time all the dear
brothers with whom he is to go through life, whom he is to help and be
helped by when his father and mother shall be here no longer.”
They embraced, and Tacita wiped two bright tears from her husband’s
eyelashes. “I am impatient for Iona to come and see the boy,” she said
more lightly. “Nearly all her letter was of him, and she comes only to
see him. She thinks that his hair will grow darker. I want it to be like
yours by and by; but this gold floss looks well on a baby. You must read
her letter. She wishes me to have a little oil portrait of him taken
that she can carry away with her. The messenger who came yesterday is an
artist, she writes, and makes lovely pictures of infants. She chose him
for that reason.”
Iona appeared to them suddenly on one of those June days. She came laden
with gifts, letters and photographs, and had so many messages to
deliver, and so much to tell, that for several hours of every day for a
week she sat in the dance-room at the Star-house, to talk with any one
who might wish to come to her. The rest of her time was spent at the
school, or hanging over the infant Dylar.
Those who had never been outside could not tire of hearing her talk, and
looking at the photographs and prints she had brought. These pictures
had been carefully chosen. The sunny beach was contrasted with the
storm-tossed sea; the stately ship, all sails and colors, with the
lonely wreck and its despairing signal; the beauty of luxury with the
deformity of poverty; the dark street and unclean den with the palace
and garden.
She had faces made terrible by crime, despair, sickness, shame and
sorrow. These to a people who made health and strength a virtue were her
most effective antidote against any allurements of that larger life that
held such perils.
“It is worse than I thought, my friends,” she said to Tacita and Dylar.
“Perhaps the world never was any better; but it is worse than I thought.
It is not so much the wickedness of the smaller number, but the
carelessness of the majority. Nothing but a calamity stirs them up.
Nothing but a danger to themselves sets them thinking of others. The
prosperous seem really to believe that prosperity is a virtue and
misfortune a vice. Oh, if they only knew the delight of helping the
needy, and helping in the right way, not thinking that by a gift you can
buy any person’s liberty, or that gratitude for any assistance whatever
should bear the strain of any assumption the helper may be guilty of,
but giving outright, helping outright, and forgetting all about it.
There is no pleasure like it. Much is said of ingratitude: far more
should be said of the coarseness of fibre in those who impose a sort of
slavery on the recipients of their favors.
“But, much as I wonder at the living, I wonder yet more at the dying, or
those who are looking forward to their own death. There are men and
women who leave fortunes to the already rich, or to institutions which
are not in need, or to found or endow libraries which bear their names,
while all about them reigns an earthly hell of poverty to which they
never give a thought.
“Now and then one hears of something lovely. I remember a man in America
who, dying, left money to give a house, an acre of land, and a pension
sufficient to live on modestly, to a number of homeless women, single or
widows. The only notice I ever saw of that tender and sympathizing
remembrance of the homeless called it ‘eccentric.’ Most people who give
wish to herd the unfortunate together, making a solid and permanent
exposition of their benevolence which they can describe in the
newspapers.”
“What are women doing?” Tacita asked. “Some things I saw gave me a
troubled feeling. It was so different from our women here, so noble,
harmonious and restful as they are!”
“It is, perhaps, inevitable,” Iona said. “I do not like to find fault
with my sisters when they strive to be something better than dolls.
Every transition state is disagreeable. I hope that, having made the
circle, they may come back to a higher plane of the same hemisphere they
have occupied in the past. At present many are ruining what they propose
to regenerate. Boasting that they will bring back the lost Paradise,
they go no farther than Cain, the serpent, and partial nakedness. Woman
as a law-maker is meddlesome and tyrannical. She goes too much into
detail. There is a pertness and shrillness in their way of bringing in
the millennium which irritates my nerves. They won’t let you alone. They
nag at you. With some, you cannot speak in their presence without
repenting of having opened your mouth. You deplore the evils of society,
and they call you a pessimist; you praise the beautiful, the sublime,
and discern a rainbow somewhere, and they dub you optimist; you venture
to touch on some half possibility of intimations reaching the living
from the dead, and they pin ‘Spiritist’ on your shawl; you surmise that
we cannot be sure that we are to live only one life upon the earth, and
they discover that you are are a Theosophist, and make remarks about
your Karma. They have a mania brought from their jam-pots for labeling
things. It is a relief to turn from them and talk with a sensible man
whose ideas are more in the _affresco_ style, and do not scratch.
“And then, on some happy day you meet a woman, _the_ woman, noble,
judicial, kind, courageous, modest and sympathizing, and you fall at her
feet.”
“I think that something ideal may result from this uprising of women,”
said Dylar. “It is crude now, as you say. But when they shall have shown
what they can do, they will voluntarily return, the mothers among them,
to their quiet homes, and say to man, ‘As we were before, we could not
help making many of you worthless. Now we are going to make a race of
noble men. We will rule the state through the cradle.’”
“Like our Tacita,” said Iona with a smile. “Elena always said that she
was fit to rule a state.”
“Dear Elena!” said Dylar’s wife. “I am so impatient to see her. It will
be delightful to have you both here together, if but for a day.”
For Elena was on her way to San Salvador, and near; and they meant to
keep her. She had had enough of travel and unassisted labor; and she was
needed at home.
“Do you see how our little palm-trees grow?” Tacita asked. “We are going
to have them set in the green of the Basilica, after all. They will be
ready in the autumn.”
Iona looked at the young trees thoughtfully.
“I would like to earn a leaf,” she said.