CHAPTER XXVI.
When spring came round again, Tacita was a mother, having given birth to the tenth Dylar.
“And now we say aPater 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 hisfestashall 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 thatgratitude 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 theaffrescostyle, and do not scratch.
“And then, on some happy day you meet a woman,thewoman, 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.