“All that unfortunate waste of mother-pain can be prevented; for we here will now take up for him, and others, the work of being spiritual mothers, who will very simply, in this home, supplement the work of the other poor mothers who have had to give birth to ill-conditioned children, without being properly accoutred, with the time, money, and education requisite to enable them to teach these children the ways of life.
“That day on the balcony when he was destroying the rosebud, his mother’s spirit touched mine (as mine now touches yours), and she urged me (as I am now urging you) to bring this child out of his state of arrested development into harmony with righteousness. She informed me that in the bonds of matrimony, as well as out, Bertha, mothers often endure abuse which no creature but man thrusts on his mate; abuse which devitalizes and poisons the fountain at which, born and unborn, the babe is fed; and which weakens the nerve substance of the child, by draining the vital forces of the mother, in a way more ruinous than would be a sword-thrust.
“This mother with spiritual insistence urged me to keep her son in the body, and to carry him through this valley of the shadow of death, so as to enable him to attain a resurrection to newness of life in this body.”
Bertha’s eyes were raised in soul-flaming sympathy with the sufferings hinted at. Such violence had been done her. For years she had been hurled into wraths and torments, and into the dangers of that moral defeat from which she had been delivered by Ethel’s comprehension of her inward righteousness, as opposed to the outward conditions that had been thrust upon her, and as opposed to the reputation which she had unjustly been made to bear.
And of all this she thought. But Ethel’s stated recognition of the commonness of the outrages put on woman as maid and mother, now aroused her intelligence as to the general need for a general enlightenment. But her wrath was inexpressible, and she cried out suddenly: “O, but he is a fool, that Reginald! If he had treated me well I could have done him great good. I hate him! I wish he would cease to live in any world,—could be blasted, blotted out of all worlds, and made into nothing at all, with a lasting ache of shame to it! For he is a fool. Miss Ethelbert, it’s—it’s him! That’s who it was!” And she covered her face, stretched and distorted with loathing, and whispered dreadfully:
“Let him die as the fool dies; withhold your breath of life from him. Dead he would be but for the vitality you exhale upon the upper realms of his being. Let him die! Let him be damned, as he has damned my poor Waldemar into being! I do hate, hate fools!”
Just so had Mrs. Mancredo said: “I do—dislike sick men.”
And Ethelbert, well knowing that woman’s dislike of folly and sickness would turn men away from both, if woman were free to rise to her own heights, said calmly: “It is precisely because you hate fools that you will conspire with me, his mother, and other angels of God, to annihilate the fool and evoke the man. Two children, Waldemar and Reginald,—is it not so? Your Waldemar is your son, and better born than Reginald. For after that assault you were deserted by your assailant, and lived in virginal conditions through all the time of the coming of your son to this present incarnation. You have lived since, loathing evil, seeking the good and pursuing it, and—in an humble sense—pondering these things in your heart, as did the mother of our Lord; and—”
“Aye, I hate him! I would gladly have been like the Virgin Mother, reverently treated, by the spirit-of-life in some good man,—if not by the Angel of the Annunciation. Mystery and unfathomable mystery as it all is, I claim I should have had the highest and best. I am a good girl; I am from a good family. I love that story; I love the mystery as the good Father in our mountain village in Germany taught it. I meant always to be like Mary, blessed among women. Reginald betrothed me; and betrothal is almost marriage in my land.”
She turned, and gazing again back toward Reginald’s chair, said again: “Aye, I hate him! Beast, brute! I think—I think I must kill him! I do hate him! What will my Waldemar think of me! I hate that man!”