During this time, Dolores, carrying her infant in one hand, with the other spread the table, served the potatoes, and distributed to each one his part. The children ate from her plate, and Stein remarked that she did not even touch the dish she had prepared with so much care.
“You do not eat, Dolores?” he said to her.
“Do you not know the saying,” she replied laughing, “ ‘He who has children at his side will never die of indigestion,’ Don Frederico? What they eat nourishes me.”
Momo, who found himself beside this group, drew away his plate, so that his brothers would not have the temptation to ask him for its contents. His father, who remarked it, said to him—
“Don’t be avaricious; it is a shameful vice: be not avaricious; avarice is an abject vice. Know that one day an avaricious man fell into the river. A peasant who saw it, ran to pull him out; he stretched out his arm, and cried to him, ‘Give me your hand!’ What had he to give? A miser—give! Before giving him any thing he allowed himself to be swept down by the current. By chance he floated near to a fisherman; ‘Take my hand!’ he said to him. As it was a question of taking, our man was willing, and he escaped danger.”
“It is not such wit you should relate to your son, Manuel,” said Maria. “You ought to set before him, for example, the bad rich man, who would give to the unfortunate neither a morsel of bread, nor a glass of water. ‘God grant,’ answered the beggar to him, ‘that all that you touch changes to this silver which you so hold to.’ The wish of the beggar was realized. All that the miser had in his house was changed into metals as hard as his heart. Tormented by hunger and thirst, he went into the country, and having perceived a fountain of pure water, clear as crystal, he approached with longing to taste it; but the moment his lips touched it, the water was turned to silver. He would take an orange, and the orange was changed to gold. He thus died in a frenzy of rage and fury, cursing what he had desired.”
Manuel, the strongest-minded man in the assembly, bowed down his head.
“Manuel,” his mother said to him, “you imagine that we ought not to believe but what is a fundamental article, and that credulity is common only to the imbecile. You are mistaken: men of good sense are credulous.”
“But, my mother, between belief and doubt there is a medium.”
“And why,” replied the good old woman, “laugh at faith, which is the first of all virtues? How will it appear to you, if I say to you: ‘I have given birth to you, I have educated you, I have guided your earliest steps—I have fulfilled my obligations!’ Is the love of a mother nothing but an obligation! What say you?”