Not far from the noisy grape-pickers, under another awning, were women sorting nuts and olives. They suspended their work as Iona came down the street and paused to speak to them. All looked up into her face with an earnest and reverential gaze. They had not ceased to wonder at the change in her, nor had they learned to define it; for while, in her gentleness and simplicity of manner she was more like one of them, they were yet conscious of a superiority which they had never before recognized in her. It was as though a frost-lily should in a single night be changed to a true lily, fragrant and still.
She spoke a few words to them, and then went up to the veranda to Tacita.
“Stay with me a little while!” said Tacita eagerly, bringing her a chair. “I think of you all the time, and cannot keep the tears out of my eyes.”
Iona embraced her. “The same hand leads us both, dear. Do not grieve. For me, I am in haste to go. You have yourself made me more eager with your munificent gift.”
For Tacita, with Dylar’s approval, had given all her little fortune to Iona to be disposed of “not in doing charity,” she said, “but in doing justice.”
And Iona had replied: “Yes, justice! For though charity may move us to act, that which we do of good is but a just restitution.”
“My heart is in anguish for the world’s poor,” she said now. “And not for the beggar alone. I think of those who can indeed escape physical starvation by constant labor, but whose souls starve in that weary round that leaves them no leisure to look about the fair world in which they exist like ants half buried in sand. I think of homeless men and women, oh! and children, eating the bread of bitterness at the tables of the coarse and insolent; of artistic souls cramped by some need that any one of a thousand persons known to them could supply, could understand without being told, if they had a spark of true human sympathy in their hearts, but which they behold with the insensibility of stones. Your fortune, my Tacita, will be a heaven’s dew to such. For your largess will be given only to the silent, who ask not. I do not know the world as well as many of our people do; but those who have had most experience say that the almost universal motto acted on, if not confessed, is the saying of Cain: ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ Now, I wish to have as my motto that I am my brother’s keeper whenever and wherever one has need of me. I will have nothing to do with agents nor organizations. I will see the suffering face to face. Wherever I see the eyes of the Crucified looking at me through a human face, there will I offer help. The King shall send me to meet them.”
“There are those,” said Tacita, “who will affect anguish in order to move you. They rob the real sufferer, and they create distrust and hardness in the charitable.”
“I shall sometimes be deceived,” Iona said. “Who is not? Sovereigns are deceived by their courtiers, husbands by their wives and wives by their husbands, and friends deceive each other, and children deceive their parents. I go with no romantic trustfulness, I assure you.”
The hour for her departure hastened to come.