He looked at her with a smile. “Why, then,” he said, “it is true that one sometimes has a headache, and is willing to resume one’s duties.”
The train drew up. The lady called a porter, and, with a courteous but distant salutation to the gentleman, departed.
CHAPTER XXVI.
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.