“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 his festa shall 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 that gratitude 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.