The padre feeling the justness of the direction, and kindly sympathy manifested by the Manatitlans and Heracleans, could not withhold his eyes from giving misty manifestation of emotional appreciation. This “weakness” caused Dr. Baāhar, who had with politic diplomacy conformed, in outward appearance, to Heraclean usage, to become cynically provoked, openly urging that his childish tears accounted for his mistaking the rough-hewn Heraclean statues for the Christian prototypes of his creed. Notwithstanding the padre’s regretful humiliations, from a lack of thoughtful consideration, he could not withhold a retortful reminder from his old noli me tangere opponent, of his more flagrant assumption; after a moment’s hesitation, he replied, “I claim but a limited knowledge in genealogical matters pertaining to mythology, but I think I was not more daft in my judgment when I mistook the statue in the misty morning light, for the virgin mother and child, than you was in judging the Heracleans politic worshipers of one of your old Sclavo-vendic deities, because you found a statue garlanded with vine-disguised Kyronese mousetraps.”
This ever ready repartee, and apt for the occasion, served to dispel the reproachful shadows, that in impression hung over the padre from his listless predisposition to lapse into his old fatuous rulings of instinct. The admonitions of the Dosch had also aroused in him a reproachful fear that his example would serve to impair the confidence of new arrivals in the effective permanency of Heraclean example; which awakened in him a determination in his own mind “to make his calling and election sure,” by a thoughtful avoidance of precedental inclinations.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
Dr. Baāhar, acting in accordance with the suggestion of the Dosch, given a few months previous, had devoted his attention to the cultivation of fruit-bearing plants, shrubs, and trees, but his success from a lack of objective constancy and discriminative judgment, was inclined to be enigmatical in practical results. Instead of studying the practical adaptation of productive vegetation for the requirements of healthful subsistence, he was quite content with transplanting rare growths, obtained from the surrounding country in the latifundium, without anxious regard for the development of fruitful utility, often introducing those that it had required the labor of years to exterminate, when sowed upon the wind from the brink of the precipice by the Indian besiegers. Fortunately his democratic ideas, which reverenced the rights of naturalization in freedom from adaptability, and rapid succession in office, gave his citizen plants but little time to take root, except those of the most worthless description that live upon the blight of the fruitfully good. Yet with all his inadvertencies, accident occasionally favored a useful result, as many of the fugitive growths which had in seed-flight adapted themselves to congenial soil proclaimed their transatlantic origin and capability for life sustaining reproduction with provident forethought in cultivation. His botanical ambition found ample satisfaction in tracing their genealogical relationship without testing their fruitful capacity, except in chimerical conjecture, founded upon precedental arguments advanced by the most ancient writers.
Under the affectionate tuition of necessity, Isolita’s instincts had been trained for the consistent conservation and advancement of vitality, and her knowledge, despite the disadvantages of siege, had extended with a wide reach beyond the cinctus walls. With cultivated attainments for the discernment of cause and effect, she had with the dependent emergency of her people upon a continued supply of vegetable products become a practical botanist, capable of tracing at sight the natural life-sustaining affinities of fruits and roots, although ignorant of their technical classification into generas, orders, and species. Visiting the embryotic garden of the doctor, shortly after their espousal, she was surprised to find the only thriving plant the noxious venoseminata, the evil genius of fruitful vegetation, which when once allowed to take root, in new soil, offered hydra resistance to the efforts bestowed for its eradication. With her quick perception she discovered the danger incurred from its heedless cultivation, not only to the plot of her adopted Socius, but to the neighboring plantations, which with full exampled growth would become subject to its contagious encroachments. Quick in preservative action she seized a dibble, and before the technical precedentalist could arrest her practical intention, the malignant parasite was uprooted, and hung dependent from the branch of a tree exposed to the full rays of the sun. Too late for expostulation, the theorist stood aghast at her audacity, but kept silence lest from her skillful use of the dibble she should trace the noxious thrift of the plant to his jesuitical cultivation, despite the warnings of his neighbors. Recovering, when he saw her raise plant after plant, consigning them to the same fate, and in process exposing others to remove from their roots the fatal tentacles, he remonstrated; but she still continued her labor, the while congratulating him when she discovered that none of the diffusia had trespassed beyond his limits. At length convinced that no stray fibre remained, she carefully gathered every leaf, branch, and tendril to be united in the fate of the parent stalk. Completing her search for the garroting quirls of the venoseminata, that strangulated above the surface with an effect as deadly as the wide spreading roots beneath the surface, she silently replaced those promising fruition worthy of cultivation, then standing in a smilingly questioning attitude of graceful solicitation, she waited to learn the measure of her Socius’ approval. To which he answered in words, with eyes fitfully glancing askance, half with shame, inwrought with furtive displeasure, “To be sure I understood the nature of the plant, but I wished for the others to grow in company with it, that they might improve upon its evil example, in vindication of our theatrical enactments which portray sensational evil, that they may show the shadow of a surviving moral, for it is the duty of the good to shame the evil; for what says one of your old Roman poets?
“‘In evil company you should ever show,
That purity can protect itself, and ever grow.’”
Isolita. “But did you not see that it was destroying all within its reach?”
Socius. “But as in war, evil eventually exhausts itself; and by furnishing more hardy growths I should have overcome it in time.”
Isolita. “But it would have soon extended itself beyond your limits. Besides, of what avail the cultivation of your ground if your useful plants were condemned to be constantly devoured by this parasite without reaching fruition. In permitting evil to grow and expand under your hand for neighborly infliction, when in the beginning you have the power of suppressing it at ease, to perfect extinction, would make you miserably culpable as an abettor.”