The Torch Bearer

by Reina Melcher Marquis

Had the question occurred to him then, Ted would have said that no artist could surrender herself thus to maternity. Peter Burnett, reverently watching, did say, "No one but a poet could be a mother like that!"

Sheila had been very ill at the time of the child's birth, and a year passed before she regained her natural vigor. It was, perhaps, the happiest year of her life. Every now and then in the course of a lifetime, there come seasons of pure, untroubled joy, when all the practical concerns of ordinary existence pause for a little while, and the petty cares and worries make way, and even the commonplace pleasures stand aside, abashed. Such a season of joy was Sheila's then. She could never recollect it afterward without a quickening and lifting of her heart, and she knew at the time—Oh, very surely—that she had drawn down heaven to herself.

Of course it did not last. As her strength increased and the every day business of living became more and more her affair, she dropped to the level of a normal contentment, and thus to the interests that had occupied her before the miracle was accomplished.

Eric, her little son, was well into his second year, however, before she felt the urging restlessness of her gift, and even then she denied the creative impulses stirring within her; she put them from her—while she longed to yield herself to them instead. "Go away!" she said to them fiercely. "Oh, go away before you spoil my beautiful peace!" But for every time that she drove them forth, they returned the stronger, as if they would proclaim: "You can't be rid of us! You may narcotize us with the sedative of your content. You may banish us altogether. But we'll always waken! We'll always come back! For we're a part of you—just as much a part of you as your son is!"

It was true. They were, indeed, a part of her. She would always be different from other women after all—because of them. She would always have to reckon with them; to appease them, or to deny them at her own bitter cost.

And now there came the question: "Why deny them any longer?" Eric had been a very healthy baby from the first; he had, also, an excellent nurse, a young mulatto girl who shared her race's enthusiasm for children. In the kitchen ruled an old cook who brooked no interference from "Li'l Miss." Obviously, neither her child nor her house demanded all of Sheila's time. So in the quiet afternoons, when Eric had been taken outdoors, she began to write for an hour or two. Surely, she argued, she now had a right to those two hours out of each twenty-four, especially since she did not take them from her husband, her son, or her home. It was her own leisure, her own opportunity for rest, that she sacrificed, if sacrifice there was.

But though she justified herself, she somehow said nothing about the matter to Ted. She agreed with him now—Oh, warmly enough!—that motherhood was the greatest thing in life for a woman; but she did not, she never would, believe with him that it must be the only thing. Nor should he believe it always, she told herself. She would prove to him that a woman could be both mother and artist. She would prove it to him, as she had dreamed of doing—but not just yet. They loved each other so dearly, they were so happy together, that she shrank from disturbing their harmony by any discussion or dissension. And discussion and dissension there would be before Ted could be converted. Amiable as he was in his healthy, hearty fashion, he would be intolerant and irritable about this. So she worked on in secret; and for a couple of months nothing and no one was the worse for it.

Then, when Eric was two years old, he was taken ill; suddenly, swiftly, terribly, as a little child can be smitten from rosy vigor to death's very brink. The disease was scarlet fever.

"How can he have gotten it?" Sheila and Ted asked each other, bewildered and agonized. But soon—only too soon—they knew. Lila, the nurse, disappeared directly after the verdict was pronounced. "Afraid!" cried Sheila scornfully, "afraid—though she said she loved him!"

"Yes'm," agreed old Lucindy, who had come from her kitchen to help nurse the boy with a loyalty that was in itself a scathing comment on Lila's defection, "yes'm, she's feared all right—but not ob gittin' fever."