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The Nemesis of Motherhood
by
The fire fell, and all was still in the room. The nurse drowsed in her chair. The very roses seemed to hush themselves in dropping now and then a petal lest they wake the mother and the child from their deep, sweet, regenerating sleep.
III
There was but one room in the log-cabin of the forest clearing. The summer moonlight poured in a flood of pale-green silver through the open door and the windows, glorifying all the place.
The young mother, lying there with her first-born beside her, had done what she could to make the spot homelike till something better should replace it; and it wore a certain reminiscence of castle halls in the tapestry of skins, in the huge antlers, in the crossed arms.
The woman, who had come from a dozen miles away to be with her now — one to whose help she had gone herself when the forest-fever smote the household there, was in the lean-to with the doctor. The husband was out hunting, unaware of the imminence of the event; and the two lads were with him. There was no one in the room but the mother and her child.
No one? What was this shape in the moonlight — this shining mist — the winged shape of a great angel, gleaming obscurely in the bloom of the broad glow? What the darker shape of another that seemed the shadow of the first? Or were they shapes at all, or more than th
e phantasmagoria of a failing brain?
She was too weak to note anything closely; but she felt in long thrills through all her frame the soft, slow breathing of the baby at her side, and her soul was full of a rapture of gladness. She felt, moreover, vaguely conscious of a certain dim sense of triumph, for although her father’s holdings had gone in a distant branch to the heir male, she knew that she, inheriting of her father, that her son, inheriting of her, truly represented the race — not that son of many alien mothers who now had name and place.
Left dowerless, through mishap, she had married a man of adventurous spirit, and had come out here, a pioneer, to begin fresh life; her son was to be one of the makers of the new world. But of none of this she thought now or was aware, save as a dull undercurrent. She faintly remembered thinking before he was born that this child was to be the flower of his race; that his mother must make him so; that his mother’s father had already made him so — that father in whom there had been no taint of dishonor, of self-seeking, of uncleanness, of distemper of mind or body. Perhaps the nobility had lain dormant in herself; she had feared that; she had tried to rouse it — but on the whole had given herself small time to dwell upon it. There had been far too much to do to think if she possessed virtues and graces. She had had plans, in the early days, of great work among the prisons she would visit, and the help she would give the convict people; of the way in which she would bring pleasure to certain of the insane; and, when war broke out, of the help she might be as an army nurse — she familiar with sick-rooms. But she had had no chance to bring herself to proof; for her father had needed her every hour. And when he had died, she had married a poor man, a prince among poor men as she felt, and she had come out with him to build a new home under new conditions. As, upon the voyage, she had looked over at those in the steerage, her heart had swelled with pity, and with a sense of being in reality one of them, with no right to more ease; she had gone in among them, and an old woman there had died in her arms, and to the child of a poor young wife she had rendered the first offices. And as her foot touched shore her heart had swelled again, but with a sort of ecstasy, thinking of the great promise this land gave to the oppressed of all the earth. On the train across the country she had found two little lads whose people had died and who were bewildered at their homeless condition; and she and her husband had taken them to their home in the wilderness.