PAGE 3
Theodora, Gift Of God
by
“Mary, dear,” the intruder gushed, “God has sent you something.”
The hickory flashed forth black and white and red. Mary stood upon the ground.
“Where are they?” she demanded.
“They?” repeated the lady. “There is only one.”
“Why, I prayed for two. Which did he send?”
“Which do you think?” parried the lady. “Which do you hope it is?”
Even Mary’s scorn was unprepared for this weak-mindedness. “The goat, of course,” she responded curtly. “Is it the goat?”
“Goat!” gasped the scandalized aunt. “Goat! Why, God has sent you a baby sister, dear.”
“A sister! a baby!” gasped Mary in her turn. “I don’t need no sister. I prayed for a goat just as plain as plain. ‘Dear God,’ I says, ‘please bless everybody, and make me a good girl, an’ send me a goat an’ wagon.’ And they went an’ changed it to a baby sister! Why, I never s’posed they made mistakes like that.”
Crestfallen and puzzled she allowed herself to be led back to the darkened house where her grandmother met her with the heavenly substitute wrapped in flannel. And as she held it against the square and unresponsive bosom of her apron she realized how the “Bible gentleman” must have felt when he asked for bread and was given a stone.
During the weeks that followed, the weight of the stone grew heavier and heavier while the hunger for bread grew daily more acute. Not even the departure of interfering relatives could bring freedom, for the baby’s stumpy arms bound Mary to the house as inexorably as bolts and bars could have done. She passed weary hours in a hushed room watching the baby, when outside the sun was shining, the birds calling, the apples waxing greener and larger, and the shining knights and ladies winding down to Camelot. She sat upon the porch, still beside the baby, while the river rippled, the wheatfields wimpled, and the cows came trailing down from the pasture, down from the upland pasture where the sentinel hickory stood and watched until the sun went down, and, one by one, the lights came out in distant Camelot. She listened for the light laughter of the ladies, the jingling of the golden armor, the swishing of the branches and of the waves. Listened all in vain, for Theodora, that gift of God, had powerful lungs and a passion for exercising them so that minor sounds were overwhelmed and only yells remained.
But the deprivation against which she most passionately rebelled was that of her father’s society. Before the advent of Theodora she had been his constant companion. They were perfectly happy together, for the poet who at nineteen had burned to challenge the princes of the past and to mold the destinies of the future was, at twenty-nine, very nearly content to busy himself about the occurrences of the present and to edit a weekly paper in the town which had known and honored his father, and was proud of, if puzzled by, their well-informed debonair son. Even himself he sometimes puzzled. He knew that this was not to be his life’s work, this chronicling of the very smallest beer, this gossip and friendliness and good cheer. But it served to fill his leisure and his modest exchequer until such time as he could finish his great tragedy and take his destined place among the writers of his time. Meanwhile, he told himself, with somewhat rueful humor, there was always an editor ready to think well of his minor poems and an audience ready to marvel at them, “which is more, my dear,” he pointed out to his admiring wife, “than Burns could have said for himself–or Coleridge.”
And when his confidence and his hopes flickered, as the strongest of hopes and confidence sometimes will, when his tragedy seemed far from completion, his paper paltry, and his life narrow, he could always look into his daughter’s eyes and there find faith in himself and strength and sunny patience.