University of Virginia Library

26. CHAPTER XXVI.
MOTHERHOOD.

IT is supposed by some that to become a mother
is of itself a healing and saving dispensation; that
of course the reign of selfishness ends, and the reign
of better things begins, with the commencement of
maternity.

But old things do not pass away and all things
become new by any such rapid process of conversion.
A whole life spent in self-seeking and self-pleasing is no
preparation for the most august and austere of woman's
sufferings and duties; and it is not to be wondered
at if the untrained, untaught, and self-indulgent shrink
from this ordeal, as Lillie did.

The next spring, while the gables of the new cottage
on Elm Street were looking picturesquely through the
blossoming cherry-trees, and the smoke was curling
up from the chimneys where Grace and her husband
were cosily settled down together, there came to John's
house another little Lillie.

The little creature came in terror and trembling.
For the mother had trifled fearfully with the great laws

of her being before its birth; and the very shadow
of death hung over her at the time the little new
life began.

Lillie's mother, now a widow, was sent for, and by
this event installed as a fixture in her daughter's dwelling;
and for weeks the sympathies of all the neighborhood
were concentrated upon the sufferer. Flowers
and fruits were left daily at the door. Every one
was forward in offering those kindly attentions which
spring up so gracefully in rural neighborhoods. Everybody
was interested for her. She was little and pretty
and suffering; and people even forgot to blame her for
the levities that had made her present trial more
severe. As to John, he watched over her day and
night with anxious assiduity, forgetting every fault and
foible. She was now more than the wife of his youth;
she was the mother of his child, enthroned and glorified
in his eyes by the wonderful and mysterious experiences
which had given this new little treasure to their
dwelling.

To say the truth, Lillie was too sick and suffering for
sentiment. It requires a certain amount of bodily
strength and soundness to feel emotions of love; and,
for a long time, the little Lillie had to be banished from
the mother's apartment, as she lay weary in her darkened
room, with only a consciousness of a varied succession
of disagreeables and discomforts. Her general
impression about herself was, that she was a much
abused and most unfortunate woman; and that all that
could ever be done by the utmost devotion of everybody

in the house was insufficient to make up for such
trials as had come upon her.

A nursing mother was found for the little Lillie
in the person of a goodly Irish woman, fair, fat, and
loving; and the real mother had none of those awakening
influences, from the resting of the little head in her
bosom, and the pressure of the little helpless fingers,
which magnetize into existence the blessed power of
love.

She had wasted in years of fashionable folly, and
in a life led only for excitement and self-gratification,
all the womanly power, all the capability of motherly
giving and motherly loving that are the glory of
womanhood. Kathleen, the white-armed, the gentle-bosomed,
had all the simple pleasures, the tendernesses,
the poetry of motherhood; while poor, faded, fretful
Lillie had all the prose — the sad, hard, weary prose —
of sickness and pain, unglorified by love.

John did not well know what to do with himself
in Lillie's darkened room; where it seemed to him
he was always in the way, always doing something
wrong; where his feet always seemed too large and
heavy, and his voice too loud; and where he was sure,
in his anxious desire to be still and gentle, to upset
something, or bring about some general catastrophe,
and to go out feeling more like a criminal than ever.

The mother and the nurse, stationed there like a pair
of chief mourners, spoke in tones which experienced
feminine experts seem to keep for occasions like these,
and which, as Hawthorne has said, give an effect as

[ILLUSTRATION] [Description: 706EAF. Page 300. In-line Illustration. Image of a man kneeling next to a woman and child. The man is putting his finger out for the baby to hold. They are outdoors. The caption reads, "An' it 's a blessin' they brings wid 'em sir."] if the voice had been dyed black. It was a comfort
and relief to pass from the funeral gloom to the little
pink-ruffled chamber among the cherry-trees, where the
birds were singing and the summer breezes blowing,
and the pretty Kathleen was crooning her Irish songs,
and invoking the holy virgin and all the saints to
bless the “darlin'” baby.

“An' it 's a blessin' they brings wid 'em to a house,
sir; the angels comes down wid 'em. We can't see
'em, sir; but, bless the darlin', she can. And she smiles
in her sleep when she sees 'em.”

Rose and Grace came often to this bower with kisses
and gifts and offerings, like a pair of nice fairy godmothers.
They hung over the pretty little waxen
miracle as she opened her great blue eyes with a silent,
mysterious wonder; but, alas! all these delicious moments,
this artless love of the new baby life, was not
for the mother. She was not strong enough to enjoy
it. Its cries made her nervous; and so she kept the
uncheered solitude of her room without the blessing
of the little angel.

People may mourn in lugubrious phrase about the
Irish blood in our country. For our own part, we
think the rich, tender, motherly nature of the Irish
girl an element a thousand times more hopeful in
our population than the faded, washed-out indifferentism
of fashionable women, who have danced and flirted
away all their womanly attributes, till there is neither
warmth nor richness nor maternal fulness left in them, —
mere paper-dolls, without milk in their bosoms or blood
in their veins. Give us rich, tender, warm-hearted
Bridgets and Kathleens, whose instincts teach them the
real poetry of motherhood; who can love unto death,
and bear trials and pains cheerfully for the joy that
is set before them. We are not afraid for the republican
citizens that such mothers will bear to us. They
are the ones that will come to high places in our
land, and that will possess the earth by right of the
strongest.

Motherhood, to the woman who has lived only to be
petted, and to be herself the centre of all things, is

a virtual dethronement. Something weaker, fairer,
more delicate than herself comes, — something for her
to serve and to care for more than herself.

It would sometimes seem as if motherhood were
a lovely artifice of the great Father, to wean the heart
from selfishness by a peaceful and gradual process.
The babe is self in another form. It is so interwoven
and identified with the mother's life, that she passes
by almost insensible gradations from herself to it; and
day by day the distinctive love of self wanes as the
child-love waxes, filling the heart with a thousand
new springs of tenderness.

But that this benignant transformation of nature
may be perfected, it must be wrought out in Nature's
own way. Any artificial arrangement that takes the
child away from the mother interrupts that wonderful
system of contrivances whereby the mother's nature
and being shade off into that of the child, and her
heart enlarges to a new and heavenly power of loving.

When Lillie was sufficiently recovered to be fond
of any thing, she found in her lovely baby only a new
toy, — a source of pride and pleasure, and a charming
occasion for the display of new devices of millinery.
But she found Newport indispensable that summer
to the re-establishment of her strength. “And really,”
she said, “the baby would be so much better off quietly
at home with mamma and Kathleen. The fact is,” she
said, “she quite disregards me. She cries after Kathleen
if I take her; so that it 's quite provoking.”

And so Lillie, free and unencumbered, had her gay

season at Newport with the Follingsbees, and the
Simpkinses, and the Tompkinses, and all the rest of
the nice people, who have nothing to do but enjoy
themselves; and everybody flattered her by being
incredulous that one so young and charming could
possibly be a mother.