Hilda’s Home: A Story of Woman’s Emancipation by Rosa Graul - HTML preview

CONCLUSION.

The evening meal is over. All have gathered on the broad veranda to watch the golden sunset as it dips its slanting rays in the river beyond. They are unusually quiet, even for this serious band. Last night’s merry-making has made them just a little tired, besides which their hearts are full of unuttered prayers for the future success of that new home.

Mrs. Leland is sitting in the comfortable depths of an easy chair. A sturdy little man of four summers perches upon her knee, patting grandma’s cheek, tossing her hair in his efforts to smooth it, taking her face between both chubby hands and drawing her head forward so that he can kiss her happy, smiling lips and altogether making love in the most approved child fashion.

Margaret is sitting at her feet, her arm thrown across her mother’s knee, while her eyes with a happy, tender light follow the movements of her boy, and her heart swells with fond tenderness and pride at the knowledge that he is her very own.

At grandma’s back stands Wilbur whose eyes also follow the antics of the boy when they for a few moments lose sight of the glorious sunset.

Mr. Roland is a visitor at the home tonight, and sits a little to the right of this group, quietly drinking in the scene before him in the pauses of the animated conversation he is carrying on with the brilliant little lecturer, Althea Wood, who also is a guest at the home tonight.

Farther to the left are various groups. The two pairs of sisters—Imelda and Cora, Edith and Hilda—have formed a circle, their babies forming the center of their attention. There are little prattlers while one sweet little cooing innocent lies close to Imelda’s breast.

O, the joys of young motherhood! And the group of men that were standing a little apart felt the influence of the spell and each thought his sweetheart had never looked more fair.

Alice in delicate health was reclining in an easy chair while Milton with adoring eyes stood over her chair ready to do her slightest bidding. O, if she were only safely tided over the coming hour of trial! And as the sigh escapes him his hand caressingly toys with the bright mass of shining hair.

Lawrence has his Norma perched upon his knee answering her many questions. She has grown to be quite a big girl now, but has never outgrown her early love for her papa, and ever with the old delight greets his coming. The two are so near to Alice that she can comfortably watch them, and while a smile of proud tenderness wreathes her lips, it is Milton’s hand to which they are laid.

“My baby!” She whispered the tender words.

“A little longer patience,” is Milton’s whispered reply, “and your baby will be your own!”

Her hand went up to his face with a caressing touch.

“I know,” she smilingly said, “but it was Norma I meant this time.”

He drew the hand to his lips as with a knowing smile he answered,

“Ah, I see!”

Lawrence now and then let his eyes wander to the mother of his child, then they would turn to the group of fair young women where a pair of sweet gray eyes met his in a tender glance, then to rest on the little one reclining against his bosom. Which did he love most? His eyes lit up with a glad tenderness as they rested on the little one and then he drew the fair curly head so near him, close to his heart and hid his face in the fluffy masses; could he himself answer the question?

Many other faces we see which are all new to us, but they are all men and women worthy to be called by these names.

A group of the younger people have strayed down to the sweet-scented gardens gathering flowers as they go. Osmond and Homer are fast friends. Both are young men untouched by the rough hand of fate. Their young manhood, so perfect in its strength and beauty giving them the appearance of young kings, so proud, so lofty, was their bearing. Elmer, too, could scarcely be termed a boy any longer. His twenty years sat well on his broad shoulders and the eyes of the fifteen year old Meta shone bright as stars, her cheeks flushed as he chased her through the winding mazes of the park, and when he had caught her and kissed the rosy lips she submitted as a matter of course with the most natural grace.

Osmond had thrown himself at the feet of Hattie Wallace whose nineteen summers sat lightly on her shoulders. She was such a fairy and with rosy hued cheeks she listened to the soft, love-freighted words that fell in whispers from Osmond’s lips.

Homer’s companion was a dark, soft-eyed young girl timid and shy who had been an inmate of the home for one year, where she had come with her mother who had fled in the dead of night from her husband and sought refuge in this haven of rest, and Homer was teaching the sweet Katie her first experience in the mysteries of love.

Aleda, the youngest of the Wallace girls was also there, and seventeen years had developed a truly pretty and healthy girl from the delicate querulous child. Another new comer had engaged her attention. Reading from a volume of Tennyson, a boy scarce older than herself was reclining at her feet. He too had been brought there by a mother, not one who had fled the cruelties of an unappreciative husband, as she had never applied the title to any man. He had been a child of love.

His mother, in the wild sweet delirium of a first love, had abandoned herself to her artist lover without a thought of right or wrong. And he, pure and noble had no thought of wronging her. But disease had early marked him for its own, and ere the child of his Wilma had seen the light of day his own life had closed in that sleep that knows no waking, and she was left alone to buffet the storms of life as best she could, an orphan and without friends. With a babe in her arms, of “illegal” origin, the path of her life had not been strewn with roses. But amidst all her privations and trials she had kept her love pure for her child and had fostered only instincts pure and holy in the young mind, and when she heard of the home she applied at its gates, telling her story in pure, unvarnished words, never dreaming of an effort to hide any of her past. Only by the light of truth could the delicate fair woman thread her path through the world.

As might be expected, she had been received with open arms. Wilma, the mother of Horace, our young poet, and Honora, Katie’s mother, could now be seen as they stand arm in arm watching the golden sunset and the children whose future promises to bring with it less of the pain that has so early drawn silver threads through their own brown locks.

The world at large knew not the full meaning of this home as yet. The world is yet too completely steeped in superstition and ignorance to have permitted its existence had the full meaning been known. The “Hunter Co-operative Home” it had been called, and thus it was known to the world. It was known that babes had made their advent therein, but none but the initiated knew that marriage as an institution was banished from its encircling walls.

Would you ask us if happiness was so unalloyed within those walls that no pangs of regret or of pain could enter there? Well, no! We are not so foolish as to make such claim. There are hours of temptation; there are moments of forgetfulness; there are sometimes swift, keen, torturing pangs that nothing earthly can completely shut out. Our heroes and heroines are not angels. They are—when the very best of them has been said—only intelligent, sensible and sensitive men and women—but men and women who are possessed of high ideals and who are striving hard to reach and practicalize them. They live in a world of thought. They do nothing blindly, inconsiderately; their every action is done with eyes wide open. In trying to gain the goal they have set themselves to reach, they strive not to think of self alone. The future of those who have been entrusted to their care, the young lives their love has called into existence, exacts from them much of self-denial. They are individualists, yet not so absolutely such that they do not realize that sometimes the ego must be held in check so as not to rob another of his, or her birthright.

You ask again, “Does this home life, as you have pictured insure against the possibility of the affections changing?”

And again we answer, No! Certainly not. Such changes will and must come. Yet it is not to be expected that where there is liberty, in the fullest sense of the word, life will be a constant wooing? Is it not the lack of liberty that deals the death blow to many a happy, many a once happy home? to many a home that was founded in the sweetest of hopes, the brightest of prospects, only to be shattered and wrecked in a few short years? aye, even a few short months or weeks? And when such a change does come, in spite of all efforts to prevent, how great a thing it must be to know yourself free! free to embrace the new love without the horrible stigma of “shame!” as our modern society now brands it, and which stigma causes such unspeakable misery, such endless suffering.

And if a woman desires to repeat the experience of motherhood, why should it be wrong when she selects another to be the father of her, instead of the one who has once performed this office for her? Why should the act be less pure when she bestows a second love, when the object of this second love is just as true, just as noble, just as pure-minded as was the first one? Why should an act be considered a crime with one partner which had been fully justified with another?

Reader, judge me not hastily. Judge not my ideas, my ideals, without having first made a careful study of life as you find it around you. My words are backed by personal experience and observation, experience as bitter as any that has been herein recorded. Indeed I doubt if I should, or could, ever have given birth to the thoughts expressed in these pages had it not been for that experience—which is one of a thousand—and when you have carefully weighed my words, think of the good that must result to future generations when unions are purely spontaneous, saying nothing of the increase of happiness to those who are permitted thus to choose, and to live.

When, O, when will the great mass of humanity learn and realize that in enforced motherhood, unwelcome motherhood, is to be found the chief cause of the degradation that gives birth to human woe. When will they see that unwelcome motherhood is the curse resting upon and crushing out the life energies of woman; while on the other hand, the consciousness of being the mother of a desired babe, a child conceived in a happy, a loving embrace, needs no other blessing, no other sanction, no other license, than such act itself bestows.