The Fears of Love
Do love and fear always walk up and down together in a mother’s heart? Mimosa never knew what it was to be without fear for her little sons. She knew the perils of an Indian street. Thick as the dust on it, those perils lay about her boys. She could not forget the indelible impressions etched deep upon the mind of a young child by the sights and the sounds of the streets.
Far back in memory lay a dreadful day when her father found his eldest son bringing into his own clean house boys with minds that were open sewers. He seized the wretched youth, tied him to a pillar in an upper room, and scourged him with a rope. Then, in his desperation, he did the most extreme thing known to Hindu fathers in the way of punishment. It is meted out sometimes to lads who want to follow Christ and have confessed at home. He put pepper in his eyes.
But vain, vain is all without the power of the cleansing Spirit to deal with the heart within.. The boy was forbidden the privileges of the house, his mother and sisters saw little of him. The father wrestled alone with his trouble; his son had wasted his property, but that was nothing
114 to this; and when at last the abject one declared his intention of joining the Way, his father smiled a grim smile; the Church was welcome to him.
The boy arrived at our bungalow on the Iyer’s birthday. Not a hint of his past was allowed to filter through to us; nor was his motive — desire for education for commercial reasons — discoverable at once. He was received as a birthday gift from heaven, a new opportunity; with joy and with love he was welcomed; and he lived to make more scars in hearts that had trusted him and toiled for him. Such are the griefs of the angels, the shame of Christ. This boy, a man now, was back in his village, and he stung Mimosa with wasp stings of sharp words whenever he had the chance.
But she did not mind that, if only she could keep her boys from him and such as he. So she watched over them, combining that vigilant mother-duty with all else that she did.
They were almost always with her; for there was no one who felt as she did, with whom she could leave them. They helped her with her housework, though that was against custom; for in India boys are served, they do not serve.
At first they rather demurred.
“Buy a little sister for us,” they said to her one day. ‘“So-and-so and So-and-so’”’ — naming boys of their acquaintance — “have little sisters who sweep the house for them and polish the brass vessels and help to cook. If we had one we need not work at all.”
Mimosa smiled. In her wise heart she felt it was no bad training, this unusual training of the house, and she told the little boys it was all right. They helped her so nicely she really did not need to buy a little sister.