Chapter 3

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_ Chapter III

Maria fell asleep that night with the full assurance that she had not been mistaken concerning the beauty of the little face which she had seen in the looking-glass. All that troubled her was the consideration that her aunt Maria, whose homely face seemed to glare out of the darkness at her, might have looked just as she did when she was her age. She hoped, and then she hoped that the hope was not wicked, that she might die young rather than live to look like her aunt Maria. She pictured with a sort of pleasurable horror, what a lovely little waxen-image she would look now, laid away in a nest of white flowers. She had only just begun to doze, when she awoke with a great start. Her father had opened her door, and stood calling her.

"Maria," he said, in an agitated voice.

Maria sat up in bed. "Oh, father, what is it?" said she, and a vague horror chilled her.

"Get up, and slip on something, and go into your mother's room," said her father, in a gasping sort of voice. "I've got to go for the doctor."

Maria put one slim little foot out of bed. "Oh, father," she said, "is mother sick?"

"Yes, she is very sick," replied her father. His voice sounded almost savage. It was as if he were furious with his wife for being ill, furious with Maria, with life, and death itself. In reality he was torn almost to madness with anxiety. "Slip on something so you won't catch cold," said he, in his irritated voice. "I don't want another one down."

Maria ran to her closet and pulled out a little pink wrapper. "Oh, father, is mother very sick?" she whispered again.

"Yes, she is very sick. I am going to have another doctor to-morrow," replied her father, still in that furious, excited voice, which the sick woman must have heard.

"What shall I--" began Maria, but her father, running down the stairs, cut her short.

"Do nothing," said he. "Just go in there and stay with her. And don't you talk. Don't you speak a word to her. Go right in." With that the front door slammed.

Maria went tiptoeing into her mother's room, still shaking from head to foot, and her blue eyes seeming to protrude from her little white face. Even before she entered her mother's room she became conscious of a noise, something between a wail and a groan. It was indescribably terrifying. It was like nothing which she had ever heard before. It did not seem possible that her mother, that anything human, in fact, was making such a noise, and yet no animal could have made it, for it was articulate. Her mother was in fact both praying and repeating verses of Scripture, in that awful voice which was no longer capable of normal speech, but was compounded of wail and groan. Every sentence seemed to begin with a groan, and ended with a long-drawn-out wail. Maria went close to her mother's bed and stood looking at her. Her poor little face would have torn her mother's heart with its piteous terror, had she herself not been in such agony.

Maria did not speak. She remembered what her father had said. As her mother lay there, stretched out stiff and stark, almost as if she were dead, Maria glanced around the room as if for help. She caught sight of a bottle of cologne on the dresser, one which she had given her mother herself the Christmas before; she had bought it out of her little savings of pocket-money. Maria went unsteadily over to the dresser and got the cologne. She also opened a drawer and got out a clean handkerchief. She became conscious that her mother's eyes were upon her, even although she never ceased for a moment her cries of agony.

"What--r you do--g?" asked her mother, in her dreadful voice.

"Just getting some cologne to put on your head, to make you feel better, mother," replied Maria, piteously. She thought she must answer her mother's question in spite of her father's prohibition.

Her mother seemed to take no further notice; she turned her face to the wall. "Have--mercy upon me, O Lord, according to Thy loving kindness, according to the multitude of Thy tender mercies," she shrieked out. Then the words ended with a long-drawn-out "Oh--oh--"

Had Maria not been familiar with the words, she could not have understood them. Not a consonant was fairly sounded, the vowels were elided. She went, feeling as if her legs were sticks, close to her mother's bed, and opened the cologne bottle with hands which shook like an old man's with the palsy. She poured some cologne on the handkerchief and a pungent odor filled the room. She laid the wet handkerchief on her mother's sallow forehead, then she recoiled, for her mother, at the shock of the coldness, experienced a new and almost insufferable spasm of pain. "Let--me alone!" she wailed, and it was like the howl of a dog.

Maria slunk back to the dresser with the handkerchief and the cologne bottle, then she returned to her mother's bedside and seated herself there in a rocking-chair. A lamp was burning over on the dresser, but it was turned low; her mother's convulsed face seemed to waver in unaccountable shadows. Maria sat, not speaking a word, but quivering from head to foot, and her mother kept up her prayers and her verses from Scripture. Maria herself began to pray in her heart. She said it over and over to herself, in unutterable appeal and terror, "O Lord, please make mother well, please make her well." She prayed on, although the groaning wail never ceased.

Suddenly her mother turned and looked at her, and spoke quite naturally. "Is that you?" she said.

"Yes, mother. I'm so sorry you are sick. Father has gone for the doctor."

"You haven't got on enough," said her mother, still in her natural voice.

"I've got on my wrapper."

"That isn't enough, getting up right out of bed so. Go and get my white crocheted shawl out of the closet and put it over your shoulders."

Maria obeyed. While she was doing so her mother resumed her cries. She said the first half of the twenty-third psalm, then she looked again at Maria seating herself beside her, and said, in her own voice, wrested as it were by love from the very depths of mortal agony. "Have you got your stockings on?" said she.

"Yes, ma'am, and my slippers."

Her mother said no more to her. She resumed her attention to her own misery with an odd, small gesture of despair. The cries never ceased. Maria still prayed. It seemed to her that her father would never return with the doctor. It seemed to her, in spite of her prayer, that all hope of relief lay in the doctor, and not in the Lord. It seemed to her that the doctor must help her mother. At last she heard wheels, and, in her joy, she spoke in spite of her father's injunction. "There's the doctor now," said she. "I guess he's bringing father home with him."

Again her mother's eyes opened with a look of intelligence, again she spoke in her natural voice. She looked towards the clothes which she had worn during the day, on a chair. "Put my clothes in the closet," said she, but her voice strained terribly on the last word.

Maria flew, and hung up her mother's clothes in the closet just before her father and the doctor entered the room. As she did so, the tears came for the first time. She had a ready imagination. She thought to herself that her mother might never put on those clothes again. She kissed the folds of her mother's dress passionately, and emerged from the closet, the tears streaming down her face, all the muscles of which were convulsed. The doctor, who was a young man, with a handsome, rather hard face, glanced at her before even looking at the moaning woman in the bed. He said something in a low tone to her father, who immediately addressed her.

"Go right into your own room, and stay there until I tell you to come out, Maria," said he, still in that angry voice, which seemed to have no reason in it. It was the dumb anger of the race against Fate, which included and overran individuals in its way, like Juggernaut.

At her father's voice, Maria gave a hysterical sob and fled. A sense of injury tore her heart, as well as her anxiety. She flung herself face downward on her bed and wept. After a while she turned over on her back and looked at the room. Not one little thing in the whole apartment but served to rack her very soul with the consideration of her mother's love, which she was perhaps about to lose forever. The dainty curtains at the windows, the scarf on the dresser, the chintz cover on a chair--every one her mother had planned. She could not remember how much her mother had scolded her, only how much she had loved her. At the moment of death the memory of love reigns triumphant over all else, but she still felt the dazed sense of injury that her father should have spoken so to her. She could hear the low murmur of voices in her mother's room across the hall. Suddenly the cries and moans ceased. A great joy irradiated the child. She said to herself that her mother was better, that the doctor had given her something to help her.

She got off the bed, wrapped her little pink garment around her, and stole across the hall to her mother's room. The whole hall was filled with a strange, sweet smell which made her faint, but along with the faintness came such an increase of joy that it was almost ecstasy. She turned the knob of her mother's door, but, before she could open it, it was opened from the other side, and her father's face, haggard and resentful as she had never seen it, appeared.

"Go back!" he whispered, fiercely.

"Oh, father, is mother better?"

"Go back!"

Maria went back, and again the tempest of woe and injury swept over her. Why should her father speak to her so? Why could he not tell her if her mother were better? She sat in her little rocking-chair beside the window, and looked out at the night. She was conscious of a terrible sensation which seemed to have its starting-point at her heart, but which pervaded her whole body, her whole consciousness. She was conscious of such misery, such grief, that it was like a weight and a pain. She knew now that her mother was no better, that she might even die. She heard no more of the cries and moans, and somehow now, the absence of them seemed harder to bear than they themselves had been. Suddenly she heard her mother's door open. She heard her father's voice, and the doctor's in response, but she still could not distinguish a word. Presently she heard the front door open and close softly. Then her father hurried down the steps, and got into the doctor's buggy and drove away. It was dark, but she could not mistake her father. She knew that he had gone for another doctor, probably Dr. Williams, who lived in the next town, and was considered very skilful. The other doctor was remaining with her mother. She did not dare leave her room again. She sat there watching an hour, and a pale radiance began to appear in the east, which her room faced. It was like dawn in another world, everything had so changed to her. The thought came to her that she might go down-stairs and make some coffee, if she only knew how. Her father might like some when he returned. But she did not know how, and even if she had she dared not leave her room again.

The pale light in the east increased, suddenly rosy streamers, almost like northern lights, were flung out across the sky. She could distinguish things quite clearly. She heard the rattle of wheels, and thought it was her father returning with Dr. Williams, but instead it was the milkman in his yellow cart. He carried a bottle of milk around to the south door. There was something horribly ghastly in that every-day occurrence to the watching child. She realized the interminable moving on of things in spite of all individual sufferings, as she would have realized the revolution of a wheel of torture. She felt that it was simply hideous that the milk should be left at the door that morning, just as if everything was as it had been. When the milkman jumped into his wagon, whistling, it seemed to her as if he were doing an awful thing. The milk-wagon stopped at the opposite house, then moved on out of sight down the street. She wished to herself that the milkman's horse might run away while he was at some door. The rancor which possessed her father, the kicking against the pricks, was possessing her. She felt a futile rage, like that of some little animal trodden underfoot. A boy whom she knew ran past whooping, with a tin-pail, after the milkman. Evidently his mother wanted some extra milk. The sun was reflected on the sides of the swinging pail, and the flash of light seemed to hurt her, and she felt the same unreasoning wrath against the boy. Why was not Willy Royce's mother desperately sick, like her mother, instead of simply sending for extra milk? The health and the daily swing of the world in its arc of space seemed to her like a direct insult.

At last it occurred to her that she ought to dress herself. She left the window, brushed her hair, braided it, and tied it with a blue ribbon, and put on her little blue gingham gown which she commonly wore mornings. Then she sat by the window again. It was not very long after that that she saw the doctor coming, driving fast. Her father was with him, and between them sat a woman. She recognized the woman at once. She was a trained nurse who lived in Edgham. "They have got Miss Bell," she thought; "mother must be awful sick." She knew that Miss Bell's wages were twenty-five dollars a week, and that her father would not have called her in except in an extreme case. She watched her father help out the woman, who was stout and middle-aged, and much larger than he. Miss Bell had a dress-suit case, which her father tugged painfully into the house; Miss Bell followed him. She heard his key turn in the lock while the doctor fastened his horse.

She saw the doctor, who was slightly lame, limp around to the buggy after his horse was tied, and take out two cases. She hated him while he did it. She felt intuitively that something terrible was to come to her mother because of those cases. She watched the doctor limp up the steps with positive malevolence. "If he is such a smart doctor, why doesn't he cure himself?" she asked.

She heard steps on the stairs, then the murmur of voices, and the sound of the door opening into her mother's room. A frightful sense of isolation came over her. She realized that it was infinitely worse to be left by herself outside, suffering, than outside happiness. She tried again to pray, then she stopped. "It is no good praying," she reflected, "God did not stop mother's pain. It was only stopped by that stuff I smelled out in the entry." She could not reason back of that; her terror and misery brought her up against a dead wall. It seemed to her presently that she heard a faint cry from her mother's room, then she was quite sure that she smelled that strange, sweet smell even through her closed door. Then her father opened her door abruptly, and a great whiff of it entered with him, like some ghost of pain and death.

"The doctors have neither of them had any breakfast, and they can't leave her," he said, with a jerk of his elbow, and speaking still with that angry tone towards the unoffending child. "Can you make coffee?"

"I don't know how."

"Good for nothing!" said her father, and shut the door with a subdued bang.

Maria heard him going down-stairs, and presently she heard a rattle in the kitchen, a part of which was under her room. She went out herself and stole softly down the stairs. Her father, with an air of angry helplessness, was emptying the coffee-pot into her mother's nice sink. Maria stood trembling at his elbow. "I don't believe that's where mother empties it," she ventured.

"It has got to be emptied somewhere," said her father, and his tone sounded as if he swore. Maria shrank back. "They've got to have some coffee, anyhow."

Maria's father carried the coffee-pot over to the stove, in which a freshly kindled fire was burning, and set it on it, in the hottest place. Maria stealthily moved it back while he was searching for the coffee in the pantry. She did not know much, but she did know that an empty coffee-pot on such a hot place would come to ruin.

Her father emerged from the pantry with a tin-canister in his hand. "I've sent a telegram to our aunt Maria for her to come right on," said he, "but she can't get here before afternoon. I don't suppose you know how much coffee your mother puts in. I don't suppose you know about anything."

Maria realized dimly that she was a scape-goat, but there was such terrible suffering in her father's face that she had no impulse to rebel. She smelled of the canister which her father held out towards her with a nervously trembling hand. "Why, father, this is tea; it isn't coffee," said she.

"Well, if you don't know anything that a big girl like you ought to know, I should think you might know enough not to try to make coffee with tea," said her father.

Maria looked at her father in a bewildered sort of way. "I guess the coffee is in the other canister," said she, meekly.

"Why didn't you say so then?" demanded her father.

Maria was silent. It seemed to her that her father had gone mad. Harry Edgham made a ferocious stride across the kitchen to the pantry. Maria followed him. "I guess that is the coffee canister," said she, pointing.

"Why didn't you say so, then?" asked her father, viciously, and again Maria made no reply. Her father seized the coffee canister and approached the stove. "I don't suppose you know how much she puts in. I don't suppose you know anything," said he.

"I guess she puts in about a cupful," said Maria, trembling.

"A cupful! with coffee at the price it is now? I guess she doesn't," said her father. He poured the coffee-pot full of boiling water from the tea-kettle, then he tipped the coffee canister into his hand, and put one small pinch into the pot.

"Oh, father," ventured Maria. "I don't believe--"

"You don't believe what?"

"I don't believe that is enough."

"Of course it's enough. Don't you suppose your father knows how to make coffee?"

Her father set the coffee-pot on the stove, where it immediately began to boil. Then he carried back the canister into the pantry, and returned with a panful of eggs. "You can set the table, I suppose, anyhow?" said he. "You know enough to do as much as that?"

"Yes, I can do that," replied Maria, with alacrity, and indeed she could. Her mother had exacted some small household tasks from her, and setting the table was one of them. She hurried into the dining-room and began setting the table with the pretty blue-flowered ware that her mother had been so proud of. She seemed to feel tears in her heart when she laid the plates, but none sprang to her eyes. Somehow, handling these familiar inanimate things was the acutest torture. Presently she smelled eggs burning. She realized that her father was burning up the eggs, in his utter ignorance of cookery. She thought privately that she didn't believe but she could cook the eggs, but she dared not go out in the kitchen. Her father, in his anxiety, had actually reached ferocity. He had always petted her, in his easy-going fashion, now he terrified her. She dared not go out there.

All at once, as she was getting the clean napkins from the sideboard, she heard the front door open, and one of the neighbors, Mrs. Jonas White, entered without knocking. She was a large woman and carelessly dressed, but her great face was beaming with kindness and pity.

"I just heard how bad your ma was," she said, in a loud whisper, "an' I run right over. I thought mebbe--How is she?"

"She is very sick," replied Maria. She felt at first an impulse to burst into tears before this broadside of sympathy, then she felt stiff.

"You are as white as a sheet," said Mrs. White. "Who is burnin' eggs out there?" She pointed to the kitchen.

"Father."

"Lord! Who's up-stairs?"

"Miss Bell and the doctors. They've sent for Aunt Maria, but she can't come before afternoon."

Mrs. White fastened a button on her waist. "Well, I'll stay till then," said she. "Lillian can get along all right." Lillian was Mrs. White's eighteen-year-old daughter.

Mrs. White opened the kitchen door. "How is she?" she said in a hushed voice to Harry Edgham, frantically stirring the burned eggs, which sent up a monstrous smoke and smell. As she spoke, she went over to him, took the frying-pan out of his hands, and carried it over to the sink.

"She is a very sick woman," replied Harry Edgham, looking at Mrs. White with a measure of gratitude.

"You've got Dr. Williams and Miss Bell, Maria says?"

"Yes."

"Maria says her aunt is coming?"

"Yes, I sent a telegram."

"Well, I'll stay till she gets here," said Mrs. White, and again that expression of almost childish gratitude came over the man's face. Mrs. White began scraping the burned eggs off the pan.

"They haven't had any breakfast," said Harry, looking upward.

"And they don't dare leave her?"

"No."

"Well, you just go and do anything you want to, Maria and I will get the breakfast." Mrs. White spoke with a kindly, almost humorous inflection. Maria felt that she could go down on her knees to her.

"You are very kind," said Harry Edgham, and he went out of the kitchen as one who beats a retreat before superior forces.

"Maria, you just bring me the eggs, and a clean cup," said Mrs. White. "Poor man, trying to cook eggs!" said she of Maria's father, after he had gone. She was one of the women who always treat men with a sort of loving pity, as if they were children. "Here is some nice bacon," said she, rummaging in the pantry. "The eggs will be real nice with bacon. Now, Maria, you look in the ice-chest and see if there are any cold potatoes that can be warmed up. There's plenty of bread in the jar, and we'll toast that. We'll have breakfast in a jiffy. Doctors do have a hard life, and Miss Bell, she ought to have her nourishment too, if she's goin' to take care of your mother."

When Maria returned from the ice-box, which stood out in the woodshed, with a plate of cold potatoes, Mrs. White was sniffing at the coffee-pot.

"For goodness sake, who made this?" said she.

"Father."

"How much did he put in?"

"He put in a little pinch."

"It looks like water bewitched," said Mrs. White. "Bring me the coffee canister. You know where that is, don't you?"

"Yes, ma'am."

Maria watched Mrs. White pour out the coffee which her father had made, and start afresh in the proper manner.

"Men are awful helpless, poor things," said Mrs. White. "This sink is in an awful condition. Did your father empty all this truck in it?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Well, I must clean it out, as soon as I get the other things goin', or the dreen will be stopped up." Mrs. White's English was not irreproachable, but she was masterful.

Maria continued to stand numbly in the middle of the kitchen, watching Mrs. White, who looked at her uneasily.

"You must be a good girl, and trust in the Lord," said she, and she tried to make her voice sharp. "Now, don't stand there lookin' on; just fly round and do somethin'. I don't believe but the dinin'-room needs dustin'. You find somethin' and dust the dinin'-room real nice, while I get the breakfast."

Maria obeyed, but she did that numbly, without any realization of the task.

The morning wore on. The doctors, one at a time came down, and the nurse came down, and they ate a hearty breakfast. Maria watched them, and hated them because they could eat while her mother was so ill. Miss Bell also ate heartily, and she felt that she hated her. She was glad that her father refused anything except a cup of coffee. As for herself, Mrs. White made her drink an egg beaten up with milk. "If you won't eat your breakfast, you've got to take this," said she.

Mrs. White took her own breakfast in stray bites, while she was clearing away the table. She stayed, and put the house in order, until Maria's aunt Maria arrived. One of the physicians went away. For a short time Maria's mother's groans and wailings recommenced, then the smell of chloroform was strong throughout the house.

"I wonder why they don't give her morphine instead of chloroform?" said Mrs. White, while Maria was wiping the dishes. "It is dreadful dangerous to give that, especially if the heart is weak. Well, don't you be scart. I've seen folks enough worse than your mother git well."

In the last few hours Maria's face had gotten a hard look. She no longer seemed like a little girl. After a while the doctors went away.

"I don't suppose there is much they can do for a while, perhaps," remarked Mrs. White; "and Miss Bell, she is as good as any doctor."

Both physicians returned a little after noon, and previously Mrs. Edgham had made her voice of lamentation heard again. Then it ceased abruptly, but there was no odor of chloroform.

"They are giving her morphine now, I bet a cooky," Mrs. White said. She, with Maria, was clearing away the dinner-table then. "What time do you think your aunt Maria will get here?" she asked.

"About half-past two, father said," replied Maria.

"Well, I'm real glad you've got some one like her you can call on," said Mrs. White. "Somebody that 'ain't ever had no family, and 'ain't tied. Now I'd be willin' to stay right along myself, but I couldn't leave Lillian any length of time. She 'ain't never had anything hard put on her, and she 'ain't any too tough. But your aunt can stay right along till your mother gits well, can't she?"

"I guess so," replied Maria.

There was something about Maria's manner which made Mrs. White uneasy. She forced conversation in order to make her speak, and do away with that stunned look on her face. All the time now Maria was saying to herself that her mother was going to die, that God could make her well, but He would not. She was conscious of blasphemy, and she took a certain pleasure in it.

Her aunt Maria arrived on the train expected, and she entered the house, preceded by the cabman bearing her little trunk, which she had had ever since she was a little girl. It was the only trunk she had ever owned. Both physicians and the nurse were with Mrs. Edgham when her sister arrived. Harry Edgham had been walking restlessly up and down the parlor, which was a long room. He had not thought of going to the station to meet Aunt Maria, but when the cab stopped before the house he hurried out at once. Aunt Maria was dressed wholly in black--a black mohair, a little black silk cape, and a black bonnet, from which nodded a jetted tuft. "How is she?" Maria heard her say, in a hushed voice, to her father. Maria stood in the door. Maria heard her father say something in a hushed tone about an operation. Aunt Maria came up the steps with her travelling-bag. Harry forgot to take it. She greeted Mrs. White, whom she had met on former visits, and kissed Maria. Maria had been named for her, and been given a silver cup with her name inscribed thereon, which stood on the sideboard, but she had never been conscious of any distinct affection for her. There was a queer, musty odor, almost a fragrance, about Aunt Maria's black clothes.

"Take the trunk up the stairs, to the room at the left," said Harry Edgham, "and go as still as you can." The man obeyed, shouldering the little trunk with an awed look.

Aunt Maria drew Mrs. White and Maria's father aside, and Maria was conscious that they did not want her to hear; but she did overhear--"...one chance in ten, a fighting chance," and "Keep it from Maria, her mother had said so." Maria knew perfectly well that that horrible and mysterious thing, an operation, which means a duel with death himself, was even at that moment going on in her mother's room. She slipped away, and went up-stairs to her own chamber, and softly closed the door. Then she forgot her lack of faith and her rebellion, and she realized that her only hope of life was from that which is outside life. She knelt down beside her bed, and began to pray over and over, "O God, don't let my mother die, and I will always be a good girl! O God, don't let my mother die, and I will always be a good girl!"

Then, without any warning, the door opened and her father stood there, and behind him was her aunt Maria, weeping bitterly, and Mrs. White, also weeping.

"Maria," gasped out Harry Edgham. Then, as Maria rose and went to him, he seized upon her as if she were his one straw of salvation, and began to sob himself, and Maria knew that her mother had died. _

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