Chapter 5

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_ Chapter V

Maria looked at her aunt with an expression of almost idiocy. For the minute, the term Aunt Maria used, especially as applied to her father, had no more meaning for her than a term in a foreign tongue. She was very pale. "Courtin'," she stammered out vaguely, imitating her aunt exactly, even to the dropping of the final "g."

Aunt Maria was, for the moment, too occupied with her own personal grievances and disappointments to pay much attention to her little niece. "Yes, courtin'," she said, harshly. "I've been suspectin' for some time, an' now I know. A man, when he's left a widower, don't smarten up the way he's done for nothin'; I know it." Aunt Maria nodded her head aggressively, with a gesture almost of butting.

Maria continued to gaze at her, with that pale, almost idiotic expression. It was a fact that she had thought of her father as being as much married as ever, even although her mother was dead. Nothing else had occurred to her.

"Your father's thinkin' of gettin' married again," said Aunt Maria, "and you may as well make up your mind to it, poor child." The words were pitying, the tone not.

"Who?" gasped Maria.

"I don't know any more than you do," replied Aunt Maria, "but I know it's somebody." Suddenly Aunt Maria arose. It seemed to her that she must do something vindictive. Here she had to return to her solitary life in her New England village, and her hundred dollars a year, which somehow did not seem as great a glory to her as it had formerly done. She went to the parlor windows and closed them with jerks, then she blew out the lamp. "Come," said she, "it's time to go to bed. I'm tired, for my part. I've worked like a dog all day. Your father has got his key, an' he can let himself in when he gets through his courtin'."

Maria crept miserably--she was still in a sort of daze--up-stairs after Aunt Maria.

"Well, good-night," said Aunt Maria. "You might as well make up your mind to it. I suppose it had to come, and maybe it's all for the best." Aunt Maria's voice sounded as if she were trying to reconcile the love of God with the existence of hell and eternal torment. She closed her door with a slam. There are, in some New England women, impulses of fierce childishness.

Maria, when she was in her room, had never felt so lonely in her life. A kind of rage of loneliness possessed her. She slipped out of her clothes and went to bed, and then she lay awake. She heard her father when he returned. The clock on a church which was near by struck twelve soon after. Maria tried to imagine another woman in the house in her mother's place; she thought of every eligible woman in Edgham whom her father might select to fill that place, but her little-girl ideas of eligibility were at fault. She thought only of women of her mother's age and staidness, who wore bonnets. She could think of only two, one a widow, one a spinster. She shuddered at the idea of either. She felt that she would much rather have had her father marry Aunt Maria than either of those women. She did not altogether love Aunt Maria, but at least she was used to her. Suddenly it occurred to her that Aunt Maria was disappointed, that she felt badly. The absurdity of it struck her strongly, but she felt a pity for her; she felt a common cause with her. After her father had gone into his room, and the house had long been silent, she got up quietly, opened her door softly, and crept across the hall to the spare room, which Aunt Maria had occupied ever since she had been there. She listened, and heard a soft sob. Then she turned the knob of the door softly.

"Who is it?" Aunt Maria called out, sharply.

Maria was afraid that her father would hear.

"It's only me, Aunt Maria," she replied. Then she also gave a little sob.

"What's the matter?"

Maria groped her way across the room to her aunt's bed. "Oh, Aunt Maria, who is it?" she sobbed, softly.

Aunt Maria did what she had never done before: she reached out her arms and gathered the bewildered little girl close, in an embrace of genuine affection and pity. She, too, felt that here was a common cause, and not only that, but she pitied the child with unselfish pity. "You poor child, you are as cold as ice. Come in here with me," she whispered.

Maria crept into bed beside her aunt, but she would rather have remained where she was. She was a child of spiritual rather than physical affinities, and the contact of Aunt Maria's thin body, even though it thrilled with almost maternal affection for her, repelled her.

Aunt Maria began to weep unrestrainedly, with a curious passion and abandonment for a woman of her years.

"Has he come home?" she whispered. Aunt Maria's hearing was slightly defective, especially when she was nervously overwrought.

"Yes. Aunt Maria, who is it?"

"Hush, I don't know. He hasn't paid any open court to anybody, that I know of, but--I've seen him lookin'."

"At whom?"

"At Ida Slome."

"But she is younger than my mother was."

"What difference do you s'pose that makes to a man. He'll like her all the better for that. You can thank your stars he didn't pitch on a school-girl, instead of the teacher."

Maria lay stretched out stiff and motionless. She was trying to bring her mind to bear upon the situation. She was trying to imagine Miss Ida Slome, with her pink cheeks and her gay attire, in the house instead of her mother. Her head began to reel. She no longer wept. She became dimly conscious, after a while, of her aunt Maria's shaking her violently and calling her by name, but she did not respond, although she heard her plainly. Then she felt a great jounce of the bed as her aunt sprang out. She continued to lie still and rigid. She somehow knew, however, that her aunt was lighting the lamp, then she felt, rather than saw, the flash of it across her face. Her aunt Maria pulled on a wrapper over her night-gown, and hurried to the door. "Harry, Harry Edgham!" she heard her call, and still Maria could not move. Then she also felt, rather than saw, her father enter the room with his bath-robe slipped over his pajamas, and approach the bed.

"What on earth is the matter?" he said. He also laid hands on Maria, and, at his touch, she became able to move.

"What on earth is the matter?" he asked again.

"She didn't seem able to speak or move, and I was scared," replied Aunt Maria, with a reproachful accent on the "I"; but Harry Edgham was too genuinely concerned at his little daughter's white face and piteous look to heed that at all.

He leaned over and began stroking her soft little cheeks, and kissing her. "Father's darling," he whispered. Then he said over his shoulder to Aunt Maria, "I wish you would go into my room and get that flask of brandy I keep in my closet."

Aunt Maria obeyed. She returned with the flask and a teaspoon, and Maria's father made her swallow a few drops, which immediately warmed her and made the strange rigidity disappear.

"I guess she had better stay in here with you the rest of the night," said Harry to his sister-in-law; but little Maria sat up determinately.

"No, I'm going back to my own room," she said.

"Hadn't you better stay with your aunt, darling?"

Harry Edgham looked shamefaced and guilty. He saw that his sister-in-law and Maria had been weeping, and he knew why, in the depths of his soul. He saw no good reason why he should feel so shamed and apologetic, but he did. He fairly cowered before the nervous little girl and her aunt.

"Well, let father carry you in there, then," he said; and he lifted up the slight little thing, carried her across the hall to her room, and placed her in bed.

It was a very warm night, but Maria was shivering as if with cold. He placed the coverings over her with clumsy solicitude. Then he bent down and kissed her. "Try and keep quiet, and go to sleep, darling," he said. Then he went out.

Aunt Maria was waiting for him in the hall. Her face, from grief and consternation, had changed to sad and dignified resignation.

"Harry," said she.

Harry Edgham stopped.

"Well, sister," he said, with pleasant interrogation, although he still looked shamefaced.

Aunt Maria held a lamp, a small one, which she was tipping dangerously.

"Look out for your lamp, Maria," he said.

She straightened the lamp, and the light shone full upon her swollen face, at once piteous and wrathful. "I only wanted to know when you wanted me to go?" she said.

"Oh, Lord, Maria, you are going too fast!" replied Harry, and he fairly ran into his own room.

The next morning when Maria, in her little black frock--it was made of a thin lawn for the hot days, and the pale slenderness of her arms and neck were revealed by the thinness of the fabric--went to school, she knew, the very moment that Miss Ida Slome greeted her, that Aunt Maria had been right in her surmise. For the first time since she had been to school, Miss Slome, who was radiant in a flowered muslin, came up to her and embraced her. Maria submitted coldly to the embrace.

"You sweet little thing," said Miss Slome.

There was a man principal of the school, but Miss Slome was first assistant, and Maria was in most of her classes. She took her place, with her pretty smile as set as if she had been a picture instead of a living and breathing woman, on the platform.

"You are awful sweet all of a sudden, ain't you?" said Gladys Mann in Maria's ear.

Maria nodded, and went to her own seat.

All that day she noted, with her sharp little consciousness, the change in Miss Slome's manner towards her. It was noticeable even in class. "It is true," she said to herself. "Father is going to marry her."

Aunt Maria was a little pacified by Harry's rejoinder the night before. She begun to wonder if she had been, by any chance, mistaken.

"Maybe I was wrong," she said, privately, to Maria. But Maria shook her head.

"She called me a sweet little thing, and kissed me," said she.

"Didn't she ever before?"

"No, ma'am."

"Well, she may have taken a notion to. Maybe I was mistaken. The way your father spoke last night sort of made me think so."

Aunt Maria made up her mind that if Harry was out late the next Sunday, and the next Wednesday, that would be a test of the situation. The first time had been Wednesday, and Wednesday and Sunday, in all provincial localities, are the acknowledged courting nights. Of course it sometimes happens that an ardent lover goes every night; but Harry Edgham, being an older man and a widower, would probably not go to that extent.

He soon did, however. Very soon Maria and her aunt went to bed every night before Harry came home, and Miss Ida Slome became more loving towards Maria.

Wollaston Lee, boy as he was, child as he was, really suffered. He lost flesh, and his mother told Aunt Maria that she was really worried about him. "He doesn't eat enough to keep a bird alive," said she.

It never entered into her heart to imagine that Wollaston was in love with the teacher, a woman almost if not quite old enough to be his mother, and was suffering because of her love for Harry Edgham.

One afternoon, when Harry's courtship of Ida Slome had been going on for about six weeks, and all Edgham was well informed concerning it, Maria, instead of going straight home from school, took a cross-road through some woods. She dreaded to reach home that night. It was Wednesday, and her father would be sure to go to see Miss Slome. Maria felt an indefinable depression, as if she, little, helpless girl, were being carried so far into the wheels of life that it was too much for her. Her father, of late, had been kinder than ever to her; Maria had begun to wonder if she ought not to be glad if he were happy, and if she ought not to try to love Miss Slome. But this afternoon depression overcame her. She walked slowly between the fields, which were white and gold with queen's-lace and golden-rod. Her slender shoulders were bent a little. She walked almost like an old woman. She heard a quick step behind her, and Wollaston Lee came up beside her. She looked at him with some sentiment, even in the midst of her depression. The thought flashed across her mind, what is she should marry Wollaston at the same time her father married Miss Slome? That would be a happy and romantic solution of the affair. She colored sweetly, and smiled, but the boy scowled at her.

"Say?" he said.

Maria trembled a little. She was surprised.

"What?" she asked.

"Your father is the meanest man in this town, he is the meanest in New Jersey, he is the meanest man in the whole United States, he is the meanest man in the whole world."

Again the boy scowled at Maria, who did not understand; but she would not have her father reviled.

"He isn't, so there!" she said.

"He's going to marry teacher."

"I don't see as he is mean if he is," said Maria, forced into justice by injustice.

"I was going to marry her myself, if she'd only waited, and he hadn't butted in," said Wollaston.

The boy gave one last scowl at the little girl, and it was as if he scowled at all womanhood in her. Then he gave a fling away, and ran like a wild thing across the field of golden-rod and queen's-lace. Maria, watching, saw him throw himself down prone in the midst of the wild-flowers, and she understood that he was crying because the teacher was going to marry her father. She went on, walking like a little old woman, and she had a feeling as if she had found a road in the world that led outside all love. _

Read next: Chapter 6

Read previous: Chapter 4

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