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By the Light of the Soul: A Novel, a novel by Mary E Wilkins Freeman |
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Chapter 27 |
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_ Chapter XXVII Maria had always attended church, and would have said, had she been asked, that she believed in religion, that she believed in God; but she had from the first, when she had thought of such matters at all, a curious sort of scorn, which was half shame, at the familiar phrases used concerning it. When she had heard of such and such a one that "he was serious," that he had "experienced conviction," she had been filled with disgust. The spiritual nature of it all was to her mind treated materially, like an attack of the measles or mumps. She had seen people unite with the church of which her mother had been a member, and heard them subscribe to and swear their belief in articles of faith, which seemed to her monstrous. Religion had never impressed her with any beauty, or sense of love. Now, for the first time, after her father had died, she seemed all at once to sense the nearness of that which is beyond, and a love and longing for it, which is the most primitive and subtlest instinct of man, filled her very soul. Her love for her father projected her consciousness of him beyond this world. In the midst of her grief a strange peace was over her, and a realization of love which she had never had before. Maria, at this period, had she been a Catholic, might have become a religious devotee. She seemed to have visions of the God-man crowned with thorns, the rays of unutterable and eternal love, and sacred agony for love's sake. She said to herself that she loved God, that her father had gone to him. Moreover, she took a certain delight in thinking that her own mother, with her keen tongue and her heart of true gold, had him safe with her. She regarded Ida with a sort of covert triumph during those days after the funeral, when the sweet, sickly fragrance of the funeral flowers still permeated the house. Maria did not weep much after the first. She was not one to whom tears came easily after her childhood. She carried about with her what seemed like an aching weight and sense of loss, along with that strange new conviction of love and being born for ultimate happiness which had come to her at the time of her father's death. The spring was very early that year. The apple-trees were in blossom at an unusual time. There was a tiny orchard back of the Edgham house. Maria used to steal away down there, sit down on the grass, speckled with pink-and-white petals, and look up through the rosy radiance of bloom at the infinite blue light of the sky. It seemed to her for the first time she laid hold on life in the midst of death. She wondered if she could always feel as she did then. She had a premonition that this state, which bordered on ecstasy, would not endure. "Maria does not act natural, poor child," Ida said to Mrs. Voorhees. "She hardly sheds a tear. Sometimes I fear that her father's marrying again did wean her a little from him." "She may have deep feelings," suggested Mrs. Voorhees. Mrs. Voorhees was an exuberant blonde, with broad shallows of sentimentality overflowing her mind. "Perhaps she has," Ida assented, with a peculiar smile curling her lips. Ida looked handsomer than ever in her mourning attire. The black softened her beauty, instead of bringing it into bolder relief, as is sometimes the case. Ida mourned Harry in a curious fashion. She mourned the more pitifully because of the absence of any mourning at all, in its truest sense. Ida had borne in upon her the propriety of deep grief, and she, maintaining that attitude, cramped her very soul because of its unnaturalness. She consoled herself greatly because of what she esteemed her devotion to the man who was gone. She said to herself, with a preen of her funereal crest, that she had been such a wife to poor Harry as few men ever had possessed. "Well, I have the consolation of thinking that I have done my duty," she said to Mrs. Voorhees. "Of course you have, dear, and that is worth everything," responded her friend. "I did all I could to make his home attractive," said Ida, "and he never had to wait for a meal. How pretty he thought those new hangings in the parlor were! Poor Harry had an aesthetic sense, and I did my best to gratify it. It is a consolation." "Of course," said Mrs. Voorhees. If Ida had known how Maria regarded those very red silk parlor hangings she would have been incredulous. Maria thought to herself how hard her poor father had worked, and how the other hangings, which had been new at the time of Ida's marriage, could not have been worn out. She wanted to tear down the filmy red things and stuff them into the kitchen stove. When she found out that her father had saved up nearly a thousand dollars for her, which was deposited to her credit in the Edgham savings-bank, her heart nearly broke because of that. She imagined her father going without things to save that little pittance for her, and she hated the money. She said to herself that she would never touch it. And yet she loved her father for saving it for her with a very anguish of love. Ida was manifestly surprised when Henry's will was read and she learned of Maria's poor little legacy, but she touched her cool red lips to Maria's cheek and told her how glad she was. "It will be a little nest-egg for you," she said, "and it will buy your trousseau. And, of course, you will always feel at perfect liberty to come here whenever you wish to do so. Your room will be kept just as it is." Maria thanked her, but she detected an odd ring of insincerity in Ida's voice. After she went to bed that night she speculated as to what it meant. Evelyn was not with her. Ida had insisted that she should occupy her own room. "You will keep each other awake," she said. Evelyn had grown noticeably thin and pale in a few days. The child had adored her father. Often, at the table, she would look at his vacant place, and push away her plate, and sob. Ida had become mildly severe with her on account of it. "My dear child," she said, "of course we all feel just as you do, but we control ourselves. It is the duty of those who live to control themselves." "I want my papa!" sobbed Evelyn convulsively. "You had better go away from the table, dear," said Ida calmly. "I will have a plate of dinner kept warm for you, and by-and-by when you feel like it, you can go down to the kitchen and Agnes will give it to you." In fact, poor little Evelyn, who was only a child and needed her food, did steal down to the kitchen about nine o'clock and got her plate of dinner. But she was more satisfied by Agnes bursting into tears and talking about her "blissed father that was gone, and how there was niver a man like him," and actually holding her in her great lap while she ate. It was a meal seasoned with tears, but also sweetened with honest sympathy. Evelyn, when she slipped up the back stairs to her own room after her supper, longed to go into her sister's room and sleep with her, but she did not dare. Her little bed was close to the wall, against which, on the other side, Maria's bed stood, and once Evelyn distinctly heard a sob. She sobbed too, but softly, lest her mother hear. Evelyn felt that she and Maria and Agnes were the only ones who really mourned for her father, although she viewed her mother in her mourning robes with a sort of awe, and a feeling that she must believe in a grief on her part far beyond hers and Maria's. Ida had obtained a very handsome mourning wardrobe for both herself and Evelyn, and had superintended Maria's. Maria paid for her clothes out of her small earnings, however. Ida had her dress-maker's bill made out separately, and gave it to her. Maria calculated that she would have just about enough to pay her fare back to Amity without touching that sacred blood-money in the savings-bank. It had been on that occasion that Ida had made the remark to her about her always considering that house as her home, and had done so with that odd expression which caused Maria to speculate. Maria decided that night, as she lay awake in bed, that Ida had something on her mind which she was keeping a secret for the present. The surmise was quite justified, but Maria had not the least suspicion of what it was until three days before her vacation was to end, when Ida received a letter with the Amity post-mark, directed in Aunt Maria's precise, cramped handwriting. She spoke about it to Maria, who had brought it herself from the office that evening after Evelyn had gone to bed. "I had a letter from your aunt Maria this morning," she said, with an assumed indifference. "Yes; I noticed the Amity post-mark and Aunt Maria's writing," said Maria. Ida looked at her step-daughter, and for the first time in her life she hesitated. "I have something to say to you, Maria," she said, finally, in a nervous voice, so different from her usual one that Maria looked at her in surprise. She waited for her to speak further. "The Voorhees are going abroad," she said, abruptly. "Are they?" "Yes, they sail in three weeks--three weeks from next Saturday." Maria still waited, and still her step-mother hesitated. At last, however, she spoke out boldly and defiantly. "Mrs. Voorhees's sister, Miss Angelica Wyatt, is going with them," said she. "Mrs. Voorhees is not going to take Paul; she will leave him with her mother. She says travelling is altogether too hard on children." "Does she?" "Yes; and so there are three in the party. Miss Wyatt has her state-room to herself, and--they have asked me to go. The passage will not cost me anything. All the expense I shall have will be my board, and travelling fares abroad." Maria looked at her step-mother, who visibly shrank before her, then looked at her with defiant eyes. "Then you are going?" she said. "Yes. I have made up my mind that it is a chance which Providence has put in my way, and I should be foolish, even wicked, to throw it away, especially now. I am not well. Your dear father's death has shattered my nerves." Maria looked, with a sarcasm which she could not repress, at her step-mother's blooming face, and her rounded form. "I have consulted Mrs. Voorhees's physician, in New York," said Ida quickly, for she understood the look. "I consulted him when I went to the city with Mrs. Voorhees last Monday, and he says I am a nervous wreck, and he will not answer for the consequences unless I have a complete change of scene." "What about Evelyn?" asked Maria, in a dry voice. "I wrote to your aunt Maria about her. The letter I got this morning was in reply to mine. She writes very brusquely--she is even ill-mannered--but she says she is perfectly willing for Evelyn to go there and board. I will pay four dollars a week--that is a large price for a child--and I knew you would love to have her." "Yes, I should; I don't turn my back upon my own flesh and blood," Maria said, abruptly. "I guess I shall be glad to have her, poor little thing! with her father dead and her mother forsaking her." "I think you must be very much like your aunt Maria," said Ida, in a cool, disagreeable voice. "I would fight against it, if I were you, Maria. It is not interesting, such a way as hers. It is especially not interesting to gentlemen. Gentlemen never like girls who speak so quickly and emphatically. They like girls to be gentle." "I don't care what gentlemen think," said Maria, "but I do care for my poor, forsaken little sister." Maria's voice broke with rage and distress. "You are exceedingly disagreeable, Maria," said Ida, with the radiant air of one who realizes her own perfect agreeableness. Maria's lip curled. She said nothing. "Evelyn's wardrobe is in perfect order for the summer," said Ida. "Of course she can wear her white frocks in warm weather, and she has her black silk frocks and coat. I have plenty of black sash ribbons for her to wear with her white frocks. You will see to it that she always wears a black sash with a white frock, I hope, Maria. I should not like people in Amity to think I was lacking in respect to your father's memory." "Yes, I will be sure that Evelyn wears a black sash with a white frock," replied Maria, in a bitter voice. She rose abruptly and left the room. Up in her own chamber she threw herself face downward upon her bed, and wept the tears of one who is oppressed and helpless at the sight of wrong and disloyalty to one beloved. Maria hardly thought of Evelyn in her own personality at all. She thought of her as her dead father's child, whose mother was going away and leaving her within less than three weeks after her father's death. She lost sight of her own happiness in having the child with her, in the bitter reflection over the disloyalty to her father. "She never cared at all for father," she muttered to herself--"never at all; and now she does not really care because he is gone. She is perfectly delighted to be free, and have money enough to go to Europe, although she tries to hide it." Maria felt as if she had caught sight of a stone of shame in the place where a wife's and mother's heart should have been. She felt sick with disgust, as if she had seen some monster. It never occurred to her that she was possibly unjust to Ida, who was, after all, as she was made, a being on a very simple and primitive plan, with an acute perception of her own welfare and the means whereby to achieve it. Ida was in reality as innocently self-seeking as a butterfly or a honey-bee. She had never really seen anybody in the world except herself. She had been born humanity blind, and it was possibly no more her fault than if she had been born with a hump. The next day Ida went to New York with Mrs. Voorhees to complete some preparations for her journey, and to meet Mrs. Voorhees's sister, who was expected to arrive from the South, where she had been spending the winter. That evening the Voorheeses came over and discussed their purchases, and Miss Wyatt, the sister, came with them. She was typically like Mrs. Voorhees, only younger, and with her figure in better restraint. She had so far successfully fought down an hereditary tendency to avoirdupois. She had brilliant yellow hair and a brilliant complexion, like her sister, and she was as well, even better, dressed. Ida had purchased that day a steamer-rug, a close little hat, and a long coat for the voyage, and the women talked over the purchases and their plans for travel with undisguised glee. Once, when Ida met Maria's sarcastic eyes, she colored a little and complained of a headache, which she had been suffering with all day. "Yes, there is no doubt that you are simply a nervous wreck, and you would break down entirely without the sea-voyage and the change of scene," said Mrs. Voorhees, in her smooth, emotionless voice and with a covert glance at Maria. Ida had confided to her the attitude which she knew Maria took with reference to her going away. "All I regret--all that mars my perfect delight in the prospect of the trip--is parting with my darling little Paul," Mrs. Voorhees said, with a sigh. "That is the way I feel with regard to Evelyn," said Ida. Maria, who was sewing, took another stitch. She did not seem to hear. The next day but one Maria and Evelyn started for Amity. Ida did not go to the station with them. She was not up when they started. The curtains in her room were down, and she lay in bed, drawing down the corners of her mouth with resolution when Maria and Evelyn entered to bid her good-bye. Maria said good-bye first, and bent her cheek to Ida's lips; then it was Evelyn's turn. The little girl looked at her mother with fixed, solemn eyes, but there were no tears in them. "Mamma is so sorry she cannot even go to the station with her darling little girl," said Ida, "but she is completely exhausted, and has not slept all night." Evelyn continued to look at her, and there came into her face an innocent, uncomplaining accusation. "Mamma cannot tell you how much she feels leaving her precious little daughter," whispered Ida, drawing the little figure, which resisted rigidly, towards her. "She would not do it if she were not afraid of losing her health completely." Evelyn remained in her attitude of constrained affection, bending over her mother. "Mamma will write you very often," continued Ida. "Think how nice it will be for you to get letters! And she will bring you some beautiful things when she comes back." Then Ida's voice broke, and she found her handkerchief under her pillow and put it to her eyes. Evelyn, released from her mother's arm, regarded her with that curiosity and unconscious accusation which was more pitiful than grief. The child was getting her first sense, not of loss, for one cannot lose that which one has never had, but of non-possession of something which was her birthright. When at last they were on the train, Evelyn surprised her sister by weeping violently. Maria tried to hush her, but she could not. Evelyn wept convulsively at intervals all the way to New York. When they were in the cab, crossing the city, Maria put her arm around her sister and tried to comfort her. "What is it, precious?" she whispered. "Do you feel so badly about leaving your mother?" "No," sobbed the little girl. "I feel so badly because I don't feel badly." Maria understood. She began talking to her of her future home in Amity, and the people whom she would see. All at once Maria reflected how Lily would be married to George Ramsey when she returned, that she should see George's wife going in and out the door that might have been the door of her own home, and she also had a keen pang of regret for the lack of regret. She no longer loved George Ramsey. It was nothing to her that he was married to Lily; but, nevertheless, her emotional nature, the best part of her, had undergone a mutilation. Love can be eradicated, but there remains a void and a scar, and sometimes through their whole lives such scars of some people burn. _ |
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