By the Light of the Soul Part 58

"He is asleep, that is all, and breathing hard," replied her mother.

"Go back to bed."

"Go back to bed, darling," said Maria.

"What is the matter?" asked Evelyn. She burst into a low, frightened wail.

"Go back to bed this instant, Evelyn," said her mother, and the child fled, whimpering.

Maria stood close to her father. Ida seated herself in a chair beside the table on which the lamp stood. Neither of them spoke again. The dying man continued to breathe his deep, rattling breath, the breath of one who is near the goal of life and pants at the finish of the race. The cook, a large Irishwoman, put her face inside the door.

"The doctor is comin' right away," said she. Then in the same breath she muttered, looking at poor Harry, "Oh, me G.o.d!" and fled, doubtless to pray for the poor man's soul.

Then the doctor's carriage-wheels were heard, and he came up-stairs, ushered by Irene, who stood in the doorway, listening and looking with a sort of alien expression, as if she herself were immortal, and sneered and wondered at it all.

Ida greeted the doctor in her usual manner. "Good-evening, doctor,"

she said, smiling. "I am sorry to have disturbed you at this hour, but Mr. Edgham has an acute attack of indigestion and I could not rouse him, and I thought it hardly wise to wait until morning."

The doctor, who was an old man, unshaven and grim-faced, nodded and went up to the bed. He did not open his medicine-case after he had looked at Harry.

"I suppose you can give him something, doctor?" Ida said.

"There is nothing that mortal man can do, madam," said the doctor, surlily. He disliked Ida Edgham, and yet he felt apologetic towards her that he could do nothing. He in reality felt testily apologetic towards all mankind that he could not avert death at last.

Ida's brilliant color faded then; she ceased to smile. "I think I should have been told," she said, with a sort of hard indignation.

The doctor said nothing. He stood holding Harry's hand, his fingers on the pulse.

"You surely do not mean me to understand that my husband is dying?"

said Ida.

"He cannot last more than a few hours, madam," replied the doctor, with pitilessness, yet still with the humility of one who has failed in a task.

"I think we had better have another doctor at once," said Ida.

"Irene, go down street to the telegraph operator and tell him to send a message for Dr. Lameth."

"He has been consulted, and also Dr. Green and Dr. Anderson, not four weeks ago, and we all agree," said the doctor, with a certain defiance.

"Go, Irene," said Ida.

Irene went out of the room, but neither she nor the cook left the house.

"The madam said to send a telegram," Irene told the cook, "but the doctor said it was no use, and I ain't goin' to stir out a step again to-night. I'm afraid."

The cook, who was weeping beside the kitchen table, hardly seemed to hear. She wept profusely and muttered surrept.i.tiously prayers on her rosary for poor Harry's soul, which pa.s.sed as day dawned.

Chapter XXVII

Maria had always attended church, and would have said, had she been asked, that she believed in religion, that she believed in G.o.d; 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 G.o.d-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 G.o.d, 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 gra.s.s, 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 a.s.sented, 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 fas.h.i.+on. 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 att.i.tude, 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 a.s.sumed 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.