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Mary E. Wilkins Freeman - By the Light of the Soul

M >> Mary E. Wilkins Freeman >> By the Light of the Soul



By the Light of the Soul

A Novel

By
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman


Author of
"The Debtor" "The Portion of Labor"
"Jerome" "A New England Nun"
Etc. etc.


Illustrations by
Harold M. Brett


New York and London
Harper & Brothers Publishers
1907



Copyright, 1906, by Harper & Brothers.
All rights reserved.
Published January, 1907.



To Harriet and Carolyn Alden



Chapter I


Maria Edgham, who was a very young girl, sat in the church vestry
beside a window during the weekly prayer-meeting.

As was the custom, a young man had charge of the meeting, and he
stood, with a sort of embarrassed dignity, on the little platform
behind the desk. He was reading a selection from the Bible. Maria
heard him drone out in a scarcely audible voice: "Whom the Lord
loveth, He chasteneth," and then she heard, in a quick response, a
soft sob from the seat behind her. She knew who sobbed: Mrs. Jasper
Cone, who had lost her baby the week before. The odor of crape came
in Maria's face, making a species of discordance with the fragrance
of the summer night, which came in at the open window. Maria felt
irritated by it, and she wondered why Mrs. Cone felt so badly about
the loss of her baby. It had always seemed to Maria a most
unattractive child, large-headed, flabby, and mottled, with ever an
open mouth of resistance, and a loud wail of opposition to existence
in general. Maria felt sure that she could never have loved such a
baby. Even the unfrequent smiles of that baby had not been winning;
they had seemed reminiscent of the commonest and coarsest things of
life, rather than of heavenly innocence. Maria gazed at the young man
on the platform, who presently bent his head devoutly, and after
saying, "Let us pray," gave utterance to an unintelligible flood of
supplication intermingled with information to the Lord of the state
of things on the earth, and the needs of his people. Maria wondered
why, when God knew everything, Leon Barber told him about it, and she
also hoped that God heard better than most of the congregation did.
But she looked with a timid wonder of admiration at the young man
himself. He was so much older than she, that her romantic fancies,
which even at such an early age had seized upon her, never included
him. She as yet dreamed only of other dreamers like herself,
Wollaston Lee, for instance, who went to the same school, and was
only a year older. Maria had made sure that he was there, by a
glance, directly after she had entered, then she never glanced at him
again, but she wove him into her dreams along with the sweetness of
the midsummer night, and the morally tuneful atmosphere of the place.
She was utterly innocent, her farthest dreams were white, but she
dreamed. She gazed out of the window through which came the wind on
her little golden-cropped head (she wore her hair short) in cool
puffs, and she saw great, plumy masses of shadow, themselves like the
substance of which dreams were made. The trees grew thickly down the
slope, which the church crowned, and at the bottom of the slope
rushed the river, which she heard like a refrain through the
intermittent soughing of the trees. A whippoorwill was singing
somewhere out there, and the katydids shrieked so high that they
almost surmounted dreams. She could smell wild grapes and pine and
other mingled odors of unknown herbs, and the earth itself. There had
been a hard shower that afternoon, and the earth still seemed to cry
out with pleasure because of it. Maria had worn her old shoes to
church, lest she spoil her best ones; but she wore her pretty pink
gingham gown, and her hat with a wreath of rosebuds, and she felt to
the utmost the attractiveness of her appearance. She, however, felt
somewhat conscience-stricken on account of the pink gingham gown. It
was a new one, and her mother had been obliged to have it made by a
dress-maker, and had paid three dollars for that, beside the
trimmings, which were lace and ribbon. Maria wore the gown without
her mother's knowledge. She had in fact stolen down the backstairs on
that account, and gone out the south door in order that her mother
should not see her. Maria's mother was ill lately, and had not been
able to go to church, nor even to perform her usual tasks. She had
always made Maria's gowns herself until this pink gingham.

Maria's mother was originally from New England, and her conscience
was abnormally active. Her father was of New Jersey, and his
conscience, while no one would venture to say that it was defective,
did not in the least interfere with his enjoyment of life.

"Oh, well, Abby," her father would reply, easily, when her mother
expressed her distress that she was unable to work as she had done,
"we shall manage somehow. Don't worry, Abby." Worry in another
irritated him even more than in himself.

"Well, Maria can't help much while she is in school. She is a
delicate little thing, and sometimes I am worried about her."

"Oh, Maria can't be expected to do much while she is in school," her
father said, easily. "We'll manage somehow, only for Heaven's sake
don't worry."

Then Maria's father had taken his hat and gone down street. He always
went down street of an evening. Maria, who had been sitting on the
porch, had heard every word of the conversation which had been
carried on in the sitting-room that very evening. It did not alarm
her at all because her mother considered her delicate. Instead, she
had a vague sense of distinction on account of it. It was as if she
realized being a flower rather than a vegetable. She thought of it
that night as she sat in meeting. She glanced across at a girl who
went to the same school--a large, heavily built child with a
coarseness of grain showing in every feature--and a sense of
superiority at once exalted and humiliated her. She said to herself
that she was much finer and prettier than Lottie Sears, but that she
ought to be thankful and not proud because she was. She felt vain,
but she was sorry because of her vanity. She knew how charming her
pink gingham gown was, but she knew that she ought to have asked her
mother if she might wear it. She knew that her mother would scold
her--she had a ready tongue--and she realized that she would deserve
it. She had put on the pink gingham on account of Wollaston Lee, who
was usually at prayer-meeting. That, of course, she could not tell
her mother. There are some things too sacred for little girls to tell
their mothers. She wondered if Wollaston would ask leave to walk home
with her. She had seen a boy step out of a waiting file at the vestry
door to a blushing girl, and had seen the girl, with a coy readiness,
slip her hand into the waiting crook of his arm, and walk off, and
she had wondered when such bliss would come to her. It never had. She
wondered if the pink gingham might bring it to pass to-night. The
pink gingham was as the mating plumage of a bird. All unconsciously
she glanced sideways over the fall of lace-trimmed pink ruffles at
her slender shoulders at Wollaston Lee. He was gazing straight at
Miss Slome, Miss Ida Slome, who was the school-teacher, and his young
face wore an expression of devotion. Maria's eyes followed his; she
did not dream of being jealous; Miss Slome seemed too incalculably
old to her for that. She was not so very old, in her early thirties,
but the early thirties to a young girl are venerable. Miss Ida Slome
was called a beauty. She, as well as Maria, wore a pink dress, at
which Maria privately wondered. The teacher seemed to her too old to
wear pink. She thought she ought wear black like her mother. Miss
Slome's pink dress had knots of black velvet about it which
accentuated it, even as Miss Slome's face was accentuated by the
clear darkness of her eyes and the black puff of her hair above her
finely arched brows. Her cheeks were of the sweetest red--not pink
but red--which seemed a further tone of the pink of her attire, and
she wore a hat encircled with a wreath of red roses. Maria thought
that she should have worn a bonnet. Maria felt an odd sort of
instinctive antagonism for her. She wondered why Wollaston looked at
the teacher so instead of at herself. She gave her head a charming
cant, and glanced again, but the boy still had his eyes fixed upon
the elder woman, with that rapt expression which is seen only in the
eyes of a boy upon an older woman, and which is primeval, involving
the adoration and awe of womanhood itself. The boy had not reached
the age when he was capable of falling in love, but he had reached
the age of adoration, and there was nothing in little Maria Edgham in
her pink gingham, with her shy, sidelong glances, to excite it. She
was only a girl, the other was a goddess. His worship of the teacher
interfered with Wollaston's studies. He was wondering as he sat there
if he could not walk home with her that night, if by chance any _man_
would be in waiting for her. How he hated that imaginary man. He
glanced around, and as he did so, the door opened softly, and Harry
Edgham, Maria's father, entered. He was very late, but he had waited
in the vestibule, in order not to attract attention, until the people
began singing a hymn, "Jesus, Lover of my Soul," to the tune of "When
the Swallows Homeward Fly." He was a distinctly handsome man. He
looked much younger than Maria's mother, his wife. People said that
Harry Edgham's wife might, from her looks, have been his mother. She
was a tall, dark, rather harsh-featured woman. In her youth she had
had a beauty of color; now that had passed, and she was sallow, and
she disdained to try to make the most of herself, to soften her stern
face by a judicious arrangement of her still plentiful hair. She
strained it back from her hollow temples, and fastened it securely on
the top of her head. She had a scorn of fashions in hair or dress
except for Maria. "Maria is young," she said, with an ineffable
expression of love and pride, and a tincture of defiance, as if she
were defying her own age, in the ownership of the youth of her child.
She was like a rose-bush which possessed a perfect bud of beauty, and
her own long dwelling upon the earth could on account of that be
ignored. But Maria's father was different. He was quite openly a vain
man. He was handsome, and he held fast to his youth, and would not
let it pass by. His hair, curling slightly over temples boyish in
outlines, although marked, was not in the least gray. His mustache
was carefully trimmed. After he had seated himself unobtrusively in a
rear seat, he looked around for his daughter, who saw him with
dismay. "Now," she thought, her chances of Wollaston Lee walking home
with her were lost. Father would go home with her. Her mother had
often admonished Harry Edgham that when Maria went to meeting alone,
he ought to be in waiting to go home with her, and he obeyed his
wife, generally speaking, unless her wishes conflicted too
strenuously with his own. He did not in the least object to-night,
for instance, to dropping late into the prayer-meeting. There were
not many people there, and all the windows were open, and there was
something poetical and sweet about the atmosphere. Besides, the
singing was unusually good for such a place. Above all the other
voices arose Ida Slome's sweet soprano. She sang like a bird; her
voice, although not powerful, was thrillingly sweet. Harry looked at
her as she sang, and thought how pretty she was, but there was no
disloyalty to his wife in the look. He was, in fact, not that sort of
man. While he did not love his Abby with utter passion, all the women
of the world could not have swerved him from her.

Harry Edgham came of perhaps the best old family in that vicinity,
Edgham itself had been named for it, and while he partook of that
degeneracy which comes to the descendants of the large old families,
while it is as inevitable that they should run out, so to speak, as
flowers which have flourished too many years in a garden, whose soil
they have exhausted, he had not lost the habit of rectitude of his
ancestors. Virtue was a hereditary trait of the Edghams.

Harry Edgham looked at Ida Slome with as innocent admiration as
another woman might have done. Then he looked again at his daughter's
little flower-like head, and a feeling of love made his heart warm.
Maria could sing herself, but she was afraid. Once in a while she
droned out a sweet, husky note, then her delicate cheeks flushed
crimson as if all the people had heard her, when they had not heard
at all, and she turned her head, and gazed out of the open window at
the plumed darkness. She thought again with annoyance how she would
have to go with her father, and Wollaston Lee would not dare accost
her, even if he were so disposed; then she took a genuine pleasure in
the window space of sweet night and the singing. Her passions were
yet so young that they did not disturb her long if interrupted. She
was also always conscious of the prettiness of her appearance, and
she loved herself for it with that love which brings previsions of
unknown joys of the future. Her charming little face, in her
realization of it, was as the untried sword of the young warrior
which is to bring him all the glory of earth for which his soul longs.

After the meeting was closed, and Harry Edgham, with his little
daughter lagging behind him with covert eyes upon Wollaston Lee, went
out of the vestry, a number inquired for his wife. "Oh, she is very
comfortable," he replied, with his cheerful optimism which solaced
him in all vicissitudes, except the single one of actually witnessing
the sorrow and distress of those who belonged to him.

"I heard," said one man, who was noted in the place for his
outspokenness, which would have been brutal had it not been for his
naivete--"I heard she wasn't going to get out again."

"Nonsense," replied Harry Edgham.

"Then she is?"

"Of course she is. She would have come to meeting to-night if it had
not been so damp."

"Well, I'm glad to hear it," said the man, with a curious
congratulation which gave the impression of disappointment.

Little Maria Edgham and her father went up the village street; Harry
Edgham walked quite swiftly. "I guess we had better hurry along," he
observed, "your mother is all alone."

Maria tagged behind him. Her father had to stop at a grocery-store on
the corner of the street where they lived, to get a bag of peaches
which he had left there. "I got some peaches on my way," he
explained, "and I didn't want to carry them to church. I thought your
mother might like them. The doctor said she might eat fruit." With
that he darted into the store with the agility of a boy.

Maria stood on the dusty sidewalk in the glare of electric light, and
waited. Her pink gingham dress was quite short, but she held it up
daintily, like a young lady, pinching a fold between her little thumb
and forefinger. Mrs. Jasper Cone, with another woman, came up, and to
Maria's astonishment, Mrs. Cone stopped, clasped her in her arms and
kissed her. As she did so, she sobbed, and Maria felt her tears of
bereavement on her cheek with an odd mixture of pity and awe and
disgust. "If my Minnie had--lived, she might have grown up to be like
her," she gasped out to her friend. "I always thought she looked like
her." The friend made a sympathetic murmur of assent. Mrs. Cone
kissed Maria again, holding her little form to her crape-trimmed
bosom almost convulsively, then the two passed on. Maria heard her
say again that she always had thought the baby looked like her, and
she felt humiliated. She looked after the poor mother's streaming
black veil with resentment. Then Miss Ida Slome passed by, and
Wollaston Lee was clinging to her arm, pressing as closely to her
side as he dared. Miss Slome saw Maria, and spoke in her sweet, crisp
tone. "Good-evening, Maria," said she.

Maria stood gazing after them. Her father emerged from the store with
the bag of peaches dangling from his hand. He looked incongruous. Her
father had too much the air of a gentleman to carry a paper bag. "I
do hope your mother will like these peaches," he said.

Maria walked along with her father, and she thought with pain and
scorn how singular it was for a boy to want to go home with an old
woman like Miss Slome, when there were little girls like her.



Chapter II


Maria and her father entered the house, which was not far. It was a
quite new Queen Anne cottage of the better class, situated in a small
lot of land, and with other houses very near on either side. There
was a great clump of hydrangeas on the small smooth lawn in front,
and on the piazza stood a small table, covered with a dainty white
cloth trimmed with lace, on which were laid, in ostentatious
neatness, the evening paper and a couple of magazines. There were
chairs, and palms in jardinieres stood on either side of the flight
of wooden steps.

Maria's mother was, however, in the house, seated beside the
sitting-room table, on which stood a kerosene lamp with a singularly
ugly shade. She was darning stockings. She held the stocking in her
left hand, and drew the thread through regularly. Her mouth was
tightly closed, which was indicative both of decision of character
and pain. Her countenance looked sallower than ever. She looked up at
her husband and little girl entering. "Well," she said, "so you've
got home."

"I've brought you some peaches, Abby," said Harry Edgham. He laid the
bag on the table, and looked anxiously at his wife. "How do you feel
now?" said he.

"I feel well enough," said she. Her reply sounded ill-humored, but
she did not intend it to be so. She was far from being ill-humored.
She was thinking of her husband's kindness in bringing the peaches.
But she looked at the paper bag on the table sharply. "If there is a
soft peach in that bag," said she, "and there's likely to be, it will
stain the table-cover, and I can never get it out."

Harry hastily removed the paper bag from the table, which was covered
with a white linen spread trimmed with lace and embroidered.

"Don't you feel as if you could eat one to-night? You didn't eat much
supper, and I thought maybe--"

"I don't believe I can to-night, but I shall like them to-morrow,"
replied Mrs. Edgham, in a voice soft with apology. Then she looked
fairly for the first time at Maria, who had purposely remained behind
her father, and her voice immediately hardened. "Maria, come here,"
said she.

Maria obeyed. She left the shelter of her father's broad back, and
stood before her mother, in her pink gingham dress, a miserable
little penitent, whose penitence was not of a high order. The
sweetness of looking pretty was still in her soul, although Wollaston
Lee had not gone home with her.

Maria's mother regarded her with a curious expression compounded of
pride and almost fierce disapproval. Harry went precipitately out of
the room with the paper bag of peaches. "You didn't wear that new
pink gingham dress that I had to hire made, trimmed with all that
lace and ribbon, to meeting to-night?" said Maria's mother.

Maria said nothing. It seemed to her that such an obvious fact
scarcely needed words of assent.

"Damp as it is, too," said her mother.

Mrs. Edgham extended a lean, sallow hand and felt of the dainty
fabric. "It is just as limp as a rag," said she, "about spoiled."

"I held it up," said Maria then, with feeble extenuation.

"Held it up!" repeated her mother, with scorn.

"I thought maybe you wouldn't care."

"Wouldn't care! That was the reason why you went out the other door
then. I wondered why you did. Putting on that new pink gingham dress
that I had to hire made, trimmed with all that lace and ribbon, and
wearing it out in the evening, damp as it is to-night! I don't see
what you were thinking of, Maria Edgham."

Maria looked down disconsolately at the lace-trimmed ruffles on her
skirt, but even then she thought how pretty it was, and how pretty
she must look herself standing so forlornly before her mother. She
wondered how her mother could scold her when she was her own
daughter, and looked so sweet. She still felt the damp coolness of
the night on her cheeks, and realized a bloom on them like that of a
wild rose.

But Mrs. Edgham continued. She had the high temper of the women of
her race who had brought up great families to toil and fight for the
Commonwealth, and she now brought it to bear upon petty things in
lieu of great ones. Besides, her illness made her irritable. She
found a certain relief from her constant pain in scolding this child
of her heart, whom secretly she admired as she admired no other
living thing. Even as she scolded, she regarded her in the pink dress
with triumph. "I should think you would be ashamed of yourself, Maria
Edgham," said she, in a high voice.

Harry Edgham, who had deposited the peaches in the ice-box, and had
been about to enter the room, retreated. He went out the other door
himself, and round upon the piazza, when presently the smoke of his
cigar stole into the room. Then Mrs. Edgham included him in her wrath.

"You and your father are just alike," said she, bitterly. "You both
of you will do just what you want to, whether or no. He will smoke,
though he knows it makes me worse, besides costing more than he can
afford, and you will put on your best dress, without asking leave,
and wear it out in a damp night, and spoil it."

Maria continued to stand still, and her mother to regard her with
that odd mixture of worshipful love and chiding. Suddenly Mrs. Edgham
closed her mouth more tightly.

"Stand round here," said she, violently. "Let me unbutton your dress.
I don't see how you fastened it up yourself, anyway; you wouldn't
have thought you could, if it hadn't been for deceiving your mother.
You would have come down to me to do it, the way you always do. You
have got it buttoned wrong, anyway. You must have been a sight for
the folks who sat behind you. Well, it serves you right. Stand round
here."

"I am sorry," said Maria then. She wondered whether the wrong
fastening had showed much through the slats of the settee.

Her mother unfastened, with fingers that were at once gentle and
nervous, the pearl buttons on the back of the dress. "Take your arms
out," said she to Maria. Maria cast a glance at the window. "There's
nobody out there but your father," said Mrs. Edgham, harshly, "take
your arms out."

Maria took her arms out of the fluffy mass and stood revealed in her
little, scantily trimmed underwaist, a small, childish figure, with
the utmost delicacy of articulation as to shoulder-blades and neck.
Maria was thin to the extreme, but her bones were so small that she
was charming even in her thinness. Her little, beautifully modelled
arms were as charming as a fairy's.

"Now slip off your skirt," ordered her mother, and Maria complied and
stood in her little white petticoat, with another glance of the
exaggerated modesty of little girlhood at the window.

"Now," said her mother, "you go and hang this up in the kitchen where
it is warm, on that nail on the outside door, and maybe some of the
creases will come out. I've heard they would. I hope so, for I've got
about all I want to do without ironing this dress all over."

Maria gazed at her mother with sudden compunction and anxious love.
After all, she loved her mother down to the depths of her childish
heart; it was only that long custom had so inured her to the loving
that she did not always realize the warmth of her heart because of
it. "Do you feel sick to-night mother?" she whispered.

"No sicker than usual," replied her mother. Then she drew the
delicate little figure close to her, and kissed her with a sort of
passion. "May the Lord look out for you," she said, "if you should
happen to outlive me! I don't know what would become of you, Maria,
you are so heedless, wearing your best things every day, and
everything."

Maria's face paled. "Mother, you aren't any worse?" said she, in a
terrified whisper.

"No, I am not a mite worse. Run along, child, and hang up your dress,
then go to bed; it's after nine o'clock."

It did not take much at that time to reassure Maria. She had
inherited something of the optimism of her father. She carried her
pink dress into the kitchen, with wary eyes upon the windows, and
hung it up as her mother had directed. On her return she paused a
moment at the foot of the stairs in the hall, between the dining-room
and sitting-room. Then, obeying an impulse, she ran into the
sitting-room and threw her soft little arms around her mother's neck.
"I'm real sorry I wore that dress without asking you, mother," she
said. "I won't again, honest."

"Well, I hope you will remember," replied her mother. "If you wear
the best you have common you will never have anything." Her tone was
chiding, but the look on her face was infinitely caressing. She
thought privately that never was such a darling as Maria. She looked
at the softly flushed little face, with its topknot of gold, the
delicate fairness of the neck, and slender arms, and she had a
rapture of something more than possession. The beauty of the child
irradiated her very soul, the beauty and the goodness, for Maria
never disobeyed but she was sorry afterwards, and somehow glorified
faults seem lovelier than cold virtues. "Well, run up-stairs to bed,"
said she. "Be careful of your lamp."

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