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

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"It is only I and Evelyn," replied Maria.

Then the door was opened, and Aunt Maria, in her ruffled night-gown
and cap, holding a streaming lamp, stood back hastily lest somebody
see her. "Come in and shut the door quick, for goodness sake!" said
she. "I am all undressed."

Maria and Evelyn went in, and Maria closed and locked the door.

"What have you come home for?" asked Aunt Maria. "Why didn't you go
to the reception, and stay at Miss Thomas's, the way you said you
were going to, I'd like to know?"

"Evelyn didn't feel very well, and I thought we'd better come home,"
replied Maria, with a little note of evasion in her voice.

Aunt Maria turned and looked sharply at Evelyn, who was leaning
against the wall. She was faint again, and she looked, in her white
dress with her slender curves, like a bas-relief. "What on earth is
the matter with her?" asked Aunt Maria in her angry voice, which was
still full of the most loving concern. She caught hold of Evelyn's
slight arm. "You are all tired out, just as I expected," she said. "I
call the whole thing pure tomfoolery. If girls want to get educated,
let them, but when it comes to making such a parade when they are all
worn out with education there is no sense in it. Maria, you get her
up-stairs to bed."

Evelyn was too exhausted to make any resistance. She allowed Maria to
assist her up-stairs and undress her. When her sister bent over her
to kiss her good-night, she said, soothingly, "There now, darling; go
to sleep. You will feel better now school is done and you will have a
chance to rest."

But Evelyn responded with the weakest and most hopeless little sob.

"Don't cry, precious," said Maria.

"Won't you tell if I tell you something?" said Evelyn, raising
herself on one slender arm.

"No, dear."

"Well--he does--care a good deal about me. I know now. I--I met him
out in the grove after the exercises were over, and--there was nobody
there, and he--he caught hold of my arms, and, Maria, he looked at
me, but--" Evelyn burst into a weak little wail.

"What is it, dear?"

"Oh, I don't know what it is, but for some reason he thinks he can't
tell me. He did not say so, but he made me know, and--and oh, Maria,
he is going away! He is not coming back to Westbridge at all. He is
going to get another place!"

"Nonsense!"

"Yes, it is so. He said so. Oh, Maria! you will think I am dreadful,
and I do love you and Aunt Maria and Uncle Henry and Aunt Eunice, but
I can't help minding his going away where I can never see him, more
than anything else in the world. I can't help loving him most. I do
feel so very badly, sister, that I think I shall die."

"Nonsense, darling."

"Yes, I shall. And I am not ashamed now. I was ashamed because I
thought so much about a man who did not care anything about me, but
now I am not ashamed. I am just killed. A person is not to blame for
being killed. I am not ashamed. I am killed. He is going away, and I
shall never see him again. The sight of him was something; I shall
not even have that. You don't know, sister. I don't love him for my
own self, but for himself. Just the knowing he is near is something,
and I shall not even have that." Evelyn was too weak to cry
tumultuously, but she made little, futile moans, and clung to Maria's
hand. Maria tried to soothe her, and finally the child, worn out,
seemed to be either asleep or in the coma of exhaustion.

Then Maria went into her own room. She undressed, and sat down beside
the window with a wrapper over her night-gown. Now she had to solve
her problem. She began as she might have done with a problem in
higher algebra, this problem of the human heart and its emotions. She
said to herself that there were three people. Evelyn, Wollaston and
herself, three known quantities, and an unknown quantity of
happiness, and perhaps life itself, which must be evolved from them.
She eliminated herself and her own happiness not with any particular
realization of self-sacrifice. She came of a race of women to whom
self-sacrifice was more natural than self-gratification. She was
unhappy, but there was no struggle for happiness to render the
unhappiness keener. She thought first of Evelyn. She loved Wollaston.
Maria reasoned, of course, that she was very young. This first love
might not be her only one, but the girl's health might break under
the strain, and she took into consideration, as she had often done,
the fairly abnormal strength of Evelyn's emotional nature in a slight
and frail young body. Evelyn was easily one who might die because of
a thwarted love. Then Maria thought of Wollaston, and, loving him as
she did, she acknowledged to herself coolly that he was the first to
be considered, his happiness and well being. Even if Evelyn did break
her heart, the man must have the first consideration. She tried to
judge fairly as to whether she or Evelyn would on the whole be the
best for him. She estimated herself, and she estimated Evelyn, and
she estimated the man. Wollaston Lee was a man of a strong nature,
she told herself. He was capable of self-restraint, of holding his
head up from his own weaknesses forever. Maria reasoned that if he
had been a weaker man she would have loved him just the same, and in
that case Evelyn would have been the one to be sacrificed. She
thought that a girl like Evelyn would not have been such a good wife
for a weak man as she herself, who was stronger. But Wollaston did
not need any extraneous strength. On the contrary, some one who was
weaker than he might easily strengthen his strength. It seemed to her
that Evelyn was distinctly better for the man than she. Then she
remembered the look which she had seen on his face when Evelyn began
her essay that day.

"If he does not love her now it is because he is bound to me," she
thought. "He would most certainly love her if it were not for me."

Again it seemed to Maria distinctly better that she should die,
better--that is, for Evelyn and the man. But she had the thought,
with no morbid desire for suicide or any bitterness. It simply seemed
to her as if her elimination would produce that desirable unknown
quantity of happiness.

Elimination and not suicide seemed to her the only course for her to
pursue. She sat far into the night thinking it over. She had great
imagination and great daring. Things were possible to her which would
not have been possible to many--that is, she considered things as
possibilities which would have seemed to many simply vagaries. She
thought of them seriously, with a belief in their fulfilment. It was
almost morning, the birds had just begun to sing in scattering
flute-like notes, when she crept into bed.

She hardly slept at all. She heard the gathering chorus of the birds,
in a half doze, until seven o'clock. Then she got up and dressed
herself. She peeped cautiously into Evelyn's room. The girl was
sleeping, her long, dark lashes curled upon her wan cheeks. She
looked ghastly, yet still lovely. Maria looked at her, and her mouth
compressed. Then she turned away. She crept noiselessly down the
stairs and into the kitchen where Aunt Maria was preparing breakfast.
The stove smoked a little and the air was blue.

"How is she?" asked Aunt Maria, in a hushed voice.

"She is fast asleep."

"Better let her sleep just as long as she will," said Aunt Maria.
"These exhibitions are pure tomfoolery. She is just tuckered out."

"Yes, I think she is," said Maria.

Aunt Maria looked keenly at her, and her face paled and lengthened.

"Maria Edgham, what on earth is the matter with _you?_" she said.
"You look as bad as she does. Between both of you I am at my wit's
end."

"Nothing ails me," said Maria.

"Nothing ails you? Look at yourself in the glass there."

Maria stole a look at herself in a glass which hung over the
kitchen-table, and she hardly knew her own face, it had gathered such
a strange fixedness of secret purpose. That had altered it more than
her pallor. Maria tried to smile and say again that nothing ailed
her, but she could not. Suddenly a tremendous pity for her aunt came
over her. She had not thought so much about that. But now she looked
at things from her aunt's point of view, and she saw the pain to
which the poor old woman must be put. She saw no way of avoiding the
giving her the pain, but she suffered it herself. She went up to Aunt
Maria and kissed her.

Aunt Maria started back, and rubbed her face violently. "What did you
do that for?" said she, in a frightened voice. Then she noticed
Maria's dress, which was one which she seldom wore unless she was
going out. "What have you got on your brown suit for this morning?"
said she.

"I thought I would go down to the store after breakfast and get some
embroidery silk for that centre-piece," replied Maria.

As she spoke she seemed to realize what a little thing a lie was, and
how odd it was that she should realize it, who had been brought up to
speak the truth.

"Your gingham would have been enough sight better to have worn this
hot morning," said Aunt Maria, still with that air of terror and
suspicion.

"Oh, this dress is light," replied Maria, going out.

"Where are you going now?"

"Into the parlor."

Aunt Maria stood still, listening, until she heard the parlor door
open. She was still filled with vague suspicion. She did not hear
quite as acutely as formerly, and Maria had no difficulty about
leaving the parlor unheard the second after she entered it, and
getting her hat and coat and a small satchel which she had brought
down-stairs with her from the hat-tree in the entry. Then she opened
the front door noiselessly and stole out. She went rapidly down the
street in the direction of the bridge, which she had been accustomed
to cross when she taught school in Amity. She met Jessy Ramsey, now
grown to be as tall as herself, and pretty with a half-starved,
pathetic prettiness. Jessy was on her way to work. She went out by
the day, doing washings. She stopped when she met Maria, and gave a
little, shy look--her old little-girl look--at her. Maria also
stopped. "Good-morning, Jessy," said she. Then she asked how she was,
if her cough was better, and where she was going to work. Then,
suddenly, to Jessy's utter amazement and rapture, she kissed her. "I
never forget what a good little girl you were," said she, and was
gone. Jessy stood for a moment staring after her. Then she wiped her
eyes and proceed to her scene of labor.

Maria went to the railroad station. She was just in time for a train.
She got on the rear car and sat in the last seat. She looked about
and did not see anybody whom she knew. She recalled how she had run
away before, and how Wollaston had brought her back. She knew that it
would not happen so again. She was on a through train which did not
stop at the station where he had found her. When the train slowed up
a little in passing that station, she saw the bench on the platform
where she had sat, and a curious sensation came over her. She was
like one who has made the leap and realizes that there is nothing
more to dread, and who gets even a certain abnormal pleasure from the
sensation. When the conductor came through the car she purchased her
ticket for New York, and asked when the train was due in the city.
When she learned that it was due at an hour so late that it would be
impossible for her to go, as she had planned, to Edgham that night,
she did not, even then, for the time being, feel in the least
dismayed. She had plenty of money. Her last quarter's salary was in
her little satchel. The train was made up of Pullmans only, and it
was by a good chance that she had secured a seat. She gazed out of
the large window at the flying landscape, and again that sense of
pleasure in the midst of pain was over her. The motion itself was
exhilarating. She seemed to be speeding past herself and her own
anxieties, which suddenly appeared as petty and evanescent as the
flying telegraph-poles along the track. "It has to be over some
time," she reflected. "Nothing matters." She felt comforted by a
realization of immensity and the continuance of motion. She
comprehended her own atomic nature in the great scheme of things. She
had never done so before. Her own interests had always loomed up
before her like a beam in the eye of God. Now she saw that they were
infinitesimal, and the knowledge soothed her. She leaned her head
back and dozed a little. She was awakened by the porter thrusting a
menu into her hands. She ordered something. It was not served
promptly, and she had no appetite. There was some tea which tasted of
soap.

Chapter XXXVII

There were very few people in this car, for the reason that there had
recently been a terrible rear-end collision on the road, and people
had flocked into the forward cars. There were three young girls who
filled the car with chatter, and irritated Maria unreasonably. They
were very pretty and well dressed, and with no reserve. They were as
inconsequently confidential about their own affairs as so many
sparrows, but more intelligible. One by one the men left and went
into the smoker, before this onslaught of harsh trebles shrieking
above the roar of the train, obtruding their little, bird-like
affairs, their miniature hoppings upon the stage of life, upon all in
the car.

Finally, there were none left in the car except Maria, these young
girls, an old lady, who accosted the conductors whenever they entered
and asked when the train was due in New York (a tremulous, vibratory
old lady in antiquated frills and an agitatedly sidewise bonnet, and
loose black silk gloves), and across the aisle a tiny, deformed
woman, a dwarf, in fact, with her maid. This little woman was richly
dressed, and she had a fine face. She was old enough to be Maria's
mother. Her eyes were dark and keen, her forehead domelike, and her
square, resigned chin was sunken in the laces at her throat. Her maid
was older than she, and waited upon her with a faithful solicitude.
The little woman had some tea, which the maid produced from a small
silver caddy in a travelling-bag, and the porter, with an obsequious
air, brought boiling water in two squat, plated tea-pots. It was the
tea which served to introduce Maria. She had just pushed aside, with
an air half of indifference, half of disgust, her own luke-warm
concoction flavored with soap, when the maid, at her mistress's
order, touched the bell. When the porter appeared, Maria heard the
dwarf ask for another pot of boiling water, and presently the maid
stood beside her with a cup of fragrant tea.

"Miss Blair wishes me to ask if you will not drink this instead of
the other, which she fears is not quite satisfactory," the maid said,
in an odd, acquired tone and manner of ladyism, as if she were
repeating a lesson, yet there seemed nothing artificial about it. She
regarded Maria with a respectful air. Maria looked across at the
dwarf woman, who was looking at her with kindly eyes which yet seemed
aloof, and a half-sardonic, half-pleasant smile.

Maria thanked her and took the tea, which was excellent, and
refreshed her. The maid returned to her seat, facing her mistress.
They had finished their luncheon. She leaned back in her chair with a
blank expression of face. The dwarf looked out of the window, and
that same half-pleasant, half-sardonic smile remained upon her face.
It was as if she regarded all nature with amused acquiescence and
sarcasm, at its inability to harm her, although it had made the
endeavor.

Maria glanced at her very rich black attire, and a great pearl cross
which gleamed at her throat, and she wondered a little about her.
Then she turned again to the flying landscape, and again that sense
of unnatural peace came over her. She did not think of Evelyn and
Wollaston, or her aunts and uncle, whom she was leaving, except with
the merest glance of thought. It was as if she were already in
another world.

The train sped on, and the girls continued their chatter, and their
high-shrieking trebles arose triumphant above all the clatter. It was
American girlhood rampant on the shield of their native land. Still
there was something about the foolish young faces and the inane
chatter and laughter which was sweet and even appealing. They became
attractive from their audaciousness and their ignorance that they
were troublesome. Their confidence in the admiration of all who saw
and heard almost compelled it. Their postures, their crossing their
feet with lavish displays of lingerie and dainty feet and hose, was
possibly the very boldness of innocence, although Maria now and then
glanced at them and thought of Evelyn, and was thankful that she was
not like them.

The little dwarf also glanced now and then at them with her pleasant
and sardonic smile and with an unruffled patience. She seemed either
to look up from the depths of, or down from the heights of, her
deformity upon them, and to hardly sense them at all. None of the men
returned until a large city was reached, where some of them were to
get off. Then they lounged into the car, were brushed, took their
satchels, and when the train reached the station swung out, with the
unfailing trebles still in their ears.

Before the train reached New York, all the many appurtenances had
vanished from the car. The chattering girls also had alighted at a
station, with a renewed din like a flock of birds, and there were
then left in the rear car only Maria, the dwarf woman, and her maid.

It was not until the train was lighted, and she could no longer see
anything from the window except signal-lights and lighted windows of
towns through which they whirled, that Maria's unnatural mood
disappeared. Suddenly she glanced around the lighted car, and terror
seized her. She was no longer a very young girl; she had much
strength of character, but she was unused to the world. For the first
time she seemed to feel the cold waters of it touch her very heart.
She thought of the great and terrible city into which she was to
launch herself late at night. She considered that she knew absolutely
nothing about the hotels. She even remembered, vaguely, having heard
that no unattended woman was admitted to one, and then she had no
baggage except her little satchel. She glanced at herself in the
little glass beside her seat, and her pretty face all at once
occurred to her as being a great danger rather than an advantage. Now
she wished for her aunt Maria's face instead of her own. She imagined
that Aunt Maria might have no difficulty even under the same adverse
circumstances. She looked years younger than she was. She thought for
a moment of going into the lavatory and rearranging her hair, with a
view to making herself look plain and old, as she had done before,
but she recalled the enormous change it had made in her appearance,
and she was afraid to do that lest it should seem a suspicious
circumstance to the conductors and her fellow-passengers. She glanced
across the aisle at the dwarf woman, and their eyes met, and suddenly
a curious sort of feeling of kinship came over the girl. Here was
another woman outside the pale of ordinary life by physical
conditions, as she herself was by spiritual ones. The dwarf's eyes
looked fairly angelic and heavenly to her. She saw her speak in a
whisper to her maid, and the woman immediately arose and came to her.

"Miss Blair wishes me to ask if you will be so kind as to go and
speak to her; she has something which she wishes to say to you," she
said, in the same parrot-like fashion.

Maria arose at once, and crossed the aisle and seated herself in the
chair which the maid vacated. The maid took Maria's at a nod from her
mistress.

The little woman looked at Maria for a moment with her keen, kind
eyes and her peculiar smile deepened. Then she spoke. "What is the
matter?" she asked.

Maria hesitated.

The dwarf looked across at her maid. "She will not understand
anything you say," she remarked. "She is well trained. She can hear
without hearing--that is her great accomplishment."

Still Maria said nothing.

"You got on at Amity," said the dwarf. "Is that where you live?"

"Yes."

"What is your name?"

Maria closed her mouth firmly.

The dwarf laughed. "Oh, very well," said she. "If you do not choose
to tell it, I can. Your name is Ackley--Elizabeth Ackley. I am glad
to meet you, Miss Ackley."

Maria paled a little, but she said nothing to disapprove this
extraordinary statement.

"My name is Blair--Miss Rosa Blair," said the dwarf. "I am a rose,
but I happened to bloom outside the pale." She laughed gayly, but
Maria's eyes upon her were pitiful. "You are also outside the pale in
some way," said Miss Blair. "I always know such people when I meet
them. There is an affinity between them and myself. The moment I saw
you I said to myself: she also is outside the pale, she also has
escaped from the garden of life. Well, never mind, child; it is not
so very bad outside when one becomes accustomed to it. I am. Perhaps
you have not had time; but you will have. What is the matter?"

"I am running away," replied Maria then.

"Running away! From what?"

"It is better for me to be away," said Maria, evading the question.
"It would be better if I were dead."

"But you are not," said the dwarf, with a quick movement almost of
alarm.

"No," said Maria; "and I see no reason why I shall not live to be an
old woman."

"I don't either," said Miss Blair. "You look healthy. You say, better
if you were dead--better for whom, yourself or others?"

"Others."

"Oh!" said Miss Blair. She remained quietly regardful of Maria for a
little while, then she spoke again. "Where are you going when you
reach New York?" she asked.

"I was going out to Edgham, but I shall miss the last train, and I
shall have to go to a hotel," replied Maria, and she looked at the
dwarf with an expression of almost childish terror.

"Don't you know that it may be difficult for a young girl alone? Have
you any baggage?"

Maria looked at her little satchel, which she had left beside her
former chair.

"Is that all?" asked Miss Blair.

"Yes."

"You must certainly not think of trying to go to a hotel at this time
of night," said the dwarf. "You must go home with me. I am entirely
safe. Even your mother would trust you with me, if you have one."

"I have not, nor father, either," replied Maria. "But I am not afraid
to trust you for myself."

A pleased expression transfigured Miss Blair's face. "You do not
distrust me and you do not shrink from me?" she said.

"No," replied Maria, looking at her with indescribable gratitude.

"Then it is settled," said the dwarf. "You will come home with me. I
expect my carriage when we arrive at the station. You will be
entirely safe. You need not look as frightened as you did a few
moments ago again. Come home with me to-night; then we will see what
can be done."

Miss Blair turned her face towards the window. Her big chair almost
swallowed her tiny figure, the sardonic expression had entirely left
her face, which appeared at once noble and loving. Maria gazed at her
as she sat so, with an odd, inverted admiration. It seemed
extraordinary to her she should actually admire any one like this
deformed little creature, but admire her she did. It was as if she
suddenly had become possessed of a sixth sense for an enormity of
beauty beyond the usual standards.

Miss Blair glanced at her and saw the look in her eyes, and a look of
triumph came into her own. She bent forward towards Maria.

"You are sheltering me as well as I am sheltering you," she said, in
a low voice.

Maria did not know what to say. Miss Blair leaned back again and
closed her eyes, and a look of perfect peace and content was on her
face.

It was not long before the train rolled into the New York tunnel.
Miss Blair's maid rose and took down her mistress's travelling cloak
of black silk, which she brushed with a little, ivory brush taken
from her travelling-bag.

"This young lady is going home with us, Adelaide," said Miss Blair.

"Yes, ma'am," replied the maid, without the slightest surprise.

She took Maria's coat from the hook where it swung, and brushed it
also, and assisted her to put it on before the porter entered the car.

Maria felt again in a daze, but a great sense of security was over
her. She had not the slightest doubt of this strange little creature
who was befriending her. She felt like one who finds a ledge of
safety on a precipice where he had feared a sheer descent. She was
content to rest awhile on the safe footing, even if it were only
transient.

When they alighted from the train at the station a man in livery met
them and assisted Miss Blair down the steps with obsequiousness.

"How do you do, James?" said Miss Blair, then went on to ask the man
what horses were in the carriage.

"The bays, Miss Blair," replied the man, respectfully.

"I am glad of that," said his mistress, as she went along the
platform. "I was afraid Alexander might make a mistake and put in
those new grays. I don't like to drive with them at night very well."
Then she said to Maria: "I am very nervous about horses, Miss Ackley.
You may wonder at it. You may think I have reached the worst and
ought to fear nothing, but there are worsts beyond worsts."

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