By the Light of the Soul Part 33

"I'm cryin' 'cause--'cause--" panted the child.

"Because what, darling?"

"Because you are crying, and--and--"

"And what?"

"'Cause I 'ain't got anything to cry for."

"Why, you precious darling!" said Maria. She hugged the child close, and all at once a sense of peace and comfort came over her, even in the face of approaching disaster. She sensed the love and pity which holds the world, through this little human key-note of it which had struck in her ears.

Chapter XVII

Harry Edgham's disease proved to be one of those concerning which no physician can accurately calculate its duration or termination. It had, as diseases often have, its periods of such utter quiescence that it seemed as if it had entirely disappeared. It was not a year after Harry had received his indeterminate death sentence before he looked better than he had done for a long while. The color came back to his cheeks, his expression regained its youthful joyfulness.

Everybody said that Harry Edgham was quite well again. He had observed a certain diet and taken remedies; then, in the summer, he took, for the first time for years, an entire vacation of three weeks, and that had its effect for the better.

Maria began to be quite easy with regard to her father's health. It seemed to her that, since he looked so well, he must be well. Her last winter at the Lowe Academy was entirely free from that worriment. Then, too, Wollaston Lee had graduated and begun his college course, and she no longer had him constantly before her eyes, bringing to memory that bewildering, almost maddening experience of theirs that night in New York. She was almost happy, in an odd, middle-aged sort of fashion, during her last term at the academy before her graduation. She took great pride in her progress in her studies. She was to graduate first of her cla.s.s. She did not even have to work very hard to accomplish it. Maria had a mind of marvellous quickness of grasp. Possibly her retentive powers were not entirely in proportion, but, at all events, she accomplished much with comparatively little labor.

Harry was very proud of her. The evening before her graduation Ida had gone to New York to the theatre and Evelyn was in bed, and Maria dressed herself in her graduation gown, which was charming--Ida had never neglected her, in respect to dress, at least--and came down to show herself to her father. He would not be able to be present at the graduation on account of an unusual press of business. Maria came so lightly that she almost seemed to float into the room, with her fine white draperies trailing behind her and her knots of white ribbon fluttering, and stood before her father.

"Father," said she, "I want you to see the way I'll look to-morrow.

Isn't this dress pretty?"

"Lovely," said Harry. "It is very becoming, too," he added.

Indeed, Maria really looked pretty again in this charming costume.

During the last few months her cheeks had filled out and she had gotten some lovely curves of girlhood. Her eyes shone with a peculiar brilliancy, her red lips trembled into a smile, her hair, in a fluff above her high forehead, caught the light.

Maria laughed gayly. "Take care, father, or you will make me vain,"

she said.

"You have some reason to be," Harry said, honestly. "You are going to graduate first in your cla.s.s, and--well, you are pretty, dear--at least you are to father, and, I guess, to other folks."

Maria blushed. "Only to father, because he is partial," she said.

Then she went up to him and rubbed her blooming cheek against his.

"Do you know what makes me happier than anything else?" she said--"happier than graduating first, happier than my pretty dress, happier than anything?"

"No. What, dear?"

"Feeling that you are well again."

There was an almost imperceptible pause before Harry replied. Then he said, in his pleasant voice, which had never grown old, "Yes, dear; I am better, dear, I think."

"Think," Maria said, gayly. "Why, you are well, father. Don't you know you are well?"

"Yes, I think I am better, dear."

"Better? You are well. n.o.body can look as young and handsome as you do and be ill, possibly. You are well, father. I know you can't quite get what that horrid old croaking doctor told you out of your mind, but doctors don't know everything. You are well, and that makes me happier than anything else in the world."

Harry laughed a little faintly. "Well, I dare say you are right, dear," he said.

"Right?--of course I am right," said Maria. Then she danced off to change her gown.

After she had gone, Harry rose from the chair; he had been sitting beside the centre-table with the evening paper. He walked over to the window and looked out at the night. It was bright moonlight. The trees were in full leaf, and the shadows were of such loveliness that they fairly seemed celestial. Harry gazed out at the night scene, at the moon riding through the unbelievable and unfathomable blue of the sky, like a crystal ball, with a slight following of golden clouds; he gazed at the fairy shadows which transformed the familiar village street into something beyond earth, and he sighed. The conviction of his approaching dissolution had never been so strong as at that moment. He seemed fairly to see his own mortality--that gate of death which lay wide open for him. Yet, all at once, a sense of peace and trust almost ineffable came over him. Death seemed merely the going-out into the true open, the essence of the moonlight and the beauty. It seemed the tasting and absorbing the food for his own spiritual hunger, which had been upon him from birth, that which had always been just out of his reach. When Maria returned in her pink gingham school-gown, she found her father seated beside the table as he had been when she left. He looked up at her with a bright smile which somehow chilled her, although she tried to drive the conviction of the chill from her mind. She got a new book from the case, and proposed reading aloud to him.

"Hadn't you better go to bed, dear?" said Harry. "You will have a hard day to-morrow."

"No; I am going to sit up with you till She comes home," said Maria, "and we might as well amuse ourselves." She began to read, and Harry listened happily. But Maria, whenever she glanced over her book at her father's happy face, felt the same undefinable chill.

However, when Ida came home and they had a little supper of sardines and crackers, she did not think any more of it. She went to bed with her head full of the morrow and her new gown and the glories awaiting her. She tried not to be vain, but was uncomfortably conscious that she was glad that she was first in her cla.s.s, instead of some other girl or instead of a boy. Maria felt especially proud of ranking ahead of the boys.

The next day was, as she had antic.i.p.ated, one of happy triumph for her. She stood on the stage in her lovely dress and read her valedictory, which, although trite enough, was in reality rather better in style than most valedictories. She received a number of presents, a tiny gold watch from her father among them, and a ring with a turquoise stone from Ida, and quant.i.ties of flowers. The day after the graduation Maria had her photograph taken, with all her floral offerings around her, with a basket of roses on her arm and great bouquets in her lap and on a little photographic table beside her. The basket of roses was an anonymous offering. It came with no card. If Maria had dreamed that Wollaston Lee had sent it, she would never have sat for her photograph with it on her arm. But she did not think of Wollaston at all that day. He was completely out of her mind for the time, swallowed up in her sense of personal joy and triumph.

Wollaston had not graduated first in his cla.s.s in the academy the year before. A girl had headed that cla.s.s also. Maria had felt a malicious joy at the fact, at the time, and it was entirely beyond her imagination now that Wollaston, who had seemed to dislike her, although she was forced to admit that he had been exceedingly honorable, had sent roses to her. She suspected that one of the teachers, a young man who had paid, in a covert and shamefaced way, a little attention to her, had sent the basket. She thought the roses lovely, and recognized the inadvisability of thanking this teacher, since he had not enclosed his card. She did not like him very well--indeed, she felt a certain repugnance to him--but roses were roses, and she was a young girl.

"Who gave you the basket of roses, dear?" her father asked when she was displaying her trophies the day after her graduation.

Maria blushed. "I don't know," said she; "there wasn't any card with them." As she spoke she seemed to see the face of the young history teacher, Mr. Latimer, with his spa.r.s.e, sandy beard, and she felt how very distasteful he was to her, even if gilded, so to speak, by roses.

"I think some enamoured boy in her cla.s.s who was too shy to send his card with his floral offering was the one," Ida said to Harry when Maria had gone out. She laughed a softly sarcastic laugh.

Harry looked at her uneasily.

"Maria is too young to get such ideas into her head," he said.

"My dear," said Ida, "you forget that such ideas do not get into girls' heads; they are born in them."

"I presume one of the other girls sent them," said Harry, almost angrily.

"Perhaps," replied Ida, and again she laughed her soft, sarcastic laugh, which grated terribly on Harry. It irritated him beyond measure that any boy should send roses to this little, delicate, fair girl of his. For all he had spoken of her marriage, the very idea of confiding her to any other man than himself made him furious.

Especially the idea of some rough school-boy, who knew little else than to tumble about in a football game and was not his girl's mental equal, irritated him. He went over in his mind all the boys in her cla.s.s. The next morning, going to New York, Edwin Shaw, who had lost much of his uncouthness and had divorced himself entirely from his family in the matter of English, was on the train, and he scowled at him with such inscrutable fierceness that the boy fairly trembled. He always bowed punctiliously to Maria's father, and this morning Maria was with her father. She was to have a day off: sit in her father's office and read a book until noon, then go to lunch with him at a French restaurant, then go to the matinee. She wore a festive silk waist, and looked altogether lovely, the boy thought.

"Who is that great gawk of a fellow?" asked Harry of Maria.

"Edwin Shaw. He was in my cla.s.s," replied Maria, and she blushed, for no earthly reason except that her father expected her to do so. Young girls are sometimes very ready, even to deceit, to meet the emotional expectations of their elders. Harry then and there made up his mind that Edwin Shaw was the sender of the basket of roses.

"He comes of a family below par, and he shows it," he said, viciously, to Maria. He scowled again at Edwin's neck, which was awkwardly long above his collar, but the boy did not see it. He sat on the opposite side of the car a seat in advance.

Harry said again to Maria, when they had left the train, and Edwin, conscious of his back, which he was straightening, was striding in front of them, what a great gawk of a fellow he was, and how he came of a family below par. Maria a.s.sented indifferently. She did not dream of her father's state of mind, and, as for Edwin Shaw, he was no more to her than a set of car-steps, not so much, because the car-steps were of obvious use.

That very night, when Maria and her father reached home after a riotous day in the city, there was a letter in the post-office from Aunt Maria, to the effect that there was no doubt that Maria could have the school in Amity in the fall. The teacher who had held the position was to be married in a few weeks. The salary was not much--Amity was a poor little country village--but Maria felt as if she had expectations of untold wealth. She was sorry at the prospect of leaving her father and Evelyn, but the idea of self-support and independence, and taking a little of the burden from her father, intoxicated her. Maria had the true spirit of the women of her race.

She liked the feel of her own muscles and nerves of individuality and self-reliance. She felt a head taller after she had read her aunt's letter.

"She says she will board me for four dollars a week," she said. "I shall have quite a lot of money clear."

"Well, four dollars a week will recompense her, and help her, too,"

said Harry, a little gloomily. To tell the truth, he did not in the least like the idea of Maria's going to Amity to teach. Nothing except the inner knowledge of his own failing health could have led him to consent to it. Ida was delighted at the news, but she concealed her delight as well as her annoyance under her smiling mask, and immediately began to make plans for Maria's wardrobe.