By the Light of the Soul Part 39

Maria knew that she was even cruelly pert to her aunt, but she felt like stinging--like crowding some of the stings out of her own heart.

She asked herself was ever any girl so horribly placed as she was, married, and not married; and now she had seen some one else whom she must shun and try to hate, although she wished to love him. Maria felt instinctively, remembering the old scenes over the garden fence, and remembering how she herself had looked that very day as she started out, with her puffy blue velvet turban rising above the soft roll of her fair hair and her face blooming through a film of brown lace, and also remembering George Ramsey's tone as he asked if he might call, that if she were free that things might happen with her as with other girls; that she and George Ramsey might love each other, and become engaged; that she might save her school money for a trousseau, and by-and-by be married to a man of whom she should be very proud. The patches on George Ramsey's trousers became very dim to her. She admired him from the depths of her heart.

"I guess we had better look at flannels first," Eunice said. "It won't do to get all wool, aside from the expense, for with that Ramsey woman's washing it wouldn't last any time."

She and her aunt made most of their purchases in Adams & Wood's. They succeeded in obtaining quite a comfortable little outfit for Jessy Ramsey, and at last boarded a car laden with packages. Eunice had a fish-net bag filled to overflowing, but Maria, who, coming from the vicinity of New York, looked down on bags, carried her parcels in her arms.

Directly they were seated in the car Eunice gave Maria a violent nudge with her sharp elbow. "He's on this car," she whispered in her ear, with a long hiss which seemed to penetrate the girl's brain.

Maria made an impatient movement.

"Don't you think you ought to just step over and thank him?"

whispered Eunice. "I'll hold your bundles. He's on the other side, a seat farther back. He raised his hat to me."

"Hush! I can't here."

"Well, all right, but I thought it would look sort of polite," said Eunice. Then she subsided. Once in a while she glanced back at George Ramsey, then uneasily at her niece, but she said nothing more.

The car was crowded. Workmen smelling of leather clung to the straps.

One, in the aisle next Maria, who sat on the outside this time, leaned fairly against her. He was a good-looking young fellow, but he had a heavy jaw. He held an unlighted pipe in his mouth, and carried a two-story tin dinner-pail. Maria kept shrinking closer to her aunt, but the young man pressed against her all the more heavily. His eyes were fixed with seeming unconsciousness ahead, but a furtive smile lurked around his mouth.

George Ramsey was watching. All at once he arose and quietly and un.o.btrusively came forward, insinuated himself with a gentle force between Maria and the workman, and spoke to her. The workman muttered something under his breath, but moved aside. He gave an ugly glance at George, who did not seem to see him at all. Presently he sat down in George's vacated seat beside another man, who said something to him with a coa.r.s.e chuckle. The man growled in response, and continued to scowl furtively at George, who stood talking to Maria. He said something about the fineness of the day, and Maria responded rather gratefully. She was conscious of an inward tumult which alarmed her, and made her defiant both at the young man and herself, but she could not help responding to the sense of protection which she got from his presence. She had not been accustomed to anything like the rudeness of the young workman. In New Jersey caste was more clearly defined.

Here it was not defined at all. An employe in a shoe-factory had not the slightest conception that he was not the social equal of a school-teacher, and indeed in many cases he was. There were by no means all like this one, whose mere masculine estate filled him with entire self-confidence where women were concerned. In a sense his ignorance was pathetic. He had honestly thought that the pretty, strange girl must like his close contact, and he felt aggrieved that this other young man, who did not smell of leather and carried no dinner-pail, had ousted him. He viewed Maria's delicate profile with a sort of angry tenderness.

"Say, she's a beaut, ain't she?" whispered the man beside him, with a malicious grin, and again got a surly growl in response.

Maria finally, much to her aunt's delight, said to George that they had been shopping, and thanked him for the articles which his money had enabled them to buy.

"The poor little thing can go to school now," said Maria. There was grat.i.tude in her voice, and yet, oddly enough, still a tinge of reproach.

"If mother and I had dreamed of the true state of affairs we would have done something before," George Ramsey said, with an accent of apology; and yet he could not see for the life of him why he should be apologetic for the poverty of these degenerate relatives of his.

He could not see why he was called upon to be his brother's keeper in this case, but there was something about Maria's serious, accusing gaze of blue eyes, and her earnest voice, that made him realize that he could prostrate himself before her for uncommitted sins. Somehow, Maria made him feel responsible for all that he might have done wrong as well as his actual wrong-doing, although he laughed at himself for his mental att.i.tude. Suddenly a thought struck him. "When are you going to take all these things (how you ever managed to get so much for ten dollars I don't understand) to the child?" he asked, eagerly.

Maria replied, unguardedly, that she intended to take them after supper that night. "Then she will have them all ready for Monday,"

she said.

"Then let me go with you and carry the parcels," George Ramsey said, eagerly.

Maria stiffened. "Thank you," she said, "but Uncle Henry is going with me, and there is no need."

Maria felt her aunt Eunice give a sudden start and make an inarticulate murmur of remonstrance, then she checked herself. Maria knew that her uncle walked a mile from his factory to save car-fare; she knew also that she was telling what was practically an untruth, since she had made no agreement with her uncle to accompany her.

"I should be happy to go with you," said George Ramsey, in a boyish, abashed voice.

Maria said nothing more. She looked past her aunt out of the window.

The full moon was rising, and all at once all the girl's sweet light of youthful romance appeared again above her mental horizon. She felt that it would be almost heaven to walk with George Ramsey in that delicious moonlight, in the clear, frosty air, and take little Jessy Ramsey her gifts. Maria was of an almost abnormal emotional nature, although there was little that was material about the emotion. She dreamed of that walk as she might have dreamed of a walk with a fairy prince through fairy-land, and her dream was as innocent, but it unnerved her. She said again, in a tremulous voice, that she was very much obliged, and murmured something again about her uncle Henry; and George Ramsey replied, with a certain sober dignity, that he should have been very happy.

Soon after that the car stopped to let off some pa.s.sengers, and George moved to a vacant seat in front. He did not turn around again.

Maria looked at his square shoulders and again gazed past her aunt at the full orb of the moon rising with crystalline splendor in the pale amber of the east. There was a clear gold sunset which sent its reflection over the whole sky.

Presently, Eunice spoke in her little, deprecating voice, which had a slight squeak.

"Did you speak to your uncle Henry about going with you this evening?" she asked.

"No, I didn't," admitted Maria, reddening, "but I knew he would be willing."

"I suppose he will be," said Eunice. "But he does get home awful tuckered out Sat.u.r.day nights, and he always takes his bath Sat.u.r.day nights, too."

Eunice looked out of the window with a slight frown. She adored her husband, and the thought of that long walk for him on his weary Sat.u.r.day evening, and the possible foregoing of his bath, troubled her.

"I don't believe George Ramsey liked it," she whispered, after a little.

"I can't help it if he didn't," replied Maria. "I can't go with him, Aunt Eunice."

As they jolted along, Maria made up her mind that she would not ask her uncle to go with her at all; that she would slip out unknown to Aunt Maria and ask the girl who lived in the house on the other side, Lily Merrill, to go with her. She thought that two girls need not be afraid, and she could start early.

As she parted from her aunt Eunice at the door of the house, after they had left the car (Eunice's door was on the side where the Ramseys lived, and Maria's on the Merrill side), she told her of her resolution.

"Don't say anything to Uncle Henry about going with me," said she.

"Why, what are you going to do?"

"I'll get Lily Merrill. I know she won't mind."

Maria and Lily Merrill had been together frequently since Maria had come to Amity, and Eunice accounted them as intimate. She looked hesitatingly a second at her niece, then she said, with an evident air of relief:

"Well, I don't know but you can. It's bright moonlight, and it's late in the season for tramps. I don't see why you two girls can't go together, if you start early."

"We'll start right after supper," said Maria.

"I would," said Eunice, still with an air of relief.

Maria took her aunt's fish-net bag, as well as her own parcels, and carried them around to her aunt Maria's side of the house, and deposited them on the door-step. There was a light in the kitchen, and she could see her aunt Maria's shadow moving behind the curtain, preparing supper. Then she ran across the yard, over the frozen furrows of a last year's garden, and knocked at the side-door of the Merrill house.

Lily herself opened the door, and gave a little, loving cry of surprise. "Why, is it you, dear?" she said.

"Yes. I want to know if you can go over the river with me to-night on an errand?"

"Over the river? Where?"

"Oh, only to Jessy Ramsey's. Aunt Eunice and I have been to Westbridge and bought these things for her, and I want to carry them to her to-night. I thought maybe you would go with me."

Lily hesitated. "It's a pretty lonesome walk," said she, "and there are an awful set of people on the other side of the river."

"Oh, nonsense!" cried Maria. "You aren't afraid--we two together--and it's bright moonlight, as bright as day."

"Yes, I know it is," replied Lily, gazing out at the silver light which flooded everything, but she still hesitated. A light in the house behind gave her a background of light. She was a beautiful girl, prettier than Maria, taller, and with a timid, pliant grace.

Her brown hair tossed softly over her big, brown eyes, which were surmounted by strongly curved eyebrows, her nose was small, and her mouth, and she had a fascinating little way of holding her lips slightly parted, as if ready for a loving word or a kiss. Everybody said that Lily Merrill had a beautiful disposition, albeit some claimed that she lacked force. Maria dominated her, although she did not herself know it. Lily continued to hesitate with her beautiful, startled brown eyes on Maria's face.

"Aren't you afraid?" she said.