By the Light of the Soul Part 16

"You bet."

"I don't see how he does it!"

"He looks sort of worn-out to me. He's grown awful old, I noticed it to-day."

"Well, all Ida cares for is herself. _She_ don't see he's grown old, you can be sure of that," said Mrs. White, with an odd sort of bitterness. Actually the woman was so filled with maternal instincts that the bare dream of Harry as her Lillian's husband had given her a sort of motherly solicitude for him, which she had not lost. "It's a shame," said she.

"Oh, well, it's none of my funeral," said Lillian, easily. She took a chocolate out of a box which her lover had sent her, and began nibbling it like a squirrel.

"Poor man," said Mrs. White. Tears of emotion actually filled her eyes and mingled with the rheum of her cold. She took out her moist ball of handkerchief again and dabbed both her eyes and nose.

Lillian looked at her half amusedly, half affectionately. "Mother, you do beat the Dutch," said she.

Mrs. White actually snivelled. "I can't help remembering the time when his poor first wife died," said she, "and how he and little Maria came here to take their meals, poor souls. Harry Edgham was just the one to be worked by a woman, poor fellow."

Lillian sucked her chocolate with a full sense of its sweetness. "Ma, you can't keep track of all creation, nor cry over it," said she.

"You've got to leave it to the Lord. Have you taken your pink pellet?"

"Poor little Maria, too," said Mrs. White.

"Good gracious, ma, don't you take to worryin' over her," said Lillian. "Here's your pink pellet. A young one dressed up the way she was to-day!"

"Dress ain't everything, and nothin' is goin' to make me believe that Ida Slome is a good mother to her, nor to her own child neither. It ain't in her."

Lillian, approaching her mother at the window with the pink pellet and a gla.s.s of water, uttered an exclamation. "For the land's sake, there she is now!" she said. "Look, ma, there is Maria in her new suit, and she's got the baby in a little carriage on runners. Just look at the white fur-tails hanging over the back. Ain't that a handsome suit?"

Mrs. White gazed out eagerly. "It must have cost a pile," said she.

"I don't see how he does it."

"She sees you at the window," said Lillian.

Both she and her mother smiled and waved at Maria. Maria bowed, and smiled with a sweet irradiation of her rosy face.

"She's a little beauty, anyhow," said Lillian.

"Dear child," said Mrs. White, and she snivelled again.

"Ma, either your cold or the stuff you are takin' is making you dreadful nervous," said Lillian. "You cry at nothin' at all. How straight she is! No stoop about her."

Maria was, in fact, carrying herself with an extreme straightness both of body and soul. She was conscious to the full of her own beauty in her new suit, and of the loveliness of her little sister in her white fur nest of a sledge. She was inordinately proud. She had asked Ida if she might take the child for a little airing before the early Sunday dinner, and Ida had consented easily.

Ida also wished for an opportunity to talk with Harry about her cherished scheme, and preferred doing so when Maria was not in the house. For manifest reasons, too, Sunday was the best day on which to approach her husband on a subject which she realized was a somewhat delicate one. She was not so sure of his subservience when Maria was concerned, as in everything else, and Sunday was the day when his nerves were less strained, when he had risen late. Ida did not insist upon his going to church, as his first wife had done. In fact, if the truth was told, Harry wore his last winter's overcoat this year, and she was a little doubtful about its appearance in conjunction with her new velvet costume. He sat in the parlor when Ida entered after Maria had gone out with Evelyn. Harry looked at her admiringly.

"How stunning you do look in that velvet dress!" he said.

Ida laughed consciously. "I rather like it myself," said she. "It's a great deal handsomer than Mrs. George Henderson's, and I know she had hers made at a Fifth Avenue tailor's, and it must have cost twice as much."

Ida had filled Harry with the utmost faith in her financial management. While he was spending more than he had ever done, and working harder, he was innocently unconscious of it. He felt a sense of grat.i.tude and wonder that Ida was such a good manager and accomplished such great results with such a small expenditure. He was unwittingly disloyal to his first wife. He remembered the rigid economy under her sway, and owned to himself, although with remorseful tenderness, that she had not been such a financier as this woman. "You ought to go on Wall Street," he often told Ida. He gazed after her now with a species of awe that he had such a splendid, masterful creature for his wife, as she moved with the slow majesty habitual to her out of the room, the black plumes on her hat softly floating, the rich draperies of her gown trailing in sumptuous folds of darkness.

When she came down again, in a rose-colored silk tea-gown trimmed with creamy lace, she was still more entrancing. She brought with her into the room an atmosphere of delicate perfume. Harry had stopped smoking entirely nowadays. Ida had persuaded him that it was bad for him. She had said nothing about the expense, as his first wife had been accustomed to do. Therefore there was no tobacco smoke to dull his sensibilities to this delicate perfume. It was as if a living rose had entered the room. Ida sank gracefully into a chair opposite him. She was wondering how she could easily lead up to the subject in her mind. There was much diplomacy, on a very small and selfish scale, about Ida. She realized the expediency of starting from apparently a long distance, to establish her sequences in order to maintain the appearance of unpremeditativeness.

"Isn't it a little too warm here, dear?" said she, presently, in the voice which alone she could not control. Whenever she had an entirely self-centred object in mind, an object which might possibly meet with opposition, as now, her voice rang harsh and lost its singing quality.

Harry did not seem to notice it. He started up immediately. The portieres between the room and the vestibule were drawn. He had, in fact, felt somewhat chilly. It was a cold day, and he had a touch of the grip. "I will open the portieres, dear," he said. "I dare say you are right."

"I noticed it when I first came in," said Ida. "I meant to draw the portieres apart myself, but going out through the library I forgot it. Thank you, dear. How is your cold?"

"It is nothing, dear," replied Harry. "There is only a little soreness in my throat."

He resumed his seat, and noticed the fragrance of roasted chicken coming through the parted portieres from the kitchen. Harry was very fond of roasted chicken. He inhaled that and the delicate perfume of Ida's garments and hair. He regarded her glowing beauty with affection which had no taint of sensuality. Harry had more of a poetic liking for sweet odors and beauty than a sensual one.

Harry Edgham in these days had a more poetic and spiritual look than formerly. He had not lost his strange youthfulness of expression; it was as if a child had the appearance of having been longer on the earth. His hair had thinned, and receded from his temples, and the bold, almost babyish fulness of his temples was more evident. His face was thinner, too, and he had not much color. His mouth was drawn down at the corner, and he frowned slightly, as a child might, in helpless but non-aggressive dissent. His worn appearance was very noticeable, in spite of his present happy mood, of which his wife shrewdly took advantage.

Ida Edgham did not care for books, although she never admitted that fact, but she could read with her cold feminine astuteness the moods and souls of men, with unerring quickness. Those last were to her advantage or disadvantage, and in anything of that nature she was gifted by nature. Ida Edgham might have been, as her husband might have been, a poet, an adventuress, who could have made the success of her age had she not been hindered, as well as aided, by her self-love. She had the shrewdness which prognosticates as well as discerns, and saw the inevitableness of the ultimatum of all irregularities in a world which, however irregular it is in practice, still holds regularity as its model of conduct and progression. Ida Edgham would, in the desperate state of the earth before the flood, have made herself famous. As it was, her irregular talents had a limited field; however, she did all she could. It always seemed to her that, as far as the right and wrong of things went, her own happiness was eminently right, and that it was distinctly wrong for her, or any one else, to oppose any obstacle to it. She allowed the pleasant influences of the pa.s.sing moment to have their full effect upon her husband, and she continued her leading up to the subject by those easy and apparently unrelated sequences which none but a diplomat could have managed.

"Thank you, dear," she said, when Harry resumed his seat. "The air is cold but very clear and pleasant out to-day," she continued.

"It looks so," said Harry.

"Still, if I were you, I think I would not go out; it might make your cold worse," said Ida.

"No, I think it would be full as well for me to stay in to-day,"

replied Harry happily. He hemmed a little as he spoke, realizing the tickle in his throat with rather a pleasant sense of importance than annoyance. He stretched himself luxuriously in his chair, and gazed about the warm, perfumed, luxurious apartment.

"You have to go out to-morrow, anyway," said Ida, and she increased his sense of present comfort by that remark.

"That is so," said Harry, with a slight sigh.

Lately it had seemed harder than ever before for him to start early in the black winter mornings and hurry for his train. Then, too, he had what he had never had before, a sense of boredom, of ennui, so intense that it was almost a pain. The deadly monotony of it wearied him. For the first time in his life his harness of duty chafed his spirit. He was so tired of seeing the same train, the same commuters, taking the same path across the station to the ferry-boat, being jostled by the same throng, going to the same office, performing the same, or practically the same, duties, that his very soul was irritated. He had reached a point where he not only needed but demanded a change, but the change was as impossible, without destruction, as for a planet to leave its...o...b..t.

Ida saw the deepening of the frown on his forehead and the lengthening of the lines around his mouth.

"Poor old man!" said she. "I wish I had a fortune to give you, so you wouldn't have to go."

The words were fairly cooing, but the tone was still harsh. However, Harry brightened. He regarded this lovely, blooming creature and inhaled again the odor of dinner, and reflected with a sense of grat.i.tude upon his mercies. Harry had a grateful heart, and was always ready to blame himself.

"Oh, I should be lost, go all to pieces, if I quit work," he said, laughing. "If I were left a fortune, I should land in an insane asylum very likely, or take to drink. No, dear, you can't teach such an old bird new tricks; he's been in one tree too long, summer and winter."

"Well, after all, you have not got to go out to-day," remarked Ida, skilfully, and Harry again stretched himself with a sense of present comfort.

"That is so, dear," he said.

"I have something you like for supper, too," said Ida, "and I think George Adams and Louisa may drop in and we can have some music."

Harry brightened still more. He liked George Adams, and the wife had more than a talent for music, of which Harry was pa.s.sionately fond.

She played wonderfully on Ida's well-tuned grand piano.

"I thought you might like it," said Ida, "and I spoke to Louisa as I was coming out of church."