By the Light of the Soul Part 2

"Just getting some cologne to put on your head, to make you feel better, mother," replied Maria, piteously. She thought she must answer her mother's question in spite of her father's prohibition.

Her mother seemed to take no further notice; she turned her face to the wall. "Have--mercy upon me, O Lord, according to Thy loving kindness, according to the mult.i.tude of Thy tender mercies," she shrieked out. Then the words ended with a long-drawn-out "Oh--oh--"

Had Maria not been familiar with the words, she could not have understood them. Not a consonant was fairly sounded, the vowels were elided. She went, feeling as if her legs were sticks, close to her mother's bed, and opened the cologne bottle with hands which shook like an old man's with the palsy. She poured some cologne on the handkerchief and a pungent odor filled the room. She laid the wet handkerchief on her mother's sallow forehead, then she recoiled, for her mother, at the shock of the coldness, experienced a new and almost insufferable spasm of pain. "Let--me alone!" she wailed, and it was like the howl of a dog.

Maria slunk back to the dresser with the handkerchief and the cologne bottle, then she returned to her mother's bedside and seated herself there in a rocking-chair. A lamp was burning over on the dresser, but it was turned low; her mother's convulsed face seemed to waver in unaccountable shadows. Maria sat, not speaking a word, but quivering from head to foot, and her mother kept up her prayers and her verses from Scripture. Maria herself began to pray in her heart. She said it over and over to herself, in unutterable appeal and terror, "O Lord, please make mother well, please make her well." She prayed on, although the groaning wail never ceased.

Suddenly her mother turned and looked at her, and spoke quite naturally. "Is that you?" she said.

"Yes, mother. I'm so sorry you are sick. Father has gone for the doctor."

"You haven't got on enough," said her mother, still in her natural voice.

"I've got on my wrapper."

"That isn't enough, getting up right out of bed so. Go and get my white crocheted shawl out of the closet and put it over your shoulders."

Maria obeyed. While she was doing so her mother resumed her cries.

She said the first half of the twenty-third psalm, then she looked again at Maria seating herself beside her, and said, in her own voice, wrested as it were by love from the very depths of mortal agony. "Have you got your stockings on?" said she.

"Yes, ma'am, and my slippers."

Her mother said no more to her. She resumed her attention to her own misery with an odd, small gesture of despair. The cries never ceased.

Maria still prayed. It seemed to her that her father would never return with the doctor. It seemed to her, in spite of her prayer, that all hope of relief lay in the doctor, and not in the Lord. It seemed to her that the doctor must help her mother. At last she heard wheels, and, in her joy, she spoke in spite of her father's injunction. "There's the doctor now," said she. "I guess he's bringing father home with him."

Again her mother's eyes opened with a look of intelligence, again she spoke in her natural voice. She looked towards the clothes which she had worn during the day, on a chair. "Put my clothes in the closet,"

said she, but her voice strained terribly on the last word.

Maria flew, and hung up her mother's clothes in the closet just before her father and the doctor entered the room. As she did so, the tears came for the first time. She had a ready imagination. She thought to herself that her mother might never put on those clothes again. She kissed the folds of her mother's dress pa.s.sionately, and emerged from the closet, the tears streaming down her face, all the muscles of which were convulsed. The doctor, who was a young man, with a handsome, rather hard face, glanced at her before even looking at the moaning woman in the bed. He said something in a low tone to her father, who immediately addressed her.

"Go right into your own room, and stay there until I tell you to come out, Maria," said he, still in that angry voice, which seemed to have no reason in it. It was the dumb anger of the race against Fate, which included and overran individuals in its way, like Juggernaut.

At her father's voice, Maria gave a hysterical sob and fled. A sense of injury tore her heart, as well as her anxiety. She flung herself face downward on her bed and wept. After a while she turned over on her back and looked at the room. Not one little thing in the whole apartment but served to rack her very soul with the consideration of her mother's love, which she was perhaps about to lose forever. The dainty curtains at the windows, the scarf on the dresser, the chintz cover on a chair--every one her mother had planned. She could not remember how much her mother had scolded her, only how much she had loved her. At the moment of death the memory of love reigns triumphant over all else, but she still felt the dazed sense of injury that her father should have spoken so to her. She could hear the low murmur of voices in her mother's room across the hall.

Suddenly the cries and moans ceased. A great joy irradiated the child. She said to herself that her mother was better, that the doctor had given her something to help her.

She got off the bed, wrapped her little pink garment around her, and stole across the hall to her mother's room. The whole hall was filled with a strange, sweet smell which made her faint, but along with the faintness came such an increase of joy that it was almost ecstasy.

She turned the k.n.o.b of her mother's door, but, before she could open it, it was opened from the other side, and her father's face, haggard and resentful as she had never seen it, appeared.

"Go back!" he whispered, fiercely.

"Oh, father, is mother better?"

"Go back!"

Maria went back, and again the tempest of woe and injury swept over her. Why should her father speak to her so? Why could he not tell her if her mother were better? She sat in her little rocking-chair beside the window, and looked out at the night. She was conscious of a terrible sensation which seemed to have its starting-point at her heart, but which pervaded her whole body, her whole consciousness.

She was conscious of such misery, such grief, that it was like a weight and a pain. She knew now that her mother was no better, that she might even die. She heard no more of the cries and moans, and somehow now, the absence of them seemed harder to bear than they themselves had been. Suddenly she heard her mother's door open. She heard her father's voice, and the doctor's in response, but she still could not distinguish a word. Presently she heard the front door open and close softly. Then her father hurried down the steps, and got into the doctor's buggy and drove away. It was dark, but she could not mistake her father. She knew that he had gone for another doctor, probably Dr. Williams, who lived in the next town, and was considered very skilful. The other doctor was remaining with her mother. She did not dare leave her room again. She sat there watching an hour, and a pale radiance began to appear in the east, which her room faced. It was like dawn in another world, everything had so changed to her. The thought came to her that she might go down-stairs and make some coffee, if she only knew how. Her father might like some when he returned. But she did not know how, and even if she had she dared not leave her room again.

The pale light in the east increased, suddenly rosy streamers, almost like northern lights, were flung out across the sky. She could distinguish things quite clearly. She heard the rattle of wheels, and thought it was her father returning with Dr. Williams, but instead it was the milkman in his yellow cart. He carried a bottle of milk around to the south door. There was something horribly ghastly in that every-day occurrence to the watching child. She realized the interminable moving on of things in spite of all individual sufferings, as she would have realized the revolution of a wheel of torture. She felt that it was simply hideous that the milk should be left at the door that morning, just as if everything was as it had been. When the milkman jumped into his wagon, whistling, it seemed to her as if he were doing an awful thing. The milk-wagon stopped at the opposite house, then moved on out of sight down the street. She wished to herself that the milkman's horse might run away while he was at some door. The rancor which possessed her father, the kicking against the p.r.i.c.ks, was possessing her. She felt a futile rage, like that of some little animal trodden underfoot. A boy whom she knew ran past whooping, with a tin-pail, after the milkman. Evidently his mother wanted some extra milk. The sun was reflected on the sides of the swinging pail, and the flash of light seemed to hurt her, and she felt the same unreasoning wrath against the boy. Why was not w.i.l.l.y Royce's mother desperately sick, like her mother, instead of simply sending for extra milk? The health and the daily swing of the world in its arc of s.p.a.ce seemed to her like a direct insult.

At last it occurred to her that she ought to dress herself. She left the window, brushed her hair, braided it, and tied it with a blue ribbon, and put on her little blue gingham gown which she commonly wore mornings. Then she sat by the window again. It was not very long after that that she saw the doctor coming, driving fast. Her father was with him, and between them sat a woman. She recognized the woman at once. She was a trained nurse who lived in Edgham. "They have got Miss Bell," she thought; "mother must be awful sick." She knew that Miss Bell's wages were twenty-five dollars a week, and that her father would not have called her in except in an extreme case. She watched her father help out the woman, who was stout and middle-aged, and much larger than he. Miss Bell had a dress-suit case, which her father tugged painfully into the house; Miss Bell followed him. She heard his key turn in the lock while the doctor fastened his horse.

She saw the doctor, who was slightly lame, limp around to the buggy after his horse was tied, and take out two cases. She hated him while he did it. She felt intuitively that something terrible was to come to her mother because of those cases. She watched the doctor limp up the steps with positive malevolence. "If he is such a smart doctor, why doesn't he cure himself?" she asked.

She heard steps on the stairs, then the murmur of voices, and the sound of the door opening into her mother's room. A frightful sense of isolation came over her. She realized that it was infinitely worse to be left by herself outside, suffering, than outside happiness. She tried again to pray, then she stopped. "It is no good praying," she reflected, "G.o.d did not stop mother's pain. It was only stopped by that stuff I smelled out in the entry." She could not reason back of that; her terror and misery brought her up against a dead wall. It seemed to her presently that she heard a faint cry from her mother's room, then she was quite sure that she smelled that strange, sweet smell even through her closed door. Then her father opened her door abruptly, and a great whiff of it entered with him, like some ghost of pain and death.

"The doctors have neither of them had any breakfast, and they can't leave her," he said, with a jerk of his elbow, and speaking still with that angry tone towards the unoffending child. "Can you make coffee?"

"I don't know how."

"Good for nothing!" said her father, and shut the door with a subdued bang.

Maria heard him going down-stairs, and presently she heard a rattle in the kitchen, a part of which was under her room. She went out herself and stole softly down the stairs. Her father, with an air of angry helplessness, was emptying the coffee-pot into her mother's nice sink. Maria stood trembling at his elbow. "I don't believe that's where mother empties it," she ventured.

"It has got to be emptied somewhere," said her father, and his tone sounded as if he swore. Maria shrank back. "They've got to have some coffee, anyhow."

Maria's father carried the coffee-pot over to the stove, in which a freshly kindled fire was burning, and set it on it, in the hottest place. Maria stealthily moved it back while he was searching for the coffee in the pantry. She did not know much, but she did know that an empty coffee-pot on such a hot place would come to ruin.

Her father emerged from the pantry with a tin-canister in his hand.

"I've sent a telegram to our aunt Maria for her to come right on,"

said he, "but she can't get here before afternoon. I don't suppose you know how much coffee your mother puts in. I don't suppose you know about anything."

Maria realized dimly that she was a scape-goat, but there was such terrible suffering in her father's face that she had no impulse to rebel. She smelled of the canister which her father held out towards her with a nervously trembling hand. "Why, father, this is tea; it isn't coffee," said she.

"Well, if you don't know anything that a big girl like you ought to know, I should think you might know enough not to try to make coffee with tea," said her father.

Maria looked at her father in a bewildered sort of way. "I guess the coffee is in the other canister," said she, meekly.

"Why didn't you say so then?" demanded her father.

Maria was silent. It seemed to her that her father had gone mad.

Harry Edgham made a ferocious stride across the kitchen to the pantry. Maria followed him. "I guess that is the coffee canister,"

said she, pointing.

"Why didn't you say so, then?" asked her father, viciously, and again Maria made no reply. Her father seized the coffee canister and approached the stove. "I don't suppose you know how much she puts in.

I don't suppose you know anything," said he.

"I guess she puts in about a cupful," said Maria, trembling.

"A cupful! with coffee at the price it is now? I guess she doesn't,"

said her father. He poured the coffee-pot full of boiling water from the tea-kettle, then he tipped the coffee canister into his hand, and put one small pinch into the pot.

"Oh, father," ventured Maria. "I don't believe--"

"You don't believe what?"

"I don't believe that is enough."

"Of course it's enough. Don't you suppose your father knows how to make coffee?"