By the Light of the Soul Part 34

"Whatever I have new I am going to pay you back, father, now I am going to earn money," Maria said, proudly.

After she went up-stairs to bed that night, Evelyn, who was now a slim, beautiful little girl, rather tall for her age, and going to a private school in the village, came into her room, and Maria told Evelyn how much she was going to do with the money which she was to earn. Maria, at this time, was wholly mercenary. She had not the least ambition to benefit the young. She was, in fact, young herself, but her head was fairly turned with the most selfish of considerations. It was true that she planned to spend the money which she would earn largely upon others, but that was, in itself, a subtle, more rarefied form of selfishness.

"I remember Aunt Maria's parlor carpet was worn almost threadbare, and I mean to buy her a new one with the very first money I earn,"

Maria said to little Evelyn; and she thought, as she met Evelyn's beautiful, admiring eyes, how very kind and thoughtful she, Maria, would be with her wealth.

"I suppose Aunt Maria is very poor," Evelyn remarked, in her charming little voice.

"Oh, very. She lives on a hundred dollars a year."

"Will you get enough to eat?" asked Evelyn, anxiously.

"Oh yes. I shall pay her four dollars a week, and if she got along with only a hundred a year, only think what she can do with that. I know Aunt Eunice, Uncle Henry's wife, hasn't a good dress, either. I think I shall buy a brown satin for her."

"How awful good you are, sister!" said little Evelyn, and Maria quite agreed with her. The conviction of her own goodness, and her forthcoming power to exercise it, filled her soul with a gentle, stimulating warmth after she was in bed. The moonlight shone brightly into her room. She gazed at the bright shaft of silver it made across all her familiar possessions, and, notwithstanding her young girl dreams were gone, she realized that, although she had lost all the usual celestial dreams and rafters of romance which go to make a young girl's air-castle, she had still left some material, even if of less importance.

She spent, on the whole, a very happy summer. Her father looked entirely well; she was busy in preparations for her life in Amity; and, what relieved her the most, Wollaston Lee was not at home for more than five days during the entire vacation. He went camping-out with a party of college-boys. Maria was, therefore, not subjected to the nervous strain of seeing him. During the few days he was at home he had his chum with him, and Maria only saw him twice--once on the street, when she returned his bow distantly and heard with no pleasure the other boy ask who that pretty girl was, and once in church. She gave only the merest side-glance at him in church, and she was not sure that he looked at her at all, but she went home pale and nervous. A secret of any kind is a hard thing for a girl to bear about with her, and Maria's, which was both tragic and absurd, was severer than most. At times it seemed to her, when she looked in her gla.s.s, that all she saw was the secret; it seemed to her, when other people looked at her, that it was all they saw. It was one reason for her readiness to go to Amity. She would there be out of reach of people who could in any way have penetrated her secret. She would not run the risk of meeting Wollaston; of meeting his father and mother, and wondering if he had, after all, told; of meeting Gladys Mann, and wondering if she had told, and knowing that she knew.

Maria, in these last months, saw very little of Gladys, who had sunken entirely into the lower stratum of society in which she belonged. Gladys had left school, where she had not learned much, and she went out cleaning and doing house-work, at seventy-five cents a day. Sometimes Maria met her going to and fro from a place of employment, and at such times there was fear in Maria's face and a pathetic admiration and rea.s.surance in the other girl's. Gladys had grown hard and large as to her bones and muscles, but she did not look altogether well. She had a half-nourished, spiritually and bodily, expression, which did not belie the true state of affairs with her. She had neither enough meat nor enough ideality. She was suffering, and the more because she did not know. Gladys was of the opinion that she was, on the whole, enjoying life and having a pretty good time. She earned enough to buy herself some showy clothes, and she had a lover, a "steady," as she called him. It is true that she was at times a little hara.s.sed by jealousy concerning another girl who had a more fully blown beauty than she, and upon whom she sometimes suspected her lover was casting admiring eyes.

It was at this time that Gladys, whose whole literature consisted of the more pictorial of the daily papers, wrote some badly spelled and very pathetic little letters, asking advice as to whether a girl of her age, who had been keeping steady company with a young man of her lover's age, whom she dearly loved, should make advances if he seemed to exhibit a preference for another girl, and she inquired pitifully of the editor, as of some deity, as to whether she thought her lover did really prefer the other girl to her. These letters, and the answers, were a source of immense comfort to Gladys. Sometimes, when she met Maria, they made her feel almost on terms of equality with her. She doubted if Maria, smart as she was, had ever really appeared in the papers. She wrote her letters under different names, and even sent them from neighboring towns, and walked long distances, when she felt that she wanted to save car-fare, to post them. Once Maria met her as she was walking along with an evening paper in her hand, reading the reply to one of her letters, and Maria wondered at the expression on Gladys's face. She at once pitied, feared, and detested Gladys. She doubted if she were a good girl; she herself, like a nun without even dreams, seemed living in another sphere, she felt so far removed. She was in reality removed, although Gladys, if the truth were told, was not so bad, and she got some good advice from the answers in response to her letters, which restrained her. Still, her view of everything was different. She was different. Black was not as black to her as to Maria; a spade was not so truly a spade. She recognized immorality as a fact, but it did not seem to her of so much importance. In one sense she was more innocent even than Maria, for she had never felt the true living clutch of vice on her soul, even in imagination; she could not. The devil to her was not of enough consequence to enable her to sin in the truest sense of the word. All her family were immoral, and a constant living in an atmosphere of immorality may, in one sense, make one incapable of spiritual sin. One needs to fully sense a sin in order to actually commit it. Gladys could hardly sense sin as Maria could. Still she had a sense of proud virtue after reading the paragraphs of good advice in reply to her letters to the paper, and she felt that it placed her nearer Maria's level. On the occasion when Maria met her reading the paper, she even spoke.

"Hullo, M'ria!" said she.

"Good-evening," Maria replied, politely and haughtily.

But Gladys did not seem to notice the haughtiness. She pressed close to Maria.

"Say!" said she.

"What?" asked Maria.

"Ain't you ever goin' to--?"

"No, I am not," replied Maria, deadly pale, and trembling from head to foot.

"Why don't you write to this paper and ask what you had better do?"

said Gladys. "It's an awful good plan. You do git awful good advice."

"I don't wish to," replied Maria, trying to pa.s.s, but Gladys stood in her way.

"But say, M'ria, you be in an awful box," said she. "You can't never marry n.o.body else without you get locked up, you know."

"I don't want to," Maria said, shortly.

"Mebbe you will."

"I never shall."

"Well, if you do, you had better write to this paper, then you can find out just what to do. It won't tell you to do nothin' wrong, and it's awful sensible. Say, M'ria."

"Well, what?"

"I 'ain't never told a living soul, and I never shall, but I don't see what you are goin' to do if either you or him wants to git married to anybody else."

"I am not worrying about getting married," said Maria. This time she pushed past Gladys. Her knees fairly knocked together.

Gladys looked at her with sympathy and the old little-girl love and adoration. "Well, don't you worry about me tellin'," said she.

Chapter XVIII

Maria began her teaching on a September day. It was raining hard, but there was all about an odd, fict.i.tious golden light from the spray of maple-leaves which overhung the village. Amity was a typical little New England village--that is, it had departed but little from its original type, although there was now a large plant of paper-mills, which had called in outsiders. The outsiders were established by themselves on a sort of Tom Tidler's ground called "Across the River." The river was little more than a brook, except in spring, when, after heavy snows, it sometimes verified its name of the Ramsey River. Ramsey was an old family name in Amity, as Edgham was in Edgham. Once, indeed, the little village had been called Ramsey Four Corners. Then the old Ramsey family waned and grew less in popular esteem, and one day the question of the appropriateness of naming the village after them came up. There was another old family, by the name of Saunders, between whom and the Ramseys had always been a dignified New England feud. The Saunders had held their own much better than the Ramseys. There was one branch especially, to which Judge Josiah Saunders belonged, which was still notable. Judge Josiah had served in the State legislature, he was a judge of the superior court, and he occupied the best house in Amity, a fine specimen of the old colonial mansion house, which had been in the Saunders family for generations. Judge Saunders had made additions to this old mansion, conservative, modern colonial additions, and it was really a n.o.ble building. It was shortly after he had made the additions to his house, and had served his first term as judge of the superior court, that the question of changing the name of the village from Ramsey Four Corners to Saunders had been broached. Meetings had been held, in which the name of our celebrated townsman, the Honorable Josiah Saunders, had been on every tongue. The Ramsey family obtained scant recognition for past merits, but a becoming silence had been maintained as to their present status. The only recognized survivors of the old house of Ramsey at that time were the widow, Amelia Ramsey, the wife of Anderson Ramsey, deceased, as she appeared in the minutes of the meetings, and her son George, a lad of sixteen, and the same who, in patched attire, had made love to Maria over the garden fence when she was a child. It was about that time that the meetings were taking place, and the name of the village had been changed to Amity. It had been held to be a happy, even a n.o.ble and generous thought, on the part of Josiah Saunders. "Would that in such wise, by a combination of poetical aspirations and practical deeds, all differences might be adjusted upon this globe," said the Amity Argus, in an account of the meeting. Thenceforth, Ramsey Four Corners became Amity, and the most genteel of the ladies had Amity engraved on their note-paper.

Mrs. Amelia Ramsey and George, who had suffered somewhat in their feelings, in spite of the poetical adjustment of the difference, had no note-paper. They were poor, else Amity might never have been. They lived in a house which had been, in its day, as pretentious as the Saunders mansion. At the time of Maria's first visit to Amity it had been a weather-beaten old structure, which had not been painted for years, and had a curious effect as of a blur on the landscape, with its roof and walls of rain and sun stained s.h.i.+ngles and clapboards, its leaning chimneys, and its Corinthian pillars widely out of the perpendicular, supporting crazily the roofs of the double veranda.

When Maria went to Amity to begin teaching, the old house had undergone a transformation. She gazed at it with amazement out of the sitting-room window, which faced it, on the afternoon of her arrival.

"Why, what has happened to the old Ramsey house?" she asked her aunt Maria.

"Well, in the first place, a cousin died and left them some money,"

replied Aunt Maria. "It was a matter of ten thousand dollars. Then Amelia and George went right to work and fixed up the house. It was none of my business, but it seemed dreadful silly to me. If I had been in their place, I'd have let that old ramshackle of a place go to pot and bought a nice little new house. There was one they could have got for fifteen hundred dollars, on this side of the river; but no, they went to work, and they must have laid out three thousand clear on that old thing."

"It is beautiful!" said Maria, regarding it with admiration.

"Well, I don't think it's very beautiful, but everybody to their liking," replied Aunt Maria, with a sniff of her high, transparent nostrils. "For my part, I'd rather have a little, clean new house before all the old ones, that folks have died in and worried in, in creation."

But Maria continued to regard the renovated Ramsey house with admiration. It stood close to the street, as is the case with so many old houses in rural New England. It had a tiny brick strip of yard in front, on which was set, on either side of the stoop, a great century-plant in a pot. Above them rose a curving flight of steps to a broad veranda, supported with Corinthian pillars, which were now upright and glistening with white paint, as was the entire house.

"They had it all fixed up, inside and out," said Aunt Maria. "There wasn't a room but was painted and papered, and a good many had to be plastered. They did not get much new furniture, though. I should have thought they'd wanted to. All they've got is awful old. But I heard George Ramsey say he wouldn't swap one of those old mahogany pieces for the best new thing to be bought. Well, everybody to their taste.

If I had had my house all fixed up that way, I should have wanted new furniture to correspond."

"What is George Ramsey doing?" asked Maria, with a little, conscious blush of which she was ashamed. Maria, all her life, would blush because people expected it of her. She knew as plainly as if she had spoken, that her aunt Maria was considering suddenly the advantages of a possible match between herself and George Ramsey. What Aunt Maria said immediately confirmed this opinion. She spoke with a sort of chary praise of George. Aunt Maria had in reality never liked the Ramseys; she considered that they felt above her, and for no good reason; still, she had an eye for the main chance. It flashed swiftly across her mind that her niece was pretty, and George might lose his heart to her and marry her, and then Mrs. Amelia Ramsey might have to treat her like an equal and no longer hold her old, aristocratic head so high.

"Well," said she, "I suppose George Ramsey is pretty smart. They say he is. I guess he favors his grandfather. His father wasn't any too bright, if he was a Ramsey. George Ramsey, they say, worked his way through college, used to be bell-boy or waiter or something in a hotel summers, unbeknown to his mother. Amelia Ramsey would have had a conniption fit if she had known that her precious boy was working out. She used to talk as grand as you please about George's being away on his vacation. Maybe she did know, but if she did she never let on. I don't know as she let on even to herself. Amelia Ramsey is one of the kind who can shut their eyes even when they look at themselves. There never was a lookin'-gla.s.s made that could show Amelia Ramsey anything she didn't want to see. I never had any patience with her. I believe in being proud if you've got anything to be proud of, but I don't see any sense in it otherwise. Anyhow, I guess George is doing pretty well. A distant relation of his mother, an Allen, not a Ramsey, got a place in a bank for him, they say, and he gets good pay. I heard it was three thousand a year, but I don't believe it. He ain't much over twenty, and it ain't likely. I don't know jest how old he is. He's some older than you."

"He's a good deal older than I," said Maria, remembering sundry confidences with the tall, lanky boy over the garden fence.

"Well, I don't know but he is," said Aunt Maria, "but I don't believe he gets three thousand a year, anyhow."

The next morning Maria, on her way to school in the rain, pa.s.sing under the unconquerable golden glow of the maples, cast a surrept.i.tious glance at the old Ramsey house as she pa.s.sed. It had been wonderfully changed for the better. Even the garden at the side next her aunt's house was no longer a weedy enclosure, but displayed an array of hardy flowers which the frost had not yet affected.

Marigolds tossed their golden and russet b.a.l.l.s through the misty wind of the rain, princess-feathers waved bravely, and chrysanthemums showed in gorgeous clumps of rose and yellow and white. As she pa.s.sed, a tidy maid emerged from the front door and began sweeping out the rain which had lodged in the old hollows of the stone stoop, worn by the steps of generations. The rain flew before her plying broom in a white foam. The maid wore a cap and a wide, white ap.r.o.n.

Maria reflected that the Ramseys had indeed come into palmier days, since they kept a maid so attired. She thought of George Ramsey with his patched trousers, and again the old feeling of repulsion and wonder at herself that she could have had romantic dreams about him came over her. Maria felt unutterably old that morning, and yet she had a little, childish dread of her new duties. She was in reality afraid of the school-children, although she did not show it. She got through the day very creditably, although that night she was tired as she had never been in her life, and, curiously enough, her sense of smell seemed to be the most affected. Many of her pupils came from poor families, the families of operatives in the paper-mills, and their garments were shabby and unclean. Soaked with rain, they gave out pungent odors. Maria's sense of smell was very highly developed.

It seemed to her that her very soul was permeated, her very thoughts and imagination, with the odor of damp, unclean clothing, of draggled gowns and wraps and hats and wet leather. She could not eat her supper; she could not eat the luncheon which her aunt had put up for her, since the school being a mile away, it was too far to walk home for the noonday dinner in the rain.

"You 'ain't eat hardly a mite of luncheon," Aunt Maria said when she opened the box.