By the Light of the Soul Part 35

"I did not feel very hungry," Maria replied, apologetically.

"If you don't eat, you'll never hold out school-teaching in the world," said Aunt Maria.

She repeated it when Maria scarcely tasted her supper, although it was a nice one--cold ham, and scrambled eggs, scrambled with cream, and delicious slabs of layer-cake. "You'll never hold out in the world if you don't eat," said she.

"To tell the truth," replied Maria, "I can smell those poor children's wet clothes so that it has taken away all my appet.i.te."

"Land! you'll have to get over that," said Aunt Maria.

"It seems to me that everything smells and tastes of wet, dirty clothes and shoes," said Maria.

"You'll have to learn not to be so particular," said Aunt Maria, and she spoke with the same affectionate severity that Maria remembered in her mother. "Put it out of your mind," she added.

"I can't," said Maria, and a qualm of nausea came over her. It was as if the damp, unclean garments and the wet shoes were pressed close under her nostrils. She looked pale.

"Well, drink your tea, anyhow," said Aunt Maria, with a glance at her.

After supper Aunt Maria, going into the other side of the house to borrow some yeast, said to her brother Henry that she did not believe that Maria would hold out to teach school. "She has come home sick on account of the smells the very first day," said she, "and she hasn't eat her supper, and she scarcely touched her luncheon."

Henry Stillman laughed, a bitter, sardonic laugh which he had acquired of late years. "Oh, well, she will get used to it," he replied. "Don't you worry, Maria. She will get used to it. The smell of the poor is the smell of the world. Heaven itself must be full of it."

His wife eyed him with a half-frightened air. "Why, don't talk so, Henry!" she said.

Henry Stillman laughed, half sardonically, half tenderly. "It is so, my dear," he said, "but don't you worry about it."

In these days Henry Stillman, although always maintaining his gentle manner towards children and women, had become, in the depths of his long-suffering heart, a rebel against fate. He had borne too long that burden which is the heaviest and most ign.o.ble in the world, the burden of a sense of injury. He knew that he was fitted for better things than he had. He thought that it was not his own personal fault that he did not have them, and his very soul was curdling with a conviction of wrong, both at the hands of men and G.o.d. In these days he ceased going to church. He watched his wife and sister set out every Sunday, and he stayed at home. He got a certain satisfaction out of that. All who realize an injury have an amount of childishness in acts of retaliation. He, Henry Stillman, actually had a conviction that he was showing recrimination and wounding fate, which had so injured him, if only with a pin-p.r.i.c.k, by staying away from church.

After Maria came to live with them, she, too, went to church, but he did not view her with the same sardonic air that he did the older women, who had remained true to their faith in the face of disaster.

He looked at Maria, in her pretty little best gowns and hats, setting forth, and a sweet tenderness for her love of G.o.d and belief sweetened his own agnosticism. He would not for the world have said a word to weaken the girl's faith nor to have kept her away from church. He would have urged her to go had she manifested the slightest inclination to remain at home. He was in a manner jealous of the girl's losing what he had himself lost. He tried to refrain from airing his morbid, bitter views of life to his wife, but once in a while he could not restrain himself as now. However, he laughed so naturally, and asked Maria, who presently came in, how many pupils had been present, and how she liked school-teaching, that his wife began to think that he had not been in earnest.

"They are such poor, dirty little things," Maria said, "and their clothes were wet, and--and--" A look of nausea overspread her face.

"You will get used to that," said her uncle, laughing pleasantly.

"Eunice, haven't we got some cologne somewhere?"

Eunice got a bottle of cologne, which was seldom used, being a luxury, from a closet in the sitting-room, and put some on Maria's handkerchief. "You won't think anything about it after a little,"

said she, echoing her husband.

"I suppose the scholars in Lowe Academy were a different cla.s.s," said Aunt Maria, who had seated herself as primly as ever, with her hands crossed but not touching the lap of her black gown. The folds of the skirt were carefully arranged, and she did not move after having once seated herself, for fear of creasing it.

"They were clean, at least," said Maria, with a little grimace of disgust. "It does seem as if people might be clean, if they are poor."

"Some folks here are too poor to buy soap and wash-cloths and towels," her uncle said, still not bitterly. "You must take that into account, Maria. It takes a little extra money even to keep clean; people don't get that into their heads, generally speaking, but it is so."

"Well, I haven't had much money," said Aunt Maria, "but I must say I have kept myself in soap and wash-rags and towels."

"You might not have been able to if you had had half a dozen children and a drinking husband, or one who was out of work half the time,"

her brother said.

An elderly blush spread over his sister's face. "Well, the Lord knows I'd rather have the soap and towels and wash-rags than a drunken husband and half a dozen dirty children," she retorted, sharply.

"Lucky for you and the children that you have," said Henry. Then he turned again to his niece, of whom he was very fond. "It won't rain every day, dear," he said, "and the smells won't be so bad. Don't worry."

Maria smiled back at him bravely. "I shall get used to it," she said, sniffing at the cologne, which was cheap and pretty bad.

Maria was in reality dismayed. Her experience with children--that is, her personal experience--had been confined to her sister Evelyn.

She compared dainty little Evelyn with the rough, uncouth, half-degenerates which she had encountered that morning, sitting before her with gaping mouths of stupidity or grins of impish impudence, in their soiled, damp clothing, and her heart sank. There was nothing in common except youth between these children, the offspring of ignorance and often drunken sensuality, and Evelyn. At first it seemed to her that there was absolutely no redeeming quality in the whole. However, the next morning the sun shone through the yellow maple boughs, and was reflected from the golden carpet of leaves which the wind and rain of the day before had spread beneath.

The children were dry; some of them had become ingratiating, even affectionate. She discovered that there were a number of pretty little girls and innocent, honest little boys, whose mothers had made pathetic attempts to send them clean and whole to school. She also discovered that some of them had reasonably quick intelligence, especially one girl, by name Jessy Ramsey. She was of a distant branch of the old Ramseys, and had a high, spiritual forehead, from which the light hair was smoothly combed in damp ridges, and a delicate face with serious, intent blue eyes, under brows strangely pent for a child. Maria straightway took a fancy to Jessy Ramsey.

When, on her way home at night, the child timidly followed in her wake, she reached out and grasped her tiny hand with a warm pressure.

"You learned your lessons very well, Jessy," she said, and the child's face, as she looked up at her, grew positively brilliant.

When Maria got home she enthused about her.

"There is one child in the school who is a wonder," said she.

"Who?" asked Aunt Maria. She was in her heart an aristocrat. She considered the people of Amity--that is, the manufacturing people (she exempted her own brother as she might have exempted a prince of the blood drawn into an ign.o.ble pursuit from dire necessity)--as distinctly below par. Maria's school was across the river. She regarded all the children below par. "I do wish you could have had a school this side of the river," she added, "but Miss Norcross has held the other ten years, and I don't believe she will ever get married, she is so mortal homely, and they like her. Who is the child you are talking about?"

"Her name is Ramsey, Jessy Ramsey."

Aunt Maria sniffed. "Oh!" said she. "She belongs to that Eugene Ramsey tribe."

"Any relation to the Ramseys next door?" asked Maria.

"About a tenth cousin, I guess," replied Aunt Maria. "There was a Eugene Ramsey did something awful years ago, before I was born, and he got into state-prison, and then when he came out he married as low as he could. They have never had anything to do with these Ramseys.

They are just as low as they can be--always have been."

"This little girl is pretty, and bright," said Maria.

Aunt Maria sniffed again. "Well, you'll see how she'll turn out," she said. "Never yet anything good came of that Eugene Ramsey tribe. That child's father drinks like a fish, and he's been in prison, and her mother's no better than she should be, and she's got a sister that everybody talks about--has ever since she was so high."

"This seems like a good little girl," said Maria.

"Wait and see," said Aunt Maria.

But for all that Maria felt herself drawn towards this poor little offspring of the degenerate branch of the Ramseys. There was something about the child's delicate, intellectual, fairly n.o.ble cast of countenance which at once aroused her affection and pity. It was in December, on a bitterly cold day, when Maria had been teaching in Amity some two months, when this affection and pity ripened into absolute fondness and protection. The children were out in the bare school-yard during the afternoon recess, when Maria, sitting huddled over the stove for warmth, heard such a clamor that she ran to the window. Out in the desolate yard, a parallelogram of frozen soil hedged in with a high board fence covered with grotesque, and even obscene, drawings of pupils who had from time to time reigned in district number six, was the little Ramsey girl, surrounded by a crowd of girls who were fairly yelping like little mongrel dogs. The boys' yard was on the other side of the fence, but in the fence was a knot-hole wherein was visible a keen boy-eye. One girl after another was engaged in pulling to the height of her knees Jessy Ramsey's poor, little, dirty frock, thereby disclosing her thin, naked legs, absolutely uncovered to the freezing blast. Maria rushed bareheaded out in the yard and thrust herself through the crowd of little girls.

"Girls, what are you doing?" she asked, sternly.

"Please, teacher, Jessy Ramsey, she 'ain't got nothin' at all on under her dress," piped one after another, in accusing tones; then they yelped again.

Tears of pity and rage sprang to Maria's eyes. She caught hold of the thin little shoulder, which was, beyond doubt, covered by nothing except her frock, and turned furiously upon the other girls.

"You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!" said she; "great girls like you making fun of this poor child!"

"She had ought to be ashamed of herself goin' round so," retorted the biggest girl in school, Alice Sweet, looking boldly at Maria. "She ain't no better than her ma. My ma says so."

"My ma says I mustn't go with her," said another girl.

"Both of you go straight into the school-house," said Maria, at a white heat of anger as she impelled poor little Jessy Ramsey out of the yard.