By the Light of the Soul Part 47

Lily sprang up. "I am going home," said she.

"Going home? Why?"

"He has come to see you, and I won't stay. I won't. I know you despised me for what I did the other night, and I won't do such a thing as to stay when he has come to see another girl. I am not quite as bad as that." Lily started towards her cloak, which lay over a chair.

Maria seized her by the shoulders with a nervous grip of her little hands. "Lily Merrill," said she, "if you stir, if you dare to stir to go home, I will not go to the door at all!"

Lily gasped and looked at her.

"I won't!" said Maria.

The bell rang a second time.

"You have got to go to the door," said Maria, with a sudden impulse.

Lily quivered under her hands.

"Why? Oh, Maria!"

"Yes, you have. You go to the door, and I will run up-stairs the back way to my room. I don't feel well to-night, anyway. I have an awful headache. You go to the door, and if it is--George Ramsey, you tell him I have gone to bed with a headache, and you have come over to stay with me because Aunt Maria has gone away. Then you can ask him in."

A flush of incredulous joy came over Lily's face.

"You don't mean it, Maria?" she whispered, faintly.

"Yes, I do. Hurry, or he'll go away."

"Have you got a headache, honest?"

"Yes, I have. Hurry, quick! If it is anybody else do as you like about asking him in. Hurry!"

With that Maria was gone, scudding up the back stairs which led out of the adjoining room. She gained her chamber as noiselessly as a shadow. The room was very dark except for a faint gleam on one wall from a neighbor's lamp. Maria stood still, listening, in the middle of the floor. She heard the front door opened, then she heard voices.

She heard steps. The steps entered the sitting-room. Then she heard the voices in a steady flow. One of them was undoubtedly a man's. The ba.s.s resonances were unmistakable. A peal of girlish laughter rang out. Maria noiselessly groped her way to her bed, threw herself upon it, face down, and lay there shaking with silent sobs.

Chapter XXII

Maria did not hear Lily laugh again, although the conversation continued. In reality, Lily was in a state of extreme shyness, and was, moreover, filled with a sense of wrong-doing. There had been something about Maria's denial which had not convinced her. In her heart of hearts, the heart of hearts of a foolish but loving girl, who never meant anybody any harm, and, on the contrary, wished everybody well, although naturally herself first, she was quite sure that Maria also loved George Ramsey. She drooped before him with this consciousness when she opened the door, and the young man naturally started with a little surprise at the sight of her.

"Maria has gone to bed with a headache," she faltered, before George had time to inquire for her. Then she added, in response to the young man's look of astonishment, the little speech which Maria had prepared for her. "Her aunt has gone out, and so I came over to stay with her." Lily was a born actress. It was not her fault that a little accent of tender pity for Maria in her lonely estate, with her aunt away, and a headache, crept into her voice. She at the moment almost believed what she said. It became quite real to her.

"I am sorry Miss Edgham has a headache," said George, after a barely perceptible second of hesitation, "but, as long as she has, I may as well come in and make you a little call, Lily."

Lily quivered perceptibly. She tried to show becoming pride, but failed. "I should be very happy to have you," she said, "but--"

"Well, it _is_ asking you to play second fiddle, and no mistake,"

laughed George Ramsey, "for I did think I would make Miss Edgham a little call. But, after all, the second fiddle is an indispensable thing, and you and I are old friends, Lily."

He could not help the admiration in his eyes as he looked at Lily.

She carried a little lamp, and the soft light was thrown upon her lovely face, and her brown hair gleamed gold in it. No man could have helped admiring her. Lily had never been a very brilliant scholar, but she could read admiration for herself. She regained her self-possession.

"I don't mind playing second fiddle," said she. "I should be glad if I could play any fiddle. Come in, Mr. Ramsey."

"How very formal we have grown!" laughed George, as he took off his coat and hat in the icy little hall. "Why, don't you remember we went to school together? What is the use?"

"George, then," said Lily. Her voice seemed to caress the name.

The young man colored. He was of a stanch sort, but he was a man, and the adulation of such a beautiful girl as this touched him. He took the lamp out of her hand.

"Come in, then," he said; "but it is rather funny for me to be calling on you here, isn't it?"

"Funnier than it would be for you to call on me at my own house,"

said Lily, demurely, with a faint accent of reproach.

"Well, I must admit I am not very neighborly," George replied, with an apologetic air. "But, you see, I am really busy a good many evenings with accounts, and I don't go out very much."

Lily reflected that he had come to call on Maria, in spite of being busy, but she said nothing. She placed Maria's vacant chair for him beside the sitting-room stove.

"It is a hard storm," she said.

"Very. It is a queer night for Miss Edgham's aunt to go out, it seems to me."

"Mrs. Ralph Wright has a tea-party," said Lily. "Maria's aunt Eunice has gone, too. My mother was invited, but mother never goes out in the evening."

After these commonplace remarks, Lily seated herself opposite George Ramsey, and there was a little silence. Again the expression of admiration came into the young man's face, and the girl read it with delight. Sitting gracefully, her slender body outlined by the soft green of her dress, her radiant face showing above the ivory cameo brooch at her throat, she was charming. George Ramsey owned to himself that Lily was certainly a great beauty, but all the same he thought regretfully of the other girl, who was not such a beauty, but who had somehow appealed to him as no other girl had ever done. Then, too, Maria was in a measure new. He had known Lily all his life; the element of wonder and surprise was lacking in his consciousness of her beauty, and she also lacked something else which Maria had. Lily meant no more to him--that is, her beauty meant no more to him--than a symmetrical cherry-tree in the south yard, which was a marvel of scented beauty, humming with bees every spring. He had seen that tree ever since he could remember. He always looked upon it with pleasure when it was in blossom, yet it was not to him what a new tree, standing forth unexpectedly with its complement of flowers and bees, would have been. It was very unfortunate for Lily that George had known her all his life. In order really to attract him it would be necessary for him to discover something entirely new in her.

"It was very good of you to come in and stay with Miss Edgham while her aunt was gone," said George.

He felt terribly at a loss for conversation. He had, without knowing it, a sense of something underneath the externals which put a constraint upon him.

Lily had one of the truth-telling impulses which redeemed her from the artifices of her mother.

"Oh," said she, "I wanted to come. I proposed coming myself. It is dull evenings at home, and I did not know that Maria would go to bed or that you would come in."

"Well, mother has gone to that tea-party, too," said George, "and I looked over here and saw the light, and I thought I would just run in a minute."

For some unexplained reason tears were standing in Lily's eyes and her mouth quivered a little. George could not see, for the life of him, why she should be on the verge of tears. He felt a little impatient, but at the same time she became more interesting to him.

He had never seen Lily weeping since the time when she was a child at school, and used to conceal her weeping little face in a ring of her right arm, as was the fas.h.i.+on among the little girls.

"This light must s.h.i.+ne right in your sitting-room windows," said Lily, in a faint voice. She was considering how pitiful it was that George had not had the impulse to call upon her, Lily, when she was so lovely and loving in her green gown; and how even this little happiness was not really her own, but another girl's. She had not the least realization of how Maria was suffering, lying in her room directly overhead.

Maria suffered as she had never suffered before. George Ramsey was her first love; the others had been merely childish playthings. She was strangling love, and that is a desperate deed, and the strangler suffers more than love. Maria, with the memory of that marriage which was, indeed, no marriage, but the absurd travesty of one, upon her, was in almost a suicidal frame of mind. She knew perfectly well that if it had not been for that marriage secret which she held always in mind, that George Ramsey would continue to call, that they would become engaged, that her life might be like other women's. And now he was down there with Lily--Lily, in her green gown. She knew just how Lily would look at him, with her beautiful, soft eyes. She hated her, and yet she hated herself more than she hated her. She told herself that she had no good reason for hating another girl for doing what she herself had done--for falling in love with George Ramsey. She knew that she should never have made a confidant of another girl, as Lily had made of her. She realized a righteous contempt because of her weakness, and yet she felt that Lily was the normal girl, that nine out of ten would do exactly what she had done. And she also had a sort of pity for her. She could not quite believe that a young man like George Ramsey could like Lily, who, however beautiful she was, was undeniably silly. But then she reflected how young men were popularly supposed not to mind a girl's being silly if she was beautiful. Then she ceased to pity Lily, and hated her again. She became quite convinced that George Ramsey would marry her.

She had locked her door, and lay on her bed fully dressed. She made up her mind that when Aunt Maria came she would pretend to be asleep.

She felt that she could not face Aunt Maria's wondering questions.

Then she reflected that Aunt Maria would be home soon, and a malicious joy seized her that Lily would not have George Ramsey long to herself. Indeed, it was scarcely half-past eight before Maria heard the side-door open. Then she heard, quite distinctly, Aunt Maria's voice, although she could not distinguish the words. Maria laughed a little, smothered, hysterical laugh at the absurdity of the situation.