By the Light of the Soul Part 5

Harry Edgham laughed again.

It was the next morning when Aunt Maria appeared at the early breakfast with a pompadour. Her thin frizzes were carefully puffed over a mystery which she had purchased the afternoon before.

Maria, when she first saw her aunt, stared open-mouthed; then she ate her breakfast as if she had seen nothing.

Harry Edgham gave one sharp stare at his sister-in-law, then he said: "Got your hair done up a new way, haven't you, Maria?"

"Yes, my hat didn't set well on my head with my hair the way I was wearing it," replied Aunt Maria with dignity; still she blushed. She knew that her own hair did not entirely conceal the under structure, and she knew, too, why she wore the pompadour.

Harry Edgham recognized the first fact with simple pity that his sister-in-law's hair was so thin. He remembered hearing a hair-tonic recommended by another man in the office, and he wondered privately if Maria would feel hurt if he brought some for her. Of the other fact he had not the least suspicion. He said: "Well, it's real becoming to you, Maria. I guess I like it better than the other way.

I notice all the girls seem to wear their hair so nowadays."

Aunt Maria smiled at him gratefully. When her sister had married him, she had wondered what on earth she saw in Harry Edgham; now he seemed to her a very likeable man.

When Maria sat in school that morning, her aunt's pompadour diverted her mind from her book; then she caught Gladys Mann's wondering eyes upon her, and she studied again.

While Maria could scarcely be said to have an intimate friend at school, a little girl is a monstrosity who has neither a friend nor a disciple; she had her disciple, whose name was Gladys Mann. Gladys was herself a little outside the pale. Most of her father's earnings went for drink, and Gladys's mother was openly known to take in was.h.i.+ng to make both ends meet, and keep the girl at school at all; moreover, she herself came of one of the poor white families which flourish in New Jersey as well as at the South, although in less numbers. Gladys's mother was rather a marvel, inasmuch as she was willing to take in was.h.i.+ng, and do it well too, but Gladys had no higher rank for that. She was herself rather a pathetic little soul, dingily pretty, using the patois of her kind, and always at the f.a.g end of her cla.s.ses. Her education, so far, seemed to meet with no practical results in the child herself. Her brain merely filtered learning like a sieve; but she thought Maria Edgham was a wonder, and it was really through her, and her alone, that she obtained any education.

"What makes you always say 'have went'?" Maria would inquire, with a half-kindly, half-supercilious glance at her satellite.

"What had I ought to say," Gladys would inquire, meekly--"have came?"

"Have gone," replied Maria, with supreme scorn.

"Then when my mother has came home shall I say she has gone?"

inquired Gladys, with positive abjectness.

"Gladys, you are such a ninny," said Maria. "Why don't you remember what you learn at school, instead of what you hear at home?"

"I guess I hear more at home than I learn at school," Gladys replied, with an adoring glance at Maria.

Maria half despised Gladys, and yet she had a sort of protective affection for her, as one might have for a little clinging animal, and she confided more in her than in any one else, sure, at least, of an outburst of sympathy. Maria had never forgotten how Gladys had cried the first morning she went to school after her mother died.

Every time Gladys glanced at poor little Maria, in her black dress, her head went down on a ring of her little, soiled, cotton-clad arms on her desk, and Maria knew that she was sorrier for her than any other girl in school.

Gladys had a sort of innocent and ignorant impertinence; she asked anything which occurred to her, with no reflection as to its effect upon the other party.

"Say, is it true?" she asked that very morning at recess.

"Is what true?"

"Is your father goin' to marry her?"

"Marry who?" Maria turned quite pale, and forgot her own grammar.

"Why, your aunt Maria."

"My aunt Maria? I guess he isn't!" Maria left Gladys with an offended strut. However, she reflected on Aunt Maria's pompadour. A great indignation seized her. After this she treated Aunt Maria stiffly, and she watched both her and her father.

There was surely nothing in Harry Edgham's behaviour to warrant a belief that he contemplated marrying his deceased wife's sister.

Sometimes he even, although in a kindly fas.h.i.+on, poked fun at her, in Maria's presence. But Aunt Maria never knew it; she was, in fact, impervious to that sort of thing. But Maria came to be quite sure that Aunt Maria had designs on her father. She observed that she dressed much better than she had ever done; she observed the fairly ostentatious attention which she bestowed upon her brother-in-law, and also upon herself, when he was present. She even used to caress Maria, in her wooden sort of way, when Harry was by to see. Once Maria repulsed her roughly. "I don't like to be kissed and fussed over," said she.

"You mustn't speak so to your aunt," said Harry, when Aunt Maria had gone out of the room. "I don't know what we should have done without her."

"You pay her, don't you, father?" asked Maria.

"Yes, I pay her," said Harry, "but that does not alter the fact that she has done a great deal which money could not buy."

Maria gazed at her father with suspicion, which he did not recognize.

It had never occurred to Harry Edgham to marry Aunt Maria. It had never occurred to him that she might think of the possibility of such a thing. It was now nearly a year since his wife's death. He himself began to take more pains with his attire. Maria noticed it. She saw her father go out one evening clad in a new, light-gray suit, which he had never worn before. She looked at him wonderingly when he kissed her good-bye. Harry never left the house without kissing his little daughter.

"Why, you've got a new suit, father," she said.

Harry blushed. "Do you like it, dear?" he asked.

"No, father, I don't like it half as well as a dark one," replied Maria, in a sweet, curt little voice. Her father colored still more, and laughed, then he went away.

Aunt Maria, to Maria's mind, was very much dressed-up that evening.

She had on a muslin dress with sprigs of purple running through it, and a purple ribbon around her waist. She made up her mind that she would stay up until her father came home, in that new gray suit, no matter what Aunt Maria should say.

However, contrary to her usual custom, Aunt Maria did not mention, at half-past eight, that it was time for her to go to bed. It was half-past nine, and her father had not come home, and Aunt Maria had said nothing about it. She appeared to be working very interestedly on a sofa-cus.h.i.+on which she was embroidering, but her face looked, to Maria's mind, rather woe-begone, although there was a shade of wrath in the woe. When the little clock on the sitting-room shelf struck one for half-past nine, Maria looked at her aunt, wondering.

"Why, I wonder where father has gone so late?" she said.

Aunt Maria turned, and her voice, in reply, was both pained and pitiless. "Well, you may as well know first as last," said she, "and you'd better hear it from me than outside: your father has gone courtin'."

Chapter V

Maria looked at her aunt with an expression of almost idiocy. For the minute, the term Aunt Maria used, especially as applied to her father, had no more meaning for her than a term in a foreign tongue.

She was very pale. "Courtin'," she stammered out vaguely, imitating her aunt exactly, even to the dropping of the final "g."

Aunt Maria was, for the moment, too occupied with her own personal grievances and disappointments to pay much attention to her little niece. "Yes, courtin'," she said, harshly. "I've been suspectin' for some time, an' now I know. A man, when he's left a widower, don't smarten up the way he's done for nothin'; I know it." Aunt Maria nodded her head aggressively, with a gesture almost of b.u.t.ting.

Maria continued to gaze at her, with that pale, almost idiotic expression. It was a fact that she had thought of her father as being as much married as ever, even although her mother was dead. Nothing else had occurred to her.

"Your father's thinkin' of gettin' married again," said Aunt Maria, "and you may as well make up your mind to it, poor child." The words were pitying, the tone not.

"Who?" gasped Maria.

"I don't know any more than you do," replied Aunt Maria, "but I know it's somebody." Suddenly Aunt Maria arose. It seemed to her that she must do something vindictive. Here she had to return to her solitary life in her New England village, and her hundred dollars a year, which somehow did not seem as great a glory to her as it had formerly done. She went to the parlor windows and closed them with jerks, then she blew out the lamp. "Come," said she, "it's time to go to bed. I'm tired, for my part. I've worked like a dog all day. Your father has got his key, an' he can let himself in when he gets through his courtin'."

Maria crept miserably--she was still in a sort of daze--up-stairs after Aunt Maria.

"Well, good-night," said Aunt Maria. "You might as well make up your mind to it. I suppose it had to come, and maybe it's all for the best." Aunt Maria's voice sounded as if she were trying to reconcile the love of G.o.d with the existence of h.e.l.l and eternal torment. She closed her door with a slam. There are, in some New England women, impulses of fierce childishness.