By the Light of the Soul. Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
had happened. She herself was more like her mother in temperament—that is, like the New-Englander who goes through life with the grief of a loss grown to his heart. Nothing could exceed Harry Edgham's tenderness to his motherless little girl. He was always contriving something for her pleasure and comfort; but Maria, when her father laughed, regarded him with covert wonder and reproach.
Her aunt Maria continued to live with them, and kept the house. Aunt Maria was very capable. It is doubtful if there are many people on earth who are not crowned, either to their own consciousness or that of others, with at least some small semblance of glories. Aunt Maria had the notable distinction of living on one hundred dollars a year. She had her rent free, but upon that she did not enlarge. Her married brother owned a small house, of the story-and-a-half type prevalent in New England villages, and Maria had the north side. She lived, aside from that, upon one hundred dollars a year. She was openly proud of it; her poverty became, in a sense, her riches. “Well, all I have is just one hundred a year,” she was fond of saying, “and I don't complain. I don't envy anybody. I have all I want.” Her little plans for thrift were fairly Machiavellian; they showed subtly. She told everybody what she had for her meals. She boasted that she lived better than her brother, who was earning good wages in a shoe-factory. She dressed very well, really much better than her sister-in-law. “Poor Eunice never had much management,” Maria was wont to say, smoothing down, as she spoke, the folds of her own gown. She never wore out anything; she moved carefully and sat carefully; she did a good deal of fancy-work, but she was always very particular, even when engaged in the daintiest toil, to cover her gown with an apron, and she always held her thin-veined hands high. She charged this upon her niece Maria when she had her new black clothes. “Now, Maria,” said she, “there is one thing I want you to remember, here is nothin'—” (Aunt Maria elided her final “g” like most New-Englanders, although she was not deficient in education, and even prided herself upon her reading.) “Black is the worst thing in the world to grow shiny. Folks can talk all they want to about black bein' durable. It isn't. It grows shiny. And if you will always remember one thing when you are at home, to wear an apron when you are doin' anything, and when you are away, to hold your hands high, you will gain by it. There is no need of anybody gettin' the front breadths of their dresses all shiny by rubbin' their hands on them. When you are at school you must remember and hold your school-books so they won't touch your dress. Then there is another thing you must remember, not to move your arms any more than you can help, that makes the waist wear out under the arms. There isn't any need of your movin' your arms much if any when you are in school, that I can see, and when you come home you can change your dress. You might just as well wear out your colored dresses when you are home. Nobody is goin' to see you. If anybody comes in that I think is goin' to mind, you can just slip up-stairs, and put on your black dress. It isn't as if you had a little sister to take your things—they ought to be worn out.”
It therefore happened that Maria was dressed the greater part of the time, in her own home, where she missed her mother most, in bright-colored array, and in funeral attire outside. She told her father about it, but he had not a large income, and it had been severely taxed by his wife's almost tragic illness and death. Besides, if the truth were known, he disliked to see Maria in mourning, and the humor of the thing also appealed to him.
“You had better wear what your aunt says, dear. You feel just the same in your heart, don't you?” asked Harry Edgham, with that light laugh of his, which always so shocked his serious little daughter.
“Yes, sir,” she replied, with a sob.
“Well, then, do just as your aunt says, and be a good little girl,” said Harry, and he went hastily out on the porch with his cigar.
Nothing irritated him so much as to see Maria weep for her mother. He was one of those who wrestle and fight against grief, and to see it thrust in his face by the impetus of another heart exasperated him, although he could say nothing. It may be that, with his temperament, it was even dangerous for him to cherish grief, and, for that very reason, he tried to put his dead wife out of his mind, as she had been taken out of his life.
“Well, men are different from women,” Aunt Maria said to her niece Maria one night, when Harry had gone out on the piazza, after he had talked and laughed a good deal at the supper-table.
Harry Edgham heard the remark, and his face took on a set expression which it could assume at times. He did not like his sister-in-law, although he disguised the fact. She was very useful. His meals were always on time, the house was as neatly kept as before, and Maria was being trained as she had never been in household duties.
Maria was obedient, under silent protest, to her aunt. Often, after she had been bidden to perform some household task, and obeyed, she had gone to her own room and wept, and told herself that her mother would never have put such things on her. She had no one in whom to confide. She was not a girl to have unlimited intimates among other girls at school. She was too self-centred, and, if the truth were told, too emulative.
“Maria Edgham thinks she's awful smart,” one girl would say to another. They all admitted, even the most carping, that Maria was pretty. “Maria Edgham is pretty enough, and she knows it,” said they. She was in the high school, even at her age, and she stood high in her classes. There was always a sort of moral strike going on against Maria, as there is against all superiority, especially when the superiority is known to be recognized by the possessor thereof.
In spite of her prettiness, she was not a favorite even among the boys. They were, as a rule, innocent as well as young, but they would rather have snatched a kiss from such a pretty, dainty little creature than have had her go above them in the algebra class. It did not seem fitting. Without knowing it, they were envious. They would not even acknowledge her cleverness, not even Wollaston Lee, for whom Maria entertained a rudimentary affection. He was even rude to her.
“Maria Edgham is awful stuck up,” he told his mother. He was of that age when a boy tells his mother a good deal, and he was an only child.
“She's a real pretty little girl, and her aunt says she is a good girl,” replied his mother, who regarded the whole as the antics of infancy.
The Lees lived near the Edghams, on the same street, and Mrs. Lee and Aunt Maria had exchanged several calls. They were, in fact, almost intimate. The Lees were at the supper-table when Wollaston made his deprecatory remark concerning Maria, and he had been led to do so by the law of sequence. Mrs. Lee had made a remark about Aunt Maria to her husband. “I believe she thinks Harry Edgham will marry her,” she said.
“That's just like you women, always trumping up something of that kind,” replied her husband. His words were rather brusque, but he regarded, while speaking them, his wife with adoration. She was a very pretty woman, and looked much younger than her age.
“You needn't tell me,” said Mrs. Lee. “She's just left off bonnets and got a new hat trimmed with black daisies; rather light mourning, I call it, when her sister has not been dead a year.”
“You spiteful little thing!” said her husband, still with his adoring eyes on his wife.
“Well, it's so, anyway.”
“Well, she would make Harry a good wife, I guess,” said her husband, easily; “and she would think more of the girl.”
It was then that Wollaston got in his remark about poor Maria, who had herself noticed with wonder that her aunt had bought a new hat that spring instead of a bonnet.
“Why, Aunt Maria, I thought you always wore a bonnet!” said she, innocently, when the hat came home from the milliner's.
“Nobody except old women are wearing bonnets now,” replied her aunt, shortly. “I saw Mrs. Rufus Jones, who is a good deal older than I, at church Sunday with a hat trimmed with roses. The milliner told me nobody of my age wore a bonnet.”
“Did she know how old you really are, Aunt Maria?” inquired Maria with the utmost innocence.
Harry Edgham gave a little chuckle, then came to his sister-in-law's rescue. He had a thankful heart for even small benefits, and Aunt Maria had done a good deal for him and his, and