Without any doubt, Maria's self-consciousness, which was at its
height at this time, helped her to endure the loss of her mother, and
all the sad appurtenances of mourning. She had a covert pleasure at
the sight of her fair little face, in her black hat, above her black
frock. She realized a certain importance because of her grief.
However, there were times when the grief itself came uppermost; there
were nights when she lay awake crying for her mother, when she was
nothing but a bereft child in a vacuum of love. Her father's
tenderness could not make up to her for the loss of her mother's.
Very soon after her mother's death, his mercurial temperament jarred
upon her. She could not understand how he could laugh and talk as if
nothing 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 it had never occurred
to him that the doing might not be entirely disinterested. Besides,
Aunt Maria had always seemed to him, as well as to his daughter, very
old indeed. It might have been that the bonnets had had something to
do with it. Aunt Maria had never affected fashions beyond a certain
epoch, partly from economy, partly from a certain sense of injury.
She had said to herself that she was old, she had been passed by; she
would dress as one who had. Now her sentiments underwent a curious
change. The possibility occurred to her that Harry might ask her to
take her departed sister's place. She was older than that sister,
much older than he, but she looked in her glass and suddenly her
passed youth seemed to look forth upon her. The revival of hopes
sometimes serves as a tonic. Aunt Maria actually did look younger
than she had done, even with her scanty frizzes. She regarded other
women, not older than herself, with pompadours, and aspiration seized
her.
One day she went to New York shopping. She secretly regarded that as
an expedition. She was terrified at the crossings. Stout, elderly
woman as she was, when she found herself in the whirl of the great
city, she became as a small, scared kitten. She gathered up her
skirts, and fled incontinently across the streets, with policemen
looking after her with haughty disapprobation. But when she was told
to step lively on the trolley-cars, her true self asserted its
endurance. "I am not going to step in front of a team for you or any
other person," she told one conductor, and she spoke with such
emphasis that even he was intimidated, and held the car meekly until
the team had passed. When Aunt Maria came home from New York that
particular afternoon, she had an expression at once of defiance and
embarrassment, which both Maria and her father noticed.
"Well, what did you see in New York, Maria?" asked Harry, pleasantly.
"I saw the greatest lot of folks without manners, that I ever saw in
my whole life," replied Aunt Maria, sharply.
Harry Edgham laughed. "You'll get used to it," he said, easily.
"Everybody who comes from New England has to take time to like New
York. It is an acquired taste."
"When I do acquire it, I'll be equal to any of them," replied Aunt
Maria. "When I lose my temper, they had better look out."
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
washing 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 washing, 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 fag
end of her classes. 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 fashion, 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-cushion 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'."