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 butting.
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 God with the existence of hell and eternal torment. She
closed her door with a slam. There are, in some New England women,
impulses of fierce childishness.
Maria, when she was in her room, had never felt so lonely in her
life. A kind of rage of loneliness possessed her. She slipped out of
her clothes and went to bed, and then she lay awake. She heard her
father when he returned. The clock on a church which was near by
struck twelve soon after. Maria tried to imagine another woman in the
house in her mother's place; she thought of every eligible woman in
Edgham whom her father might select to fill that place, but her
little-girl ideas of eligibility were at fault. She thought only of
women of her mother's age and staidness, who wore bonnets. She could
think of only two, one a widow, one a spinster. She shuddered at the
idea of either. She felt that she would much rather have had her
father marry Aunt Maria than either of those women. She did not
altogether love Aunt Maria, but at least she was used to her.
Suddenly it occurred to her that Aunt Maria was disappointed, that
she felt badly. The absurdity of it struck her strongly, but she felt
a pity for her; she felt a common cause with her. After her father
had gone into his room, and the house had long been silent, she got
up quietly, opened her door softly, and crept across the hall to the
spare room, which Aunt Maria had occupied ever since she had been
there. She listened, and heard a soft sob. Then she turned the knob
of the door softly.
"Who is it?" Aunt Maria called out, sharply.
Maria was afraid that her father would hear.
"It's only me, Aunt Maria," she replied. Then she also gave a little
sob.
"What's the matter?"
Maria groped her way across the room to her aunt's bed. "Oh, Aunt
Maria, who is it?" she sobbed, softly.
Aunt Maria did what she had never done before: she reached out her
arms and gathered the bewildered little girl close, in an embrace of
genuine affection and pity. She, too, felt that here was a common
cause, and not only that, but she pitied the child with unselfish
pity. "You poor child, you are as cold as ice. Come in here with me,"
she whispered.
Maria crept into bed beside her aunt, but she would rather have
remained where she was. She was a child of spiritual rather than
physical affinities, and the contact of Aunt Maria's thin body, even
though it thrilled with almost maternal affection for her, repelled
her.
Aunt Maria began to weep unrestrainedly, with a curious passion and
abandonment for a woman of her years.
"Has he come home?" she whispered. Aunt Maria's hearing was slightly
defective, especially when she was nervously overwrought.
"Yes. Aunt Maria, who is it?"
"Hush, I don't know. He hasn't paid any open court to anybody, that I
know of, but--I've seen him lookin'."
"At whom?"
"At Ida Slome."
"But she is younger than my mother was."
"What difference do you s'pose that makes to a man. He'll like her
all the better for that. You can thank your stars he didn't pitch on
a school-girl, instead of the teacher."
Maria lay stretched out stiff and motionless. She was trying to bring
her mind to bear upon the situation. She was trying to imagine Miss
Ida Slome, with her pink cheeks and her gay attire, in the house
instead of her mother. Her head began to reel. She no longer wept.
She became dimly conscious, after a while, of her aunt Maria's
shaking her violently and calling her by name, but she did not
respond, although she heard her plainly. Then she felt a great jounce
of the bed as her aunt sprang out. She continued to lie still and
rigid. She somehow knew, however, that her aunt was lighting the
lamp, then she felt, rather than saw, the flash of it across her
face. Her aunt Maria pulled on a wrapper over her night-gown, and
hurried to the door. "Harry, Harry Edgham!" she heard her call, and
still Maria could not move. Then she also felt, rather than saw, her
father enter the room with his bath-robe slipped over his pajamas,
and approach the bed.
"What on earth is the matter?" he said. He also laid hands on Maria,
and, at his touch, she became able to move.
"What on earth is the matter?" he asked again.
"She didn't seem able to speak or move, and I was scared," replied
Aunt Maria, with a reproachful accent on the "I"; but Harry Edgham
was too genuinely concerned at his little daughter's white face and
piteous look to heed that at all.
He leaned over and began stroking her soft little cheeks, and kissing
her. "Father's darling," he whispered. Then he said over his shoulder
to Aunt Maria, "I wish you would go into my room and get that flask
of brandy I keep in my closet."
Aunt Maria obeyed. She returned with the flask and a teaspoon, and
Maria's father made her swallow a few drops, which immediately warmed
her and made the strange rigidity disappear.
"I guess she had better stay in here with you the rest of the night,"
said Harry to his sister-in-law; but little Maria sat up
determinately.
"No, I'm going back to my own room," she said.
"Hadn't you better stay with your aunt, darling?"
Harry Edgham looked shamefaced and guilty. He saw that his
sister-in-law and Maria had been weeping, and he knew why, in the
depths of his soul. He saw no good reason why he should feel so
shamed and apologetic, but he did. He fairly cowered before the
nervous little girl and her aunt.
"Well, let father carry you in there, then," he said; and he lifted
up the slight little thing, carried her across the hall to her room,
and placed her in bed.
It was a very warm night, but Maria was shivering as if with cold. He
placed the coverings over her with clumsy solicitude. Then he bent
down and kissed her. "Try and keep quiet, and go to sleep, darling,"
he said. Then he went out.
Aunt Maria was waiting for him in the hall. Her face, from grief and
consternation, had changed to sad and dignified resignation.
"Harry," said she.
Harry Edgham stopped.
"Well, sister," he said, with pleasant interrogation, although he
still looked shamefaced.
Aunt Maria held a lamp, a small one, which she was tipping
dangerously.
"Look out for your lamp, Maria," he said.
She straightened the lamp, and the light shone full upon her swollen
face, at once piteous and wrathful. "I only wanted to know when you
wanted me to go?" she said.
"Oh, Lord, Maria, you are going too fast!" replied Harry, and he
fairly ran into his own room.
The next morning when Maria, in her little black frock--it was made
of a thin lawn for the hot days, and the pale slenderness of her arms
and neck were revealed by the thinness of the fabric--went to school,
she knew, the very moment that Miss Ida Slome greeted her, that Aunt
Maria had been right in her surmise. For the first time since she had
been to school, Miss Slome, who was radiant in a flowered muslin,
came up to her and embraced her. Maria submitted coldly to the
embrace.
"You sweet little thing," said Miss Slome.
There was a man principal of the school, but Miss Slome was first
assistant, and Maria was in most of her classes. She took her place,
with her pretty smile as set as if she had been a picture instead of
a living and breathing woman, on the platform.
"You are awful sweet all of a sudden, ain't you?" said Gladys Mann in
Maria's ear.
Maria nodded, and went to her own seat.
All that day she noted, with her sharp little consciousness, the
change in Miss Slome's manner towards her. It was noticeable even in
class. "It is true," she said to herself. "Father is going to marry
her."
Aunt Maria was a little pacified by Harry's rejoinder the night
before. She begun to wonder if she had been, by any chance, mistaken.
"Maybe I was wrong," she said, privately, to Maria. But Maria shook
her head.
"She called me a sweet little thing, and kissed me," said she.
"Didn't she ever before?"
"No, ma'am."
"Well, she may have taken a notion to. Maybe I was mistaken. The way
your father spoke last night sort of made me think so."
Aunt Maria made up her mind that if Harry was out late the next
Sunday, and the next Wednesday, that would be a test of the
situation. The first time had been Wednesday, and Wednesday and
Sunday, in all provincial localities, are the acknowledged courting
nights. Of course it sometimes happens that an ardent lover goes
every night; but Harry Edgham, being an older man and a widower,
would probably not go to that extent.
He soon did, however. Very soon Maria and her aunt went to bed every
night before Harry came home, and Miss Ida Slome became more loving
towards Maria.
Wollaston Lee, boy as he was, child as he was, really suffered. He
lost flesh, and his mother told Aunt Maria that she was really
worried about him. "He doesn't eat enough to keep a bird alive," said
she.
It never entered into her heart to imagine that Wollaston was in love
with the teacher, a woman almost if not quite old enough to be his
mother, and was suffering because of her love for Harry Edgham.
One afternoon, when Harry's courtship of Ida Slome had been going on
for about six weeks, and all Edgham was well informed concerning it,
Maria, instead of going straight home from school, took a cross-road
through some woods. She dreaded to reach home that night. It was
Wednesday, and her father would be sure to go to see Miss Slome.
Maria felt an indefinable depression, as if she, little, helpless
girl, were being carried so far into the wheels of life that it was
too much for her. Her father, of late, had been kinder than ever to
her; Maria had begun to wonder if she ought not to be glad if he were
happy, and if she ought not to try to love Miss Slome. But this
afternoon depression overcame her. She walked slowly between the
fields, which were white and gold with queen's-lace and golden-rod.
Her slender shoulders were bent a little. She walked almost like an
old woman. She heard a quick step behind her, and Wollaston Lee came
up beside her. She looked at him with some sentiment, even in the
midst of her depression. The thought flashed across her mind, what is
she should marry Wollaston at the same time her father married Miss
Slome? That would be a happy and romantic solution of the affair. She
colored sweetly, and smiled, but the boy scowled at her.
"Say?" he said.
Maria trembled a little. She was surprised.
"What?" she asked.
"Your father is the meanest man in this town, he is the meanest in
New Jersey, he is the meanest man in the whole United States, he is
the meanest man in the whole world."
Again the boy scowled at Maria, who did not understand; but she would
not have her father reviled.
"He isn't, so there!" she said.
"He's going to marry teacher."
"I don't see as he is mean if he is," said Maria, forced into justice
by injustice.
"I was going to marry her myself, if she'd only waited, and he hadn't
butted in," said Wollaston.
The boy gave one last scowl at the little girl, and it was as if he
scowled at all womanhood in her. Then he gave a fling away, and ran
like a wild thing across the field of golden-rod and queen's-lace.
Maria, watching, saw him throw himself down prone in the midst of the
wild-flowers, and she understood that he was crying because the
teacher was going to marry her father. She went on, walking like a
little old woman, and she had a feeling as if she had found a road in
the world that led outside all love.