Extreme youth is always susceptible to diversion which affords a
degree of alleviation for grief. Many older people have the same
facility of turning before the impetus of circumstances to another
view of life, which serves to take their minds off too close
concentration upon sorrow, but it is not so universal. Maria,
although she was sadly lonely, in a measure, enjoyed taking her meals
at Mrs. Jonas White's. She had never done anything like it before.
The utter novelty of sitting down to Mrs. White's table, and eating
in company with her and Mr. Jonas White, and Lillian White, and a son
by the name of Henry, amused her. Then, too, they were all very kind
to her. They even made a sort of heroine of her, especially at noon,
when her father was in New York and she, consequently, was alone.
They pitied her, in a covert sort of fashion, because her father was
going to get married again, especially Mrs. White and Lillian.
Lillian was a very pretty girl, with a pert carriage of blond head,
and a slangy readiness of speech.
"Well, she's a dandy, as far as looks and dress go, and maybe she'll
make you a real good mother-in-law," she said to Maria. Maria knew
that Lillian should have said step-mother, but she did not venture to
correct her.
"Looks ain't everything," said Mrs. White, with a glance at her
daughter. She had thought of the possibility of Harry Edgham taking a
fancy to her Lillian.
Mr. Jonas White, who with his son Henry kept a market, thereby
insuring such choice cuts of meat, spoke then. He did not, as a rule,
say much at table, especially when Maria and her father, who in his
estimation occupied a superior place in society, were present.
"Guess Mr. Edgham knows what he's about," said he. "He's going to
marry a good-looking woman, and one that's capable of supportin'
herself, if he's laid up or anything happens to him. Guess she's all
right."
"I guess so, too," said Henry White. Both nodded reassuringly at
Maria, who felt mournfully comforted.
"Shouldn't wonder if she'd saved something, too," said Mr. White.
When he and his son were on their way back to the market, driving in
the white-covered wagon with "J. White & Son" on the sides thereof,
they agreed that women were queer.
"There's your mother and Lillian, they mean all right," said Jonas
White, "but they were getting that poor young one all stirred up."
Maria never settled with herself whether the Whites thought she had a
pleasant prospect before her or the reverse, but they did not
certainly influence her to love Miss Ida Slome any more.
Miss Slome was so kind to Maria, in those days, that it really seemed
to her that she ought to love her. She and her father were invited to
take tea at Miss Slome's boarding-house, and after tea they sat in
the little parlor which the teacher had for her own, and Miss Slome
sang and played to them. She had a piano. Maria heard her and her
father talking about the place in the Edgham parlor where it was to
stand. Harry stood over Miss Slome as she was singing, and Maria
observed how his arm pressed against her shoulder.
After the song was done, Harry and Miss Slome sat down on the sofa,
and Harry drew Maria down on the other side. Harry put his arm around
his little daughter, but not as if he realized it, and she peeked
around and saw how closely he was embracing Miss Slome, whose cheeks
were a beautiful color, but whose set smile never relaxed. It seemed
to Maria that Miss Slome smiled exactly like a doll, as if the smile
were made on her face by something outside, not by anything within.
Maria thought her father was very silly. She felt scorn, shame, and
indignation at the same time. Maria was glad when it was time to go
home. When her father kissed Miss Slome, she blushed, and turned away
her head.
Going home, Harry almost danced along the street. He was as
light-hearted as a boy, and as thoughtlessly in love.
"Well, dear, what do you think of your new mother?" he asked, gayly,
as they passed under the maples, which were turning, and whose
foliage sprayed overhead with a radiance of gold in the electric
light.
Then Maria made that inevitable rejoinder which is made always, which
is at once trite and pathetic. "I can't call her mother," she said.
But Harry only laughed. He was too delighted and triumphant to
realize the pain of the child, although he loved her. "Oh, well,
dear, you needn't until you feel like it," he said.
"What am I going to call her, father?" asked Maria, seriously.
"Oh, anything. Call her Ida."
"She is too old for me to call her that," replied Maria.
"Old? Why, dear, Ida is only a girl."
"She is a good deal over thirty," said Maria. "I call that very old."
"You won't, when you get there yourself," replied Harry, with another
laugh. "Well, dear, suit yourself. Call her anything you like."
It ended by Maria never calling her anything except "you," and
referring to her as "she" and "her." The woman, in fact, became a
pronoun for the child, who in her honesty and loyalty could never put
another word in the place which had belonged to the noun, and feel
satisfied.
Maria was very docile, outwardly, in those days, but inside she was
in a tumult of rebellion. She went home with Miss Slome when she was
asked, but she was never gracious in response to the doll-like smile,
and the caressing words, which were to her as automatic as the smile.
Sometimes it seemed to Maria that if she could only have her own
mother scold her, instead of Miss Slome's talking so sweetly to her,
she would give the whole world.
For some unexplained cause, the sorrow which Maria had passed through
had seemed to stop her own emotional development. She looked at
Wollaston Lee sometimes and wondered how she had ever had dreams
about him; how she had thought she would like him to go with her,
and, perhaps, act as silly as her father did with Miss Slome. She
remembered how his voice sounded when he said she was nothing but a
girl, and a rage of shame seized her. "He needn't worry," she
thought. "I wouldn't have him, not if he was to go down on his knees
in the dust." She told Gladys Mann that she thought Wollaston Lee was
a very homely boy, and not so very smart, and Gladys told another
girl whose brother knew Wollaston Lee, and he told him. After a
little, Wollaston and Maria never spoke when they met. The girl did
not seem to see the boy; she was more delicate in her manner of
showing aversion, but the boy gazed straight at her with an insolent
stare, as at one who had dared him. He told the same boy who had told
him what Maria had said, that he thought Amy Long was the prettiest
girl in school, and Maria was homely enough to crack a looking-glass,
and that came back to Maria. Everything said in the school always
came back, by some mysterious law of gravitation.
There was one quite serious difficulty involved in Aunt Maria's
deserting her post, and that was, Maria was too young to be left
alone in the house every night while her father was visiting his
fiancee. She could not stay at Mrs. White's, because it was obviously
unfair to ask them to remain up until nearly midnight to act as her
guardian every, or nearly every, night in the week. However, Harry
submitted the problem to Miss Slome, who solved it at once. She had,
in some respects, a masterly brain, and her executive abilities were
somewhat thrown away in her comparatively humble sphere.
"You must have the house cleaned," said she. "Let the woman you get
to clean stay over until you come home. She won't be afraid to go
home alone afterwards. Those kind of people never are. I suppose you
will get Mrs. Addix?"
"They tell me she is about the best woman for house-cleaning," said
Harry, rather helplessly. He was so unaccustomed to even giving a
thought to household details, that he had a vague sense of self-pity
because he was now obliged to do so. His lost Abby occasionally, he
believed, had employed this Mrs. Addix, but she had never troubled
him about it.
It thus happened that every evening little Maria Edgham sat guarded,
as it were, by Mrs. Addix. Mrs. Addix was of the poor-white race,
like the Manns--in fact, she was distantly related to them. They were
nearly all distantly related, which may have accounted for their
partial degeneracy. Mrs. Addix, however, was a sort of anomaly.
Coming, as she did, of a shiftless, indolent family, she was yet a
splendid worker. She seemed tireless. She looked positively radiant
while scrubbing, and also more intelligent. The moment she stopped
work, she looked like an automatic doll which had run down: all
consciousness of self, or that which is outside self, seemed to leave
her face; it was as if her brain were in her toiling arms and hands.
Moreover, she always went to sleep immediately after Harry had gone
and Maria was left alone with her. She sat in her chair and breathed
heavily, with her head tipped idiotically over one shoulder.
It was not very lively for Maria during those evenings. She felt
afraid to go to bed and leave the house alone except for the heavily
sleeping woman, whom her father had hard work to rouse when he
returned, and who staggered out of the door, when she started home,
as if she were drunk. She herself never felt sleepy; it was even hard
for her to sleep when at last her father had returned and she went to
bed. Often after she had fallen asleep her heart seemed to sting her
awake.
Maria grew thinner than ever. Somebody called Harry Edgham's
attention to the fact, and he got some medicine for her to take. But
it was not medicine which she needed--that is, not medicine for the
body, but for the soul. What probably stung her most keenly was the
fact that certain improvements, for which her mother had always
longed but always thought she could not have, were being made in the
house. A bay-window was being built in the parlor, and one over it,
in the room which had been her father's and mother's, and which Maria
dimly realized was, in the future, to be Miss Ida Slome's. Maria's
mother had always talked a good deal about some day having that
bay-window. Maria reflected that her father could have afforded it
just as well in her mother's day, if her mother had insisted upon it,
like Miss Slome. Maria's mother had been of the thrifty New England
kind, and had tried to have her husband save a little. Maria knew
well enough that these savings were going into the improvements, the
precious dollars which her poor mother had enabled her father to save
by her own deprivations and toil. Maria heard her father and Miss
Slome talk about the maid they were to have; Miss Slome would never
dream of doing her own work, as her predecessor had done. All these
things the child dwelt upon in a morbid, aged fashion, and,
consequently, while her evenings with Mrs. Addix were not enjoyable,
they were not exactly dull. Nearly every room in the house was being
newly papered and painted. Maria and Mrs. Addix sat first in one
room, then in another, as one after another was torn up in the
process of improvement. Generally the room which they occupied was
chaotic with extra furniture, and had a distracted appearance which
grated terribly upon the child's nerves. Only her own room was not
touched. "You shall have your room all fixed up next year," her
father told her. "I would have it done now, but father is going to
considerable expense as it is." Maria assured him, with a sort of
wild eagerness, that she did not want her room touched. It seemed to
her that if the familiar paper which her mother had selected were
changed for something else, and the room altered, that the last
vestige of home would disappear, that she could not bear it.
"Well," said Harry, easily, "your paper will do very well, I guess,
for a while longer; but father will have your room fixed up another
year. You needn't think you are going to be slighted."
That night, Maria and Mrs. Addix sat in Maria's room. The parlor was
in confusion, and so was the dining-room and the guest-chamber;
indeed, the house was at that time in the height of its repairs. That
very day Maria's mother's room had been papered with a beautiful
paper with a sheenlike satin, over which were strewn garlands of pink
roses. Pink was Miss Slome's favorite color. They had a new hard-wood
floor laid in that room, and there was to be a pink rug, and white
furniture painted with pink roses; Maria knew that her father and
Miss Slome had picked it out. That evening, after her father had
gone, and she sat there with the sleeping Mrs. Addix, a sort of
frenzy seized her, or, rather, she worked herself up to it. She
thought of what her mother would have said to that beautiful new
paper, and furniture, and bay-window. Her mother also had liked pink.
She thought of how much her mother would have liked it, and how she
had gone without, and not made any complaint about her shabby old
furnishings, which had that very day been sold to Mrs. Addix for an
offset to her wages, and which Maria had seen carried away. She
thought about it all, and a red flush deepened on her cheeks, and her
blue eyes blazed. For the time she was abnormal. She passed the limit
which separates perfect sanity from mania. She had some fancy-work in
her hands. Mrs. White had suggested that she work in cross-stitch a
cover for the dresser in her new mother's room, and she was engaged
upon that, performing, as she thought, a duty, but her very soul
rebelled against it. She made some mistakes, and whenever she did she
realized with a sort of wicked glee that the thing would not be
perfect, and she never tried to rectify them.
Finally, Maria laid her work softly on the table, beside which she
was sitting. She glanced at Mrs. Addix, whose heavy, measured
breathing filled the room, then she arose. She took the lamp from the
table, and tiptoed out. Maria stole across the hall. The room which
had been her father's and mother's was entirely empty, and the roses
on the satiny wall-paper gleamed out as if they were real. There was
a white-and-silver picture-moulding. Maria set her lamp on the floor.
She looked at the great bay-window, she looked at the roses on the
walls. Then she did a mad thing. The paper was freshly put on; it was
hardly dry. Maria deliberately approached the wall near the
bay-window, where the paper looked somewhat damp; she inserted her
slender little fingers, with a scratching of her nails under the
edge, and she tore off a great, ragged strip. Then she took up her
lamp and returned to her room.
Mrs. Addix was still asleep. She had begun to snore, in an odd sort
of fashion, with deep, regular puffs of breath; it was like the
beating of a drum to peace and rest, after a day of weary and
unskilled labor unprofitable to the soul. Maria sat down again. She
took up her work. She felt very wicked, but she felt better.