One morning Angelica didn’t get up. Her mother, in great anxiety, came
over to her, to make enquiries, but Angelica drove her away with
fierceness, swearing at her, abusing her.
"Let me alone!" she cried. "Shut your mouth and mind your own business!"
"Oh, Angie, Angie!" said the poor soul. "If you’d only talk to me! If
you only had the sense to know how I could help you!"
"Shut up!" screamed Angelica, hysterically. "And get out! Don’t speak to
me again!"
Mrs. Kennedy took up her pail and went out; but half-way up the stairs
she collapsed. She sat down on one of the steps and tried to pray; but
she didn’t know quite what to ask of God.
Because she _knew_; she couldn’t doubt any longer. She knew what was
wrong with Angelica!
She didn’t really want to pray. She wanted God to do the talking. She
wanted to listen to Him, not to talk to Him; to discuss it, to ask
questions, to have an explanation, to hear the voice of authority.
What was the use of sitting there telling Him what He surely knew? Or to
beg for mercy or pity, when what she wanted was advice? Not that vague
sort of "guidance" which one prayed for, and which really meant puzzling
things out alone as best one could. There was one thing, though----
"Oh, Lord!" she prayed. "Soften Thou her heart and let her turn to me!"
She remembered afterward how miraculously this prayer was answered.
She was scrubbing the vestibule--a task of peculiar hopelessness,
because people always came in to walk over it all the time she was
trying to clean it. She heard a voice say "Mommer!" and, looking up, saw
her child, huddled in an old wrapper, standing before her. Angelica was
struggling with a deadly nausea. She was frightened and desperate, her
face a sickly white, her hair in dank disorder.
"Mommer!" she said again. "Come down-stairs! I feel awful sick!"
Her mother got up, leaving pail and brush where they were, and put an
arm around this beloved child, so much taller and stronger than she, and
yet, in her youth and her ignorance, so much weaker. She helped her
down-stairs and into bed again.
"Lie still!" she said. "That’s the best you can do, my deary. It’ll pass
away."
"Can’t you get me some sort of medicine, mommer?"
"Nothing that would help you, my deary," Mrs. Kennedy told her. "You’ve
just got to bear it, Angelica."
The girl looked up with somber eyes.
"Mommer," she said, "listen! What do you guess is the matter with me?"
"Angelica, my deary, I _know_!"
"Then, mommer, I’m going to kill myself!"
Her mother said nothing at all, but to herself she thought:
"Why not? It would be the best and the quickest for both of us. If you
don’t--oh, what’s ahead of us, and how ever can we go through with it?"
Angelica searched her mother’s face, but in vain; it was impassive.
"What else _can_ I do?" she cried.
"There’s always something that can be done," said her mother. "We’ll try
and think, deary."
"Mommer!"
"Yes, my deary?"
"Do you feel--different to me?"
"No, Angelica, nor ever shall!"
But she did. Strong in the simple soul was the old worship of the
virgin. Angelica had been before a mystic and holy thing. She was now no
more than a woman, like herself; and a woman is no fit object for
worship.
Mrs. Kennedy wasn’t shocked, in a moral sense. She didn’t dwell much
upon that side of the case. Her great concern was with practical
problems--above all, how they were to get the money which she knew would
be needed. She always spoke of girls in similar situations as
"unfortunate," and that is just the way she saw it.
She sat at the bedside, trying her best to make some sort of plan.