By the Light of the Soul. Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу By the Light of the Soul - Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman страница 17
Harry looked lovingly at her, then his eyes fell on the door of the room which had been papered that day. It occurred to him to go in and see how the new paper looked.
“Come in with father, and let's see the improvements,” he said, in a gay voice, to Maria.
Maria followed him into the room. It would have been difficult to say whether triumphant malice and daring, or fear, prevailed in her heart.
Harry, carrying the lamp, entered the room, with Maria slinking at his heels. The first thing he saw was the torn paper.
“Hullo!” said he. He approached the bay-window with his lamp. “Confound those paperers!” he said.
For a minute Maria did not say a word. She was not exactly struggling with temptation; she had inherited too much from her mother's Puritan ancestry to make the question of a struggle possible when the duty of truth stared her, as now, in the face. She simply did not speak at once because the thing appeared to her stupendous, and nobody, least of all a child, but has a threshold of preparation before stupendous things.
“They haven't half put the paper on,” said her father. “Didn't half paste it, I suppose. You can't trust anybody unless you are right at their heels. Confound 'em! There, I've got to go round and blow 'em up to-morrow, before I go to the city.”
Then Maria spoke. “I tore that paper off, father,” said she.
Harry turned and stared at her. His face went white. For a second he thought the child was out of her senses.
“What?” he said.
“I tore that paper off,” repeated Maria.
“You? Why?”
The double question seemed to hit the child like a pistol-shot, but she did not flinch.
“Mother never had paper as pretty as this,” she said, “nor new furniture.” Her eyes met her father's with indescribable reproach.
Harry looked at her with almost horror. For the moment the child's eyes looked like her dead mother's, her voice sounded like her's. He continued gazing at her.
“I couldn't bear it,” said Maria. “She” [she meant Mrs. Addix] “was asleep. I was all alone. I got to thinking. I came in here and tore it off.”
Harry heaved a deep sigh. He did not look nor was he in the least angry.
“I know your poor mother didn't have much,” said he. He sighed again. Then he put his arm around Maria and kissed her. “You can have your room newly papered now, if you want it,” said he, in a choking voice. “Father will send you over to Ellisville to-morrow with Mrs. White, and you can pick out some paper your own self, and father will have it put right on.”
“I don't care about any,” said Maria, and she began to sob.
“Father's baby,” said Harry.
She felt his chest heave, and realized that her father was weeping as well as she.
“Oh, father, I don't want new paper,” she sobbed out, convulsively. “Mother picked out that on my room, and—and—I am sorry I tore this off.”
“Never mind, darling,” said Harry. He almost carried the child back to her own room. “Now get to bed as soon as you can, dear,” he said.
After Maria, trembling and tearful, had undressed and was in bed, her father came back into the room. He held a small lamp in one hand, and a tumbler with some wine in the other.
“Here is some of the wine your mother had,” said Harry. “Now I want you to sit right up and drink this.”
“I—don't want it, father,” gasped Maria.
“Sit right up and drink it.”
Maria sat up. The tumbler was a third full, and the wine was an old port. Maria drank it. Immediately her head began to swim; she felt in a sort of daze when her father kissed her, and bade her lie still and go right to sleep, and went out of the room. She heard him, with sharpened hearing, enter her mother's room. She remembered about the paper, and the new furniture, and how she was to have a new mother, and how she had torn the paper, and how her own mother had never had such things, but she remembered through a delicious haze. She felt a charming warmth pervade all her veins. She was no longer unhappy. Nothing seemed to matter. She soon fell asleep.
As for Harry Edgham, he entered the empty room which he had occupied with his dead wife. He set the lamp on the floor and approached the paper, which poor little Maria, in her fit of futile rebellion, had torn. He carefully tore off still more, making a clean strip of the paper where Maria had made a ragged one. When he had finished, it looked as if the paper had in reality dropped off because of carelessness in putting on. He gathered up the pieces of paper and stood looking about the room.
There is something about an empty room, empty except of memories, but containing nothing besides, no materialities, no certainties as to the future, which is intimidating to one who stops and thinks. Harry Edgham was not, generally speaking, of the sort who stop to think; but now he did. The look of youth faded from his face. Instead of the joy and triumph which had filled his heart and made it young again, came remembrance of the other woman, and something else, which resembled terror and dread. For the first time he deliberated whether he was about to do a wise thing: for the first time, the image of Ida Slome's smiling beauty, which was ever evident to his fancy, produced in him something like doubt and consternation. He looked about the room, and remembered the old pieces of furniture which had that day been carried away. He looked at the places where they had stood. Then he remembered his dead wife, as he had never remembered her before, with an anguish of loss. He said to himself that if he only had her back, even with her faded face and her ready tongue, that old, settled estate would be better for him than this joy, which at once dazzled and racked him. Suddenly the man, as he stood there, put his hands before his face; he was weeping like a child. That which Maria had done, instead of awakening wrath, had aroused a pity for himself and for her, which seemed too great to be borne. For the instant, the dead triumphed over the living.
Then Harry took up the lamp and went to his own room. He set the lamp on the dresser, and looked at his face, with the rays thrown upward upon it, very much as Maria had done the night of her mother's death. When he viewed himself in the looking-glass, he smiled involuntarily; the appearance of youth returned. He curled his mustache and moved his head this way and that. He thought about some new clothes which he was to have. He owned to himself, with perfect ingenuousness, that he was, in his way, as a man, as good-looking as Ida herself. Suddenly he remembered how Abby had looked when she was a young girl and he had married her; he had not compared himself so favorably with her. The image of his dead wife, as a young girl, was much fairer in his mind than that of Ida Slome.
“There's no use talking, Abby was handsomer than Ida when she was young,” he said to himself, as he began to undress. He went to sleep thinking of Abby as a young girl, but when once asleep he dreamed of Ida Slome.
Chapter IX
Harry and Ida Slome were to be married the Monday before Thanksgiving. The school would close on the Friday before.
Ida Slome possessed, along with an entire self-satisfaction, a vein of pitiless sense, which enabled her