By the Light of the Soul: A Novel

by Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

“Go back!” he whispered, fiercely.

“Oh, father, is mother better?”

“Go back!”

Maria went back, and again the tempest of woe and injury swept over her. Why should her father speak to her so? Why could he not tell her if her mother were better? She sat in her little rocking-chair beside the window, and looked out at the night. She was conscious of a terrible sensation which seemed to have its starting-point at her heart, but which pervaded her whole body, her whole consciousness. She was conscious of such misery, such grief, that it was like a weight and a pain. She knew now that her mother was no better, that she might even die. She heard no more of the cries and moans, and somehow now, the absence of them seemed harder to bear than they themselves had been. Suddenly she heard her mother's door open. She heard her father's voice, and the doctor's in response, but she still could not distinguish a word. Presently she heard the front door open and close softly. Then her father hurried down the steps, and got into the doctor's buggy and drove away. It was dark, but she could not mistake her father. She knew that he had gone for another doctor, probably Dr. Williams, who lived in the next town, and was considered very skilful. The other doctor was remaining with her mother. She did not dare leave her room again. She sat there watching an hour, and a pale radiance began to appear in the east, which her room faced. It was like dawn in another world, everything had so changed to her. The thought came to her that she might go down-stairs and make some coffee, if she only knew how. Her father might like some when he returned. But she did not know how, and even if she had she dared not leave her room again.

The pale light in the east increased, suddenly rosy streamers, almost like northern lights, were flung out across the sky. She could distinguish things quite clearly. She heard the rattle of wheels, and thought it was her father returning with Dr. Williams, but instead it was the milkman in his yellow cart. He carried a bottle of milk around to the south door. There was something horribly ghastly in that every-day occurrence to the watching child. She realized the interminable moving on of things in spite of all individual sufferings, as she would have realized the revolution of a wheel of torture. She felt that it was simply hideous that the milk should be left at the door that morning, just as if everything was as it had been. When the milkman jumped into his wagon, whistling, it seemed to her as if he were doing an awful thing. The milk-wagon stopped at the opposite house, then moved on out of sight down the street. She wished to herself that the milkman's horse might run away while he was at some door. The rancor which possessed her father, the kicking against the pricks, was possessing her. She felt a futile rage, like that of some little animal trodden underfoot. A boy whom she knew ran past whooping, with a tin-pail, after the milkman. Evidently his mother wanted some extra milk. The sun was reflected on the sides of the swinging pail, and the flash of light seemed to hurt her, and she felt the same unreasoning wrath against the boy. Why was not Willy Royce's mother desperately sick, like her mother, instead of simply sending for extra milk? The health and the daily swing of the world in its arc of space seemed to her like a direct insult.

At last it occurred to her that she ought to dress herself. She left the window, brushed her hair, braided it, and tied it with a blue ribbon, and put on her little blue gingham gown which she commonly wore mornings. Then she sat by the window again. It was not very long after that that she saw the doctor coming, driving fast. Her father was with him, and between them sat a woman. She recognized the woman at once. She was a trained nurse who lived in Edgham. “They have got Miss Bell,” she thought; “mother must be awful sick.” She knew that Miss Bell's wages were twenty-five dollars a week, and that her father would not have called her in except in an extreme case. She watched her father help out the woman, who was stout and middle-aged, and much larger than he. Miss Bell had a dress-suit case, which her father tugged painfully into the house; Miss Bell followed him. She heard his key turn in the lock while the doctor fastened his horse.

She saw the doctor, who was slightly lame, limp around to the buggy after his horse was tied, and take out two cases. She hated him while he did it. She felt intuitively that something terrible was to come to her mother because of those cases. She watched the doctor limp up the steps with positive malevolence. “If he is such a smart doctor, why doesn't he cure himself?” she asked.

She heard steps on the stairs, then the murmur of voices, and the sound of the door opening into her mother's room. A frightful sense of isolation came over her. She realized that it was infinitely worse to be left by herself outside, suffering, than outside happiness. She tried again to pray, then she stopped. “It is no good praying,” she reflected, “God did not stop mother's pain. It was only stopped by that stuff I smelled out in the entry.” She could not reason back of that; her terror and misery brought her up against a dead wall. It seemed to her presently that she heard a faint cry from her mother's room, then she was quite sure that she smelled that strange, sweet smell even through her closed door. Then her father opened her door abruptly, and a great whiff of it entered with him, like some ghost of pain and death.

“The doctors have neither of them had any breakfast, and they can't leave her,” he said, with a jerk of his elbow, and speaking still with that angry tone towards the unoffending child. “Can you make coffee?”

“I don't know how.”