By the Light of the Soul: A Novel

by Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

“Why not? Let me in, sister.”

“Sister is going to study,” said Maria, in a firm voice. “She can't have Evelyn. Run down-stairs, darling; run down to mamma.”

“Evelyn don't want mamma. Evelyn wants sister.”

“Papa is down there, too. Put on your clothes, like a nice girl, and show papa how smart you can be; then run down.”

“Evelyn can't button up her dress.”

“Put everything on but that, then run down, and mamma can do it for you.”

“Let me in, sister.”

“No, dear,” Maria said again. “Evelyn can't come in now.”

There came a little whimper of grief and anger which cut Maria's heart, but she was firm. She could not have even Evelyn then. She had to be alone with the knowledge she had just gained of her father's state of health. She sat down in her little chair by the window; it was her own baby chair, which she had kept all these years, and in which she could still sit comfortably, she was so slender. Then she put her face in her hands and began to weep. She had never wept as she did then, not even when her mother died. She was so much younger when her mother died that her sensibilities had not acquired their full acumen; then, too, she had not had at that time the awful foretaste of a desolate future which tinctured with bitter her very soul. Somehow, although Maria had noticed for a long time that her father did not look as he had done, it had never occurred to her that that which had happened to her mother could happen to her father. She had been like one in a house which has been struck by lightning, and had been rendered thereby incredulous of a second stroke. It had not occurred to her that whereas she had lost her mother, she could also lose her father. It seemed like too heavy a hammer-stroke of Providence to believe in and keep her reason. She had thought that her father was losing his youth, that his hair turning gray had much to do with his altered looks. She had never thought of death. It seemed to her monstrous. A rage against Providence, like nothing which she had known before, was over her. Why should she lose everything? What had she done? She reviewed her past life, and she defended herself like Job, with her summary of self-righteousness. She had always done right, so far as she knew. Her sins had been so petty as hardly to deserve the name of sins. She remembered how she had once enjoyed seeing her face in her looking-glass, how she had liked pretty, new dresses, and she could not make that seem very culpable. She remembered how, although she had never loved her step-mother, she had observed, except on that one occasion when Evelyn was lost, the utmost respect and deference for her—how she had been, after the first, even willing to love her had she met with the slightest encouragement. She could not honestly blame herself for her carefully concealed attitude of disapproval towards Ida, for she said to herself, with a subtlety which was strange for a girl so young, that she had merited it, that she was a cold, hard, self-centred woman, not deserving love, and that she had in reality been injurious for her father. She was convinced that, had her own mother lived, with her half-censorious yet wholly loving care for him, he might still have preserved his youth and his handsome boyishness and health. She thought of the half-absurd, half-tragic secret which underlay her life, and she could not honestly think herself very much to blame for that. She always thought of that with bewilderment, as one might think of some dimly remembered vagary of delirium. Sometimes it seemed to her now that it could not be true. Maria realized that she was full of self-righteousness, but she was also honest. She saw no need for her to blame herself for faults which she had not committed. She thought of the doctrine which she had heard, that children were wholly evil from their birth, and it did not seem to her true. She could say that she had been wholly evil from her birth, but she felt that she should, if she did say so, tell a lie to God and herself. She honestly could not see why, for any fault of hers, her father should die. Then suddenly her mind gave a leap from her own standing-point to that of her father. She suddenly reflected that it was not wholly her own grief for his loss which was to be considered, but her father's grief at quitting the world wherein he had dwelt so long, and his old loves of life. She reflected upon his possible fear of the Unknown into which he was to go. There was in Maria's love for her father, as there had been in her mother's, a strong element of the maternal. She thought of her father with infinite pity, as one might think of a little child about to go on a long, strange journey to an unknown place, all alone by himself. It seemed to her an awful thing for God to ask one like her father to die a lingering death, to realize it all fully, what he had to do, then to go off by himself, alone. She remembered what she had heard from the pulpit on Sundays, but somehow that Unknown seemed so frightfully wide and vast for a soul like her father's, which had always been so like the soul of a child, to find her mother in. Then she got some comfort from the memory of her mother, of her great strength. It seemed to her that her mother, wherever she was, would not let her father wander alone very long. That she would meet him with that love and chiding which is sometimes the very concert-pitch of love itself, its key-note, and lead him into those green pastures and beside those still waters of the Psalmist. Maria, at that moment, got more comfort from her memory of the masterliness of her mother, whom she had known, than from her conception of God, towards whom her soul reached out, it is true, but whom it no more comprehended than a flower comprehends the sun. The very love of God needs a human trellis whereby His creatures can reach Him, and Maria now climbed towards a trust in Him, by the reflection of her mother's love, and strength in spite of love.

Then racking pity for herself and her own loss, and rage because of it, and a pity for her father which almost roused her to a fury of rebellion, again swept away every other consideration.