By the Light of the Soul: A Novel

by Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

After she had gone, Harry rose from the chair; he had been sitting beside the centre-table with the evening paper. He walked over to the window and looked out at the night. It was bright moonlight. The trees were in full leaf, and the shadows were of such loveliness that they fairly seemed celestial. Harry gazed out at the night scene, at the moon riding through the unbelievable and unfathomable blue of the sky, like a crystal ball, with a slight following of golden clouds; he gazed at the fairy shadows which transformed the familiar village street into something beyond earth, and he sighed. The conviction of his approaching dissolution had never been so strong as at that moment. He seemed fairly to see his own mortality—that gate of death which lay wide open for him. Yet, all at once, a sense of peace and trust almost ineffable came over him. Death seemed merely the going-out into the true open, the essence of the moonlight and the beauty. It seemed the tasting and absorbing the food for his own spiritual hunger, which had been upon him from birth, that which had always been just out of his reach. When Maria returned in her pink gingham school-gown, she found her father seated beside the table as he had been when she left. He looked up at her with a bright smile which somehow chilled her, although she tried to drive the conviction of the chill from her mind. She got a new book from the case, and proposed reading aloud to him.

“Hadn't you better go to bed, dear?” said Harry. “You will have a hard day to-morrow.”

“No; I am going to sit up with you till She comes home,” said Maria, “and we might as well amuse ourselves.” She began to read, and Harry listened happily. But Maria, whenever she glanced over her book at her father's happy face, felt the same undefinable chill.

However, when Ida came home and they had a little supper of sardines and crackers, she did not think any more of it. She went to bed with her head full of the morrow and her new gown and the glories awaiting her. She tried not to be vain, but was uncomfortably conscious that she was glad that she was first in her class, instead of some other girl or instead of a boy. Maria felt especially proud of ranking ahead of the boys.

The next day was, as she had anticipated, one of happy triumph for her. She stood on the stage in her lovely dress and read her valedictory, which, although trite enough, was in reality rather better in style than most valedictories. She received a number of presents, a tiny gold watch from her father among them, and a ring with a turquoise stone from Ida, and quantities of flowers. The day after the graduation Maria had her photograph taken, with all her floral offerings around her, with a basket of roses on her arm and great bouquets in her lap and on a little photographic table beside her. The basket of roses was an anonymous offering. It came with no card. If Maria had dreamed that Wollaston Lee had sent it, she would never have sat for her photograph with it on her arm. But she did not think of Wollaston at all that day. He was completely out of her mind for the time, swallowed up in her sense of personal joy and triumph. Wollaston had not graduated first in his class in the academy the year before. A girl had headed that class also. Maria had felt a malicious joy at the fact, at the time, and it was entirely beyond her imagination now that Wollaston, who had seemed to dislike her, although she was forced to admit that he had been exceedingly honorable, had sent roses to her. She suspected that one of the teachers, a young man who had paid, in a covert and shamefaced way, a little attention to her, had sent the basket. She thought the roses lovely, and recognized the inadvisability of thanking this teacher, since he had not enclosed his card. She did not like him very well—indeed, she felt a certain repugnance to him—but roses were roses, and she was a young girl.

“Who gave you the basket of roses, dear?” her father asked when she was displaying her trophies the day after her graduation.

Maria blushed. “I don't know,” said she; “there wasn't any card with them.” As she spoke she seemed to see the face of the young history teacher, Mr. Latimer, with his sparse, sandy beard, and she felt how very distasteful he was to her, even if gilded, so to speak, by roses.

“I think some enamoured boy in her class who was too shy to send his card with his floral offering was the one,” Ida said to Harry when Maria had gone out. She laughed a softly sarcastic laugh.

Harry looked at her uneasily.

“Maria is too young to get such ideas into her head,” he said.