By the Light of the Soul: A Novel

by Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

“He has been consulted, and also Dr. Green and Dr. Anderson, not four weeks ago, and we all agree,” said the doctor, with a certain defiance.

“Go, Irene,” said Ida.

Irene went out of the room, but neither she nor the cook left the house.

“The madam said to send a telegram,” Irene told the cook, “but the doctor said it was no use, and I ain't goin' to stir out a step again to-night. I'm afraid.”

The cook, who was weeping beside the kitchen table, hardly seemed to hear. She wept profusely and muttered surreptitiously prayers on her rosary for poor Harry's soul, which passed as day dawned.

Chapter XXVII

Maria had always attended church, and would have said, had she been asked, that she believed in religion, that she believed in God; but she had from the first, when she had thought of such matters at all, a curious sort of scorn, which was half shame, at the familiar phrases used concerning it. When she had heard of such and such a one that “he was serious,” that he had “experienced conviction,” she had been filled with disgust. The spiritual nature of it all was to her mind treated materially, like an attack of the measles or mumps. She had seen people unite with the church of which her mother had been a member, and heard them subscribe to and swear their belief in articles of faith, which seemed to her monstrous. Religion had never impressed her with any beauty, or sense of love. Now, for the first time, after her father had died, she seemed all at once to sense the nearness of that which is beyond, and a love and longing for it, which is the most primitive and subtlest instinct of man, filled her very soul. Her love for her father projected her consciousness of him beyond this world. In the midst of her grief a strange peace was over her, and a realization of love which she had never had before. Maria, at this period, had she been a Catholic, might have become a religious devotee. She seemed to have visions of the God-man crowned with thorns, the rays of unutterable and eternal love, and sacred agony for love's sake. She said to herself that she loved God, that her father had gone to him. Moreover, she took a certain delight in thinking that her own mother, with her keen tongue and her heart of true gold, had him safe with her. She regarded Ida with a sort of covert triumph during those days after the funeral, when the sweet, sickly fragrance of the funeral flowers still permeated the house. Maria did not weep much after the first. She was not one to whom tears came easily after her childhood. She carried about with her what seemed like an aching weight and sense of loss, along with that strange new conviction of love and being born for ultimate happiness which had come to her at the time of her father's death.

The spring was very early that year. The apple-trees were in blossom at an unusual time. There was a tiny orchard back of the Edgham house. Maria used to steal away down there, sit down on the grass, speckled with pink-and-white petals, and look up through the rosy radiance of bloom at the infinite blue light of the sky. It seemed to her for the first time she laid hold on life in the midst of death. She wondered if she could always feel as she did then. She had a premonition that this state, which bordered on ecstasy, would not endure.

“Maria does not act natural, poor child,” Ida said to Mrs. Voorhees. “She hardly sheds a tear. Sometimes I fear that her father's marrying again did wean her a little from him.”

“She may have deep feelings,” suggested Mrs. Voorhees. Mrs. Voorhees was an exuberant blonde, with broad shallows of sentimentality overflowing her mind.