“Perhaps she has,” Ida assented, with a peculiar smile curling her lips. Ida looked handsomer than ever in her mourning attire. The black softened her beauty, instead of bringing it into bolder relief, as is sometimes the case. Ida mourned Harry in a curious fashion. She mourned the more pitifully because of the absence of any mourning at all, in its truest sense. Ida had borne in upon her the propriety of deep grief, and she, maintaining that attitude, cramped her very soul because of its unnaturalness. She consoled herself greatly because of what she esteemed her devotion to the man who was gone. She said to herself, with a preen of her funereal crest, that she had been such a wife to poor Harry as few men ever had possessed.
“Well, I have the consolation of thinking that I have done my duty,” she said to Mrs. Voorhees.
“Of course you have, dear, and that is worth everything,” responded her friend.
“I did all I could to make his home attractive,” said Ida, “and he never had to wait for a meal. How pretty he thought those new hangings in the parlor were! Poor Harry had an æsthetic sense, and I did my best to gratify it. It is a consolation.”
“Of course,” said Mrs. Voorhees.
If Ida had known how Maria regarded those very red silk parlor hangings she would have been incredulous. Maria thought to herself how hard her poor father had worked, and how the other hangings, which had been new at the time of Ida's marriage, could not have been worn out. She wanted to tear down the filmy red things and stuff them into the kitchen stove. When she found out that her father had saved up nearly a thousand dollars for her, which was deposited to her credit in the Edgham savings-bank, her heart nearly broke because of that. She imagined her father going without things to save that little pittance for her, and she hated the money. She said to herself that she would never touch it. And yet she loved her father for saving it for her with a very anguish of love.
Ida was manifestly surprised when Henry's will was read and she learned of Maria's poor little legacy, but she touched her cool red lips to Maria's cheek and told her how glad she was. “It will be a little nest-egg for you,” she said, “and it will buy your trousseau. And, of course, you will always feel at perfect liberty to come here whenever you wish to do so. Your room will be kept just as it is.”
Maria thanked her, but she detected an odd ring of insincerity in Ida's voice. After she went to bed that night she speculated as to what it meant. Evelyn was not with her. Ida had insisted that she should occupy her own room.
“You will keep each other awake,” she said.
Evelyn had grown noticeably thin and pale in a few days. The child had adored her father. Often, at the table, she would look at his vacant place, and push away her plate, and sob. Ida had become mildly severe with her on account of it.