“Number twenty-four, please,” she said.
The postmaster was both bungling and curious. He was a long time finding the box, then in giving her the letter. Maria felt dizzy. When at last he handed it to her with an inquisitive glance, she almost ran out of the office. When she was out-doors she glanced at the post-mark and saw it was Edgham. When she came to a lonely place in the road, when she was walking between stone-walls overgrown with poison-ivy, and meadowsweet, and hardhack, and golden-rod, she opened the letter. Just as she opened it she heard the sweet call of a robin in the field on her left, and the low of a cow looking anxiously over her bars.
The letter was written on soiled paper smelling strongly of tobacco, and it enclosed another smaller, sealed envelop. Maria read:
“Deer Miss,—I now tak my pen in hand to let you no that Gladys she is ded. She had a little boy bon, and he and she both died. Gladys she had been coffin for some time befoar, and jest befor she was took sick, she give me this letter, and sed for me to send it to you if ennything happened to her.
“Excuse hast and a bad pen. Mrs. Mann.”
Maria trembled so that she could hardly stand. She looked hastily around; there was no one in sight. She sank down on a large stone which had fallen from the stone wall on the left. Then she opened the little, sealed letter. It was very short. It contained only one word, one word of the vulgar slang to which poor Gladys had become habituated through her miserable life, and yet this one word of slang had a meaning of faithfulness and honor which dignified it. Maria read, “Nit.” and she knew that Gladys had died and had not told.
Chapter XXIX
It is frequently a chain of sequences whose beginnings are lost in obscurity which lead to events. The principal of the Normal School in Westbridge, which Evelyn attended and in which Maria taught, had been a certain Professor Lane. If he had not gone to Boston one morning when the weather was unusually sultry for the season, and if an east wind had not come up, causing him, being thinly clad, to take cold, which cold meant the beginning of a rapid consumption which hurried him off to Colorado, and a year later to death; if these east winds had not made it impossible for Wollaston Lee's mother, now widowed, to live with him in the college town where he had been stationed, a great deal which happened might not have come to pass at all. It was “the wind which bloweth where it listeth, and no man knoweth whence it cometh and whither it goeth,” which precipitated the small tragedy of a human life.
The Saturday before the fall term commenced, Evelyn came home from Westbridge, where she had been for some shopping, and she had a piece of news. She did not wait to remove her hat, but stood before Maria and her aunt, who were sewing in the sitting-room, with the roses nestling against the soft flying tendrils of her black hair. It was still so warm that she wore her summer hat.
“What do you think!” said she. “I have such a piece of news!”
“What is it, dear?” asked Maria. Aunt Maria looked up curiously.