By the Light of the Soul: A Novel

by Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

The baby continued to wail, and a note of despair crept into the wail. Maria could endure it no longer. She ran across the hall and flung open the door. The baby lay crying in a little pink-lined basket. Maria bent over it, and the baby at once stopped crying. She opened her mouth in a toothless smile, and she held up little, waving pink hands to Maria. Maria lifted the baby out of her basket and pressed her softly, with infinite care, as one does something very precious, to her childish bosom, and at once something strange seemed to happen to her. She became, as it were, illuminated by love.

Chapter XI

Maria had fallen in love with the baby, and her first impulse, as in the case of all true love, was secrecy. Why she should have been ashamed of her affection, her passion, for it was, in fact, passion, her first, she could not have told. It was the sublimated infatuation half compounded of dreams, half of instinct, which a little girl usually has for her doll. But Maria had never had any particular love for a doll. She had possessed dolls, of course, but she had never been quite able to rise above the obvious sham of them, the cloth and the sawdust and the paint. She had wondered how some little girls whom she had known had loved to sleep with their dolls; as for her, she would as soon have thought of taking pleasure in dozing off with any little roll of linen clasped in her arms. It was rather singular, for she had a vivid imagination, but it had balked at a doll. When, as sometimes happened, she saw a little girl of her own age, wheeling with solemnity a doll in a go-cart, she viewed her with amazement and contempt, and thought privately that she was not altogether bright. But this baby was different. It did not have to be laid on its back to make its eyes close, it did not have to be shaken and squeezed to make it vociferous. It was alive, and Maria, who was unusually alive in her emotional nature, was keenly aware of that effect. This little, tender, rosy thing was not stuffed with sawdust, it was stuffed with soul and love. It could smile; the smile was not painted on its face in a doll-factory. Maria was so thankful that this baby, Ida's baby, did not have Her smile, unchanging and permanent for all observers and all vicissitudes. When this baby smiled it smiled, and when it cried it cried. It was honest from the crown of its fuzzy head to the soles of its little pink worsted socks.

At the first reception which Ida gave after the baby came, and when it was on exhibition in a hand-embroidered robe, it screamed every minute. Maria was secretly glad, and proud of it. It meant much to her that her baby should not smile at all the company, whether it was smiling in its heart or not, the way She did. Maria had no room in her heart for any other love, except that for her father and the baby. She looked at Wollaston Lee, and wondered how she could ever have had dreams about him, how she could ever have preferred a boy to a baby like her little sister, even in her dreams. She ceased haunting the post-office for a letter from that other boy in New England, who had asked her to correspond over the garden fence, and who had either never written at all, or had misdirected his letter. She wondered how she had thought for a moment of doing such a thing as writing to a boy like that. She remembered with disgust how overgrown that boy was, and how his stockings were darned at the knees; and how she had seen patches of new cloth on his trousers, and had heard her aunt Maria say that he was so hard on his clothes on account of his passion for bird-nesting, that it was all his mother could do to keep him always decent. How could she have thought for a moment of a bird-nesting sort of boy? She was so thankful that the baby was a girl. Maria, as sometimes happens, had a rather inverted system of growth. With most, dolls come first, then boys; with her, dolls had not come at all. Boys came first, then her little baby sister, which was to her in the place of a doll, and the boys got promptly relegated to the background.

Much to Maria's delight, the French nurse, whom she at once disliked and stood in awe of, only remained until the baby was about two months old, then a little nurse-girl was engaged. On pleasant days the nurse-girl, whose name was Josephine, wheeled out the baby in her little carriage, which was the daintiest thing of the kind to be found, furnished with a white lace canopy lined with rose-colored silk. It was on these occasions that Maria showed duplicity. On Saturdays, when there was no school, she privately and secretly bribed Josephine, who was herself under the spell of the baby, to go home and visit her mother, and let her have the privilege of wheeling it herself. Maria had a small sum every week for her pocket-money, and a large part of it went to Josephine in the shape of chocolates, of which she was inordinately fond; in fact, Josephine, who came of the poor whites, like Gladys Mann, might have been said to be a chocolate maniac. Maria used to arrange with Josephine to meet her on a certain corner on Saturdays, and there the transfer was made: Josephine became the possessor of half a pound of chocolates, and Maria of the baby. Josephine had sworn almost a solemn oath to never tell. She at once repaired to her mother's, sucking chocolates on the way, and Maria blissfully wheeled the baby. She stood in very little danger of meeting Her on these occasions, because the Edgham Woman's Club met on Saturday afternoon. It often happened, however, that Maria met some of the school-girls, and then nothing could have exceeded her pride and triumph. Some of them had little brothers or sisters, but none of them such a little sister as hers.

The baby had, in reality, grown to be a beauty among babies. All the inflamed red and aged puckers and creases had disappeared; instead of that was the sweetest flush, like that of just-opened rosebuds. Evelyn was a compact little baby, fat, but not overlapping and grossly fat. It was such a matter of pride to Maria that the baby's cheeks did not hang the least bit in the world, but had only lovely little curves and dimples. She had become quite a connoisseur in babies. When she saw a baby whose flabby cheeks hung down and touched its bib, she was disgusted. She felt as if there was something morally wrong with such a baby as that. Her baby was wrapped in the softest white things: furs, and silk-lined embroidered cashmeres, and her little face just peeped out from the lace frill of a charming cap. There was only one touch of color in all this whiteness, beside the tender rose of the baby's face, and that was a little knot of pale pink baby-ribbon on the cap. Maria often stopped to make sure that the cap was on straight, and she also stopped very often to tuck in the white fur rug, and she also stopped often to thrust her own lovely little girl-face into the sweet confusion of baby and lace and embroidery and fur, with soft kisses and little, caressing murmurs of love. She made up little love phrases, which she would have been inexpressibly ashamed to have had overheard. “Little honey love” was one of them—“Sister's own little honey love.” Once, when walking on Elm Street under the leafless arches of the elms, where she thought she was quite alone, although it was a very bright, warm afternoon, and quite dry—it was not a snowy winter—she spoke more loudly than she intended, and looked up to see another, bigger girl, the daughter of the Edgham lawyer, whose name was Annie Stone. Annie Stone was large of her age—so large, in fact, that she had a nickname of “Fatty” in school. It had possibly soured her, or her over-plumpness may have been due to some physical ailment which rendered her irritable. At all events, Annie Stone had not that sweetness and placidity of temperament popularly supposed to be coincident with stoutness. She had a bitter and sarcastic tongue for a young girl. Maria inwardly shuddered when she saw Annie Stone's fat, malicious face surveying her from under her fur-trimmed hat. Annie Stone was always very well dressed, but even that did not seem to improve her mental attitude. Her large, high-colored face was also distinctly pretty, but she did not seemed to be cognizant of that to the result of any satisfaction.

“Sister's little honey love!” she repeated after Maria, with fairly a snarl of satire.

Maria had spirit, although she was for the moment dismayed.

“Well, she is—so there,” said she.

“You wait till you have a few more little honey loves,” said Annie Stone, “and see how you feel.”