By the Light of the Soul

By the Light of the Soul

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Title: By the Light of the Soul A Novel
Author: Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
Illustrator: Harold M. Brett
Release Date: January 21, 2006 [EBook #17564]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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LIGHT OF THE SOUL ***

Produced by Jeff Kaylin and Andrew Sly

By the Light of the Soul
A Novel
By Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

Author of "The Debtor" "The Portion of Labor" "Jerome" "A New
England Nun" Etc. etc.
Illustrations by Harold M. Brett
New York and London Harper & Brothers Publishers 1907

Copyright, 1906, by Harper & Brothers. All rights reserved. Published
January, 1907.

To Harriet and Carolyn Alden
Chapter I
Maria Edgham, who was a very young girl, sat in the church vestry
beside a window during the weekly prayer-meeting.
As was the custom, a young man had charge of the meeting, and he
stood, with a sort of embarrassed dignity, on the little platform behind
the desk. He was reading a selection from the Bible. Maria heard him
drone out in a scarcely audible voice: "Whom the Lord loveth, He
chasteneth," and then she heard, in a quick response, a soft sob from the
seat behind her. She knew who sobbed: Mrs. Jasper Cone, who had lost
her baby the week before. The odor of crape came in Maria's face,
making a species of discordance with the fragrance of the summer night,
which came in at the open window. Maria felt irritated by it, and she
wondered why Mrs. Cone felt so badly about the loss of her baby. It
had always seemed to Maria a most unattractive child, large-headed,
flabby, and mottled, with ever an open mouth of resistance, and a loud
wail of opposition to existence in general. Maria felt sure that she could
never have loved such a baby. Even the unfrequent smiles of that baby
had not been winning; they had seemed reminiscent of the commonest
and coarsest things of life, rather than of heavenly innocence. Maria
gazed at the young man on the platform, who presently bent his head
devoutly, and after saying, "Let us pray," gave utterance to an

unintelligible flood of supplication intermingled with information to the
Lord of the state of things on the earth, and the needs of his people.
Maria wondered why, when God knew everything, Leon Barber told
him about it, and she also hoped that God heard better than most of the
congregation did. But she looked with a timid wonder of admiration at
the young man himself. He was so much older than she, that her
romantic fancies, which even at such an early age had seized upon her,
never included him. She as yet dreamed only of other dreamers like
herself, Wollaston Lee, for instance, who went to the same school, and
was only a year older. Maria had made sure that he was there, by a
glance, directly after she had entered, then she never glanced at him
again, but she wove him into her dreams along with the sweetness of
the midsummer night, and the morally tuneful atmosphere of the place.
She was utterly innocent, her farthest dreams were white, but she
dreamed. She gazed out of the window through which came the wind
on her little golden-cropped head (she wore her hair short) in cool puffs,
and she saw great, plumy masses of shadow, themselves like the
substance of which dreams were made. The trees grew thickly down
the slope, which the church crowned, and at the bottom of the slope
rushed the river, which she heard like a refrain through the intermittent
soughing of the trees. A whippoorwill was singing somewhere out
there, and the katydids shrieked so high that they almost surmounted
dreams. She could smell wild grapes and pine and other mingled odors
of unknown herbs, and the earth itself. There had been a hard shower
that afternoon, and the earth still seemed to cry out with pleasure
because of it. Maria had worn her old shoes to church, lest she spoil her
best ones; but she wore her pretty pink gingham gown, and her hat with
a wreath of rosebuds, and she felt to the utmost the attractiveness of her
appearance. She, however, felt somewhat conscience-stricken on
account of the pink gingham gown. It was a new one, and her mother
had been obliged to have it made by