By the Light of the Soul | Page 8

Mary Wilkins Freeman
hoped that the hope was not wicked, that she might die
young rather than live to look like her aunt Maria. She pictured with a
sort of pleasurable horror, what a lovely little waxen-image she would
look now, laid away in a nest of white flowers. She had only just begun
to doze, when she awoke with a great start. Her father had opened her
door, and stood calling her.
"Maria," he said, in an agitated voice.
Maria sat up in bed. "Oh, father, what is it?" said she, and a vague
horror chilled her.
"Get up, and slip on something, and go into your mother's room," said
her father, in a gasping sort of voice. "I've got to go for the doctor."
Maria put one slim little foot out of bed. "Oh, father," she said, "is
mother sick?"
"Yes, she is very sick," replied her father. His voice sounded almost
savage. It was as if he were furious with his wife for being ill, furious

with Maria, with life, and death itself. In reality he was torn almost to
madness with anxiety. "Slip on something so you won't catch cold,"
said he, in his irritated voice. "I don't want another one down."
Maria ran to her closet and pulled out a little pink wrapper. "Oh, father,
is mother very sick?" she whispered again.
"Yes, she is very sick. I am going to have another doctor to-morrow,"
replied her father, still in that furious, excited voice, which the sick
woman must have heard.
"What shall I--" began Maria, but her father, running down the stairs,
cut her short.
"Do nothing," said he. "Just go in there and stay with her. And don't
you talk. Don't you speak a word to her. Go right in." With that the
front door slammed.
Maria went tiptoeing into her mother's room, still shaking from head to
foot, and her blue eyes seeming to protrude from her little white face.
Even before she entered her mother's room she became conscious of a
noise, something between a wail and a groan. It was indescribably
terrifying. It was like nothing which she had ever heard before. It did
not seem possible that her mother, that anything human, in fact, was
making such a noise, and yet no animal could have made it, for it was
articulate. Her mother was in fact both praying and repeating verses of
Scripture, in that awful voice which was no longer capable of normal
speech, but was compounded of wail and groan. Every sentence
seemed to begin with a groan, and ended with a long-drawn-out wail.
Maria went close to her mother's bed and stood looking at her. Her poor
little face would have torn her mother's heart with its piteous terror, had
she herself not been in such agony.
Maria did not speak. She remembered what her father had said. As her
mother lay there, stretched out stiff and stark, almost as if she were
dead, Maria glanced around the room as if for help. She caught sight of
a bottle of cologne on the dresser, one which she had given her mother
herself the Christmas before; she had bought it out of her little savings

of pocket-money. Maria went unsteadily over to the dresser and got the
cologne. She also opened a drawer and got out a clean handkerchief.
She became conscious that her mother's eyes were upon her, even
although she never ceased for a moment her cries of agony.
"What--r you do--g?" asked her mother, in her dreadful voice.
"Just getting some cologne to put on your head, to make you feel better,
mother," replied Maria, piteously. She thought she must answer her
mother's question in spite of her father's prohibition.
Her mother seemed to take no further notice; she turned her face to the
wall. "Have--mercy upon me, O Lord, according to Thy loving
kindness, according to the multitude of Thy tender mercies," she
shrieked out. Then the words ended with a long-drawn-out "Oh--oh--"
Had Maria not been familiar with the words, she could not have
understood them. Not a consonant was fairly sounded, the vowels were
elided. She went, feeling as if her legs were sticks, close to her mother's
bed, and opened the cologne bottle with hands which shook like an old
man's with the palsy. She poured some cologne on the handkerchief
and a pungent odor filled the room. She laid the wet handkerchief on
her mother's sallow forehead, then she recoiled, for her mother, at the
shock of the coldness, experienced a new and almost insufferable
spasm of pain. "Let--me alone!" she wailed, and it was like the howl of
a dog.
Maria slunk back to the dresser with the handkerchief and the cologne
bottle, then she returned to her mother's bedside and seated herself
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