Henry shook his head. "Do you want to know how long?" he said.

"Yes. What do you mean, Henry?"

"She's going to stay just as long as she has a good time there. If she has a good time there she'll stay if it's years."

"You don't mean you think she would go off and leave that darling little girl a whole year?"

"I said years," replied Henry.

"Land! I don't believe it. You're dreadful hard on women, Henry."

"Wait and see," said Henry.

Time proved that Henry, with his bitter knowledge of the weakness of human nature, was right. Ida remained abroad. After a year's stay she wrote Maria, from London, that an eminent physician there said that he would not answer for her life if she returned to the scene wherein she had suffered so much. She expressed a great deal of misery at leaving her precious Evelyn so long, but she did not feel that it was right for her to throw her life away. In a postscript to this letter she informed Maria, as if it were an afterthought, that she had let the house in Edgham furnished. She said it injured a house to remain unoccupied so long, and she felt that she ought to keep the place up for her poor father's sake, he had thought so much of it. She added that the people who rented it had no children except a grown-up daughter, so that everything would be well cared for. When Maria read the letter to her aunt the elder woman sniffed.

"H'm," said she. "I ain't surprised, not a mite."

"It keeps us here quartered on you," said Maria.

"So far as that goes, I am tickled to death she has rented the house," replied Aunt Maria. "I had made up my mind that you would feel as if you would want to go to Edgham for your summer vacation, anyway, and I thought I would go with you and keep house, though I can't say that I hankered after it. The older I grow the more I feel as if I was best off in my own home, but I would have gone. So far as I am concerned I am glad she has let the house, but I must say I ain't surprised. You mark my words, Maria Edgham, and you see if what I say won't come true."

"What is it?"

"Ida Slome will stay over there, if she has a good time. She's got money enough with poor Harry's life insurance, and now she will have her house rent. It don't cost her much to keep Evelyn here, and she's got enough. I don't mean she's got enough to traipse round with d.u.c.h.esses and earls and that sort, but she's got enough. Those folks she went with have settled down there, haven't they?"

"Yes, I believe so," said Maria. "Mr. Voorhees was an Englishman, and I believe he is in some business in London."

"Well, Ida Slome is going to stay there. I shouldn't be surprised if Evelyn was grown up before she saw her mother again."

"I can't quite believe that," Maria said.

"When you get to be as old as I am you will believe more," said her aunt Maria. "You will see that folks' selfishness hides the whole world besides. Ida Slome is that kind."

"I think she is selfish myself," said Maria, "but I don't believe she can leave Evelyn as long as that."

"Wait and see," said Aunt Maria, in much the same tone that her brother had used towards his wife.

Maria Stillman was right. Evelyn remained in Amity. She outgrew Maria's school, and attended the Normal School in Westbridge. Maria herself outgrew her little Amity school, and obtained a position as teacher in one of the departments of the Normal School, and still Ida had not returned. She wrote often, and in nearly every letter spoke of the probability of her speedy return, and in the same breath of her precarious health. She could not, however, avoid telling of her social triumphs in London. Ida was evidently having an aftermath of youth in her splendid maturity. She was evidently flattered and petted, and was thoroughly enjoying herself. Aunt Maria said she guessed she would marry again.

"She's too old," said Maria.

"Wait till you're old yourself and you won't be so ready to judge,"

said her aunt. "I ain't so sure she won't."

Evelyn was a young lady, and was to graduate the next year, and still her mother had not returned. She was the sweetest young creature in the world at that time. She was such a beauty that people used to turn and stare after her. Evelyn never seemed to notice it, but she was quite conscious, in a happy, childlike fashion, of her beauty.

She resembled her mother to a certain extent, but she had nothing of Ida's hardness. Where her mother froze, she flamed. Two-thirds of the boys in the Normal School were madly in love with her, but Evelyn, in spite of her temperament, was slow in development as to her emotions.

She was very childish, although she was full of enthusiasms and nervous energy. Maria had long learned that when Evelyn told her she was in love, as she frequently did, it did not in the least mean that she was, in the ordinary acceptation of the term. Evelyn was very imaginative. She loved her dreams, and she often raised, as it were, a radiance of rainbows about some boy of her acquaintance, but the brightness vanished the instant the boy made advances. She had an almost fierce virginity of spirit in spite of her loving heart. She did not wish to touch her b.u.t.terflies of life. She used to walk between her aunt and Maria when they were coming out of church, so that no boy would ask leave to go home with her. She clung to the girls in her cla.s.s for protection when she went to any entertainment.

Consequently her beautiful face, about which cl.u.s.tered her dark, fine hair like mist, aroused no envy. The other girls said that Evelyn Edgham was such a beauty and she did not know it. But Evelyn did know it perfectly, only at that time it filled her with a sort of timidity and shame. It was as if she held some splendid, heavy sword of victory which she had not the courage to wield. She loved her sister better than anybody else. She had no very intimate friend of her own s.e.x with whom she fell in love, after the fashion of most young girls. That might have happened had it not been for her sister, whom Evelyn thought of always as excelling everybody else in beauty and goodness and general brilliancy. Maria, when nearing thirty, was, in fact, as handsome as she had ever been. Her self-control had kept lines from her face. She was naturally healthy, and she, as well as Evelyn, had by nature a disposition to make the most of herself and a liking for adornment. Aunt Maria often told Eunice that Maria was full as good-looking as Evelyn, if she was older, but that was not quite true. Maria had never had Evelyn's actual beauty, her perfection as of a perfect flower; still she was charming, and she had admirers, whom she always checked, although her aunt became more and more distressed that she did so. Always at the bottom of Maria's heart lay her secret. It was not a guilty secret. It was savored more of the absurd of tragedy than anything else. Sometimes Maria herself fairly laughed at the idea that she was married. All this time she wondered about Wollaston Lee. She thought, with a sick terror, of the possibility of his falling in love, and wishing to marry, and trying to secure a divorce, and the horrible publicity, and what people would say and do. She knew that a divorce would be necessary, although the marriage was not in reality a marriage at all. She had made herself sufficiently acquainted with the law to be sure that a divorce would be absolutely necessary in order for either herself or Wollaston Lee to marry again. For herself, she did not wish to marry, but she did wonder uneasily with regard to him. She was not in the least jealous; all her old, childish fancy for him had been killed by that strenuous marriage ceremony, but she dreaded the newspapers and the notoriety which would inevitably follow any attempt on either side to obtain a divorce. She dreamed about it often, and woke in terror, having still before her eyes the great, black letters on the first pages of city papers. She had never seen Wollaston Lee since she had lived in Amity. She had never even heard anything about him except once, when somebody had mentioned his name and spoken of seeing him at a reception, and that he was a professor in one of the minor colleges. She did not wish ever to repeat that experience. Her heart had seemed to stand still, and she had grown so white that a lady beside her asked her hurriedly if she were faint. Maria had thrown off the faintness by a sheer effort of will, and the color had returned to her face, and she had laughingly replied with a denial.

Sometimes she thought uneasily of Gladys Mann. The clergyman who, in his excess of youthful zeal, had performed the ceremony was dead. She had seen his obituary notice in a New York paper with a horrible relief. He had died quite suddenly in one of the pneumonia winters.

But Gladys Mann and her possession of the secret troubled her. Gladys Mann, as she remembered her, had been such a slight, almost abortive character. She asked herself if she could keep such a secret, if she would have sense enough to do so. Gladys had married, too, a man of her own sort, who worked fitfully, and spent most of his money in carousing with John Dorsey and her father. Gladys had had a baby a few months after her marriage, and she had had two more since. The last time Maria had been in Amity was soon after Gladys's first baby was born. Maria had met her one day carrying the little thing swathed in an old shawl, with a pitiful attempt of finery in a white lace bonnet c.o.c.ked sidewise on its little head, which waggled over Gladys's thin shoulder. Gladys, when she saw Maria, had colored and nodded, and almost run past her without a word.

It was just before the beginning of Evelyn's last year at school when Maria received a letter from Gladys's mother. It was a curious composition. Mrs. Mann had never possessed any receptivity for education. The very chirography gave evidence of a rude, almost uncivilized mind. Maria got it one night during the last of August.

She had gone to the post-office for the last mail, and all the time there had been over her a premonition of something unwonted of much import to her. The very dusty flowers and weeds by the way-side seemed to cry out to her as she pa.s.sed them. They seemed no longer mere flowers and weeds, but hieroglyphics concerning her future, which she could almost interpret.

"I wonder what is going to happen?" she thought. "Something is going to happen." She was glad that Evelyn was not with her, as usual, but had gone for a drive with a young friend who had a pony-carriage. She felt that she could not have borne her sister's curious glances at the letter which she was sure would be in the post-office box. It was there when she entered the dirty little place. She saw one letter slanted across the dusty gla.s.s of the box. It was not a lock box, and she had to ask the postmaster for the letter.

"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 princ.i.p.al 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 pa.s.s 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 Sat.u.r.day 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.

"Why, Professor Lane has had to give up. He starts for Colorado Monday. He kept hoping he could stay here, but he went to a specialist, who told him he could not live six months in this climate, so he is starting right off. And we are to have a new princ.i.p.al."

"Who is he?" asked Maria. She felt herself trembling, for no reason that she could define.

"Addie Hemingway says he is a handsome young man. He has been a professor in some college, but his mother lives with him, and the climate didn't agree with her, and so he had resigned and was out of a position, and they have sent right away for him, and he is coming.

In fact, Addie says she thinks he has come, and that he and his mother are at Mrs. Land's boarding-house; but they are going to keep house. Addie says she has heard he is a young man and very handsome."

"What is his name?" asked Maria, faintly.

Evelyn looked at her and laughed. "The funniest thing about it all is," said she, "that he comes originally from Edgham, and you must have known him, Maria. I don't remember him at all, but I guess you must. His name is Lee, and his first name--I can't remember his first name. Did you know a young man about your age in Edgham named Lee?"

"Wollaston?" asked Maria. She hardly knew her own voice.

"Yes; that is it--Wollaston. It is an odd name. How queer it will seem to have a handsome young man for princ.i.p.al instead of poor old Professor Lane. I am sorry, for my part; I liked Professor Lane. I went to the book-store in Westbridge and bought a book for him to read on the journey, and left it at the door. I sent in my remembrances, and told the girl how sorry I was that Professor Lane was not well."

"That was a good girl," said Maria. "I am glad you did." She was as white as death, but she continued sewing steadily.