Chapter III

Maria fell asleep that night with the full assurance that she had not been mistaken concerning the beauty of the little face which she had seen in the looking-glass.  All that troubled her was the consideration that her aunt Maria, whose homely face seemed to glare out of the darkness at her, might have looked just as she did when she was her age.  She hoped, and then she 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.