The Vehement Flame Part 1

The Vehement Flame.

by Margaret Wade Campbell Deland.

TO LORIN:

Together, so many years ago--seven, I think, or eight--you and I planned this story. The first chapters had the help of your criticism ... then, I had to go on alone, urged by the memory of your interest. But all the blunders are mine, not yours; and any merits are yours, not mine. That it has been written, in these darkened years, has been because your happy interest still helped me.

MARGARET _May 12th, 1922_

THE VEHEMENT FLAME

CHAPTER I

_Love is as strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame._

_THE SONG OF SOLOMON, VIII, 6._

There is nothing in the world n.o.bler, and lovelier, and more absurd, than a boy's lovemaking. And the joyousness of it!...

The boy of nineteen, Maurice Curtis, who on a certain June day lay in the blossoming gra.s.s at his wife's feet and looked up into her dark eyes, was embodied Joy! The joy of the warm earth, of the sunshine glinting on the slipping ripples of the river and sifting through the cream-white blossoms of the locust which reared its sheltering branches over their heads; the joy of mating insects and birds, of the whole exulting, creating universe!--the unselfconscious, irresponsible, wholly beautiful Joy of pa.s.sion which is without apprehension or humor. The eyes of the woman who sat in the gra.s.s beside this very young man, answered his eyes with Love. But it was a more human love than his, because there was doubt in its exultation....

The boy took out his watch and looked at it.

"We have been married," he said, "exactly fifty-four minutes."

"I can't believe it!" she said.

"If I love you like this after fifty-four minutes of married life, how do you suppose I shall feel after fifty-four years of it?" He flung an arm about her waist, and hid his face against her knee. "We are married,"

he said, in a smothered voice.

She bent over and kissed his thick hair, silently. At which he sat up and looked at her with blue, eager eyes.

"It just came over me! Oh, Eleanor, suppose I hadn't got you? You said 'No' six times. You certainly did behave very badly," he said, showing his white teeth in a broad grin.

"Some people win say I behaved very badly when I said 'Yes.'"

"Tell 'em to go to thunder! What does Mrs. Maurice Curtis (doesn't that sound pretty fine?) care for a lot of old cats? Don't we _know_ that we are in heaven?" He caught her hand and crushed it against his mouth. "I wish," he said, very low, "I almost wish I could die, now, here! At your feet. It seems as if I couldn't live, I am so--" He stopped. So--what?

Words are ridiculously inadequate things!... "Happiness" wasn't the name of that fire in his breast, Happiness? "Why, it's G.o.d," he said to himself; "_G.o.d._" Aloud, he said, again, "We are married!"

She did not speak--she was a creature of alluring silences--she just put her hand in his. Suddenly she began to sing; there was a very n.o.ble quality in the serene sweetness of her voice:

"O thou with dewy locks, who lookest down Through the clear windows of the morning, ten Thine angel eyes upon our western isle, Which in full choir hails thy approach, O Spring!"

That last word rose like a flight of wings into the blue air. Her husband looked at her; for a compelling instant his eyes dredged the depths of hers, so that all the joyous, frightened woman in her retreated behind a flutter of laughter.

"'O Spring!'" he repeated; "_we_ are Spring, Nelly--you and I.... I'll never forget the first time I heard you sing that; snowing like blazes it was,--do you remember? But I swear I felt this hot gra.s.s then in Mrs. Newbolt's parlor, with all those awful bric-a-brac things around!

Yes," he said, putting his hand on a little sun-drenched bowlder jutting from the earth beside him; "I felt this sun on my hand! And when you came to 'O Spring!' I saw this sky--" He stopped, pulled three blades of gra.s.s and began to braid them into a ring. "Lord!" he said, and his voice was suddenly startled; "what a darned little thing can throw the switches for a man! Because I didn't get by in Math. D and Ec 2, and had to crawl out to Mercer to cram with old Bradley--I met you! Eleanor!

Isn't it wonderful? A little thing like that--just falling down in mathematics--changed my whole life?" The wild gayety in his eyes sobered. "I happened to come to Mercer--and, you are my wife." His fingers, holding the little gra.s.sy ring, trembled; but the next instant he threw himself back on the gra.s.s, and kicked up his heels in a preposterous gesture of ecstasy. Then caught her hand, slipped the braided ring over that plain circle of gold which had been on her finger for fifty-four minutes, kissed it--and the palm of her hand--and said, "You never can escape me! Eleanor, your voice played the deuce with me.

I rushed home and read every poem in my volume of Blake. Go on; give us the rest."

She smiled;

".... And let our winds Kiss thy perfumed garments; let us taste Thy morn and evening breath!..."

"Oh--_stop_! I can't bear it," he said, huskily; and, turning on his face, he kissed the gra.s.s, earth's "perfumed garment," snow-sprinkled with locust blossoms....

But the moment of pa.s.sion left him serious. "When I think of Mrs.

Newbolt," he said, "I could commit murder." In his own mind he was saying, "I've rescued her!"

"Auntie doesn't mean to be unkind," Eleanor explained, simply; "only, she never understood me--Maurice! Be careful! There's a little ant--don't step on it."

She made him pause in his diatribe against Mrs. Newbolt and move his heel while she pushed the ant aside with a clover blossom. Her anxious gentleness made him laugh, but it seemed to him perfectly beautiful.

Then he went on about Mrs. Newbolt:

"Of course she couldn't understand _you_! You might as well expect a high-tempered cow to understand a violin solo."

"How mad she'd be to be called a cow! Oh, Maurice, do you suppose she's got my letter by this time? I left it on her bureau. She'll rage!"

"Let her rage. Nothing can separate us now."

Thus they dismissed Mrs. Newbolt, and the shock she was probably experiencing at that very moment, while reading Eleanor's letter announcing that, at thirty-nine, she was going to marry this very young man.

"No; nothing can part us," Eleanor said; "forever and ever." And again they were silent--islanded in rippling tides of wind-blown gra.s.s, with the warm fragrance of dropping locust blossoms infolding them, and in their ears the endless murmur of the river. Then Eleanor said, suddenly: "Maurice!--Mr. Houghton? What will _he_ do when he hears? He'll think an 'elopement' is dreadful."

He chuckled. "Uncle Henry?--He isn't really my uncle, but I call him that;--he won't rage. He'll just whistle. People of his age have to whistle, to show they're alive. I have reason to believe," the cub said, "that he 'whistled' when I flunked in my mid-years. Well, I felt sorry, myself--on his account," Maurice said, with the serious and amiable condescension of youth. "I hated to jar him. But--gosh! I'd have flunked A B C's, for _this_. Nelly, I tell you heaven hasn't got anything on this! As for Uncle Henry, I'll write him to-morrow that I had to get married sort of in a hurry, because Mrs. Newbolt wanted to haul you off to Europe. He'll understand. He's white. And he won't really mind--after the first biff;--that will take him below the belt, I suppose, poor old Uncle Henry! But after that, he'll adore you. He adores beauty."

Her delight in his praise made her almost beautiful; but she protested that he was a goose. Then she took the little gra.s.s ring from her finger and slipped it into her pocketbook. "I'm going to keep it always," she said. "How about Mrs. Houghton?"

"She'll love you! She's a peach. And little Skeezics--"

"Who is Skeezics?"

"Edith. Their kid. Eleven years old. She paid me the compliment of announcing, when she was seven, that she was going to marry me when she grew up! But I believe, now, she has a crush on Sir Walter Raleigh.

She'll adore you, too."

"I'm afraid of them all," she confessed; "they won't like--an elopement."

"They'll fall over themselves with joy to think I'm settled for life!

I'm afraid I've been a cussed nuisance to Uncle Henry," he said, ruefully; "always doing fool things, you know,--I mean when I was a boy.

And he's been great, always. But I know he's been afraid I'd take a wild flight in actresses."

"'_Wild_' flight? What will he call--" She caught her breath.