The Vehement Flame Part 10

Edith tore downstairs, and out of the front door: "Maurice! Where are you?"--then, catching sight of him, reading and smoking in a hammock slung between two of the big columns on the east porch, she rushed at him, and pulled him to his astonished feet. "Eleanor wants you!

Something's the matter, and--"

Before she could finish, Maurice was tearing upstairs, two steps at a time....

And so it was that Edith, sulkily, worked on the roof by herself.

Yet Maurice had not entirely "backed out." ... The very next morning, before Edith was awake, he had gone out to the henhouse, and, alone, done more than his share of the shingling.

"But, Maurice, why didn't you wake me?" Edith protested, when she discovered what he had done. "I'd have gone out, too!"

"I liked doing it by myself," Maurice evaded.

And for five minutes Edith was sulky again. "He puts on airs, 'cause he's married! Well, I don't care. He can shingle the whole roof by himself if he wants to! I don't like married men, anyhow."

The married man had, indeed, wanted to be by himself--to put the nails in his mouth, and to sit on the cold, slippery shingles in the gray September morning, and to tap-tap-tap--and think, and think.

But he didn't like his thoughts very well....

He thought how he had rushed upstairs, terrified lest Eleanor was fainting or had a "stomachache," or something--and found her sitting up in bed, her cheeks red and glazed with tears, her round, full chin quivering. He thought how he had tried to make out what she was driving at about Edith, and the chicken coop, and the ridgepole!

"You told Edith I was scared!"

Maurice's bewilderment was full of stumbling questions: "Told Edith?

When? What?"

And as she said "when" and "what," ending with, "You said I am scared!"

Maurice could only say, blankly. "But my darling, you _are_!"

"You may think I am a fool, but to tell Edith so--"

"But Great Scott! I didn't!"

"I won't have you talking me over with Edith; she's a _child_! It was just what you did when you danced three times with that girl who said--Edith is as rude as she was!--and she's a _child_. How can you like to be with a child?" Of course, it was all her fear of Youth,--but Eleanor did not know that; she thought she was hurt at the boy's neglect. Her face, wet with tears, was twitching, her voice--that lovely voice!--was shrill in his astonished ears....

Maurice, on the sloping roof, in the chill September dawn, his fingers numb on the frosty nails, stopped hammering, and leaned his chin on his fist, and thought: "She's sick. She almost killed herself to save me; so her nerve has all gone. That's why she talked--that way." He put a shingle in its place, and planted a nail; "it was because she was scared that what she did was so brave! I couldn't make her see that the more scared she was, the braver she was. It wouldn't have been brave in that gump, Edith, without a nerve in her body. But why is she down on Edith?

I suppose she's a nuisance to a person with a wonderful mind like Eleanor's. Talks too much. I'll tell her to dry up when she's with Eleanor." And again he heard that strange voice: "You like to talk to a _child_."

Maurice, pounding away on Edith's roof, grew hot with misery, not because it was so terrible to have Eleanor angry with him; not even because he had finally got mad, and answered back, and said, "Don't be silly!" The real misery was something far deeper than this half-amused remorse. It was that those harmless, scolding words of his held a perfectly new idea: he had said, "Don't be silly." _Was Eleanor silly?_

Now, to a man whose feeling about his wife has been a sort of awe, this question is terrifying. Maurice, in his boy's heart, had worshiped in Eleanor, not just the G.o.d of Love, but the love of G.o.d. And was she--_silly_? No! Of course not! He pounded violently, hit his thumb, put it into his mouth, then proceeded, mumblingly, to bring his G.o.d back from the lower shrine of a pitying heart, to the high alter of a justifying mind: Eleanor was ill.... She was nervous.... She was an exquisite being of mist and music and courage and love! So of course she was sensitive to things ordinary people did not feel. Saying this, and fitting the shingles into place, suddenly the warm and happy wave of confident idealism began to flood in upon him, and immediately his mind as well as his heart was satisfied. He reproached himself for having been scared lest his star was just a common candle, like himself. He had been cruel to judge her, as he might have judged her had she been well--or a gump like Edith! For had she been well, she would not have been "silly"! Had she been well--instead of lying there in her bed, white and strained and trembling, all because she had saved his life, harnessing herself to that wagon, and bringing him, in the darkness, through a thousand terrors--nonexistent, to be sure, but none the less real--to safety and life! Oh, how could he have even thought the word "silly"? He was ashamed and humble; never again would he be cross to her! "Silly? I'm the silly one! I'm an a.s.s. I'll tell her so! I don't suppose she'll ever forgive me. She said I 'didn't understand her'; well, I didn't! But she'll never have cause to say it again! I understand her now," Then, once more, he thought, frowning, "But why is she so down on Edith?"

That Eleanor's irritation was jealousy--not of Edith, but of Edith's years--never occurred to him. So all he said was, "She oughtn't to be down on Edith; _she_ has always appreciated her!" Edith had never said that Eleanor was "silly"! But so long as it bothered Eleanor (being nervous) to have the imp round, he'd tell her not to be a nuisance. "You can say anything to Skeezics; she has sense. She understands."

But all the same, Maurice shingled his part of the henhouse before breakfast.

Maurice did not call Eleanor "silly" again for a long time. There was always--when she was unreasonable--the curbing memory that her reasonableness had been shaken by that a.s.sault of darkness and fear, and the terrible fatigue of saving his robust young life. Furthermore, Doctor Bennett--telling Henry Houghton that Eleanor had done the worst possible thing, "magnificently"--told Maurice she had "nervous prostration,"--a cloaking phrase which kindly doctors often give to perplexed husbands, so that the egotism of sickly wives may be covered up! So Maurice, repeating to himself these useful words, saw only ill health, not silliness, in Eleanor's occasional tears. It was a week after the shingling of the henhouse, that, leaving her to recuperate still further at Green Hill, he started in on his job of "office boy"--his jocose t.i.tle for his position in the real-estate office in Mercer. Eleanor did not want to be left, and said so, wistfully.

"I'll come up for Sundays," Maurice comforted her, tenderly.

On these weekly visits the Houghtons were impressed by his tenderness; he played solitaire with his wife by the hour; he read poetry to her until she fell asleep; and he told her everything he had done and every person he had seen, while he was away from her! But the rest of the household didn't get much enjoyment out of Eleanor. Even the adoring Edith had moments when admiration had to be propped up by Doctor Bennett's phrase. As, for instance, on one of Maurice's precious Sundays, he and she and Johnny Bennett and Rover and old Lion climbed up to the cabin to make things shipshape before closing the place for the winter.

"You'll be away from me all day," Eleanor said, and her eyes filled.

Maurice said he hated to leave her, but he had always helped Edith on this closing-up job.

"Oh, well; go, if you want to," Eleanor said; "but I don't see how you can enjoy being with a perfect child, like Edith!"

Maurice went--not very happily. But it was such a fine, tingling day of hard work, in a joyous wind, with resulting appet.i.tes, and much yelling at each other--"Here, drop that!" ... "Hurry up, slow poke!"--that he was happy again before he knew it. After the work was over they had a lazy hour before the fire, their eyes stinging with smoke which seemed to envelop them, no matter on which side they sat; an hour in which Rover drowsed at Maurice's feet, and Johnny, in spectacles, read _A Boy's Adventures in the Forests of Brazil_, and Edith gabbled about Eleanor....

"Oh, I wish _I_ was married," Edith said; "I'd just love to save my husband's life!"

Maurice said little, except to ask Johnny if he had got to such and such a place in the _Adventures_, or to a.s.sent to Edith's ecstasies; but once he sighed, and said Eleanor was awfully pulled down by that--that night.

"I should think," Edith said, "you'd feel she'd just about died for you, like people in history who died for each other."

"I do," Maurice said, soberly.

When they drove home in the dusk, Maurice singing, loudly; Edith, on the front seat of the wagon, snuggling against him; Johnny standing up, balancing himself by holding on to their shoulders, and old Rover jogging along on the footpath,--they were all in great spirits, until a turn in the road showed them Eleanor, sitting on a log, looking rather white.

"Suffering snakes!" said Maurice, breaking off in the middle of a word.

Before Lion could quite stop, he was at his wife's side. "Eleanor! How did you get here? ... You _walked_? Oh, Star, you oughtn't to have done such a thing!"

"I was frightened about you. It was so late. I was afraid something had happened. I came to look for you."

Edith and Johnny looked on aghast; then Edith called out: "Why, Eleanor!

I wouldn't let anything happen to Maurice!"

Maurice, kneeling beside his wife, had put his arms around her and was soothing her with all sorts of gentlenesses: "Dear, you mustn't worry so! Nelly, don't cry; why, darling, we were having such a good time, we never noticed that it was getting late ..."

"You forgot me," Eleanor said; "as long as you had Edith, you never thought how I might worry!" She hid her face in her hands.

Maurice came back to the wagon; "Edith," he said, in a low voice, "would you and Johnny mind getting out and walking? I'll bring Eleanor along later. I'm sorry, but she's--she's tired."

Edith said in a whisper, "'Course not!" Then, without a look behind her at the crying woman on the log, and the patient, mortified boy bending over her, she, and the disgusted and more deliberate Johnny, ran down the road into the twilight. Edith was utterly bewildered. With her inarticulate consciousness of the impropriety of emotion, naked, _in public_! was the shyness of a child in meeting a stranger--for that crying woman was practically a stranger. She wasn't the Bride--silent and lovely! At Johnny's gate she said, briefly, "'Night!" and went on, running--running in the dusk. When she reached the house, and found her father and mother on the east porch, she was breathless, which accounted for her brevity in saying that Maurice and Eleanor were coming--and she was just starved! In the dining room, eating a very large supper, she listened for the wheels of the wagon and reflected: "Why was Eleanor mad at _me_? She was mad at Maurice, too. But most at me. Why?" She took an enormous spoonful of sliced peaches, and stared blankly ahead of her.

Ten minutes later, hearing wheels grating on the gravel at the front door, and Maurice's voice, subdued and apologetic, she pushed her chair away from the table, rushed through the pantry and up the back stairs.

She didn't know why she fled. She only knew that she couldn't face Eleanor, who would sit with Maurice while he bolted a supper for which--though Edith didn't know it!--all appet.i.te had gone. In her room in the ell, Edith shut the door, and, standing with her back against it, tried to answer her own question:

"Why was Eleanor mad?" But she couldn't answer it. Jealousy, as an emotion, in herself or anybody else, was absolutely unknown to her.

She had probably never even heard the word--except in the Second Commandment, or as a laughing reproach to old Rover--so she really did not know enough to use it now to describe Eleanor's behavior. She only said, "Maybe it's the nervous prostration? Well, I don't like her very much. I'm glad she won't be at Fern Hill when I go there." To be a Bride--and yet to cry before people! "Crying before people," Edith said, "is just like taking off all your clothes before people--I don't care how bad her nervous prostration is; it isn't nice! But why is she mad at me? That isn't sense."

You can't run other people's feelings to cover, and try to find their cause, without mental and moral development; all this a.n.a.lysis lessened very visibly Edith's childishness; also, it made her rather rudely cold to Eleanor, whose effort to reinstate herself in the glories of the little girl's imagination only resulted in still another and entirely new feeling in Edith's mind--contempt.

"If she had a right to be mad at me yesterday--why isn't she mad to-day?" Edith reasoned.

Eleanor was quick to feel the contempt. "I don't care for Edith," she told Maurice, who looked surprised.

"She's only a child," he said.