The Vehement Flame Part 11

Edith seemed especially a child now to Maurice, since he had embarked on his job at Mercer. Not only was she unimportant to him, but, in spite of his mortification at that scene on the road, his Sat.u.r.day-night returns to his wife were blowing the fires of his love into such a glory of devotion, that Edith was practically nonexistent! His one thought was to take Eleanor to Mercer. He wanted her all to himself! Also, he had a vague purpose of being on his dignity with a lot of those Mercer people: Eleanor's aunt, just back from Europe; Brown and Hastings--cubs! But below this was the inarticulate feeling that, away from the Houghtons, especially away from Edith, he might forget his impulse to use--for a second time--that dreadful word "silly."

So, as the 20th of October approached--the day when they were to go back to town--he felt a distinct relief in getting away from Green Hill. The relief was general. Edith felt it, which was very unlike Edith, who had always sniffled (in private) at Maurice's departure! And her father and mother felt it:

"Eleanor's mind," Henry Houghton said, "is exactly like a drum--sound comes out of emptiness!"

"But Maurice seems to like the sound," Mrs. Houghton reminded him; "and she loves him."

"She wants to monopolize him," her husband said; "I don't call that love; I call it jealousy. It must be uncomfortable to be jealous," he ruminated; "but the really serious thing about it is that it will bore any man to death. Point that out to her, Mary! Tell her that jealousy is self-love, plus the consciousness of your own inferiority to the person of whom you are jealous. And it has the same effect on love that water has on fire. My definition ought to be in a dictionary!" he added, complacently.

"What sweet jobs you do arrange for me!" she said; "and as for your definition, I can give you a better one--and briefer: 'Jealousy is Human Natur'! But I don't believe Eleanor's jealous, Henry; she's only conscious, poor girl! of Maurice's youth. But there is something I _am_ going to tell her...."

She told her the day before the bridal couple (Edith still reveled in the phrase!) started for Mercer. "Come out into the orchard," Mary Houghton called upstairs to Eleanor, "and help me gather windfalls for jelly."

"I must pack Maurice's things," Eleanor called over the banisters, doubtfully; "he's a perfect boy about packing; he put his boots in with his collars."

"Oh, come along!" said Mrs. Houghton. And Eleanor yielded, scolding happily while she pinned her hat on before the mirror in the hall.

In the orchard they picked up some apples, then sat down on the bleached stubble of the mowed hillside and looked over at the dark ma.s.s of the mountain, behind which a red sun was trampling waist deep through leaden clouds. "How _can_ I bring it in?" Mrs. Houghton thought; "it won't do to just throw a warning at her!"

But she didn't have to throw it; Eleanor invited it. "I'm glad we're going to the hotel, just at first," she said; "Auntie says I don't know anything about keeping house, and I get worried for fear I won't make Maurice comfortable. I tell him so all the time!"

"I wouldn't put things into his head, Eleanor," Mrs. Houghton said (beginning her "warning"); "I mean things that you don't want him to feel. I remember when my first baby was coming--the little boy we lost--" she stopped and bit her lip; the "baby" had been gone for nearly twenty years, but he was still her little boy--"I was very forlorn, and I couldn't do anything, or go anywhere; and Henry stayed at home with me like a saint. Well, I told my father that I had told Henry it was hard on him to 'sit at home with an invalid wife.' And father said, 'If you tell him so often enough, he'll agree with you,' There's a good deal in that, Eleanor?"

"I suppose there is," Maurice's wife said, vaguely.

"So, if I were you," Mrs. Houghton said, still feeling her way, "I wouldn't give him the idea that you are any--well, older than he is. A wife might be fifty years older than her husband, and if her _spirit_ was young, years wouldn't make a bit of difference!"

Eleanor took this somewhat roundabout advice very well. "The only thing in the world I want," she said, simply, "is to make him happy."

They went back to the house in silence. But that night Eleanor paused in putting some last things into her trunk, and, going over to Maurice, kissed his thick hair. "Maurice," she said, "are you happy?"

"You bet I am!"

"You haven't said so once to-day."

"I haven't said I'm alive," he said, grinning. "Oh, Star, won't it be wonderful when we can go away from the whole caboodle of 'em, and just be by ourselves?"

"That's what I want!" she said; "just to be alone with you. I wish we could live on a desert island!..."

Down in the studio, Mr. Houghton, smoking up to the fire limit a cigar grudgingly permitted by his wife ("It's your eighth to-day," she reproached him), Henry Houghton, listening to his Mary's account of the talk in the orchard, told her what he thought of her: "May you be forgiven! Your intentions are doubtless excellent, but your truthfulness leaves something to be desired: 'Years won't make any difference'? Mary!

Mary!"

But she defended herself: "I mean, 'years' can't kill love--the highest love--the love that grows out of, _and then outgrows_, the senses! The body may be just an old glove--shabby, maybe; but if the hand inside the glove is alive, what real difference does the shabbiness make? If Eleanor's mind doesn't get rheumatic, _and if she will forget herself_!--they'll be all right. But if she thinks of herself--" Mary Houghton sighed; her husband ended her sentence for her:

"She'll upset the whole kettle of fish?"

"What I'm afraid of," she said, with a troubled look, "is that you are right:--she's inclined to be jealous, I saw her frown when he was playing checkers with Edith. I wanted to tell her, but didn't dare to, that jealousy is as amusing to people who don't feel it, as it is undignified in people who do."

"My darling, you are a brute," said Mr. Houghton; "I have long suspected it, _in re_ tobacco. As for Eleanor, _I_ would never have such cruel thoughts! _I_ belong to the gentler s.e.x. I would merely refer her to Mr.

F.'s aunt."

CHAPTER VIII

They reached Mercer in the rainy October dusk. It was cold and raw, and a bleak wind blew up the river, which, with its shifting film of oil, bent like a brown arm about the grimy, noisy town. The old hotel, with its Doric columns grimed with years of smoky river fogs, was dark, and smelled of soot; and the manners of the waiters and chambermaids would have set Eleanor's teeth on edge, except that she was so absorbed in the thrill of being back under the roof which had sheltered them in those first days of bliss.

"Do you _remember_?" she said, significantly.

Maurice, looking after suitcases and hand bags, said, absently, "Remember what?" She told him "what" and he said: "Yes. Where do you want this trunk put, Eleanor?"

She sighed; to sentimentalize and receive no response in kind, is like sitting down on a chair which isn't there. After dinner, when she and Maurice came up to their room, which had fusty red hangings and a marble-topped center table standing coldly under a remote chandelier, she sighed again, for Maurice said that, as for this hole of a hotel, the only thing _he_ thought of, was how soon they could get out of it!

"I can get that little house I told you about, only it's rather out of the way. Not many of your kind of people 'round!"

She knelt down beside him, pushing his newspaper aside and pressing her cheek against his. "_That_ doesn't make any difference!" she said; "I'm glad not to know anybody. I just want you! I don't want people."

"Neither do I," Maurice agreed; "I'd have to sh.e.l.l out my cigars to 'em if they were men!"

"Oh, is that your reason?" she said, laughing.

"Say, Star, would you mind moving? I was just reading--"

She rose, and, going over to the window, stood looking out at the streaming rain in one of those empty silences which at first had been so alluringly mysterious to him. She was waiting for his hand on her shoulder, his kiss on her hair--but he was immersed in his paper. "How can he be interested about football, _now_, when we're alone?" she thought, wistfully. Then, to remind him of lovelier things, she began to sing, very softly:

"Art thou poor, yet hast thou golden slumbers?

0 sweet content!

To add to golden numbers, golden numbers, O sweet content!--0 sweet, O sweet content--"

He dropped his paper and listened--and it seemed as if music made itself visible in his ardent, sensitive face! After a while he got up and went over to the window, and kissed her gently ...

Maurice was very happy in these first months in Mercer. The Weston office liked him--and admired him, also, which pleased his young vanity!--though he was jeered at for an incorrigible and alarming truthfulness which pointed out disadvantages to possible clients, but which--to the amazement of the office--frequently made a sale! As a result he acquired, after a while, several small gilt hatchets, presented by the "boys," and also the nickname of "G. Washington." He accepted these tributes with roars of laughter, but pointed to results: "_I get the goods!_" So, naturally, he liked his work--he liked it very much! The joy of bargaining and his quick and perhaps dangerously frank interest in clients as personalities, made him a most beguiling salesman; as a result he became, in an astonishingly short time, a real force in the office; all of which hurried him into maturity. But the most important factor in his happiness was his adoration of Eleanor. He was perfectly contented, evening after evening in the hotel, to play her accompaniments (on a rented piano), read poetry aloud, and beat her at solitaire. Also, she helped him in his practicing with a certain sweet authority of knowledge, which kept warm in his heart the sense of her infinite superiority. So when, later, they found a house, he entered very gayly upon the first test of married life--house furnishing! It was then that his real fiber showed itself. It is a risky time for all husbands and wives, a time when it is particularly necessary to "consider the stars"! It needs a fine sense of proportion as to the value, relatively, of peace and personal judgment, to give up one's idea in regard, say, to the color of the parlor rug. Maurice's likes and dislikes were emphatic as to rugs and everything else,--but his sense of proportion was sound, so Eleanor's taste,--and peace,--prevailed. It was good taste, so he really had nothing to complain of, though he couldn't for the life of him see why she picked out a _picture_ paper for a certain room in the top of the house! "I thought I'd have it for a smoking room," he said, ruefully; "and a lot of pink lambs and green chickens cavorting around don't seem very suitable. Still, if you like it, it's all right!" The memory of the night on the mountain, when Eleanor gave all she had of strength and courage and fear and pa.s.sion to the saving of his life--made pink lambs, or anything else, "all right"!

When the house-furnishing period was over, and they settled down, the "people" Eleanor didn't want to see, seemed to have no particular desire to see them; so their solitude of two (and Bingo, who barked whenever Maurice put his arms around Eleanor) was not broken in upon--which made for domestic, even if stultifying, content. But the thing that really kept them happy during that first rather dangerous year, was the smallness of their income. They had very little money; even with Eleanor's six hundred, it was nearer two thousand dollars than three, and that, for people who had always lived in more or less luxury, was very nearly poverty;--for which, of course, they had reason, so far as married happiness went, to thank G.o.d! If there are no children, it is the limited income which can be most certainly relied upon to provide the common interest which welds husband and wife together. This more or less uncomfortable, and always anxious, interest, generally develops in that critical time when the heat of pa.s.sion has begun to cool, and the friction of the commonplace produces a certain warmth of its own. These are the days when conjugal criticism, which has been smothered under the undiscriminating admiration of first love, begins to raise its head--an ugly head, with a mean eye, in which there is neither imagination nor humor. When this criticism begins to creep into daily life, and the lure of the bare shoulder and perfumed hair lessens--because they are as a.s.sured as bread and b.u.t.ter!--it is then that this saving unity of purpose in acquiring bread and b.u.t.ter comes to the rescue.

It came to the rescue of Maurice and Eleanor; they had many welding moments of anxiety on his part, and eager self-sacrifice on her part; of adding up columns of figures, with a constantly increasing total, which had to be subtracted from a balance which decreased so rapidly that Eleanor felt quite sure that the bank was cheating them! Of course they did not appreciate the value of this blessed young poverty--who of us ever appreciates poverty while we are experiencing it? We only know its value when we look back upon it! But they did--or at least Eleanor did--appreciate their isolation, never realizing that no human life can refresh another unless it may itself drink deep of human sympathies and hopes. Maurice could take this refreshment through business contacts; but, except for Mrs. O'Brien, and her baby grandson, Don, Eleanor's acquaintances in Mercer had been limited to her aunt's rather narrow circle.

When Mrs. Newbolt got back from Europe, Maurice was introduced to this circle at a small dinner given to the bride and groom to indicate family forgiveness. The guests were elderly people, who talked politics and surgical operations, and didn't know what to say to Maurice, whose blond hair and good-humored blue eyes made him seem distressingly young.

Nor did Maurice know what to say to them.

"I'd have gone to sleep," he told Eleanor, in exploding mirth, on their way home, "if it hadn't been that the food was so mighty good! I kept awake, in spite of that ancient dame who hashed up the Civil War, just to see what the next course would be!"

It was about this time that Maurice began to show a little longing for companionship (outside the office) of a kind which did not remember the Civil War. His evenings of solitaire and music were awfully nice, but--

"Brown and Hastings are in college," he told his wife; "and Mort's on a job at his father's mills. I miss 'em like the devil."

"_I_ don't want anyone but you," she said, and the tears started to her eyes; he asked her what she was crying about, and she said, "Oh, nothing." But of course he knew what it was, and he had to remind himself that "she had nervous prostration"; otherwise that terrible, hidden word "silly" would have been on his lips.