The Vehement Flame Part 18

Maurice had an overwhelming impulse to drop his weakness into endless, ageless, limitless Power; his glimmer of self-knowledge, into enormous All-Knowledge; his secrecy into Truth. An impulse to be done with silences. "G.o.d knows; so Eleanor shall know." The idea of telling the truth was to Maurice--slipping and sinking into bottomless lying--like taking hold upon the great steadinesses of the sky....

People began to talk; Maurice did not hear them. Miss Ladd made a joke; Miss Moore said something about "light miles"; the old, sad, clever woman said, "The firmament showeth his handiwork,"--and instantly, as though her words were a signal--a voice, as silvery as the moon, broke the midnight with a swelling note:

"The s.p.a.cious firmament on high, With all the blue ethereal sky ..."

A shock of attention ran through the watchers on the roof: Eleanor, standing with her hands clasped lightly in front of her, her head thrown back, her eyes lifted to the unplumbed deeps, was singing:

"The moon takes up the wondrous tale And nightly to the listening earth Repeats the story of her birth; Whilst all the stars that round her burn, And all the planets in their turn--"

A window was thrown open in a dark garret below, and some one, unseen, listened. Down in the street, two pa.s.sers-by paused, and looked up. No one spoke. The voice soared on--and ended:

"Forever singing as they shine...."

Maurice came to her side and caught her hand. There was a long sigh from the little group. For several minutes no one spoke. Miss Moore wiped her eyes; the baseball fan said, huskily, "My mother used to sing that"; the widow touched Eleanor's shoulder. "My--my husband loved it," she said, and her voice broke.

The garret window slammed down; the two people in the street vanished in the darkness. The little party on the roof melted away; they climbed through the scuttle, forgetting to joke, but saying to each other, in lowered voices: "Would you have _believed_ it?" "How wonderful!" And to Eleanor, rather humbly: "It was beautiful, Mrs. Curtis!"

In their own room, Maurice took his wife in his arms and kissed her. "I am going to tell her," he said to himself, calmly. The overwhelming grandeur of the heavens had washed him clean of fear, clean even of shame, and left him impa.s.sioned with Beauty and Law, which two are Truth. "I will tell her," he said.

Eleanor had sung without self-consciousness; but now, when they were back again in their room--so stifling after those s.p.a.ces between the worlds!--self-consciousness flooded in: "I suppose it was queer?" she said.

"It was perfect," Maurice said; he was very pale.

"I wanted to do something that they would like, and I thought they might like a hymn? Some of them said they did. But if you liked it, that is all I want."

"I loved it." His heart was pounding in his throat.... "Eleanor" (he could hardly see that terrible path among the stars, but he stumbled upward), "Eleanor, I'm not good enough for you."

"Not good enough? For _me_?" She laughed at such absurdity. He was sitting down, his elbow on his knee, his head in his hand. She came and knelt beside him. "If you are only happy! I did it to make you happy."

She heard him catch his breath. "How much do you love me?" he said.

(Oh, how long it was since he had talked that way--asking the sweet, unanswerable question of happy love!--how long since he had spoken with so much precious foolishness!) "How _much_? Why, Maurice, I love you so that sometimes, when I see you talking to other people--even these tiresome people here in the house, I could just die! I want you all to myself! I--I guess I feel about you the way Bingo feels about me," she said, trying to joke--but there were tears in her eyes.

"I'm not always ... what I ought to be," he said; "I am not--" (the path was very dim)--"awfully good. I--"

"I suppose I'm naturally jealous," she confessed; "I could die for you, Maurice; but I couldn't share your little finger! Do you remember, on our wedding day, you made me promise to be jealous? Well, I _am_." She laughed--and he was dumb. There, on the roof, Truth seemed as inevitable as Law. It did not seem inevitable now. He had lost his way among the stars. He could not find words to begin his story. But words overflowed on Eleanor's lips!... "Sometimes I get to thinking about myself--I _am_ older than you, you know, a little. Not that it matters, really; but when I see you with other people, and you seem to enjoy talking to them--it nearly kills me! And you _do_ like to talk to them. You even like to talk to--Edith, who is rude to me!" Her words poured out sobbingly: "Why, _why_ am I not enough for you? You are enough for me!"

He was silent.

"And ... and ... and we haven't a baby," she said in a whisper, and dropped her face on his knee.

He tried to lift her, but his soul was sinking within him; dropping down--down from the awful heights. Yet still he caught at Truth! "Dear, don't! As for people, I may talk to them; I may even--even be with them, or seem to like them, and--and do things, that--I don't love anybody but you, Eleanor; but I--I--"

It was a final clutch at the Hand that holds the stars. But his entreating voice broke, for she was kissing his confession from his lips. Those last words--"I don't love anybody but you"--folded her in complete content! "Dear," she said, "that's all I want--that you don't love anybody but me." She laid her wet cheek against his in silence.

What could he do but be silent, too? What could he do but choke down the confessing, redeeming words that were on his lips? So he did choke them down, turning his back on the clean freedom of Truth; and the burden of his squalid secret, which he had been ready to throw away forever, was again packed like some corroding thing in his soul....

When, late in August, he and Eleanor went to Green Hill for a few days vacation, the effect of this repression was marked. There were wrinkles on his forehead under the thatch of his blond hair; his blue eyes were dulled, and he was taciturn to the point of rudeness--except to Eleanor.

He was very polite to Eleanor. He never, now, amused himself by imagining how he could disappear if he had the luck to be in a theater fire. He knew that because he had enslaved himself to a lie, he had lost the right even to dream freedom. So there were no more "fool thoughts"

as to how a man might "kick over the traces." There was nothing for him to do, now (he said), but "play the game." The Houghtons were uneasily aware of a difference in him; and Edith, fifteen now, felt that he had changed, and had fits of shyness with him. "He's like he was that night on the river," she told herself, "when he gave the lady his coat." She sighed when she said this, and it occurred to her that she would be a missionary. "I won't get married," she thought; "I'll go and nurse lepers. He's _exactly_ like Sir Walter Raleigh."

But of course she had moments of forgetting the lepers--moments when she came down to the level of people like Johnny Bennett. When this happened, she thought that, instead of going to the South Seas, she would become a tennis star and figure in international tournaments; even Johnny admitted that she served well--for a girl. One day she confessed this ambition to Maurice, but he immediately beat her so badly that she became her old childlike, grumpy self, and said Johnny was nicer for singles; which enabled Maurice to turn her loose on John and go off alone to climb the mountain. He had a dreary fancy for looking at the camp, and living over again those days when he was still young--and a fool, of course; but not so great a fool as now, with Lily living in a little flat in Mercer. Batty's lease had expired, and she had moved into a cheaper, but still ornate, apartment house on the other side of the river. Well! Lily had floated into his life as meaninglessly as a mote floats into a streak of light, and then floated out again. He hadn't seen her since--since that time in May.

_"a.s.s--a.s.s!"_ he said to himself. "If Eleanor _knew_," he thought, "there'd be a bust-up in two minutes." He even smiled grimly to think of that evening of the eclipse when, shaken by the awful beauty of eternal order, he had, for just one high moment, dreamed that he, too, could attain the orderliness of Truth--and tell Eleanor. "Idiot!" he said, contemptuously. Probably Maurice touched his lowest level when he said that; for to be ashamed of an aspiration, to be contemptuous of emotion, is to sin against the Holy Ghost.

When Maurice reached the camp he stood for a while looking about him.

The shack had not wintered well: the door sagged on a broken hinge, and the stovepipe had blown over and lay rusting on the roof. In the blackened circle of stones were some charred logs, which made him think of the camp fire on that night of Eleanor's courage and love and terror.

He even reverted to those first excuses for her: "She nearly killed herself for me. Nervous prostration, Doctor Bennett said. I suppose a woman never gets over that. Poor Eleanor!" he said, softening; "it would kill her ... if she knew." He sat down and looked off across the valley ... "What am I going to do?" he said to himself. "I can't make her happy; I'd like to, but you can't reason with her any more than if she was a child. Edith has ten times her sense! How absurd she is about Edith. Lord! what would she do if she knew about Lily!"

He reflected, playing with the mere horror of the thought, upon just how complete the "bust-up" would be if she knew! He realized that he had undeserved good luck with Lily; she hadn't fastened herself on him. She was decent about that; if she'd been a different sort, he might have had a nasty time. But Lily was a sport--he'd say that for her; she hadn't clawed at him! And she had protested that she didn't want any money, and wouldn't take it! And she hadn't taken it. He had made some occasional presents, but nothing of any value. He had given her nothing, hardly even a thought (except the thought that he was an a.s.s), since last May.

Thinking of her now, he had another of those pangs of shame which had stabbed him so at first, but to which of late he had grown callous. The shame of having been the one--after all his goody-goody talk!--to pull her off the track; still, she was straight again now. He was quite sure of that. "You can tell when they're straight," he thought, heavily.

Perhaps, in the winter, he would send her some flowers. He thought of the bulbs on the window sill of Lily's parlor, and tried to remember a verse; something about--about--what was it?

"If of thy store there be But left two loaves, Sell one, and with the dole Buy hyacinths to feed thy soul."

He laughed; _Lily_, feeding her "soul"! "Well, she has more 'soul,' with her flower pots and her good cooking, than some women who wouldn't touch her with a ten-foot pole! Still, _I'm_ done with her!" he thought. But he had no purpose of "uplift"; the desire to reform Lily had evaporated.

"Queer; I don't care a hoot," he told himself, watching with lazy eyes the smoke from his pipe drift blue between himself and the valley drowsing in the heat. "I'd like to see the little thing do well for herself--but really I don't give a d.a.m.n." His moral listlessness, in view of the acuteness of that first remorse, and especially of that moment among the stars, when he had stretched out hands pa.s.sionately eager for the agonizing sacrament of confession, faintly surprised him.

How could he have been so wrought up about it? He looked off over the valley--saw the steely sickle of the river; saw a cloud shadow touch the shoulder of a mountain and move down across the gracious bosom of its forests. Below him, chestnuts twinkled and shimmered in the sun, and there were dusky stretches of hemlocks, then open pastures, vividly green from the August rains.... "It ought to be set to music," he thought; the violins would give the flicker of the leaves--"and the harps would outline the river. Eleanor's voice is lovely ... she looks fifty. How," he pondered, interested in the mechanics of it, "did she ever get me into that wagon?" Then, again, he was sorry for her, and said, "Poor girl!" Then he was sorry for himself. He knew that he was tired to death of Eleanor--tired of her moods and her lovemaking. He was not angry with her; he did not hate her;--he had injured her too much to hate her; he was simply unutterably tired of her--what he did hate, was this business of lugging a secret around! "I feel," he said to himself, "like a dog that's killed a hen, and had the carca.s.s tied around his neck." His face twitched with disgust at his own simile. But as for Eleanor, he had been contemptibly mean to her, and, "By G.o.d!" he said to himself, "at least I'll play the game. I'll treat her as well as I can. Other fools have married jealous women, and put up with them.

But, good Lord!" he thought, with honest perplexity, "can't the women _see_ how they push you into the very thing they are afraid of, because they bore you so infernally? If I look at a woman, Eleanor's on her ear.... Queer," he pondered; "she's good. Look how kind she is to old O'Brien's lame child. And she _can_ sing." He hummed to himself a lovely Lilting line of one of Eleanor's songs. "Confound it! why did I meet Lily? Eleanor is a million times too good for me...."

Far off he heard a sound and, frowning, looked toward the road: yes; somebody was coming! "Can't a man get a minute to himself?" Maurice thought, despairingly. It was the mild-eyed and spectacled Johnny Bennett, and behind him, Edith, panting and perspiring, and smiling broadly.

"h.e.l.lo!" she called out, in cheerful gasps; "thought we'd come up and walk home with you!"

"'Lo," Maurice said.

The boy and girl achieving the rocky knoll on which Maurice was sitting, his hands locked about his knees, his eyes angry and ashamed, staring over the treetops, sat down beside him. Johnny pulled out his pipe, and Edith took off her hat and fanned herself. "Mother and Eleanor went for a ride. I thought I'd rather come up here."

"Um--" Maurice said.

"Two letters for you," she said. "Eleanor told me to bring 'em up. Might be business."

As she handed them to him, his eye caught the address on one of them, and a little cold tingle suddenly ran down his spine. Lily had never written to him, but some instinct warned him that that cramped handwriting on the narrow lavender envelope, forwarded from the office, could only be hers. A whiff of perfumery made him sure. He had a pang of fright. At what? He could not have said; but even before he opened the purple envelope he knew the taste of fear in his mouth....

Sitting there on the mountain, looking down into the misty serenities of the sun-drenched valley, with the smoke of Johnny Bennett's pipe in his nostrils, and the friendly Edith beside him, he tore open the scented envelope, and as his eyes fell on the first lines it seemed as if the spreading world below rose up and hit him in the face:

DEAR FRIEND CURT,--I don't know what you'll say. I hope you won't be mad. I'm going to have a baby. _It's yours_....

Maurice could not see the page, a wave of nausea swamped even his horror; he swallowed--swallowed--swallowed. Edith heard him gasp, and looked at him, much interested.

"What's the matter with your hands?" Edith inquired. "Johnny! Look at his hands!"

Maurice's fingers, smoothing out the purple sheet, were shaking so that the paper rustled. He did not hear her. Then he read the whole thing through to its laconic end:

_It's yours_--honest to G.o.d. Can you help me a little? Sorry to trouble you on your vacation.

Your friend,

LILY.