The Vehement Flame Part 21

He went into his room on tiptoe, but Eleanor heard him and said, sleepily, "What on earth have you been talking about?"

"Business," Maurice told her.

"Who was your lavender-colored letter from?" Eleanor said, yawning; "I forgot to ask you. It was awfully scented!"

There was an instant's pause; Maurice's lips were dry;--then he said:

"From a woman... About a house. (My G.o.d! I've _lied_ to her!)" he said to himself...

Mary Houghton, reading comfortably in bed, looked up at her old husband over her spectacles. "I've heated some cocoa, dear," she said. "Drink it before you undress; you are worn out. What kept you downstairs until this hour?"

"Business."

Mary Houghton smiled: "Might as well tell the truth."

"Oh, Kit, it's a horrid mess!" he groaned; "I thought that boy had got to the top of Fool Hill when he married Eleanor! But he hadn't."

"Can't tell me, I suppose?"

"No. Mary, mayn't I have a cigar? I'm really awfully used up, and--"

"Henry! You are perfectly depraved! No; you may _not_. Drink your cocoa, honey. And consider the stars;--they shine, even above Fool Hill. And 'messes' look mighty small beside the Pleiades!" Then she turned a page of her novel, and added, "Poor Eleanor."

"I don't know why you say 'Poor Eleanor'!"

"Because I know that Maurice isn't sharing his 'mess' with her."

"You are uncanny!" Henry Houghton said, stirring his cocoa and looking at her admiringly.

"No; merely intelligent. Henry, don't let him have any secrets from Eleanor! Tell him to _tell_ her. She'll forgive him."

"She's not that kind, Mary."

"Dear, _almost_ every woman is 'that kind'! It's deception, not confession, that makes them--the other kind. If Maurice will confess--"

"I haven't said there was anything to confess," he protested, in alarm.

"Oh no; certainly not. You haven't said a word! (Well; you may have just one of those _little_ cigars--you poor dear!) Henry, listen: If Maurice hangs a secret round his neck it will drown him."

"If Eleanor would make cocoa for him at one o'clock in the morning there would be no chance for secrets. Kit, I have long known that you are the wisest, as well as the most virtuous and most lovable of your s.e.x, and that I shall only get to heaven by hanging on to your petticoats; but in this one particular I am much more intelligent than you."

"Heaven send you a good opinion of yourself!" his wife murmured.

But he insisted. "On certain subjects women prefer to be lied to."

"Did any woman ever tell you so?" she inquired, dryly.

He shrugged his shoulders, put his cup down, and came over to give her a kiss.

"Which is to say, 'Hold your tongue'?" his Mary inquired.

"Oh, never!" he said, and in spite of his distress he laughed; but he looked at her tenderly. "The Lord was good to me, Mary, when He made you take me."

That talk in the studio marked the moment when Maurice Curtis turned his back on youth. It was the beginning of the retreat of an ardent and gayly candid boy into the adult sophistications of Secrecy. The next day when he and Eleanor returned to Mercer, he sat in the car watching with unseeing eyes the back of her head,--her swaying hat, the softly curling tendrils of dark hair in the nape of her neck--and he saw before him a narrow path, leading--across quaking bogs of evasions!--toward a goal of always menaced safety. Mr. Houghton had indicated the path in that midnight talk, and Maurice's first step upon it would be his promise to relieve Lily of the support of her child--"_on condition that she would never communicate with him again_." After that, Henry Houghton said, "the lawyer will clinch things; and n.o.body will ever be the wiser!"

Because Eleanor was the woman she was, he saw no way of escape for Maurice, except through this bog of secrecy, where any careless step might plunge him into a lie. He had not dared to point out that other path, which his Mary thought so much safer than the sucking shakiness of the swamp--the rough and terrible path of confession, which lies across the firm aridities of Truth, and leads to that orderly freedom of the stars to which Maurice had once aspired! So now the boy was going back to Mercer to plunge into the pitfalls and limitless shades of concealment. He did it with a hard purpose of endurance, without hope, and also without complaint.

"If I can just avoid out-and-out lying," he told himself, "I can take my medicine. But if I have to lie--!"

He knew the full bitterness of his medicine when he went to see Lily...

He went the very next day, after office hours... There had been a temptation to postpone the taking of the medicine, because it had been difficult to escape from Eleanor. The well-ordered household at Green Hill had fired her with an impulse to try housekeeping again, and she wanted to urge the idea upon Maurice:

"We would be so much more comfortable; and I could have little Bingo!"

"We can't afford it," he said. (Oh, how many things he wouldn't be able to afford, now!)

"It wouldn't cost much more. I'll come down to the office this afternoon and walk home with you, and tell you what I've thought out about it."

Maurice said he had to--to go and see an apartment house at five.

"That's no matter! I'll meet you and walk along with you."

"I have several other places to go."

That hurt her. "If you don't want me--"

He was so absorbed that her words had no meaning to him. "Good-by," he said, mechanically--and the next moment he was on his way.

At the office his employer gave him a keen glance. "You look used up, Curtis; got a cold?" Mr. Weston asked, kindly.

Maurice, sick in spirit, said, "No, sir; I'm all right."

And so the minutes of the long day ticked themselves away, each a separate pang of disgust and shame, until five o'clock came, and he started for Lily's.

While he waited in the unswept vestibule of an incredibly ornate frame apartment house for the answer to his ring, and the usual: "My goodness!

Is that you? Come on up!" he had the feeling of one who stands at a closed door, knowing that when he opens it and enters he will look upon a dead face. The door was Lily's, and the face was the face of his dead youth. Carelessness was over for Maurice, and irresponsibility. And hope, too, he thought, and enthusiasm, and ambition. All over! All dead.

All lying stiff and still on the other side of a shiny golden-oak door, with its half window hung with a Nottingham lace curtain. When he started up the three flights of stairs to that little flat where he was to look upon his dead, he was calm to the point of listlessness. "My own fault. My own fault," he said.

She was waiting for him on the landing, her fresh cleanness in fragrant contrast to the forlorn untidiness of the stairways. They went into her parlor together and he began to speak at once.

"I got your letter. No; I won't sit down. I--"

"My soul and body! You're all in!" Lily said, startled, "Let me get you some whisky--"

"No, please, nothing! Lily, I'm ... awfully sorry, I--I'll do what I can.

I--"

She put her hands over her face; he went on mechanically, with his carefully prepared sentences, ending with: