The Vehement Flame Part 24

"Why, you're a great stranger! Come right in! Wait a second till I get Jacky. I've just nursed him and I put him out there so I could watch him while I scrubbed the porch." She ran out to the gate, then pushed the carriage up the path.

"Let me help you," Maurice said, politely; adding to himself, "d.a.m.n--d.a.m.n--!" Stepping backward, he lifted the front wheels, and with Lily's help pulled the perambulator on to the little porch and over the threshold into the house--which always shone with immaculate neatness and ugly comfort. He kept his eyes away from the sleeping face on the pillow. Together they got the carriage into the hall--Lily fumbling all the while with one hand to fasten the front of her dress and skipping a b.u.t.ton or two as she did so; but he had a glimpse of the heavy abundance of her bosom, and thought to himself that, esthetically, maternity was rather unpleasant.

"Go on into the parlor and sit down," she said; "I'll put him in the kitchen," She pushed the elaborate wicker perambulator, adorned with bows of blue-satin ribbon, down a dark entry smelling of very good soup stock. When she came back she found Maurice, his hat and stick in his hands, standing in her tiny front room, where the sunny window was full of geraniums and scraggly rose bushes. "I got 'em in early. And I dug up my dahlias--I was afraid of frost. (Mercy! I must clean that window on the outside!) Well, you _are_ a stranger!" she said, again, good-naturedly. Then she sighed: "Mr. Curtis, Jacky seems kind o' sick.

He's been coughing, and he's hot. Would you send for a doctor, if you was me?"

"Why, if you're worried, yes," Maurice said, impatiently; "I was just pa.s.sing, and--No, thank you; I won't sit down. I was pa.s.sing, and I thought I'd look in and give you a--a little present. If the youngster's upset, it will come in well," he ended, as his hand sought his waistcoat pocket. Lily's face was instantly anxious.

"What! Did _you_ think he looked sick, too? I was kind of worried, but if you noticed it--"

"I didn't in the least," he said, frowning; "I didn't look at him."

"He 'ain't never been what you'd call sick," Lily tried to rea.s.sure herself; "he's a reg'lar rascal!" she ended, tenderly; her eyes--those curious amber eyes, through which sometimes a tigress looks!--looked now at Maurice in pa.s.sionate motherhood.

Maurice, putting the money down on the table, said, "I wish I could do more for you, Lily; but I'm dreadfully strapped."

"Say, now, you take it right back! I can get along; I got my two upstairs rooms rented, and I've got a new mealer. And if Jacky only keeps well, I can manage fine. But that girl that's been wheelin' him has measles at her house--little s.l.u.t!" Lily said (the yellow eyes glared); "she didn't let on to me about it. Wanted her two dollars a week! If Jacky's caught 'em, I--I'll see to her!"

"Oh, he's all right," Maurice said; he didn't like "it"--although, if it hadn't been for "it" he would probably, long before this, have slipped down into the mere comfort of Lily; "it" held him prisoner in self-contempt; "it," or perhaps the larger It? the It which he had seen first in his glorious, pa.s.sionately selfish ecstasy on his wedding day; then glimpsed in the awful orderliness of the universe,--the It that held the stars in their courses! Perhaps the tiny, personal thing, Joy, and the stupendous, impersonal thing, Law, and the mysterious, unseen thing, Life, were all one? "Call it G.o.d," Maurice had said of ecstasy, and again of order; he did not call Jacky's milky lips "G.o.d." The little personality which he had made was not in the least G.o.d to him! On the contrary, it was a nuisance and a terror, and a financial anxiety. He shrank from the thought of it, and kept "decent," merely through disgust at the child as an ent.i.ty--an ent.i.ty which had driven him into loathsome evasions and secrecies which once in a while sharpened into little lies.

But he was faintly sorry, now, to see Lily look unhappy about the Thing; and he even had a friendly impulse to comfort her: "Jacky's all right!

But I'll send a doctor in, if you want me to. I saw a doctor's shingle out as I came around the corner."

She said she'd be awfully obliged; and he, looking at his watch, and realizing that Mrs. Houghton's train was due in less than an hour, hurried off.

The doctor's bell was not answered promptly; then the doctor detained him by writing down the address, getting it wrong, correcting it, and saying: "Mrs. Dale? Oh yes; you are Mr. Dale?"

"No--not at all! Just a friend. I happened to be calling, and Mrs. Dale asked me to stop and ask you to come in."

Then he rushed off. On the way to town, staring out of the window of the car, he tingled all over at Doctor Nelson's question: "You are Mr.

Dale?"... "Why the devil did I offer to get a doctor? I wish Lily would move to the ends of the earth; or that the brat would get well; or--or something."

There was a little delay in reaching the station, and when he got there, it was to find that Mrs. Houghton's train was in and she and Edith, shifting for themselves, had presumably taken a hack to find their way to Maurice's house. He was mortified, but annoyed, too, because it involved giving Eleanor some sort of lying explanation for his discourtesy. "I'll have to cook up some kind of yarn!" he thought, disgustedly...

When Edith and her mother had arrived, unaccompanied by Maurice, Eleanor was sharply worried; had anything happened to him? Oh, she was afraid something had happened to him! "Where _do_ you suppose he is?" she said, over and over. "I'm always so afraid he's been run over!" And when Maurice, flushed and apologetic, appeared, she was so relieved that she was cross. What on earth had detained him? "How _did_ you miss them?"

So Maurice immediately told half of the truth,--this being easier for him than an out-and-out lie. He had been detained because he had to go and see a house in Medfield. "Awfully sorry, Mrs. Houghton!"

Eleanor said she should have thought he needn't have stayed long enough to be late at the station! Well, he hadn't stayed long; but the--"the tenant was afraid her baby had measles and she had asked him to go and get a doctor, and--"

"Of course!" Mrs. Houghton said; "don't give it a thought, Maurice.

John Bennett met us--you knew he was at the Polytechnical?--and brought us here. But, anyhow, Edith and I were quite capable of looking out for ourselves; weren't we, Edith?"

Edith, almost sixteen now, long-legged, silent, and friendly, said, "Yes, mother" and helped herself so liberally to b.u.t.ter that her hostess thought to herself, _"Gracious!"_

However, a.s.sured that Maurice had not been run over, Eleanor was really indifferent to Edith's appet.i.te, for the sum Mrs. Houghton had offered for the girl's board was generous. So, proud of the new house, and pleased with sitting at the head of her own table, and hoping that Maurice would like the pudding, which, with infinite fussing, she had made with her own hands, she felt both happy and hospitable. She told Edith to take some more b.u.t.ter (which she did!); and tell Johnny to come to dinner some night, "and we'll have some music," she added, kindly.

"Johnny doesn't like music," said Edith; "well, I don't, either. But I guess he'll come. He likes food."

Edith effaced herself a good deal in the few days that, her mother stayed on in Mercer to launch her at Fern Hill; effaced herself, indeed, so much that Maurice, full of preoccupations of his own, was hardly aware of her presence!... He had had a scared note from Lily:

Doctor Nelson says he's _awful_ sick, and I've got to have a nurse. I don't like to, because I can't bear to have anybody do for him but me, and she charges so much. Makes me tired to see her all fussed up in white dresses--I suppose it's her laundry I'm paying for! That little girl he caught it from ought to be sent to a Reformatory. I'm afraid my new mealer'll go, if she thinks there's anything catching in the house.

I hate to ask you--

The scented, lavender-colored envelope was on Maurice's desk at the office the morning after Mrs. Houghton and Edith arrived. When he had read it, and torn it into minute sc.r.a.ps, Maurice had something else to think of than Edith! He knew Lily wouldn't want to leave "her" baby to go out and cash a money order, and checks were dangerous; so he must take that trip to Medfield again. "Well," said Maurice--pulled and jerked out to Maple Street on the leash of an ineradicable sense of decency--"the devil is getting his money's worth out of _me_!"

He entered No. 16 without turning the clanging bell, for the door was ajar. Lily was in the entry, talking to the doctor, who gave Mrs. Dale's "friend" a rather keen look. "Oh, Mr. Curtis, he's _awful_ sick!" Lily said; she was haggard with fright.

Maurice, swearing to himself for having arrived at that particular moment, said, coldly, "Too bad."

"Oh, we'll pull him through," the doctor said, with a kind look at Lily.

She caught his hand and kissed it, and burst out crying. The two men looked at each other--one amused, the other shrinking with disgust at his own moral squalor. Then from the floor above came a whimpering cry, and Lily, calling pa.s.sionately, "Yes, Sweety! Maw's coming!" flew upstairs.

"I'll look in this evening," Doctor Nelson said, and took himself off, rubbing the back of his hand on his trousers. "I wonder if there's any funny business there?" he reflected. But he thought no more about it until weeks afterward, when he happened, one day, in the bank, to stand before Maurice, waiting his turn at the teller's window. He said, "h.e.l.lo!" and Maurice said, "h.e.l.lo!" and added that it was a cold day.

The fact that Maurice said not a word about that recovering little patient in Medfield made the doctor's mind revert to the possibilities he had recognized in Lily's entry.

"Yet he looks too decent for that sort of thing," the doctor thought; "well, it's a rum world." Then Maurice took his turn at the window, and Doctor Nelson put his notes in his pocket, and the two men nodded to each other, and said, "By," and went their separate ways.

CHAPTER XIV

Edith's first winter in Mercer went pretty well; she was not fussy about what she had to eat; "I can always stoke on bread and b.u.t.ter," she said, cheerfully; and she was patient with the aging Bingo's yapping jealousies; "The smaller a dog is, the more jealous he is!" she said, with good-humored contempt; and she didn't mind Eleanor's speechlessness. "_I_ talk!" Edith said. But Maurice?... "I love him next to father and mother," Edith thought; but, all the same, she didn't know what to make of Maurice! He had very little to say to her--which made her feel annoyingly young, and made him seem so old and stern that sometimes she could hardly realize that he was the Maurice of the henhouse, and the camp, and the squabbles. Instead, he was the Maurice of that night on the river, the "Sir Walter Raleigh" Maurice! Once in a while she was quite shy with him. "He's awfully handsome," she thought, and her eyes dreamed. "What a clod Johnny is, compared to him!" ... As for Eleanor, Edith, being as un.o.bservant as most sixteen-year-old girls, saw only the lovely dark eyes and the beautiful brow under the ripple of soft black hair, Eleanor's sterile silences did not trouble her, and she never knew that the traces of tears meant a helpless consciousness that dinner had been a failure. The fact was, she never noticed Eleanor's looks! She merely thought Maurice's wife was old, and didn't "get much fun out of life--she just plays on the piano!" Edith thought. Pain of mind or body was, to Edith--as probably it ought to be to Youth--unintelligible; so she had no sympathy. In fact, being sixteen, she had still the hard heart of a child.

It may have been the remembrance of Sir Walter Raleigh that made her, one night, burst into reminiscent questions:

"Maurice! Do you remember the time that boat upset, and that girl--all painted, you know--flopped around in the water?"

Maurice said, briefly, why, yes; he believed he remembered.

"I remember that girl, too," Eleanor said; "Maurice told me about her."

"Well, what do you suppose?" Edith said; "I saw her to-day."

Maurice, pushing back his chair, got up and went into the little room opening into the dining room, which they called the library. At his desk, his pen in his hand, his jaw set, he sat listening--listening!

What in h.e.l.l would she say next? What she said was harmless enough:

"Yes, I saw her. I was walking home, and on Maple Street who should I see going into a house but this woman! She was lugging a flower pot, and a baby. And,--now, isn't this funny?--she sort of stumbled at the gate, _right by me_! And I grabbed her, and kept the child from falling; and I said--" In the library Maurice's face was white--"I said, 'Why, _I_ saw you once--you're Miss Dale. Your boat upset,' And she said, 'You have the advantage of me.' Of course she isn't a lady, you know."

Eleanor smiled, and called significantly to her husband, "Edith says your rescued friend isn't a 'lady,' Maurice!" He didn't answer, and she added to Edith, "No; she certainly isn't a lady! Darling," she called again; "do you suppose she's got married?"

To which he answered, "Where did I put those sheets of blotting paper, Eleanor?"

"Oh yes, she's married," Edith said, sc.r.a.ping her plate; "she told me her name was _Mrs_. Henry Dale. She couldn't seem to remember Maurice giving her his coat, which I thought was rather funny in her, 'cause Maurice is so handsome you'd think she'd remember him. And I said he was 'Mr. Curtis,' and she said she'd never heard the name. I got to talking to her," ("I bet you did," Maurice thought, despairingly); "and she told me that 'Jacky' had had the measles, and been awfully sick, but he was all well now, and she'd taken him into Mercer to get him a cap."

("What's Lily mean by bringing the Thing into town!" Jacky's father was saying through set teeth.) "She was perfectly bursting with pride about him," Edith went on; "said he was 'a reg'lar rascal'! Isn't it queer that I should meet her, after all these years?"

When Eleanor went into the library to hunt for the blotting paper, she, too, commented on the queerness of Edith's stumbling on the lady who wasn't a lady. "How small the world is!" said Eleanor. "Why, Maurice, here's the paper! Right before you!"