The Vehement Flame Part 28

"Who said that?" Maurice said.

Edith said she'd forgotten: "But I bet it's true. I'd simply hate a jealous person, no matter how much they loved me! Wouldn't you, Eleanor?

Wouldn't you hate Maurice if he was jealous of you? I declare I don't see how you can be so fond of Bingo!"

Maurice, suddenly ashamed of himself for his pleasure in seeing Eleanor hit, was saying, inaudibly, "Good Lord! what will she say next?" To keep her quiet, he said, good-naturedly, "Don't you want to sing, Nelly?"

She said, very low, "No." Her throat ached with the pain of knowing that the one little contribution she could make to the occasion was not really wanted!

Maurice did not urge her. He and the other two took off their shoes and stockings; and went with squeals across the stubble, down a steep bank, to a pebbly point of sand, round which a sunny swirl of water chattered loudly, then went romping off into sparkling shallows. Edith's lifted skirt, as she stepped into the current, a.s.sured her against the wetting Eleanor had foreseen, and also showed her pretty legs--and Eleanor, on the bank, her tensely trembling hand cuddling Bingo against her knee, "guarded" her things! It was at this moment that her old, unrecognized envy of Youth turned into a perfectly recognizable fear of Age. Edith was a woman now, not a child! "And I--dislike her!" Eleanor said to herself. She sat there alone, thinking of Edith's defects--her big mouth, her bad manners, her loud voice; and as she thought,--watching the waders all the while with tear-blurred eyes until a turn in the current hid them--she felt this new dislike flowing in upon her: "He talks to her; and forgets all about me!" ... She was deeply hurt. "He says she has 'brains.' ... He doesn't mind it when she says she 'doesn't care for music,' which is rude to me! And she talks about jealousy! She knows I'm jealous. Any woman who loves her husband is jealous."

Of course this pathetically false opinion made it impossible for her to realize that jealousy is just a form of self-love, nor could she enlarge upon Edith's nave generalization and say that, if a woman suffers because she is not the equal of the rival who gains her lover's love--_that_ is not jealousy! It is the anguish of recognizing her own defects, and it may be very n.o.ble. If she suffers because the rival is her inferior, _that_ is not jealousy; it is the anguish of recognizing defects in her lover, and it, too, is n.o.ble, for she is unhappy, not because he has slighted her, but because he has slighted himself!

Jealousy has no such n.o.ble elements; it is the unhappiness that Bingo knows--an ign.o.ble agony! ... But Eleanor, like many pitiful wives, did not know this. Sitting there on the bank of the river, without aspiration for herself or regret for Maurice, she knew only the anguish of being neglected. "He wouldn't have left me six years ago," she said; "He doesn't even ask me if I want to wade! I don't; but he didn't _ask_ me. He just went off with her!"

Suddenly, her fingers trembling, she began to take off her shoes and stockings. She _would_ do what Edith did! ... It was a tremor of aspiration!--an effort to develop in herself a quality he liked in Edith. She went, barefooted, with wincing cautiousness, and with Bingo stepping gingerly along beside her, across the mowed gra.s.s; then, haltingly, down the bank to the sandy edge of the river; there, while the little dog looked up at her anxiously, she dipped a white, uncertain foot into the water--and as she hesitated to essay the yielding mud, and the slimy things under the stones, she heard the returning splash of wading feet. A minute later the three youngsters appeared, Edith's skirts now very well above the danger line of wetness, and the two men offering eager guiding hands, which were entirely disdained! Then as, from under the leaning trees, they rounded the bend, there came an astonished chorus:

_"Why, look at Eleanor!"_

"Your skirt's in the water," Edith warned her; "hitch it up, and 'come on in--the water's fine!'"

She shook her head, and turned to climb up the bank.

"'The King of France,'" Edith quoted, satirically, "'marched _down_ a hill, and then marched up again!'"

Eleanor was silent. When the three began to put on their shoes and stockings, Eleanor, putting on her own, her skirt wet and drabbled about her ankles, heard Maurice and Johnny offering to tie Edith's shoestrings--a task which Edith, with condescending giggles, permitted.

Both of the boys--for Maurice seemed suddenly as much of a boy as Johnny!--went on their knees to tie, and re-tie, the brown ribbons, Maurice with gleeful and ridiculous deference.

"Want me to tie your shoestrings for you, Nelly?" he said over his shoulder.

"I am capable of tying my own, thank you," she said, so icily that the three playfellows looked at one another and Maurice, reddening sharply, said:

"Give us a song, Nelly!" But she sitting with clenched hands and tensely silent, shook her head. She was too wounded to speak. For the rest of the poor little picnic, with its gathering up of fragments and burning paper napkins--the conversation was labored and conscious.

On the trolley going home, Edith was the only one who tried to talk; Eleanor, holding Bingo in her lap, was dumb; and Johnny--hunting about for an excuse to "get away from the whole blamed outfit!" only said "M-m" now and then. But Maurice said nothing at all. After all, what can a man say when his wife has made a fool of herself?

"Even Lily would have had more sense!" he thought.

CHAPTER XVIII

That dismal festivity of the meadow marked the time when Maurice began to live in his own house only from a sense of duty ... and because Edith was there! A fact which Eleanor's aunt recognized almost as soon as Eleanor did; so, with her usual candor, Mrs. Newbolt took occasion to point things out to her niece. She had bidden Eleanor come to dinner, and Eleanor had said she would--"if Maurice happened to be going out."

"Better come when he's _not_ going out, so he can be at home and amuse Edith!" said Mrs. Newbolt. "Eleanor, my dear father used to say that women were puffect fools, because they never could realize that if they left the door _open_, a cat would put on his slippers and sit by the fire and knit; if they locked it, he'd climb up the chimney, but what he'd feel free to prowl on the roof!"

Eleanor preferred to "lock the door"; and certainly during that next winter Edith's gay interest in every topic under heaven was a roof on which Maurice prowled whenever he could! Sometimes he stayed at home in the evening, just to talk to her! When he did, those "brains" which Eleanor resented, made him indifferent to many badly cooked dinners--during which Eleanor sat at the table and saw his enjoyment, and felt that dislike of their "boarder," which had become acute the day of the picnic, hardening into something like hatred. She wondered how he endured the girl's chatter? Sometimes she hinted as much, but Edith never knew she was being criticized! She was too generous to recognize the significance of what she called (to herself) Eleanor's grouch, and Maurice's delight in such unselfconsciousness helped to keep her ignorant, for he held his tongue--with prodigious effort!--even when Eleanor hit Edith over his shoulder. If he defended her, he told himself, the fat _would_ be in the fire! So, as no one pointed out to Edith what the grouch meant, she had not the faintest idea that Eleanor was saying to herself, "Oh, if I could _only_ get rid of her!" And as no one pointed out to Eleanor that the way to hold Maurice was not to get rid of Edith, but to "open the door," that corrosive thing the girl had called "Bingoism" kept the anger of the day in the field smoldering in her mind. It was like a banked fire eating into her deepest consciousness; it burned all that winter; it was still burning even when the summer vacation came and Edith went home. Her departure was an immense relief to Eleanor; she told Maurice she didn't want her to come back, ever!

"Why not?" he said, sharply; "_I_ like having her here. Besides, think of telling Uncle Henry we didn't want Edith next winter! If you have the nerve for that, _I_ haven't." Eleanor had not the nerve; so when, at the end of June, Edith rushed home, it was understood that she would be with Maurice and Eleanor during the next term.... That was the summer that marked the seventh year of their marriage--and the fourth year of Jacky, over in the little frame house on Maple Street. But it was the first year of a knowledge, surprisingly delayed!--which came to Edith; namely, that Johnny Bennett was "queer."

It may have been this "queerness" which made her attach herself to Eleanor, who, in August, went to Green Hill for the usual two weeks'

visit. Maurice had to go away on office business three or four times during that fortnight, but he came up for one Sunday. He had insisted upon Eleanor's going, because, he said, she needed the change. "Can't you come?" she pleaded. "Do take some extra time from the office!"

"And be docked? Can't afford it!" he said; "but I'll get one week-end in with you," he promised her, looking forward with real satisfaction to the solitude of his own house. So Eleanor, saying she couldn't understand why he was so awfully economical now that he had his own money!--came alone,--full of remorse at deserting him, and worry because of his loneliness, and leaving a pining Bingo behind her. But, to her silent annoyance, as soon as she arrived at Green Hill she encountered a new and tiresome attentiveness from Edith! Edith was inescapably polite.

She did not urge upon Eleanor any of those strenuous amus.e.m.e.nts to which she and Johnny were devoted; she merely gave up the amus.e.m.e.nts, and, as Johnny expressed it, "stuck to Eleanor"! Eleanor couldn't understand it, and when Maurice at last arrived, Johnny's perplexity became audible:

"Perhaps," he told Edith, satirically, "you may be able, now, to tear yourself away from Eleanor, and go fishing with me? You fish pretty well--for a woman. Maurice can lug her round."

"I will, if Maurice will go, too," Edith said.

"What do you drag him in for?"--John paused; understanding dawned upon him: "She doesn't want to be by herself with me!" His tanned face slowly reddened, and those brown eyes of his behind the big spectacles grew keen. He didn't speak for quite a long time; then he said, very low, "I'll be here to-morrow morning at four-thirty. Be ready. I'll dig bait."

"All right," said Edith; after which, for the first time in her life, she played a shabby trick on Johnny Bennett; as soon as he had gone home, she invited Eleanor (who promptly declined), and Maurice (who as promptly accepted), to go fishing, too! Then, having got what she wanted, she reproached herself: "Johnny'll be mad as fury. But when he gets to saying things to me he makes me feel funny in the back of my neck. Besides, I want Maurice."

The fishermen were to a.s.semble in the grayness of the August dawn; and Johnny was, as usual, prepared to throw a handful of gravel at Edith's window to hurry her downstairs. But when he loomed up in the mist, who should be on the porch, fooling with a rod, but Maurice!

"What's he b.u.t.ting in for?" Johnny thought, looking so cross that Edith, coming out with the luncheon basket, was really remorseful.

"Hullo, Johnny," she said. ("I never played it on him before," she was thinking.) But at that moment her remorse was lost in alarm, for standing in the doorway was Eleanor, her hair caught up in a hurried twist, a wrapper over her shoulders, her bare feet thrust into pink bedroom slippers. (Forty-six looks fifty-six at 4.30 A.M.)

"Darling," Eleanor said, "I believe I'd like to go up to the cabin to-day. Do let's do it--just you and I!"

The three young people all spoke at once:

Johnny said: "Good scheme! We'll excuse Maurice."

Edith said, "Oh, Eleanor, Maurice loves fishing!"

And Maurice said: "I sort of think I'd like to catch a sucker or two in this pool Johnny is always cracking up. I bet he's in for a big jolt about his trout! You come, too?"

"I'd get so awfully tired. And I--I thought we could have a day together up on the mountain," she ended, wistfully.

There was a dead silence. Johnny was thinking: "Gosh! I hope she gets him." And Edith was thinking, "I'd like to choke her!" Maurice's thoughts could not be spoken; he merely said, "All right; if you want to."

"I don't believe I'll go fishing, either," Edith said.

Eleanor, on the threshold, turned quickly: "Please don't stay at home on my account!"

But Maurice settled it. "I'll not go," he said, patiently; "but you must, Edith." He threw down his rod and went into the house; Eleanor, in her flopping pink slippers, hurried after him....

"I did so want to have you to myself," she said; "you don't mind not going fishing with those children, do you?"

He said, listlessly: "Oh no. But don't let's attempt the cabin stunt."

Then he stood at the window and watched Johnny and Edith, with fishing rods and lunch basket, disappear down the road into the fog. He was too bored to be irritated; he only counted the hours until he could get back to Mercer, and the office, and the table under the silver poplar.

"I'll get hold of the Mortons, and Hannah can give us some sort of grub, and then we'll go to a show," he thought. "I can stick it out here for thirty-six hours more."

He stuck it out that morning by sitting in Mr. Houghton's studio, one leg across the arm of his chair, reading and smoking. Once Eleanor came in and asked him if he was all right. He said, briefly, "Yes."

But she was uneasy: "Maurice, I'll play tennis with you?"