The Vehement Flame Part 31

That evening, when Henry Houghton was alone with his wife, he said what he thought about Maurice: "He _is_ standing on the burning deck of this pathetic marriage of his, magnificently. He never bats an eyelash!

(Your daughter's slang is vulgar.)"

"Eleanor is the pathetic one," Mary Houghton said, sadly; "Maurice has grown cynical--which is a sort of protection to him, I suppose.

Yes; I'm afraid Edith is right; she'd better be out at the school next winter. It isn't well for a girl to see differences between a husband and wife.... Henry, you shan't have another cigar! That's the third since supper! Dear, what _is_ the trouble about Maurice?"

"Mary, things have come to a pretty pa.s.s, when you snoop around and count up my cigars! I _will_ smoke!" But he withdrew an empty hand from his cigar box, and said, sighing, "I wish I could tell you about Maurice; Kit; but I can't betray his confidence."

"If I guessed, you wouldn't betray anything?"

"Well, no. But--"

"I guessed it a good while ago. Some foolishness about a woman, of course. Or--or badness?" she ended, sadly.

He nodded. "I wish I was asleep whenever I think of it! Mary, there are some pretty steep grades on Fool Hill, and he's had hard climbing.... It's ancient history now; but I can't go into it."

"Of course not. Oh, my poor Maurice! Does Eleanor know?"

"Heavens, no! It wouldn't do."

"Honey, the unforgivable thing, to a woman, is not the sin, but the deceit. And, besides, Eleanor loves him enough to forgive him. She would die for him, I really believe!"

"Yet the green-eyed monster looks out of her eyes if he plays checkers with Edith! My darling," said Henry Houghton, "as I have before remarked, your ignorance on this one subject is colossal. _Women can't stand truth._"

"It's a provision of nature, then, that all men are liars?" she inquired, sweetly; "Henry, the loss of Edith's board won't trouble Maurice much, will it?"

"Not _as_ much, of course, now that he has all his money; but he has to scratch gravel to make four ends meet," Henry Houghton said.

"_Four_ ends!" she said; "oh, is it as bad as that? He has to support--somebody?"

He said, "Yes; so long as you have guessed. Mary, I really must have a smoke."

"Why _am_ I so weak-minded as to give in to you!" she sighed; then handed him the cigar box, and scratched a match for him; he held her wrist--the sputtering match in her fingers--lighted the cigar, blew out the match, and kissed her hand.

"You are a snooper and a porcupine about tobacco; but otherwise quite a nice woman," he said.

CHAPTER XX

When Edith's Easter vacation was over, and she went back to Mercer, she was followed by a letter from Mrs. Houghton to Eleanor, explaining the plan for the school dormitory the following winter. But there was another letter, to Maurice, addressed (discreetly) to his office. It was from Henry Houghton, and it was to the effect that if any "unexpected expenses" came along, and Maurice felt strapped because of the cessation of Edith's board, he must let Mr. Houghton know; then a suggestion as to realizing on certain securities.

"That's considerate in him," Eleanor said; "but I don't know what 'unexpected expenses' we could have?"

It was a chilly April day. Maurice happened to be laid up home with a sore throat; Eleanor, searching for a cook, had stopped at his office for a lease he wanted to see, and brought back with her some mail she found on his desk.

"I knew this letter was from Mr. Houghton, so I opened it," she said, as she handed it to him. His instant and very sharp annoyance surprised her. "I wouldn't open your _business_ letters," she defended herself; "but I didn't suppose you'd mind my seeing anything the Houghtons might write--"

"I don't like to have any of my mail opened!" he said, briefly, his eyes raking Henry Houghton's letter, and discovering (of course!) nothing in the fine, precise handwriting which was in the least betraying. ("But suppose he _had_ said what the 'unexpected expenses' might be!")

"We shall miss Edith's board," Eleanor said; "but, oh, I'll be so glad to have her go!"

Maurice was silent. "If she lives in Medfield all the time, she'll be sure and run into Lily," he thought. "The devil's in it." He was in his bedroom, wrapped up in a blanket, shivering and hot and headachy. The chance of Edith's "running into Lily" would, of course, be even less if she were at Fern Hill, than it was now when she was going back and forth in the trolley every day; but he was so uncomfortable, physically, that he didn't think of that; and his preoccupation made him blind to Eleanor's hurt look.

"I am willing to have you read all _my_ letters," she said.

"I'm not willing to have you read mine!" he retorted.

"Why not?" she demanded--"unless you have secrets from me."

"Oh, Eleanor, don't be an idiot!" he said, wearily.

"I believe you _have_ secrets!" she said--and burst out crying and ran out of the room.

He called her back and apologized for his irritability; but as he got better, he forgot that he had been irritable--he had something else to think of! He must get down to the office and write to Mr. Houghton, asking him to address personal letters to a post-office box. And he made things still safer by going out to Medfield to see Lily and give her the number of the box in case she, too, had occasion to write any "personal"

letters, which, indeed, she very rarely had. "I say _that_ for her!"

Maurice told himself. He hoped--as he always did when he had to go to Maple Street, that he would not see It--an It which had, of course, long before this, acquired sufficient personality to its father to be referred to as "Jacky"; a Jacky who, in his turn, had discovered sufficient personality in Maurice to call him "Mr. Gem'man"--a corruption of his mother's t.i.tle for her very infrequent visitor, "the gentleman."

Jacky's "Mr. Gem'man" found the front door of the little house open, and, looking in, saw Lily in the parlor, mounted on a ladder, hanging wall paper. She stepped down, laughing, and moved her bucket of paste out of his way.

"Won't you be seated?" she said. Her rosy face was beaming with artistic satisfaction; "Ain't this paper lovely?" she demanded; "it's one of them children's papers that's all the rage now. I call it a reg'lar art gallery! Look at the pants on them rabbits! It pretty near broke me to buy it. The swells put this kind of paper in 'nurseries,'

and stick their kids off in 'em; but that ain't _me_! I put it on the parlor! Set down, won't you?"

Maurice sat down and, very much bored, listened while Lily chattered on, with stories about Jacky:

"He says to the milkman yesterday, 'I like your shirt,' he says. And Amos--that's his name--he said, 'You can get one like it when you're grown up like me.' And Jacky, he says--oh, just as _sad_!--I'd rather have it now, 'cause when I grow up, maybe I'll be a lady.'"

Maurice smiled perfunctorily.

"Ain't he the limit?" Lily demanded, proudly; "he's a reg'lar rascal! He stuck out his tongue at the grocer's boy, yesterday, 'cause he stepped on my pansy bed. I wish you could 'a' seen him."

Maurice swallowed a yawn. "He's fresh."

"'Course," Lily said, quickly, "I gave him a smack! He's getting a good bringing up, Mr. Curtis. I give him a cent every morning, to say his prayers."

Maurice didn't care a copper about Jacky's manners, or his morals, either; but he said, carelessly, "A kid that's fresh is a bore."

Lily frowned. When Maurice, having explained about the letter box, gave her the usual "present" she made her usual good-natured protest--but this time there was more earnestness in it, and even a little sharpness.

"I don't need it; I've got three more mealers--well, one of 'em can't pay me; her husband's out of work; but she don't eat more than a canary, poor thing! I can take care of Jacky _myself_."

The emphasis puzzled Jacky's father for a moment. That Lily, seeing the growing perfection of her handsome, naughty little boy, was becoming uneasy lest Maurice might be moved to envy, never occurred to him. If it had, he would of course have been enormously relieved; he might even have played upon her fear of such an impossibility to induce her to move away from Mercer! As it was, after listening to the account of the pansy catastrophe, he got up to go, thankful that he had not had to lay eyes on the child, whose voice he heard from the back yard.

Lily, friendly enough in spite of that moment of resentment, went to the front door with him. She had grown rather stout in the last year or two, but she was always as shiningly clean as a rose, and her little lodging house was clean, too; she was indefatigably thorough--scrubbing and sweeping and dusting from morning to night! "It's good business," said little Lily; "and it is just honest, too, for they pay me good!" Her only unbusinesslike quality was a generous kindliness, which sometimes considered the "mealers'" purses rather than her own. She had, to be sure, small outbursts of temper, when she "smacked" Jacky, or berated her lodgers for wasting gas; but Jacky was smothered with kisses even before his howls ceased, and the lodgers were placated with cookies the very next day--but that, too, was "good business"! Her "respectability"

had become a deep satisfaction to her. She occasionally referred to herself as "a perfect lady." Her feeling about "imperfect" ladies was of most virulent disapproval. But she had no more spirituality than a hen.

Her face was as good-humored, and common, and pretty as ever; and she had a fund of not too refined, but always funny, stories to tell Maurice; so he liked her, after a fashion, and she liked him, after a fashion, too, although she was a little afraid of him; his bored preoccupation seemed like sternness to Lily. "Grouchiness," she called it; "probably that's why he don't take to Jacky," she thought; "well, it's lucky he don't, for he shouldn't have him!" But as Maurice, on the little porch, said good-by, she really wondered at his queerness in not taking to Jacky, who, grimy and handsome, was sitting on the ground, spooning earth into an empty lard pail.

"Come in out o' the dirt, Sweety!" Lily called to him.