The Vehement Flame Part 34

"Oh, do take it!" the woman urged, pleasantly, and Eleanor could not resist sinking into it.

"You are very kind," she said, smiling faintly.

The woman smiled, too, and said, "Well, I always think what I'd like anyone to do for my mother, if _she_ couldn't get a seat in a car! I guess you're about her age."

Eleanor hardly heard her; she sat staring out of the window--staring at that same landscape on which she and Maurice had gazed in the unseeing ecstasy of their fifty-four minutes of married life! "He said we would come back in fifty years--not by ourselves." As she said that, a thought stabbed her! _There was a child that day, in the yard!_

When she saw that the car was approaching the end of the route, she thought of the locust tree, and the blossoming gra.s.s, and the whispering river. "I'll go there, and think," she said.

"All out!" said the conductor; and she rose and walked, stumbling once or twice, and with one hand outstretched, as if--in the dazzling July day--she had to feel her way in an enveloping darkness. She went down the country road, where the bordering weeds were white with dust, toward that field of young love, and clover, and blue sky.

When she reached the river, curving around the meadow, brown and shallow in the midsummer droughts, she saw that the big locust was long past blossoming, but some elderberry bushes, in full bloom, made the air heavy with acrid perfume; the gra.s.s, starred by daisies, and with here and there a clump of black-eyed Susans, was ready for mowing, and was tugging at its anchoring roots, blowing, and bending, and rippling in the wind, just as it had that other day!... "And I sat right here, by the tree," she said, "and he lay there--I remember the exact place. And he took my hand--"

Her mind whirled like a merry-go-round: "Well, I knew he was hiding something. I wish I had seen Doctor Nelson, and asked him where she lives. I wonder if he's the Mortons' friend?... If I don't get that yeast cake to Mary before lunch, she can't set the rolls.... Edith saw her with a child five years ago. Why"--her mind stumbled still farther back--"why, the very day Edith arrived in Mercer, Maurice had been looking at some house in Medfield, where the tenant had a sick child.

That was why he was late in meeting Mrs. Houghton!... The child had measles. I wish I had gone to see Doctor Nelson! Then I would have known.... I can get some rolls at the bakery, and Mary needn't set them for dinner. I sang 'O Spring.'" She put her hands over her face, but there were no tears. "He kissed the earth, he was so happy. When did he stop being happy? What made him stop?... I wonder if there are any snakes here?--Oh, I _must_ think what to do!" Again her mind flew off at so violent a tangent that she felt dizzy. "I didn't tell Mary what to have for dinner.... He gave her his coat, that time when the boat upset.... She was all painted, he said so." She picked three strands of gra.s.s and began to braid them together: "He did that; he made the ring, and put it over my wedding ring." Mechanically she opened her pocketbook, and took out the little envelope, shabby now, with years of being carried there. She lifted the flap, and looked at the crumbling circle. Then she put it back again, carefully, and went on with her toilsome thinking: "I'll tell him I know that he went to see the Dale woman. ... He said we had been married fifty-four minutes. It's eight years and one month. He thinks I'm old. Well, I am. That woman in the car thought I was her mother's age, and _she_ must have been thirty! Why did he stop loving me? He hates Mary's cooking. He said Edith could make soup out of a paving stone and a blade of gra.s.s. Edith is rude to me about music, and he doesn't mind! How vulgar girls are, nowadays. Oh--I _hate_ her!... Mary'll give notice if I say anything about her soup."

Suddenly through this welter of anger and despair a small, confused thought struggled up; it was so unexpected that she actually gasped: He hadn't quite lied to her! "There _was_ office business!" Some real-estate transfer must have been put through, because--"Mrs. Dale had moved"! In her relief, Eleanor burst into violent crying; he had not _entirely_ lied! To be sure, he didn't say that the woman whom he had gone "from the office" to see, the woman who rented the house, was Mrs.

Dale; in that, he had not been frank; he kept the name back--but that was only a reserve! Only a harmless secrecy. There was nothing _wrong_ in renting a house to the Dale woman! As Eleanor said this to herself, it was as if cool water flowed over flame-licked flesh. Yes; he didn't talk to her as he did to Edith of business matters; he didn't tell her about real-estate transactions; but that didn't mean that the Dale woman was anything to him! She was crying hard, now; "He just isn't frank, that's all." She could bear _that_; it was cruel, but she could bear it!

And it was a protection to Maurice, too; it saved him from the slur of being suspected. "Oh, I am ashamed to have suspected him!" she thought; "how dreadful in me! But I've proved that I was wrong." When she said that she knew, in a numb way, that after this she must not play with the dagger of an unbelieved suspicion. She recognized that this sort of thing may be a mental diversion--but it is dangerous. If she allowed herself to do it again, she might really be stabbed; she might lose the saving certainty that he had not lied to her--that he had only been "not frank."

Suddenly she remembered how unwilling he had been, years ago, to talk of the creature to her! She smiled faintly at his foolishness. Perhaps he didn't want to talk of her now? Men are so absurd about their wives! Her heart thrilled at such precious absurdity. As for seeing that doctor--of course she wouldn't see him! She didn't _need_ to see him. And, anyhow, she wouldn't, for anything in the world, have him, or anybody else, suppose that she had had even a thought that Maurice wasn't--all right!

"He just wasn't quite frank; that was all." ... Oh, she had been wicked to suspect him! "He would never forgive me if he knew I had thought of such a thing, He must never know it."

In the comfort of her own remorse, and the rea.s.surance of his half frankness, she walked back to the station and waited, in the midday heat, for the returning car. Her head had begun to ache, but she said to herself that she must not disappoint little Donny. So she went, in the blazing sun, to the old washerwoman's house, climbed three flights of stairs, and found the boy in bed, flushed with worry for fear "Miss Eleanor" wasn't coming. She took the little feeble body in her arms, and sat down in the steamy kitchen by an open window, where Donny could see, on the clothes lines that stretched like gigantic spiderwebs across a narrow courtyard, shirts and drawers, flapping and kicking and bellying in the high, hot wind. She talked to him, and said that if his grandmother would hire a piano, she would give him music lessons;--and all the while her sore mind was wondering how old the mother of that woman in the car was? Then she sang to Donny--little merry, silly songs that made him smile:

"The King of France, And forty thousand men, Marched up a hill--"

She stopped short; Edith had thrown "The King of France" at her, that day of the picnic, when she had cringed away from the water and the slimy stones, and climbed up on the bank where she had been told to "guard the girl's shoes and stockings"! "Oh, I'll be so glad to get her and her 'brains' out of the house!" Eleanor thought. But her voice, lovely still, though fraying with the years--went on:

"Marched up a hill-- _And then marched down again_!"

When, with a splitting headache, she toiled home through the heat, she said to herself: "He ought to have been frank, and told me the woman was Mrs. Dale; I wouldn't have minded, for I know such a person couldn't have interested him. She had no figure, and she looked stupid. He couldn't have said _she_ had 'brains'! That girl in the car was impertinent."

CHAPTER XXI

The heat and the wind--and remorse--gave Eleanor such a prolonged headache that Maurice, in real anxiety and without consulting her--wrote to Mrs. Houghton that "Nelly was awfully used up by the hot weather,"

and might he bring her to Green Hill now, instead of later? Her prompt and friendly telegram, "_Come at once_," made him tell his wife that he was going to pack her off to the mountains, _quick_!

She began to say no, she couldn't manage it; "I--I can't leave Bingo"

(she was hunting for an excuse not to leave Maurice), "Bingo is so miserable if I am out of his sight."

"You can take him,--old Rover's gone to heaven. Think you can start to-morrow?" He sat down beside her and took her hand in his warm young paw; the pity of her made him frown--pity, and an intolerable annoyance at himself! She, a woman twice his age, had married him, when, of course, she ought to have told him not to be a little fool; "...wiped my nose and sent me home!" he thought, with cynical humor. But, all the same, she loved him. And he had played her a d.a.m.ned cheap trick!--which was hidden safely away in the two-family house on Ash Street. "Hidden."

What a detestable word! It flashed into Maurice's mind that if, that night among the stars, he had made a clean breast of it all to Eleanor, he wouldn't now be going through this business of hiding things--and covering them up by innumerable, squalid little falsenesses. "There would have been a bust-up, and she might have left me. But that would have been the end of it!" he thought; he would have been _free_ from what he had once compared to a dead hen tied around a dog's neck--the clinging corruption of a lie! The Truth would have made him free. Aloud, he said, "Star,"--she caught her breath at the old lovely word--"I'll go to Green Hill with you, and take care of you for a few days. I'm sure I can fix it up at the office."

The tears leaped to her eyes. "Oh, Maurice!" she said; "I haven't been nice to you. I'm afraid I'm--rather temperamental. I--I get to fancying things. One day last week I--had horrid thoughts about you."

"About _me_?" he said, laughing; "well, no doubt I deserved 'em!"

"No!" she said, pa.s.sionately; "no--you didn't! I know you didn't. But I--" With the melody of that old name in her ears, her thoughts were too shameful to be confessed. She wouldn't tell him how she had wronged him in her mind; she would just say: "Don't keep things from me, darling! Be frank with me, Maurice. And--" she stopped and tried to laugh, but her mournful eyes dredged his to find an indors.e.m.e.nt of her own certainties--"and tell me you don't love anybody else?"

She held her breath for his answer:

"You _bet_ I don't!"

The humor of such a question almost made him laugh. In his own mind he was saying, "Lily, and _Love_? Good Lord!"

Eleanor, putting her hand on his, said, in a whisper, "But we have no children. Do you mind--very much?"

"Great Scott! no. Don't worry about _that_. That's the last thing I think of! Now, when do you think you can start?" He spoke with wearied but determined gentleness.

She did not detect the weariness,--the gentleness made her so happy; he called her "Star"! He said he didn't love anyone else! He said he didn't mind because they had no children.... Oh, how dreadful for her to have had those shameful fears--and out in "their meadow," too! It was sacrilege.... Aloud, she said she could be ready by the first of the week; "And you'll stay with me? Can't you take two weeks?" she entreated.

"Oh, I can't afford _that_" he said; "but I guess I can manage one...."

Later that day, when she told Mrs. Newbolt--who had come home for a fortnight--what Maurice had planned for her, Eleanor's happiness ebbed a little in the realization that he would be in town all by himself, "for a whole week! He'll go off with the Mortons, I suppose," she said, uneasily.

"Well," said Mrs. Newbolt, with what was, for her, astonishing brevity, "why shouldn't he? Don't forget what my dear father said about cats: _'Open the door!'_ Tell Maurice you _want_ him to go off with the Mortons!"

Of course Eleanor told him nothing of the sort. But she was obliged, at Green Hill, to watch him "going off" with Edith. "I should think," she said once, "that Mrs. Houghton wouldn't want her to be wandering about with you, alone."

"Perhaps Mrs. Houghton doesn't consider me a desperate character," he said, dryly; "and, besides, Johnny Bennett chaperones us!"

Sometimes not even John's presence satisfied Eleanor, and she chaperoned her husband herself. She did it very openly one day toward the end of Maurice's little vacation. Henry Houghton had said, "Look here; you boys" (of course Johnny was hanging around) "must earn your salt! We've got to get the second mowing in before night. I'll present you both with a pitchfork."

To which Maurice replied, "Bully!"

"Me, too!" said Edith.

And John said, "I'll be glad to be of any a.s.sistance, sir."

("How their answers sum those youngsters up!" Mr. Houghton told his Mary.)

Eleanor, d.o.g.g.i.ng Maurice to a deserted spot on the porch, said, uneasily, "Don't do it, darling; it's too hot for you."

But he only laughed, and started off with the other two to work all morning in the splendid heat and dazzle of the field. "Skeezics, don't be so strenuous!" he commanded, once; and Johnny was really nervous:

"It's too hot for you, Buster."

"Too hot for your grandmother!" Edith said--bare-armed, open-throated, her creamy neck reddening with sunburn.

Toward noon, Maurice's chaperon, toiling out across the hot stubble to watch him, called from under an umbrella, "Edith! You'll get freckled."

"When I begin to worry about my complexion, I'll let you know," Edith retorted; "Maurice, your biceps are simply great!"