The Vehement Flame Part 4

"Wrong for once, Mrs. Houghton. It's the fourth."

"_I_ want the Bride," said Edith.

Her mother laughed. "Come along, honey," she said, putting her hand on her husband's shoulder, "and tell me what to say to her."

"Say she's a harpy, and tell her to go to the--"

"Henry!"

"My dear, like Mr. F.'s aunt, 'I hate a fool.' Oh, I'll tell you what to say: Say, 'Mr. F.'s aunt will send her a wedding present.' That's friendly, isn't it?"

"Better not be too literary in public," his wife cautioned him, with a significant glance at Edith, who was all ears.

When, laughing, they left the table, their daughter sc.r.a.ping her plate, pondered thus: "I suppose Mr. F. is the Bride's father. I wonder what present his aunt will give her? I wonder what 'F' stands for--Frost?

Fuller? Father and mother don't want the Bride to come; and mother thinks the Bride don't want to come. So why should they ask her to come?

And why should she come? I wouldn't," Edith said; "but I hope she will, for I love her! And oh, I _hope_ she'll bring her harp! I've never seen a harpy. But people are funny," Edith summed it up; "inviting people and not wanting 'em; and visiting 'em and not wanting to. It ain't sense,"

said Edith.

CHAPTER IV

In spite of his declaration of indifference to the feelings of his guardian, the married boy was rapidly acquiring that capacity for "worry" which Mr. Houghton desired to develop in him. _What would the mail bring him from Green Hill?_ It brought nothing for a week--a week in which he experienced certain bad moments which encouraged "worry" to a degree that made his face distinctly older than on that morning under the locust tree, when he had been married for fifty-four minutes. The first of these educating moments came on Monday, when he went to see his tutor, to say that he was--well, he was going to stop grinding.

"What?" said Mr. Bradley, puzzled.

"I'm going to chuck college, sir," Maurice said, and smiled broadly, with the rollicking certainty of sympathy that a puppy shows when approaching an elderly mastiff.

"Chuck college! What's the matter?" the mastiff said, putting a protecting hand over his helpless leg, for Maurice's restlessness--tramping about, his hands in his pockets--was a menace to the plastered member.

"I'm going into business," the youngster said; "I--Well; I've got married, and--"

"_What!_"

"--so, of course, I've got to go to work."

"See here, what are you talking about?"

The uneasy color sprang into Maurice's face, he stood still, and the grin disappeared. When he said explicitly what he was "talking about,"

Mr. Bradley's angry consternation was like the unexpected snap of the old dog; it made Eleanor's husband feel like the puppy. "I ought to have rounded him up," Mr. Bradley was saying to himself; "Houghton will hold me responsible!" And even while making unpleasant remarks to the bridegroom, he was composing, in his mind, a letter to Mr. Houghton about the helplessness incidental to a broken leg, which accounted for his failure in "rounding up." "_I_ couldn't get on to his trail!" he was exonerating himself.

When Maurice retreated, looking like a schoolboy, it took him a perceptible time to regain his sense of age and pride and responsibility. He rushed back to the hotel--where he had plunged into the extravagance of the "bridal suite,"--to pour out his hurt feelings to Eleanor, and while she looked at him in one of her lovely silences he railed at Bradley, and said the trouble with him was that he was sore about money! "He needn't worry! I'll pay him," Maurice said, largely.

And then forgot Bradley in the rapture of kissing Eleanor's hand. "As if we cared for his opinion!" he said.

"We don't care!" she said, joyously. Her misgivings had vanished like dew in the hot sun. Old Mrs. O'Brien had done her part in dissipating them. While Maurice was bearding his tutor, Eleanor had gone across town to her laundress's, to ask if Mrs. O'Brien would take Bingo as a boarder--. "I can't have him at the hotel," she explained, and then told the great news:--"I'm going to live there, because I--I'm married,"--upon which she was kissed, and blessed, and wept over! "The gentleman is a little younger than I am," she confessed, smiling; and Mrs. O'Brien said:

"An' what difference does that make? He'll only be lovin' ye hotter than an old fellow with the life all gone out o' him!"

Eleanor said, laughing, "Yes, that's true!" and cuddled the baby grandson's head against her breast.

"You'll be happy as a queen!" said Mrs. O'Brien; and "in a year from now you'll have something better to take care of than Bingo--_he'll_ be jealous!"

But she hardly heeded Mrs. O'Brien and her joyful prophecy of Bingo's approaching jealousy; having taken the dive, she had risen into the light and air, and now she forgot the questioning depths! She was on the crest of contented achievement. She even laughed to think that she had ever hesitated about marrying Maurice. Absurd! As if the few years between them were of the slightest consequence! Mrs. O'Brien was right.... So she smoothed over Maurice's first bad moment with an indifference as to Mr. Bradley's opinion which was most rea.s.suring to him. (Yet once in a while she thought of Mr. Houghton, and bit her lip.)

The next bad moment neither she nor Maurice could dismiss so easily; it came in the interview with her astounded aunt, whose chief concern (when she read the letter which Eleanor had left on her pincushion) was lest the Houghtons would think she had inveigled the boy into marrying her niece. To prove that she had not, Mrs. Newbolt told the bride and groom that she would have nothing more to do with Eleanor! It was when the fifty-four minutes had lengthened into three days that they had gone, after supper, to see her. Eleanor, supremely satisfied, with no doubts, now about the wisdom of what she had done, was nervous only as to the effect of her aunt's temper upon Maurice; and he, full of a bravado of indifference which confessed the nervousness it denied, was anxious only as to the effect of the inevitable reproaches upon Eleanor. Their five horrid minutes of waiting in the parlor for Mrs. Newbolt's ponderous step on the stairs, was broken by Bingo's dashing, with ear-piercing barks, into the room: Eleanor took him on her knee, and Maurice, giving the little black nose a kindly squeeze, looked around in pantomimic horror of the obese upholstery, and Rogers groups on the tops of bookcases full of expensively bound and unread cla.s.sics.

"How have you stood it?" he said to his wife; adding, under his breath, "If she's nasty to you, I'll wring her neck!"

She was very nasty. "I'm not a party to it," Mrs. Newbolt said; she sat, panting, on a deeply cushioned sofa, and her wheezy voice came through quivering double chins; her protruding pale eyes snapped with anger. "I shall tell you exactly what I think of you, Eleanor, for, as my dear mother used to say, if I have a virtue it is candor; I think you are a puffect fool. As for Mr. Curtis, I no more thought of protectin' him than I would think of protectin' a baby in a perambulator from its nursemaid! Bingo was sick at his stomach this mornin'. You've ruined the boy's life." Eleanor cringed, but Maurice was quite steady:

"We will not discuss it, if you please. I will merely say that I dragged Eleanor into it; I _made_ her marry me. She refused me repeatedly. Come, Eleanor."

He rose, but Mrs. Newbolt, getting heavily on to her small feet, and talking all the time, walked over to the doorway and blocked their retreat. "You needn't think I'll do anything for you!" she said to her niece; "I shall write to Mr. Houghton and tell him so. I shall tell him he isn't any more disgusted with this business than I am. And you can take Bingo with you!"

"I came to get him," Eleanor said, faintly.

"Come, Eleanor," Maurice said; and Mrs. Newbolt, puffing and talking, had to make way for them. As they went out of the door she called, angrily:

"Here! Stop! I want to give Bingo a chocolate drop!"

They didn't stop. In the street on the way to Bingo's new home, Eleanor, holding her little dog in her arms, was blind with tears, but Maurice effervesced into extravagant ridicule. His opinion of Mrs. Newbolt, her parlor, her ponderosity, and her missing g's, exhausted his vocabulary of opprobrious adjectives; but Eleanor was silent, just putting up a furtive handkerchief to wipe her eyes. It was dark, and he drew her hand through his arm and patted it.

"Don't worry, Star. Uncle Henry is white! She can write to him all she wants to! I'm betting that we'll get an invitation to come right up to Green Hill."

She said nothing, but he knew she was trembling. As they entered Mrs.

O'Brien's alley, they paused where it was dark enough, halfway between gaslights, for a man to put his arm around his wife's waist and kiss her. (Bingo growled.)

"Eleanor! I've a great mind to go back to that h.e.l.l-cat, and tell her what I think of her!"

"No. Very likely she's right. I--I have injured you. Oh, Maurice, if I _have_--"

"You'd have injured me a d.a.m.n sight more if you hadn't married me!" he said.

But for the moment her certainty that her marriage was a glorious and perfect thing, collapsed; her voice was a broken whisper:

"If I've spoiled your life--she says I have;--I'll ... kill myself, Maurice." She spoke with a sort of heavy calmness, that made a small, cold thrill run down his back; he burst into pa.s.sionate protest:

"All I am, or ever can be, will be because you love me! Darling, when you say things like--like what you said, I feel as if you didn't love me--"

Of course the reproach tautened her courage; "I do! I do! But--"

"Then never say such a wicked, cruel thing again!"

It was when Bingo had been left with Mrs. O'Brien that, on their way back to the hotel, Maurice, in a burst of enthusiasm, invited his third bad moment: "I am going to have a rattling old dinner party to celebrate your escape from the hag! How about Sat.u.r.day night?"

She protested that he was awfully extravagant; but she cheered up. After all, what difference did it make what a person like Auntie thought! "But who will you ask?" she said. "I suppose you don't know any men here? And I don't, either."