The Vehement Flame Part 40

"G.o.d doesn't eat," Maurice said, amused; "I'd say 'brought,' instead of 'brung,' if I were you."

"Hasn't He got any mouth?" Jacky said, appalled.

"Well, no," Maurice began (entering that path of unanswerable questions in which all parents are ordained to walk); "You see, G.o.d--why, G.o.d, He hasn't any mouth. He--"

"Has He got a beak?" Jacky said, intensely interested.

"Lily, for Heaven's sake," Maurice implored, "doesn't he _ever_ stop?"

"Never," said Lily, resignedly, "except when he's asleep. And n.o.body can answer him. But I wish he'd let up on G.o.d. I tell him whatever pops into my head. When it comes to G.o.d, I guess one thing 's as true as another.

Anyway, n.o.body can prove it ain't."

Just as Maurice was going away, his theological son detained him by a little clutch at his coat. "I'll give you a present next time you come,"

Jacky said, shyly.

Even the hope of a present did not lure Maurice out to Maple Street very soon. But it was self-preservation, as well as fear of discovery, which kept him away. "If I saw much of him I might--well, get kind of fond of the little beggar."

The same thought may have occurred to Lily; at any rate, when, four weeks later, Jacky's father came again; she didn't welcome him in quite her old, sweet, hospitable way; but Jacky welcomed him!... Jacky knew his mother as his slave; he showed her an absent-minded affection when he wanted to get anything out of her; but he knew Mr. Curtis as "The Man"--the man who "ordered him round," to be sure, but who gave him presents and who,--Jacky boasted to some of his gutter companions,--"could spit two feet farther than the p'leesman."

"Aw, how do you know?" the other boys scoffed.

Jacky, evading the little matter of evidence, said, haughtily, "I _know_."

When "The Man" declared that next fall Jacky was to go to school, _regularly_, and not according to his own sweet will, Jacky waited until he was alone with his mother to kick and scream and say he wouldn't.

Lily slapped him, and said, "Mr. Curtis will give you a present if you're on time every morning!"

She told Maurice to what she had committed him: "You see, I'm bound to educate him, and make a gentleman of him, so he can have an automobile, and marry a society girl. No chippy is going to get Jacky--smoking cigarettes, and saying 'La! La!' to any man that comes along. I hate those cheap girls. Look at the paint on 'em. I don't see how they have the face to show themselves on the street! Well, _I_ can't make him prompt at school; but he'll be Johnny-on-the-spot if you say so. My soul and body, he'll do anything for you! He's saved up all his prayer money and bought a lot of chewing gum for you."

"Great Scott!" said Maurice, appalled at the experimental obligations which his son's gift might involve.

"So I told him that next winter you'd give him a box of candy every Sat.u.r.day if he was on time all the week. I ain't asking you to go to any expense," she pleaded; "I'll buy the candy. But you promise him--"

"I'll promise him a spanking if he's _not_ on time, once," Maurice retorted; "for Heaven's sake, Lily, let up on spoiling him!"

At which Lily said: "He's my boy! I guess I know how to bring him up!"

Maurice, the next morning, looking across his breakfast table at Eleanor and remembering this remark, said to himself: "Lily needn't worry; I don't want him--and I couldn't have him if I did! But what _is_ going to become of him?"

His new, slowly awakening sense of responsibility expressed itself in this unanswerable question, which irritated his mind as a splinter might have irritated his flesh. He thought of it constantly--thought of it when Eleanor sang (with a slurred note once or twice), "O sweet, O sweet content!" Thought of it when his conscience reminded him that he must have tea with her in the garden under the poplar on Sunday afternoons.

Thought of it when he and she went up to the Houghtons', to spend Labor Day (she would not go without him!). Perhaps the thing that gave him some moments of forgetfulness was a quite different irritation which he felt when, on reaching Green Hill, he discovered that John Bennett, too, was spending Labor Day in the mountains. Johnny had come he said, to see his father.... "I wouldn't have known it if he hadn't mentioned it!"

said Doctor Bennett; for, Johnny practically lived at the Houghtons', where Edith was so painstakingly kind to him that he was a good deal discouraged; but the two families made pleasing deductions! Mary Houghton intimated as much to Maurice.

"What!" he said. "Are they engaged?"

"Well, no; not _yet_."

There was a little pause; then Maurice (this was one of the moments when he forgot Jacky's future!) said, with great heartiness, "Old John's in luck!" He and Mrs. Houghton were sitting on the porch in that somnolent hour after dinner, before she went upstairs to take a nap, and Maurice should go over to the Bennetts' for singles with Johnny; Eleanor was resting. Out on the lawn in the breezy sun and shadow under the tulip tree, Edith, fresh from a shampoo, was reading. Now and then she tossed her head like a colt, to make her fluffy hair blow about in a glittering brown nimbus.

Maurice got up and sauntered over to her. "Coming to see me wallop Johnny?"

"Maybe; if my horrid old hair ever dries."

Maurice looked at the "horrid old hair," and wished he could put out his hand and touch it. He was faintly surprised at himself that he didn't do it! "How mad I used to make her when I pulled her hair!" Now, he couldn't even put a finger on it. He remembered the night of Lily's distracted telegram, when he had taken Edith to Fern Hill, and she had "bet on him," and had been again, just for an instant, so entirely the "little girl" of their old frank past, that she had _kissed him_! "So, why can't I touch her hair, now?" he pondered; "we are just like brother and sister." But he knew he couldn't. Aloud, he said, "Don't be lazy, Skeezics," and lounged off toward Doctor Bennett's. His face was heavy.

At the doctor's, John, sitting on a gate post, waiting for him, yelled, derisively: "You're late! 'Fraid of getting walloped? Where's Buster?"

"She's forgotten all about you. Get busy!" Maurice commanded.

They played, neither of them with much zest, and both of them with glances toward the road. The walloping was fairly divided; but it was Maurice who gave out first, and said he had to go home. ("Eleanor'll be hunting for me, the first thing I know," he thought.)

"Tell Edith I'll come over to-night," Johnny called after him.

"I'm not carrying _billets-doux_," Maurice retorted. "I suppose," he thought, listlessly, "it will be a short engagement." He went home by the path through the woods, and halfway back Edith met him--the shining hair dried, but inclined to tumble over her ears, so that her hat slipped about on her head. She said:

"Johnny lick you?"

"Johnny? No! He's not up to it!" They both grinned, and Maurice sat down on a wayside log to put a knot in a broken shoestring. Edith sat down, too, trying to keep her hat on, and cursing (she said) the unreliability of her hair. The shoestring mended, Maurice batted a tall fern with his racket.

"Eleanor's sort of forlorn, Maurice?" Edith said. "Generally is." He slashed at the fern, and she heard him sigh. "That time she dragged me down the mountain took it out of her."

Edith nodded; then she said, with her straight look: "You're a perfect lamb, Maurice! You are awfully"--she wanted to say "patient," but there was an implication in that; so she said, lamely--"nice to Eleanor."

"The Lord knows I ought to be!" he said, cynically.

"Yes; she just about killed herself to save you," Edith agreed.

"Oh, not because of that!"

The misery in his voice startled her; she said, quickly, "How do you mean, Maurice? I don't understand."

"I ought to be 'nice' to her."

"But you are! You are!"

"I'm not."

"Maurice, I'm awfully fond of Eleanor; you won't think I'm finding fault, or anything? But sometimes, when she doesn't feel very well, she--you--I mean, you really _are_ a lamb, Maurice!"

Edith was twenty that summer--a strong, gay creature; but her old, ridiculous, incorrigible candor (and that honest kiss in the darkness!) made her still a child to Maurice.... Yet Johnny Bennett was going to marry her!... Maurice rested his chin on his left fist, and batted the fern; then he said:

"I've been infernally mean to Eleanor. It's little enough to be 'nice,'

as you call it, now."

She flew to his defense. "Talk sense! You never did a mean thing in your life."

His shrug fired her into a frankness which she regretted the next minute. "Maurice, you are too good for Eleanor--or anybody," she ended, hastily.

He gave her a look of entreaty for understanding--though he knew, he thought, that in her ignorance of life she couldn't understand even if she had been told! Yet for the mere relief of speaking, he skirted the ugly truth: