The Vehement Flame Part 42

"I love him; that's why."

After a while she said: "There's nothing wrong in it. I have a right to love him! He'll never know. How funny that I never knew--until to-night!

Yet I've felt this way for ever so long. I think since that time at Fern Hill, when he was so bothered and wouldn't tell me what was the matter."

Yes; it was strange that now, when some stabbing instinct had made her know that Maurice was not her "perfec' gentil knight," that same instinct should make her know that she loved him!... Not with the old love; not with the love that could overflow into words, the love that had kissed him when he had been "bothered"! "I can never kiss him again," she thought. She did not love him, now, "next to father and mother--dear darlings!" And when she said that, Edith knew that the "darlings" were of her past. "I love them next to Maurice," she thought, smiling faintly. "Well, he will never know it! n.o.body will ever know it.... I'll just keep on loving him as long as I live." She had no doubt about that; and she did not drop into the self-consciousness of saying, "I am wronging Eleanor." That, to Edith, would not have been sense. She knew that she was not "wronging" anyone. As for the unknown girl, who, perhaps, had "wronged" Eleanor, and about whom, now, Maurice was so ashamed and so repentant--she was of no consequence anyhow. "Of course she is bad," Edith thought, "and the whole thing was her fault!" But it was in the past; he had said so. "He said it was long ago. If," she thought, "he did run crooked, why, I'm sorry for poor Eleanor; and he ought to tell her; there's no question about _that_! It's wrong not to tell her. And of course he couldn't tell me. That wouldn't be square to Eleanor!... But I hate to have him so unhappy.... No; it's right for him to be unhappy. He ought to be! It would be dreadful if he wasn't. But, somehow, the thing itself doesn't seem to touch me. I love him. I am going to love him all I want to! But no one will ever know it."

By and by she knelt down and prayed, just one word: _"Maurice."_ She was not unhappy.

CHAPTER XXVI

During the next two days at Green Hill, Eleanor's dislike of Edith had no chance to break into silent flames, for the girl was so quiet that not even Eleanor could see anything in her behavior to Maurice to criticize. It was Maurice who did the criticizing!

"Edith, come down into the garden; I want to read something to you."

"Can't. Have to write letters."

"Edith, if you'll come into the studio I'll play you something I've patched up."

"I'm a heathen about music. Let's sit with Eleanor."

"Skeezics, what's the matter with you? Why won't you come and walk?

You're getting lazy in your old age!"

"Busy," Edith said, vaguely.

At this point Maurice insisted, and Edith sneaked out to the back entry and telephoned Johnny Bennett: "Come over, lazybones, and take some exercise!"

John came, with leaps and bounds, so to speak, and Maurice said, grumpily:

"What do you lug Johnny in for?"

So, during the rest of her visit (with John Bennett as Maurice's chaperon!) Eleanor merely ached with dislike of Edith; but, even so, she had the small relief of not having to say to herself: "Is he seeing Mrs.

Dale, now? ... Did he go to her house yesterday?" Of course, as soon as she went back to Mercer those silent questions began again; and her audible question nagged Maurice whenever he was in the house: "Did you go to the theater last night? ... Yes? _Did you go alone?_ ... Will you be home to-night to dinner? ... No? _Where are you going?_"

Maurice, answering with bored patience, thought, with tender amus.e.m.e.nt, of Edith's advice, "Tell Eleanor." How little she knew!

He did not see Edith very often that next winter, "which is just as well," he thought. But his a.n.a.lysis stopped there; he did not ask himself why it was just as well. She made flying visits to Mercer, for shopping or luncheons, so he had glimpses of her, and whenever he saw her he was conscious of a little wistful change in her, for she was shy with him--_Edith_, shy!--and much gentler. When they discussed the Eternities or the ball game, she never pounded his arm with an energetic and dissenting fist, nor was there ever the faintest suggestion of the s.e.xless "rough-house" of their old jokes! As for coming to town, she explained that she was too busy; she had taken the burden of housekeeping from her mother, and she was doing a good deal of hard reading preparatory to a course of technical training in domestic science, to which she was looking forward when she could find time for it. But whenever she did come to Mercer, she did her duty by rushing in to see Eleanor! Eleanor's criticisms of her, when she rushed out again, always made Maurice silently, but deeply, irritated. The criticisms lessened in the fall, because Eleanor had the pitiful preoccupation of watching poor Don O'Brien fade out of the world; and when he had gone she had to push her own misery aside while his grandmother's heart broke into the meager tears of age upon her "Miss Eleanor's" breast. But, besides that, she did not have the opportunity to criticize Edith, for the Houghtons went abroad.

So the rest of that year went dully by. To Eleanor, it was a time of spasmodic effort to regain Maurice's love; spasmodic, because when she had visions--hideous visions! of Maurice and the "other woman,"--then, her aspirations to regain his love, which had been born in that agony of recognized complicity in his faithlessness, would shrivel up in the vehement flame of jealousy. To Maurice, it was a time of endurance; of vague thoughts of Edith, but of no mental disloyalty to his wife. Its only brightness lay in those rare visits to Medfield, when Jacky looked at him like a worshiping puppy, and asked forty thousand questions which he couldn't answer! They were very careful visits, made only when Maurice was sure Eleanor would not be going to "look for a cook." He always balanced his brief pleasure of an hour with his little boy by an added gentleness to his wife--perhaps a bunch of violets, bought at the florist's on Maple Street where Lily got her flower pots or her bulbs.

He was very lonely, and increasingly bothered about Jacky. ... "Lily will let him go plumb to h.e.l.l. But I put him on the toboggan! ... I'm responsible for his existence," he used to think. And sometimes he repeated the words he had spoken that night when he had felt the first stir of fatherhood, "My little Jacky."

He would hardly have said he loved the child; love had come so gradually, that he had not recognized it! Yet it had come. It had been added to those other intimations of G.o.d, which also he had not recognized. Personal Joy on his wedding day had been the first; and the next had come when he looked up at the heights of Law among the stars, and then there had been the terrifying vision of the awfulness of Life, at Jacky's birth. Now, into his soul, arid with long untruth, came this flooding in of Love--which in itself is Life, and Joy, and the fulfilling of Law! Or, as he had said, once, carelessly, "Call it G.o.d."

This pursuing G.o.d, this inescapable G.o.d! was making him acutely uncomfortable now, about Jacky. Maurice felt the discomfort, but he did not recognize it as Salvation, or know Whose mercy sent it! He merely did what most of us do when we suffer: he gave the credit of his pain to the devil--not to Infinite Love. "Oh," the poor fellow thought, coming back one day from a call at the little secret house on Maple Street, "the devil's getting his money's worth out of me; well, I won't squeal about _that_! But he's getting his money's worth out of my boy, too.

She's ruining him!"

He said this once when he had been rather recklessly daring in seeing "his boy." It was Sat.u.r.day afternoon, and Jacky was free from his detested school. Maurice had given him a new sled, and then had "fallen," as he expressed it, to the little fellow's entreaty: "Mr.

Curtis, if you'll come up to the hill, I'll show you how she'll go!" But before they started Maurice had a disagreeable five minutes with Lily.

She had told him, tears of laughter running down her rosy cheeks, of some performance of Jacky's. He had asked her, she said, about his paw; "and I said his name was Mr. George Dale, and he died ten or eleven years ago of consumption--had to tell him something, you know! An' he says,--he's great on arithmetic,--'Poor paw!' he says, 'how many years was that before I was born?' I declare, I was all balled up!" Then, as she wiped her laughing eyes, she had grown suddenly angry: "I'm going to take him away from his new Sunday school; the teacher--it was her did the Paul Pry act, and asked him about his father;--well, I guess she ain't much of a lady; I never see her name in the Sunday papers;--she came down on Jacky because he told her a 'lie'; that's what she called it, 'a lie'! Said he'd go to h.e.l.l if he told lies. I said, 'I won't have you threatening my child!' I declare I felt like saying, 'You go to h.e.l.l yourself!' but of course I don't say things that ain't refined."

"Well, but Lily, the little beggar must tell the truth--"

"Mr. Curtis, Jacky didn't say anything but what you or me would say a dozen times a day. He just told her he hadn't a library book out, when he had. Seems he forgot to bring it back, so, 'course, he just said he hadn't any book. Well, this teacher, she put the lie onto him. It's a vulgar word, 'lie.' And as for h.e.l.l, they say society people don't believe there is such a place any more."

When he and his little son walked away (Jacky dragging his magnificent sled), Maurice was nervously anxious to counteract such views.

"Jacobus," he said, "I'm going to tell you something: Big men never say anything that isn't so! Do you get on to that?" (In his own mind he added, "I'm a sweet person to tell him that!") "Promise me you'll never say anything that isn't just exactly so," said Maurice.

"Yes, sir," said Jacky. "Say, Mr. Curtis, have you got teeth you can take out?" When Maurice said, rather absently, that he had not, Jacky's dismay was pathetic. "Why, maw can do _that_," he said, reproachfully.

It was the first flaw in his idol. It took several minutes to recover from the shock of disappointment; then he said: "Lookee here!" He paused beside a hydrant, and with his mittened hand broke off a long icicle, held it up and turned it about so that the sun flashed on it. "Handsome, ain't it?" he asked, timidly.

Maurice said yes, it was "handsome";--"but suppose you say _'isn't_ it'

instead of _'ain't_ it.' 'Ain't' is not a nice word. And remember what I told you about telling the truth."

"Yes, sir," said Jacky, and trudged along, pulling his sled with one hand and carrying his icicle in the other.

After this paternal effort, Maurice stood in the snow watching the crowd of children--red-cheeked, shrill-voiced--sliding down Winpole Hill and yelling and snow-balling each other as they pulled their sleds up to the top of the slope again. It was during one of these panting tugs uphill, that Jacky saw fit to slap a fellow coaster, a little, snub-nosed girl with a sniffling cold in her head, and all m.u.f.fled up in dirty scarves.

Instantly Maurice, striding in among the children, took his son by the arm, and said, sharply:

"Young man, apologize! _Quick!_ Or I'll take you home!"

Jacky gaped. "Pol'gize?"

"Say you're sorry! Out with it. Tell the little girl you're sorry you hit her."

"But I ain't," Jacky explained, anxiously; "an' you said I mustn't say what ain't so."

"Well, tell her you won't do it again," Maurice commanded, evading, as perplexed fathers must, moral contradictions.

Jacky, bewildered, said to his howling playmate, "I don't like you, but I won't hit you again, less I have to; then I'll lick the tar out of you!" He paused, rummaged in his pocket, produced a horrid precious little gray lump of something, and handed it to her. "Gum," he said, briefly.

Maurice, taking another step into paternal wisdom, was deaf to the statute of limitation in the apology; but walking home with the little boy, he said to himself, "She's ruining him!" and fell into such moody silence that he didn't even notice Jacky's obedient struggles with "isn't." Once, a week later, as a result of this experience, he tried to make some ethical suggestions to Lily. She was displaying her latest triumph--a rosebush, blossoming in _February_! And Maurice, duly admiring the glowing flower, against its background of soot-speckled snowdrift on the window sill, began upon Jacky's morals. Lily's good-humored face hardened.

"Mr. Curtis, you don't need to worry about Jacky! He don't steal, and he don't swear,--much; and he's never been pinched, and he's awful handsome; and, my G.o.d! what more do you want? I ain't going to make his life miserable by tellin' him to talk grammar, or do the polite act!"

"Lily, I only mean I want him to turn out well, and he won't unless he tells the truth--"

"He'll turn out good. You needn't worry. Anybody's got to have sense about telling the truth; you can't just plunk everything out! I--I believe I'll go and live in New York."

Instantly Maurice was silenced. "She _mustn't_ take him away!" he thought, despairingly.

His fear that she would do so was a constant worry.... His work in the Weston real-estate office involved occasional business trips of a few days, and his long hours on trains were filled with this increasing anxiety about Jacky. "If she takes him away from Mercer, and I can't ever see him, nothing can save him! But, d.a.m.n it! what can I do?" he would say. He tried to rea.s.sure himself by counting up Lily's good points; her present uprightness; her honest friendliness to him; her almost insane devotion to Jacky, and her pathetic aspiration for respectability, which was summed up in that one word of collective emptiness,--"Society." But immediately her bad points clamored in his mind; her ignorance and unmorality and vulgarity. "Truth is just a matter of expediency with her. If he gets to be a liar, I'll boot him!"

Maurice would think of these bad points until he got perfectly frantic!

His sense of wanting advice was like an ache in his mind--for there was no one who could advise him. Then, quite unexpectedly, advice came....

In the fall the Houghtons got back from Europe. Maurice saw them only between trains in Mercer, for Henry Houghton was in a great hurry to get up to Green Hill, and Edith, too, was exercised about her trunks and the unpacking of her treasures of reminiscence. But Mrs. Houghton said: "We shall be coming down to do some shopping before Christmas. No! We'll _not_ inflict ourselves upon Eleanor! We'll go to the hotel; you will both take dinner with us."