The Vehement Flame Part 50

"His _wife_?" They looked at each other for a speechess moment. Then the tears sprang to Lily's eyes. "Oh, you poor soul!" she said. "Say, don't feel bad! It's pretty near ten years ago; he was just a kid. Since then--honest to G.o.d, I give you my word, he 'ain't hardly said 'How do you do' to me!"

"I know," Eleanor said; her hands were gripped hard together; "I know that. I know he has been ... perfectly true to me--lately. I am not saying a word about that. It's the child. I want to make a proposition to you about the child." Her lips trembled, but she smiled; she remembered to smile, because if she didn't look pleasant Lily might get angry. She was a little frightened; but she gave a nervous laugh. She spoke with gentleness, almost with sweetness. "I came to see you, Mrs.

Dale, because I hope you and I can make some arrangement about the little boy. I want to help you by relieving you of--of his support. I mean," said Eleanor, still smiling with her trembling lips, "I mean, I will take him, and bring him up, so as to save you the expense." Lily's amazed recoil made her break into entreaty; "My husband wants him, and I do, too! I thought perhaps you'd let him go home with me to-night? I--I promise I'll take the best of care of him!"

Lily was too dumfounded to speak, but her thoughts raced. "For the land's sake!" she said under her breath. She was sitting down now, but her hands in her lap had doubled into rosy fighting fists.

Her silence terrified Eleanor. "If you'll give him to me," she said, "I will do anything for you--anything! If you'll just let Mr. Curtis have him." She did not mean to, but suddenly she was crying, and began to fumble for her handkerchief.

"Well, if this ain't the limit!" said Lily, and jumped up and ran to her, and put her arms around her. ("Here, take mine! It's clean.") "Say, I'm that sorry for you, I don't know what to do!" Her own tears overflowed.

Eleanor, wincing away from the gush of perfumery from the little clean handkerchief, clutched at Lily's small plump hand--"_I'll_ tell you what to do," Eleanor said; "_Give me Jacky!_"

Lily, kneeling beside her, cried, honestly and openly. "There!--now!"

she said, patting Eleanor's shoulder; "don't you cry! Mrs. Curtis, now look,"--she spoke soothingly, as if to a child, with her arm around Eleanor--"you know I _can't_ let my little boy go? Why, think how you'd feel yourself, if you had a little boy and anybody tried to get him.

Would you give him up? 'Course you wouldn't! Why, I wouldn't let Jacky go away from me, even for a day, not for the world! An' he ain't anything to Mr. Curtis. Honest! That's the truth. Now, don't you cry, dear!"

"You can see him often; I promise you, you can see him."

In spite of her pity, Lily's yellow eyes gleamed: "'See' my own child?

Well, I guess!"

"I'll give you anything," Eleanor said; "I have a little money--about six hundred dollars a year; I'll give it to you, if you'll let Mr.

Curtis have him."

"Sell Jacky for six hundred dollars?" Lily said. "I wouldn't sell him for six thousand dollars, or six million!" She drew away from Eleanor's beseeching hands. "How long has Mr. Curtis thought enough of Jacky to pay six hundred dollars for him? You can tell Mr. Curtis, from me, that I ain't no cheap trader, to give away my child for six hundred dollars!"

She sprang up, putting her clenched fists on her fat hips, and wagging her head. "Why," she demanded, raucously, "didn't you have a child of your own for him, 'stead of trying to get another woman's child away from her?"

It was a hideous blow. Eleanor gasped with pain; and instantly Lily's anger was gone.

"Say! I didn't mean that! 'Course you couldn't, at your age. I oughtn't to have said it!"

Eleanor, dumb for a moment after that deadly question, began, faintly: "Mr. Curtis will do so much for him, Mrs. Dale; he'll educate him, and--"

"I can educate him," Lily said; "you tell Mr. Curtis that; you tell him I thank him for nothing!--_I_ can educate my child to beat the band. I don't want any help from _him_. But--" she was on her knees again, stroking Eleanor's shoulder--"but if he's mean to you because you haven't had any children, I--I--I'll see to him! Well--I've always thought, what with him fussing about 'grammar,' and 'truth,' he'd be a hard man to live with. But if he's been mean to you he'd ought to be ashamed of himself!"

"Oh, he doesn't even know that I have come!" Eleanor said; "he mustn't know it. Oh, please!" She was terrified. "Don't tell him, Mrs. Dale.

Promise me you won't! He would be angry."

Her frightened despair was pitiful; Lily was at her wits' end. "My soul and body!" she thought, "what am I going to do with her?" But what was all this business? Mrs. Curtis asking for Jacky--and Mr. Curtis not knowing it? What was all this funny business? "Now I tell you," she said; "you and me are just two ladies who understand each other, and I'm going to be straight with you: if Mr. Curtis is trying to get my child away from me, he'll have a sweet time doing it! There's other places than Medfield to live in. I have a friend in New York, a society lady; she's always after me to come and live there. Mind! I'm not mad at _you_, you poor woman that couldn't have a baby--it's him I'm mad at! He knows Jacky is mine, and I'll go to New York before I'll--"

"Oh, don't say that!" Eleanor pleaded; "my husband hasn't tried to get Jacky; it's just I!"

She saw, with panic, that what Maurice had said was true--Lily might "run"! If she did, there would be no hope of getting Jacky ... and Edith would be in Mercer....

"Mrs. Dale, _promise_ me you'll stay in Medfield? It was only I who was trying to get Jacky; Mr. Curtis never thought of such a thing! I wanted him. I'd do everything for him; I'd--I'd give him music lessons."

"Honest," said Lily, soberly, "I believe you're crazy."

She looked crazy--this poor, gray-haired woman of pitiful dignity and breeding. ("I bet she's sixty!" Lily thought)--this old, childless woman, with a "Mrs." to her name, pleading with a mother to give up her boy, so he could have "music lessons"! "And Mr. Curtis's up against _that_," Lily thought, and instantly her anger at Maurice ebbed. "There, dear," she said, touching Eleanor's wet cheeks gently with that perfumed handkerchief; "I don't believe you've had any supper. I'm going to get you something to eat--"

"No, please; _please_ no!" Eleanor said. She had risen. She thought, "If she says 'dear' again, I'll--I'll die!" ... "I promise you on my word of honor," she said, faintly, "that I won't try to take Jacky away from you, if--" she paused; it was terrible to have a secret with this woman; it put her in her power, but she couldn't help it--"I won't try to get him, if you won't tell Mr. Curtis that I ... have been here?

_Please_ promise me!"

"Don't you worry," Lily said, rea.s.suringly; "I won't give you away to him."

Eleanor was moving, stumbling a little, toward the door; Lily hesitated, then ran and caught her own coat and hat from the rack in the hall.

"Wait!" she said, pinning her hat on at a hasty and uncertain angle; "I'm going with you! It ain't right for you to go by yourself ...

Jacky," she called out to the kitchen, "you be a good boy! Maw'll be home soon."

Eleanor shook her head in wordless protest. But Lily had tucked her hand under her arm, and was walking along beside her. "He ought to look out for you!" Lily said; "I declare, I've a mind to tell that man what I think of him!" On the car, while Eleanor with shaking hands was opening her purse, Lily quickly paid both fares, saying, politely, in answer to Eleanor's confused protest, "_That's_ all right!" There was no talk between them. Lily was too perplexed to say anything, and Eleanor was too frightened. So they rode, side by side, almost to Maurice's door.

There, standing on the step while Eleanor took her latch key from her pocketbook, Lily said, cheerfully, "Now you go and get a cup of tea--you're all wore out!" Then she hurried off to catch a Medfield car.

"I declare," said little Lily, "I don't know which is the worse off, him or her!"

CHAPTER x.x.xII

Eleanor, letting herself into her silent house, saw, with relief, that the library was dark, and knew that Maurice had gone to the station and she could be alone. She felt her way into the room, blundering against his big chair; the fire was almost out, and without waiting to turn on the light she thrust some kindling under a charred log and knelt down and took up the bellows. A spark brightened, ran backward under the film of ashes, then a flame hesitated, caught--and there was a little winking blaze.

"Another failure," Eleanor said. She remembered with what eager hope she had started for Lily's house; "I was going to 'bring him home' with me!

What a fool I was! ... I always fail," she said. Once more, she had "marched up a hill--and--then--marched--down--again"! Her sense of failure was like a dragging weight under her breastbone! She had not made Maurice happy; she had not given him children; she had not kept Edith out of his life. Failure! Failure! "But he loves me; he said so, when I told him I forgave him about Lily. Of course I oughtn't to have married him. But I loved him ... so much. And I did want to have just a little happiness! I never had had any." She sat there, the bellows in her white, ineffectual hands, looking into the fire; how capable Lily's hands were! She remembered the st.u.r.dy left hand, and that shiny band of gold ... Then she looked at her own slender wedding ring, and that made her think of the circle of braided gra.s.s; and the locust blossoms; and the field--and the children who were to come there on the wedding anniversaries! And now--Maurice's child called another woman "mother"!... Well, she had tried to bring him back to Maurice; tried, and failed, with hideous humiliation--for, instead of bringing Jacky back, this "mother" had brought her back!... "_And she paid my car fare!_" It was intolerable. "I must send her five cents, somehow!"

She sat on the floor, leaning against Maurice's chair, until midnight; the log burned through, broke apart, and smoldered into ashes. Once she put her cheek down on the broad arm of the chair, then kissed it--for his hand had rested on it!--his dear young hand--In the deepening chilliness, watching the ashes, she ached with the sense of her last failure; but most of the time she thought of Edith, and of what she believed she had read in those humorous, candid eyes. "She dared, _before me_!--to show him that she was in love with him! He doesn't care for her--I know that. But I won't have her come here, to my own house, and make love to him. How can I keep her from coming? Oh, if I could only get Jacky!"

But she couldn't get him. She had accepted that as final. The talk in Lily's parlor proved that there was not the slightest hope of getting Jacky. So the only thing for her to do was to keep Edith out of her house. When, at nearly one o'clock, shivering, she went up to her room, she was absorbed in thinking how she could do this. With any other girl it would have been simple enough; never invite her! But not Edith. Edith came without an invitation. Edith had, Eleanor thought, "no delicacy."

She had always been that way. She had always lacked ordinary refinement!

From the very first, she had run after Maurice. "She is capable of _kissing_ him," Eleanor told herself; "and saying she did it because he was like a brother!" Strangely enough, in this blaze of jealousy she had no flicker of resentment at Lily! Lily (now that she had seen her) was to Eleanor merely the woman to whom Jacky belonged. Looking back on those months that followed her discovery of Lily, and contrasting the agony she had felt then with her despair about Edith now, she was faintly surprised at the difference in her pain. This was probably because faithlessness of the body is not so deadly an insult to Love as faithlessness of the mind. But Eleanor did not, of course, make any such explanation. She just said to herself that Maurice had been a boy when he had been untrue to her, and she herself had been, in some ways, to blame; and he had confessed, and been forgiven. So Lily was now of no consequence--except as she interfered with Eleanor's pa.s.sionate wish to have Jacky. So she did not hate Lily, or fear her (though she was humiliated at that car fare!). But she did hate Edith, and fear of her was agony.... So she would, somehow, keep her out of the house!

Just as she was getting into bed, she wiped her eyes, then cringed at a gust of perfumery--and realized that she had brought Lily's handkerchief back with her! It was a last abas.e.m.e.nt: the woman's horrible handkerchief. She burst into hysterical weeping.... The next morning, when she came down to breakfast, her face was haggard with those ravaging tears, and with the fatigue of hating. Even before she had her coffee, she burned the scented sc.r.a.p of machine-embroidered linen, pressing it down between the logs in the library fireplace; but she could not burn her hate; it burned her!

She was so worn out that when, a little before luncheon, Edith suddenly came breezily in, she was, at first, too confused to know what to say to her.... It was an incredibly mild day; on the shady side of the back yard there was still a sooty heap of melting snow, but the sky was turquoise, soaring without a cloud and brimmed with light, so that the shadows of the bare branches of the poplar, clear-cut like jet, crisscrossed on the brick path; in the border, the brown fangs of the tulips had bitten up through the wet earth, and two militant crocuses had raised their tight-furled purple standards. Eleanor, tempted by the sunshine, had come here, m.u.f.fled up in an elderly white shawl, to sit by the little painted table--built so long ago for Edith's pleasure! She had put old Bingo's basket in the sun, and stroked him gently; he was very helpless now, and ate nothing except from her hands.

"Poor little Bingo!" Eleanor said; "dear little Bingo!" Bingo growled, and Eleanor looked up to see why--Edith was on the iron veranda.

"Hullo!" Edith said, gayly; "isn't it a wonderful day? I just ran in--"

She came down the twisted stairway and, unasked and smiling, sat down at the table. "Bingo! Don't you know your friends? One would think I was a burglar! Oh, Eleanor, the tulips are up! Do you remember when Maurice and I planted them?"

Eleanor's throat tightened. She made some gasping a.s.sent.

"I came 'round," Edith said--her frank eyes looked straight into Eleanor's eyes, dark and agonized--"I ran in, because I'm afraid you thought, yesterday, that I wanted to quarter myself on you? And I just wanted to say, don't give it a thought! I perfectly understand that sometimes it's inconvenient to have company, and--"

"It's not inconvenient to have company," Eleanor said.

Edith stopped short. ("What a dead give-away!" she thought; "she dislikes me!") Then she tried, generously, to cover the "give-away" up: She said something about guests and servants: "We're having an awful time at Green Hill--servants are the limit! When a maid stays six weeks, we call her an old family retainer!"

Eleanor said, "I have no difficulty with maids. That is not why I prefer not to have ... company."