The Vehement Flame Part 53

"How could you 'fall'? And what 'water'?"

"I had gone out to the river--up in Medfield. To--take a walk; and I ... slipped...."

"Now, Eleanor, look here; if I have a virtue, it's candor, and I'll tell you why; it saves time. That's what my dear father used to say: 'Lyin'

wastes time.' I know what you tried to do; and it was very wicked."

"But I didn't do it!"

"You tried to. If you and Maurice have quarreled, I'll stand by _you_."

Eleanor covered her face with her hands--and Mrs. Newbolt burst out, "He's treated you badly! You needn't try to deceive me,--he's been flirtin' with some woman?" Her pale, prominent eyes snapped with anger.

"Oh, Auntie, don't! He hasn't! Only, I--wanted to make him happier; and so I--" She broke into furious crying. Despairing crying.

Instantly Mrs. Newbolt was all frightened solicitude. "There! Don't cry!

Have a hot-water bag. They say there's a new kind on the market. I must get a new pair of rubbers. Your face is awfully bruised. He's puffectly happy! He worships the ground you walk on! Eleanor, don't cry. How's your cold? The ashman--"

Eleanor, gasping, said her cold was better, and repeated her determination of going home.

It was the doctor--dropping in, he said, to make sure Mrs. Curtis was none the worse for her "accident"--who put a stop to that.

"I slipped and fell," Eleanor told him; she was very hoa.r.s.e.

He said yes, he understood. "But you got badly chilled, and you had a cold to start with. So you must lie low for two or three days. When will Mr. Curtis be back?"

Eleanor said she didn't know; all she knew was she didn't want him sent for. She was "all right."

But of course he had been sent for! "I don't know that it was really necessary," Mrs. Newbolt told Mrs. Houghton, who appeared late in the afternoon; "but I wasn't goin' to take the responsibility--"

"Of course not!" Mrs. Houghton said. "Mr. Weston has telegraphed him, too, I hope?" Then, before taking her things off, she went upstairs to Eleanor. "Well!" she said, "I hear you had an accident? Sensible girl, to stay in bed!" She took Eleanor's hand, and its hot tremor made her look keenly at the haggard face on the pillow.

"Oh," Eleanor said, with a gasp of relief, "I'm so glad you're here!

There are some things I want attended to. I owe--I mean, somebody paid my car fare. And I _must_ send it to her! And then I want something from my desk; but I can't have Bridget get it, and I don't want to ask Auntie to. It's--it's a letter to Maurice. I wanted to tell him something.... But I've changed my mind. I don't want him to see it. He mustn't see it! Oh, Mrs. Houghton, would you get it for me? I'd be _so_ grateful! ... And then,--oh, that five cents! I don't know how I'm going to send it to her--"

"Tell me who it is, and I'll get it to her; and I'll get the letter,"

Mary Houghton told her; and went on with the usual sick-room encouragement: "The doctor says you are better. But you must hurry and get well, so as to help Maurice with the little boy!"

Her words were like a push against some tottering barrier.

"I tried to help him; I tried to get Jacky! I went to the woman's, but she wouldn't give him to me! I _tried_--so hard. But she wouldn't! She paid my car fare--"

Mrs. Houghton bent over and kissed her: "Tell me about it, dear; perhaps I can help."

"There is no help! ... She won't give him up. She insisted on coming home with me, and she paid my car fare! Then I thought, if--I were not alive, Maurice could get him, because he could marry her ..."

Instantly, with a thrill of horror and admiration, Mrs. Houghton understood the "accident"! "Eleanor! What a mad, mad thought! As if you could help Maurice by giving him a great grief! Oh, I do thank G.o.d he has been spared anything so terrible!"

"But," Eleanor said, excitedly, "if I were dead, it would be his duty to marry her, wouldn't it? Jacky is his child! Oughtn't he to marry Jacky's mother? Oh, Mrs. Houghton, I owe her five cents--"

The older woman was trembling, but she spoke calmly: "Eleanor, dear, you must live for Maurice, not--die for him."

"Promise me," said Eleanor, "you won't tell him?"

"Of course I won't!" said Mrs. Houghton, with elaborate cheerfulness.

She kissed her, and went downstairs, feeling very queer in her knees.

She paused at the parlor door to say to Mrs. Newbolt and Edith that she was going out to do an errand for Eleanor; "I hope Maurice will get back soon," she said. "I don't like Eleanor's looks." Then she went to get that letter which Maurice "must not see." As she walked along the street she was still tingling with the shock of having her own theories brought home to her. "Thank G.o.d," Mary Houghton said, "that nothing happened!"

The maid who opened the door at Maurice's house was evidently excited, but not about her mistress. "Oh, Mrs. Houghton!" she said, "we done our best, but he wouldn't take a bite!--and I declare I don't know what Mrs. Curtis will say. He just _wouldn't_ eat, and this morning he up and died--and me offering him a chop!" Bridget wept with real distress.

"Mrs. Houghton, please tell her we done our best; he just smelled his chop--and died. You see, he hasn't eat a thing, without she gave it to him, for--oh, more 'n a month!"

Mary Houghton went into the library, where the fire was out, and the dust on tables and chairs bore witness to the fact that Bridget had devoted herself to Bingo; the room was gloomy, and smelled of soot.

Little Bingo lay, stiff and chill, on the sofa; on a plate beside him was a chop rimmed in cold grease,--poor little, loving, jealous, old Bingo! "I hope it won't upset Mrs. Curtis," Mrs. Houghton told the maid; then gave directions about the stark little body. She found the letter in Eleanor's desk, and went back to Mrs. Newbolt's. "Love," she thought, "_is_ as strong as death; stronger! Bingo--and Eleanor."

CHAPTER x.x.xV

Maurice, followed by telegrams that never quite overtook him, did, some forty-eight hours later, get the news that Eleanor had "had an accident," and was at Mrs. Newbolt's, who thought he had "better return immediately." His business was not quite finished, but it did not need Mr. Weston's laconic wire, "Drop Greenleaf matters and come back," to start him on the next train for Mercer. He had been away nearly two weeks--two terrible weeks, of facing himself; two weeks of rebellion, and submission; of tumultuous despair and quiet acceptance. He had looked faithfully--and very shrewdly--into the "Greenleaf matters"; he had turned one or two sharp corners, with entirely honest cleverness, and he was taking back to Mercer some concessions which old Weston had slipped up on! Yes, he had done a darned good job, he told himself, lounging in the smoking compartment of one parlor car or another, or strolling up and down station platforms for a breath of air. And all the while that he was on the Greenleaf job--in Pullmans, sitting in hotel lobbies writing letters, looking through t.i.tle and probate records--his own affairs raced and raged in his thoughts; they were summed up in one word: "Edith." He could not get away from Edith! He tripped a Greenleaf trustee into an admission (and he thought, "so long as she never suspects that I love her, there's no harm in going along as we always have"). Then he conceded a point to the Greenleaf interests (and said to himself, "her hair on her shoulders that day on the lawn was like a nimbus around the head of a saint. How she'd hate that word 'saint'!").

His chuckle made one of the Greenleaf heirs think that Weston's representative was a good sort;--"pleasant fellow!" But Maurice, looking "pleasant," was thinking: "I'd about sell my soul to kiss her hair ... Oh, I _must_ stop this kind of thing! I swear it's worse than the Lily and Jacky business...." Then he signed a deed, and the Greenleaf people felt they had made a good thing of it--but Maurice's telegram that the deed was signed, caused rejoicing in the Weston office! "Curtis got ahead of 'em!" said Mr. Weston. While he was writing that triumphant telegram Maurice was wondering: "Was John Bennett a complete idiot? ... If things had been different would Edith have ... cared?" For himself, he, personally, didn't care "a d.a.m.n,"

whether Weston got ahead of Greenleaf or Greenleaf beat Weston. His own affairs engrossed him: "my job," he was telling himself, "is to see that Eleanor doesn't suffer any more, poor girl! And Edith shall never know.

And I'll make a decent man of Jacky--not a fool, like his father." So he wrote his victorious dispatch, and the Weston office congratulated itself.

Maurice had been very grateful for his fortnight of absence from everybody, except the Greenleaf heirs; grateful for a solitude of trains and lawyers' offices. Because, in solitude, he could, with entirely hopeless courage, face the future. He was facing it unswervingly the day he reached Chicago, where he was to get some final signatures; he came into the warm lobby of the hotel, glad to escape the rampaging lake wind, and while he was registering the hotel clerk produced the telegrams which had been held for him. The first, from Mr. Weston, "Drop Greenleaf," bewildered him until he read the other, "Eleanor has had an accident." Then he ran his pen through his name, asked for a time-table, and sent a peremptory wire to Mrs. Newbolt saying that he was on his way home, and asking that full particulars be telegraphed to him at a certain point on his journey. "Let me know just what happened, and how she is," he telegraphed. "It must be serious," he thought, "to send for me!"

It was hardly an hour before he was on a train for another day of travel, during which he experienced the irritation common to all of us when we receive an alarming dispatch, devoid of details. "Economizing on ten cents! What kind of an 'accident'? How serious is it? When was it?

Why didn't they let me know before?" and so on; all the futile, anxious, angry questions which a man asks himself under such circ.u.mstances. But suddenly, while he was asking these questions, another question whispered in his mind; a question to which he would not listen, and which he refused to answer; but again and again, over and over, it repeated itself, coming, it seemed, on the rhythmical roll of the wheels--the wheels which were taking him back to Eleanor! "If--if--if--"

the wheels hammered out; "_if_ anything happens to Eleanor--"? He never finished that sentence, but the beginning of it actually frightened him.

"Am I as low as this?" he said, frantically, "speculating on the possibility of anything happening to her?" But he was not so low as that--he only heard the jar of the wheels: "If--if--if--if--"

When he reached the station to which he had told Mrs. Newbolt to reply, he rushed out of the car into the telegraph office, and clutched at the message before the operator could put it into its flimsy brown envelope; as he read it he said under his breath, "Thank G.o.d!" It was from Mary Houghton:

Accident slight. Slipped into water. All right now except bad cold.

Maurice's hand shook as he folded the message and stuffed it into his pocket. He had the sense of having escaped from a terror--the terror of intolerable remorse. For if she had not been "all right," if, instead of just "a bad cold," the dispatch had said "something had happened"!--then, for all the rest of his life he would have had to remember how the wheels had beaten out that terrible refrain: "If--if--if--"

So he said, "Thank G.o.d."

All that day, while Maurice was hurrying back to Mercer, Eleanor lay very still, and when Mrs. Newbolt or Mrs. Houghton came into the room she closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep. Edith did not come into the room; so, in a hazy way, Eleanor took it for granted that she had left the house. "I should think she would!" Eleanor thought; "she could hardly have the face to stay in the same house with me." But she did not think much about Edith; she was absorbed in deciding what she should say to Maurice. Should she tell him the truth?--or some silly story of a walk to their meadow? The two alternatives flew back and forth in her mind like shuttlec.o.c.ks. There was one thing she felt sure of: that letter--which Mrs. Houghton had brought from her desk, which Maurice was to have read when she had done what she set out to do, but which now she kept clutched in her hand, or hidden under her pillow--_Maurice must not see that letter!_ If he read it, now, while she was (she told herself) still half sick from those drenched hours of the trolley ride and the dark wanderings from Mrs. O'Brien's to Mrs. Newbolt's, the whole thing would seem simply ridiculous. Some time, he must know that she loved him enough to buy Jacky for him, by dying--or trying to die! She would tell him, _some time_; because her purpose (even if it had failed) would measure the heights and depths of her love as nothing else could; but he must not know it now, because she hadn't carried it out. That first night, when she had found herself safe and warm (oh, warm! She had thought she never would be warm any more!)--when she had found herself in Mrs. Newbolt's spare room in the four-poster with its chintz hangings and its great soft pillows, she had been glad she had not carried it out. Glad not to be dead. As she lay there, shivering slowly into delicious comfort, and fending off Mrs. Newbolt's distracted questions, she had had occasional moments of a sense of danger escaped; perhaps it _would_ have been wrong to--to lie down there in the river? People call it wicked Mrs. Newbolt, for a single suspicious instant ("She forgot it right off," Eleanor said; "she just thought we'd quarreled!"); but Mrs.

Newbolt had said it was "wicked." "But I didn't do it!" Eleanor told herself in a rush of grat.i.tude. She hadn't been "wicked"! Instead, she was in Mrs. Newbolt's spare room, looking dreamily at the old French clock on the mantelpiece, whose tarnished gilt face glimmered between two slender black-marble columns; sometimes she counted the tick-tock of the slowly swinging pendulum; sometimes, toward dawn, she watched the foggy yellow daylight peer between the red rep curtains; but counting, and looking, and drowsing, she was glad to be alive. It was not until the next afternoon that she began to be faintly mortified at being alive. It was then that she had felt that she _must_ get that letter--Maurice mustn't see it! Little by little, humiliation at her failure to be heroic, grew acute. Maurice wouldn't know that she loved him enough to give him Jacky; he would just know that she was silly. She had got wet; and had a cold in her head. Snuffles--not Death. He might--_laugh_!... It was then that she implored Mrs. Houghton to get the letter out of her desk.

Yet when it was given to her she held it in her hand under the bedclothes, saying to herself that she would not destroy it, yet, because, even though she _had_ failed, there might come a time when it would prove to Maurice how much she loved him. She was so absorbed in this thought that she did not grieve much for Bingo. "Poor little Bingo," she said, vaguely, when Mrs. Houghton told her that the little dog was dead; "he was so jealous." Now, with Maurice coming nearer every hour, she could not think of Bingo; she was face to face with a decision! What should she tell him about the "accident"?

It was in the afternoon of the day that Maurice was to arrive,--he had telegraphed that he would reach Mercer in the evening;--that she had a sudden panic about Edith. "She was here that night and saw me. I know she laughed at me because I hadn't any hat on! She may--suspect? If she does, she'll tell him! What shall I do to stop her?" She couldn't think of any way to stop her! She couldn't hold her thoughts steady enough to reach a decision. First would come gladness of her own comfort and safety, and the warm, warm bed; then shame, that she had faltered and run away from a chance to do a great thing for Maurice; then terror that Edith would make her ridiculous to Maurice. Then all these thoughts would whirl about, run backward: First, terror of Edith! then shame!

then comfort! Suddenly the terror thought held fast with a question.

"Suppose I make her promise not to tell Maurice anything? I think she would keep a promise...." It would be dreadful to ask the favor of secrecy of Edith--just as she had asked the same sort of favor of Lily--but to seem silly to Maurice would be more dreadful than to ask a favor! She held to this purpose of humiliating self-protection, long enough to ask Mrs. Houghton when Edith was coming down from Green Hill.