The Vehement Flame Part 6

"_Must_ we?" she said, nervously.

"I'm afraid we've got to," he said; "you see, I must find out about ways and means. And Edith would be furious if we didn't come," he ended, chuckling.

"Is she nice?"

"Why, yes," he said; "she's just a child, of course. Only eleven. But she and I have great times. We have a hut on the mountain; we go up for a day, and Edith cooks things. She's a bully cook. Her beloved Johnny Bennett tags on behind."

"But do you like to be with a _child_?" she said, surprised.

"Oh, she's got a lot of sense. Say, Nelly, I have an idea. While we are at Green Hill, let's camp out up there?"

"You don't mean stay all night?" she said, flinching. "Oh, wouldn't it be very uncomfortable? I--I hate the dark."

The sweet foolishness of it enchanted him (baby love feeds on pap!) "Pitch dark," he teased, "and lions and tigers roaring around, and snakes--"

"Of course I'll go, if you want me to," she said, simply, but with a real sinking of the heart.

"Edith adores it," he said. "Speaking of Edith, I must tell you something so funny. Last summer I was at Green Hill, and one night Mr.

and Mrs. Houghton were away, and there was a storm. Gee, I never saw such a storm in my life! Edith has no more nerves than a tree, but even she was scared. Well, I was scared myself."

He had stretched himself out on the sofa, and she was kneeling beside him, her eyes worshiping him. "_I_ would have been scared to death," she confessed.

"Well, _I_ was!" he said. "The tornado--it was just about that!--burst on to us, and nearly blew the house off the hill--and such an infernal bellowing, and h.e.l.lish green lightning, you never saw! Well, I was just thinking about Buster--her father calls her Buster; and wondering whether she was scared, when in she rushed, in her night-gown. She made a running jump for my bed, dived into it, grabbed me, and hugged me so I was 'most suffocated, and screamed into my ear, 'There's a storm!'--as if I hadn't noticed it. I said--I could hardly make myself heard in the racket--I yelled, 'Don't you think you'd better go back to your own room? I'll come and sit there with you.' And she yelled, 'I'm going to stay here.' So she stayed."

"I think she was a little old for that sort of thing," Eleanor said, coldly.

He gave a shout of laughter. "Eleanor! Do you mean to tell me you don't see how awfully funny it was? The little thing hugged me with all her might until the storm blew over. Then she said, calmly: 'It's cold. I'll stay here. You can go and get in my bed if you want to.'"

Eleanor gave a little shrug, then rose and went over to the window. "Oh yes, it was funny; but I think she must be a rather pert little thing. I don't want to go to Green Hill."

Maurice looked worried. "I hate to urge anything you don't like, Nelly; but I really do feel we ought to accept their invitation? And you'll like them! Of course they're not in your cla.s.s. n.o.body is! I mean they're old, and sort of commonplace. But we can go and live in the woods most of the time, and get away from them,--except little Skeezics.

We'll take her along. You'll love having her; she's lots of fun. You see, I've _got_ to go to Green Hill, because I must get in touch with Uncle Henry; I've got to find out about our income!" he explained, with a broad grin.

"I should think Edith would bore you," she said. Her voice was so sharply irritated that Maurice looked at her, open-mouthed; he was too bewildered to speak.

"Why, Eleanor," he faltered; "why are you--on your ear? Was it what I told you about Edith? You didn't think that she wasn't _proper_?"

"No! Of course not! It wasn't _that_." She came quickly and knelt beside him. "Of course it wasn't _that_! It was--" She could not say what it was; perhaps she did not quite know that her annoyance at Maurice's delight in Edith was the inarticulate pain of recognizing that he might have more in common with a child, eight years his junior, than he could have with a woman twenty years his senior. Her eyes were suddenly bright with frightened tears. In a whisper, that fear which, in these days of complete belief in her own happiness, she had forgotten even to deny, came back: "What really upset me was the letters. The Houghtons are angry because I am--" she flinched, and would not utter the final word which was the hidden reason of her annoyance at Edith; so, instead of uttering it, she said, "because we eloped."

As for Maurice, he rallied her, and pretended to scold her, and tasted her tears salt upon his lips. He felt very old and protecting.

"Nonsense!" he said. "Mrs. Houghton and Uncle Henry are old, and of course they can't understand love. But the romance of it will touch them!"

And again Love cast out Fear; Eleanor, her face hidden on his shoulder, told herself that it really didn't matter what the Houghtons thought of ... an elopement.

CHAPTER V

The cloud of their first difference had blown over almost before they felt its shadow, and the sky of love was as clear as the lucid beryl of the summer night. Yet even the pa.s.sing shadow of the cloud kept both the woman and the boy repentant and a little frightened; he, because he thought he had offended her by some lack of delicacy; she, because she thought she had shocked him by what he might think was harshness to a child. Even a week afterward, as they journeyed up to Green Hill in a dusty accommodation train, there was an uneasy memory of that cloud--black with Maurice's dullness, and livid with the zigzag flash of Eleanor's irritation--and then the little shower of tears! ... What had brought the cloud? Would it ever return? ... As for those twenty dividing years, they never thought of them!

In the train they held each other's hands under the cover of a newspaper; and sometimes Maurice's foot touched hers, and then they looked at each other, and smiled--but each was wondering: his wonder was, "What made her offended at Edith?" And hers was, "How can he like to be with an eleven-year-old child!" Their talk, however, confessed no wonderings! It was the happy commonplace of companionship: Mrs. Newbolt and her departure for Europe; would Mrs. O'Brien be good to Bingo? what Maurice's business should be. Then Maurice yawned, and said he was glad that the commencement exercises at Fern Hill were over; and she said she was glad, too; she had danced, she said, until she had a pain in her side! After which he read his paper, and she looked out of the window at the flying landscape. Suddenly she said:

"That girl you danced with last night--you danced with her three times!" she said, with sweet reproach--"didn't know we were married!--she wasn't a Fern Hill girl. She told me she had been dancing with my 'nephew.'"

"Did she?... Eleanor, look at that elm tree, standing all alone in the field, like--like a winegla.s.s full of summer!"

For a moment she didn't understand his readiness to change the subject--then she had a flash of instinct: "I believe she said the same thing to you!"

"Oh, she got off some fool thing." The annoyance in his voice was like a rapier thrust of certainty.

"I knew it! But I don't care. Why should I care?"

"You shouldn't. Besides, it was only funny. I was tremendously amused."

She turned and looked out of the window.

Maurice lifted the paper which had been such a convenient shelter for clasping hands, and seemed to read for a while. Then he said, abruptly, "I only thought it was funny for her to make such a mistake."

She was silent.

"Eleanor, don't be--that way!"

"What 'way'? You mean"--her voice trembled--"feel hurt to have you dance _three times_, with a girl who said an uncomplimentary thing about me?"

"But it wasn't uncomplimentary! It was just a silly mistake anyone might make--" He stopped abruptly, for there were tears in her eyes--and instantly his tenderness infolded her like sunshine. But even while he was making her talk of other things--the heat, or the landscape--he was a little preoccupied; he was trying to explain this tiny, ridiculous, lovely unreasonableness, by tracking it back to some failure of sensitiveness on his own part. It occurred to him that he could do this better if he were by himself--not sitting beside her, faintly conscious of her tenseness. So he said, abruptly, "Star, if you don't mind, I'll go and have a smoke."

"All right," she said; "give me the paper; I haven't looked at the news for days!" She was trembling a little. The mistake of a silly girl had had, at first, no significance, it was just, as it always is to the newly married woman, amusing to be supposed not to be married! But that Maurice, knowing of the mistake, had not mentioned its absurdity, woke an uneasy consciousness that he had thought it might annoy her! Why should it annoy her?--unless the reason of the mistake was as obvious to him as to the girl?--whom he had found attractive enough to dance with three times! It was as if a careless hand had pushed open a closed door, and given Maurice's wife a glimpse of a dark landscape, the very existence of which her love had so vehemently denied.

An hour later, however, when Maurice returned, she was serene again.

Love had closed the door--bolted it! barred it! and the gray landscape of dividing years was forgotten. And as her face had cleared, so had his. He had explained her annoyance by calling himself a clod! "She hated not to be thought married--of _course_!" What a brute he was not to have recognized the subtle loveliness of a sensitiveness like that!

He wanted to tell her so, but he could only push the newspaper toward her and slip his hand under it to feel for hers--which he clutched and gripped so hard that her rings cut into the flesh. She laughed, and opened her pocketbook and showed him the little circle of gra.s.s which he had slipped over her wedding ring after fifty-four minutes of married life. At which his whole face radiated. It was as if, through those gay blue eyes of his, he poured pure joy from his heart into hers.

"Be careful," he threatened: "one minute more, and I'll kiss you right here, before people!"

She snapped her purse shut in pretended terror, but after that they held hands under the newspaper, and were perfectly happy--until the moment came of meeting the Houghtons on the platform at the junction; then happiness gave way to embarra.s.sment.

Henry Houghton, obliged to throw away a half-smoked cigar, and, saying under his breath that he wished he was asleep, was cross; but his wife was pleasantly commonplace. She kissed the bride, and the groom, too, and said that Edith was in a great state of excitement about them! Then she condoled with Eleanor about the heat, and told Maurice there were cinders on his hat. But not even her careful matter-of-courseness could make the moment anything but awkward. In the four-mile drive to Green Hill--during which Eleanor said she hoped old Lion wouldn't run away;--the young husband seemed to grow younger and younger; and his wife, in her effort to talk to Mr. Houghton, seemed to grow older and older....

"If I didn't happen to know she was a fool," Henry Houghton said to his Mary, washing his hands before going down to supper, "I should think she was quite a nice woman--she's so good looking."

"_Henry!_ At your time of life, are you deciding a woman's 'niceness' by her looks?"

"But tell her she mustn't bore him," he said, ignoring the rebuke. "Tell her that when it comes to wives, every husband on earth is Mr. F.'s aunt--he 'hates a fool'!"

"Why not tell her yourself?" she said: then she sighed; "why _did_ she do it?"