The Vehement Flame Part 8

The conquering incident happened in August. The hut up in the woods meant to Maurice and Edith and Johnny that eager grasping at hardship with which Age has no sympathy, but which is the very essence of Youth.

Within a week of her arrival at Green Hill, Eleanor (who did not like hardship;) had been carried off for a day of eating smoky food, cooked on a camp fire, and watching cloud shadows drift across the valley and up and over the hills; she had wondered, silently, why Maurice liked this very tiring sort of thing?--and especially why he liked to have Edith go along! "A child of her age is such a nuisance," Eleanor thought. But he did like it, all of it!--the fatigue, and the smoke, and the grubby food--and Edith!--he liked it so much that, just before the time set for their departure for Mercer--and the position in a real-estate office, which had been secured for Maurice--he said:

"Nelly, let's camp out up in the cabin for our last week, all by ourselves!"

Edith's face fell, and so, for that matter, did the Bride's. Edith said, "By yourselves? Not Johnny and me, too?" And Eleanor said, "_At night?_ Oh, Maurice!"

"It will be beautiful," he said; "there'll be a moon next week, and we'll sit up there and look down into the valley, and see the treetops lift up out of the mist--like islands from the foam of 'faerylands forlorn'! You'll love it."

"I'm crazy about camping," said Edith, eagerly;--and waited for an invitation, which was not forthcoming. Instead, Maurice, talking his plans over with her, made it quite clear that her room was better than her company. It was Edith's first experience in being left out, and it sobered her a little; but she swallowed the affront with her usual good sense:

"I guess he likes Eleanor more 'an me, so, 'course, it's nice to be by himself with her."

The prospect of being "by themselves" for a week was deeply moving to Maurice. And even Eleanor, though she quaked at the idea of spiders or thunderstorms, thought of the pa.s.sion of it with a thrill. "We'll be all alone!" she said to herself.

The morning that they started gypsying, everything was very impatient and delightful. The packing, the rolling up of blankets, the stowing of cooking utensils, the consulting of food lists to make sure nothing was being forgotten--all meant much tearing about and bossing; then came the loading the stuff into the light wagon, which, with old Lion, Mr.

Houghton had offered to convey the campers (and a temporary Edith) up to the top of the mountain. Edith was, of course, frankly envious, but accepted the privilege of even a day in camp with humble grat.i.tude.

"Rover and Johnny and I will come up pretty often, even if it's only for an hour, because Eleanor must not hurt her hands by washing dishes," she said, earnestly (still fishing for an invitation).

But Maurice only agreed, as earnestly: "No! Imagine Eleanor washing dishes! But I don't want you to stay all night, Buster," he told her, candidly; then he paused in his work, flung up his arms with a great breath of joyousness. "Great Scott!" he said. "I don't see why gypsies _ever_ die!"

Edith felt an answering throb of ecstasy. "Oh, Maurice, I wish you and I were gypsies!" she said. She did not in the least resent his candor as to her presence during the week of camping; though just before they started her feelings really were a little hurt: it happened that in trying to help Eleanor pack, she was close enough to her to notice a thread on her hair; instantly, she put out a friendly and officious thumb and finger to remove it--at which Eleanor winced, and said, "_Ouch!_"

"I thought it was a white thread," Edith explained, abashed.

Eleanor said, sharply, "Please don't touch my hair!" which conveyed nothing to Edith except that the Bride--who instantly ran up to her room--"was mad." When she came back (the "thread" having disappeared) Edith was full of apologies.

"Awfully sorry I mussed your hair," she said.

She went up the mountain with them, walking on the hard grades, and trying to placate Eleanor by keeping a hand on Lion's bridle, so that she might feel sure he wouldn't run away. When at last, rather blown and perspiring, they reached the camp, Eleanor got out of the wagon and said she wanted to "help"; but Edith, still contrite about the "thread,"

said: "Not I'm not going to have you hurt your lovely hands!" In the late afternoon, having saved Eleanor's hands in every possible way, she left them, and thinking, without the slightest rancor, of the rough bliss she was not asked to share, went running down the mountain with Rover at her heels.

Eleanor, wondering at her willingness to take that long road home with only the lumbering old dog for company, was intensely glad to have her go.

"Girls of that age are so uninteresting," she told Maurice; "and now we'll be all by ourselves!"

"Yes; Adam and Eve," he said; "and twilight; and the world spread out like a garden! Do you see that glimmer over there to the left? That's the beginning of the river--our river!"

He had made her comfortable with some cushions piled against the trunk of a tree, and lighted a fire in a ring of blackened stones; then he brought her her supper, and ate his own on his knees beside her, watching eagerly for ways to serve her, laughing because she cringed when, from an overhanging bough, a spider let himself down upon her skirt, and hurrying to bring her a fresh cup of coffee, because an unhappy ant had scalded himself to death in her first cup. Afterward he would not let her "hurt her hands" by washing the dishes. When this was over, and the dusk was deepening, he went into the woods to the "lean-to" in which Lion was quartered, to see that the old horse was comfortable, but a minute later came crashing back through the underbrush, laughing, but provoked.

"That imp, Edith, didn't hitch him securely, and the old fellow has walked home, if you please--!"

"Lion--gone? Oh, what shall we do?"

"Ill pull the wagon down when I want to go back for food."

"_Pull_ it?"

"Won't need much pulling! It will go down by itself. If I put you in it, I'll have to rope a log on behind as a brake, or it would run over me! I bet I give Edith a piece of my mind, when I get hold of her. But it doesn't really matter. I think I like it better to have not even Lion.

Just you--and the stars. They are beginning to p.r.i.c.k out," he said. He stretched himself on the ground beside her, his hands clasped under his head, and his happy eyes looking up into the abyss. "Sing, Star, sing!"

he said. So she sang, softly:

"How many times do I love again?

Tell me how many beads there are In a silver chain Of evening rain Unraveled from the tumbling main And threading the eye of a yellow star-- So many times--

"It looks," she broke off, "a little black in the west? And--was that lightning?"

"Only heat lightning. And if it should storm,--I have you here, in my arms, alone!" He turned and caught her to him, and his mouth crushed hers. Her eyes closed, and her pa.s.sion answered his, and all that he whispered. Yet while he kissed her, her eyes opened and she looked furtively beyond him, toward that gathering blackness.

They lay there together in the starlit dark, for a long time, his head on her breast. Sometimes she thrilled at his touch or low word, and sometimes she held his hand against her lips and kissed it--which made him protest--but suddenly he said, "By George! Nelly, I believe we are going to have a shower!"

Instantly she was alert with fright, and sat up, and looked down into the valley, where the heat lightning, which had been winking along the line of the hills, suddenly sharpened into a flash. "_Oh!_" she said, and held her breath until, from very far off, came a faint grumble of thunder. "Oh, Maurice!" she said, "it is horrible to be out here--if it thunders!"

"We won't be. Well go into the cabin, and we'll hear the rain on the roof, and the clash of the branches; and we'll see the lightning through the c.h.i.n.ks--and I'll have you! Oh, Nelly, we shall be part of the storm!--and nothing in G.o.d's world can separate us."

But this time she could not answer with any elemental impulse; she had no understanding of "being part of the storm"; instead, she watched the horizon. "Oh!" she said, flinching. "I don't like it. What shall we do?

Maurice, it _is_ going to thunder!"

"I think I did feel a drop of rain," he said,--and held out his hand: "Yes, Star, rain! It's begun!" He helped her to her feet, gathered up some of the cushions, and hurried her toward the little shelter. She ran ahead of him, her very feet reluctant, lest the possible "snake" should curl in the darkness against her ankles; but once in the cabin, with a candle lighted, she could not see the lightning, so she was able to laugh at herself; when Maurice went out for the rest of the cushions, she charged him to _hurry_! "The storm will be here in a minute!" she called to him. And he called back:

"I'll only be a second!"

She stood in the doorway looking after him, and saw his figure outlined against the glimmer of their fire, which had already felt the spatter of the coming storm and was dying down; then, even as she looked, he seemed to plunge forward, and fall--the thud of that fall was like a blow on her throat! She gasped, "Maurice--" And again, "_Maurice!_ Have you hurt yourself?"

He did not rise. A splash of rain struck her face; the mountain darkness was slit by a rapier of lightning, and there was a sudden violent illumination; she saw the tree and the cushions, and Maurice on the ground--then blackness, and a tremendous crash of thunder.

"Maurice!" she called. "Maurice!" The branches over the roof began to move and rustle, and there was a sudden downpour of rain; the camp fire went out, as if an extinguisher had covered it. She stood in the doorway for a breathless instant, then ran back into the cabin, and, catching the candle from the table, stepped out into the blackness; instantly the wind bore the little flame away!--then seemed to grip her, and twist her about, and beat her back into the house. In her terror she screamed his name; and as she did so, another flash of lightning showed her his figure, motionless on the ground.

"_He is dead_" she said to herself, in a whisper. "What shall I do?"

Then, suddenly, she knew what to do: she remembered that she had noticed a lantern hanging on the wall near the door; and now something impelled her to get it. In the stifling darkness of the shack she felt her way to it, held its oily ring in her hand, thought, frantically, of matches, groped along toward the mantelpiece, stumbled over a chair--and clutched at the match box! Something made her open the isingla.s.s slide, strike a match, and touch the blackened wick with the sulphurous sputter of flame,--the next moment, with the lighted lantern in her hand, she was out in the sheeting blackness of the rain!--running!--running!--toward that still figure by the deadened fire. Just before she reached it a twig rolled under her foot, and she said, "A _snake_,"--but she did not flinch. As she gained the circle of stones, a flash of lightning, with its instant and terrific crack and bellow of thunder, showed her a streak of blood on Maurice's face.... He had tripped and fallen, and his head had struck one of the blackened stones.

"He is dead," she said again, aloud. She put the lantern on the ground and knelt beside him; she had an idea that she should place her hand on his heart to see if he were alive. "He isn't," she told herself; but she laid her fingers, which were shaking so that she could not unfasten his coat, somewhere on his left side; she did not know whether there was any pulse; she knew nothing, except that he was "dead." She said this in a whisper, over and over. "He is dead. He is dead." The rain came down in torrents; the trees creaked and groaned in the wind; twice there were flashes of lightning and appalling roars of thunder. Maurice was perfectly still. The smoky glimmer of the lantern played on the thin streak of blood and made it look as though it was moving--trickling--

Then Eleanor began to think: "There ought to be a doctor...." If she left him, to bring help, he might bleed to death before she could get back to him. Instantly, as she said that, she knew that she did not believe that he was dead! She knew that she had hope.

With hope, a single thought possessed her. _She must take him down the mountain...._ But how? She could not carry him;--she had managed to prop him up against her knee, his blond head lolling forward, awfully, on his breast--but she knew that to carry him would be impossible. And Lion was not there! "I couldn't have harnessed him if he were," she thought.

She was entirely calm, but her mind was working rapidly: The wagon was in the lean-to! Could she get him into it? The road was downhill.... Almost to Doctor Bennett's door....

Instantly she sprang to her feet and, with the pale gleam of the lantern zigzagging across the path, she ran back to the shed; just as she reached it, a glimmer of light fell on the soaked earth, and she looked up with a start and saw the moon peering out between two ragged, swiftly moving clouds; then all was black again--but the rain was lessening, and there had been no lightning for several minutes. "He will die; I must save him," she said, her lips stiff with horror. She lifted the shafts of the wagon, and gave a little pull; it moved easily enough, and, guiding it along the slight decline, she brought it to Maurice's side.

There, looking at him, she said again, rigidly:

"He will die; I must save him."

As Henry Houghton said afterward, "It was impossible!--so she did it."

It took her more than an hour to do it, to pull and lift and shove the inert figure! Afterward she used to wonder how she had done it; wonder how she had given the final _push_, which got his sagging body up on to the floor of the wagon! It had strained every part of her;--her shoulder against his hips, her head in the small of his back, her hands gripping his heavy, dangling legs. She was soaking wet; her hair had loosened, and stray locks were plastered across her forehead. She grunted like a toiling animal.

It seemed as if her heart would crack with her effort, her muscles tear; she forgot the retreating rumble of the storm, the brooding, dripping forest stillness; she forgot even her certainty that he would die. She entirely forgot herself. She only knew--straining, gasping, sweating--that she must get the body--the dead body perhaps!--into the wagon. And she did it! Just as she did it, she heard a faint groan. Her heart stood still with terror, then beat frantically with joy.