The Vehement Flame Part 32

Jacky rose reluctantly, then stood looking, open-mouthed, at his mother's visitor.

"Say," he remarked; "I kin swear."

"You don't say so!" said Maurice.

"I kin say 'dam,'" Jacky announced, gravely.

"You are a great linguist! Who instructed you in the n.o.ble art of profanity?"

"Huh?" said Jacky, shyly.

"Who taught you?"

"Maw," said Jacky.

Maurice roared; Lily giggled,--"My soul and body! Listen to that child!

Jacky, you naughty boy, telling wrong stories. One of these days I'm going to give you a reg'lar spanking." Then she stamped her foot, for Jacky had settled down again in the dust; "Do you hear me? Come right in out of the dirt! That's one on me!" she confessed, laughing: then added, anxiously: "Say, Mr. Curtis, I do smack him when he says bad words; honest, I do! He's getting a _good_ bringing up, though my mealers spoil him something awful. But I'd just shake his prayers out of him, if he forgot 'em."

Maurice, still laughing, said: "Well, don't become too proficient, Jacobus. Good-by," he said again. And as he said it, Eleanor, in a trolley car, glanced out of the window and saw him.

"Why, there's Maurice!" she said; and motioned to the conductor to stop.

Hunting for a cook had brought her to this impossible suburb, where Maurice, no doubt, was trying to buy or sell a house. "I'll get out and walk home with him," she thought, eagerly. But the car would not stop until the end of the second block, and when she hurried back Maurice had disappeared. He had either gone off in another direction, or else entered the house; but she could not remember which house!--those gingerbread tenements were all so much alike that it was impossible to be sure on which of the small porches she had seen her husband, and a fat, common-looking woman, and a child playing in the yard. All she could do was to wander up and down the block, looking at every front door in the hope that he would appear; as he didn't, she finally took the next car into town.

"Did you sell the house this afternoon?" she asked Maurice at dinner that night; and he, remembering how part of his afternoon had been spent, said he hadn't any particular house on the string at the moment.

"Then what took you to Medfield?" Eleanor asked, simply.

"Medfield!"

"I saw you out there this afternoon," she said; "you were talking to a woman. I supposed she was a tenant. I got off the car to walk home with you, but I wasn't sure of the house; they were all alike."

"What were you doing in Medfield?"

"Oh, Hannah has given notice; I was hunting for a cook. I heard of one out on Bell Street."

"Did you find her?"

"No," Eleanor said, sighing, "it's perfectly awful!"

"Too bad!" her husband sympathized.

In the parlor, after dinner, while Eleanor was getting out the cards for solitaire, Maurice, tingling with alarm and irritation, sat down at the piano and banged out all sorts of chords and discords. "Lily'll _have_ to move," he was saying to himself. (Bang--_Bang!_) His Imagination raced with the possibilities of what would have happened if Eleanor had found the house which was "like all the other houses,"

and heard his "good-by" to Lily, or perhaps even caught the latest addition to Jacky's vocabulary! "The jig would have been up," he thought.

(Bang--Cras.h.!.+)... "She'll _have_ to move! Suppose Eleanor took it into her head to hunt her up? She's capable of it!" (Cras.h.!.+)

Eleanor's absorption in the cook she could not find kept her for nearly forty-eight hours from speculation as to what, if not office business, took Maurice to Medfield. When she did begin to speculate she said to herself, "He doesn't tell me things about his business!" Then she was stabbed again by his annoyance because she had opened the letter from Mr. Houghton; then by his secretiveness in regard to that adventure on the river with Mrs. Morton. (He had told Edith!) Then this--then that--and by and by a tiny heap of nothings, that implied reserves. He wasn't confidential. She told him _everything_! She never kept a thing from him! And he didn't even tell her why he was over in Medfield when no real-estate matters took him there. Why should he _not_ tell her? And when she said that, the inevitable answer came: He didn't tell her, because he didn't want her to know! Perhaps he had friends there? No. No friends of Maurice's could live in such a locality. Well, perhaps there was some woman? Even as she said this, she was ashamed. She knew she didn't believe it. Of course there wasn't any woman!... But, at any rate, he had interests in Medfield that he did not tell her about. She hinted this to him at breakfast the next morning. She had not meant to speak of it; she knew she would be sorry if she did. Eleanor was incapable of a.n.a.lysis, but she was, in her pitiful way, aware that jealousy, _when articulate_, is almost always vulgar--perhaps because the decorums of breeding (which insist that, for the sake of others, one's own pain must be hidden) are not propped up by the reserves of pride. At any rate, she was not often publicly bitter to Maurice. This time, however, she was.

"Apparently," she said, "Maurice has acquaintances on Maple Street whom I don't know."

"The elite," Edith remarked, facetiously; "his lovely Mrs. Dale lives there."

Maurice's start was perceptible.

"Perhaps it was Mrs. Dale you went to see?" Eleanor said.

Maurice, trained in these years of furtiveness to self-control, said, "Does she live on Maple Street, Edith?"

"I guess so. The time I rescued her little boy and her flower pot, ages ago, she was going into a house on Maple Street."

"I saw Maurice in Medfield on Thursday," said Eleanor; "and he doesn't seem to want to say what he was doing there!"

"I am perfectly willing to tell you what I was doing," he retorted; "I went from our office to see the woman who rents the house."

Eleanor's slow mind accepted this entirely true and successfully false remark with only the wonder of wounded love. "Why didn't he say that at first?" she thought; "why does he hide things from me?"

Maurice, however, made sure of that "hiding." Eleanor's attack upon him frightened him so badly that that very afternoon, after office hours (Eleanor being safe in bed with a headache), he went to see Lily. Her astonishment at another visit so soon was obvious; she was still further astonished when he told her why he had come. He hated to tell her. To speak of Eleanor offended his taste--but it had to be done. So, stammering, he began--but broke off:

"Send that child away!"

"Run out in the yard, Sweety," Lily commanded.

"Won't," said Jacky.

"Clear out!" Maurice said, sharply, and Jacky obeyed like a shot--but paused on the porch to turn the ferociously clanging doorbell round and round and round. "Well," Maurice began, "I'll tell you what's happened... Lily! Make him stop!"

"Say, now, Jacky, stop," Lily called; but Jacky, seized apparently with a new idea, had already stopped, and was running out on to the pavement.

So again Maurice began his story. Lily's instant and sympathetic understanding was very rea.s.suring. He even caught himself, under the comfort of her quick co-operation, ranging himself with her, and saying _"we."_ "We've got to guard against anything happening, you know."

"Oh, my soul and body, yes!" Lily agreed; "it would be too bad, and no sense, either; you and me just acquaintances. 'Course I'll move, Mr.

Curtis. But, there! I hate to leave my garden--and I've just papered this room! And I don't know where to go, either," she ended, with a worried look.

"How would you like to go to New York?" he said, eagerly.

She shook her head: "I've got a lot of friends in this neighborhood. But there's a two-family house on Ash Street--"

"Say," said Jacky, in the hall; "I got--"

"Oh, but you must leave Medfield!" he protested; "she"--that "she" made him wince--"she may try to hunt you up."

"She can't. She don't know my name."

Maurice felt as if privacy were being pulled away from his soul, as skin might be flayed from living flesh. "But you see," he began, huskily, "there's a--a girl who lives with us; and she--she mentioned your name."

Then, cringing, he told her about Edith.

Lily looked blankly puzzled; then she remembered; "Why, yes, sure enough! It was right at the gate--oh, as much as four years ago; I slipped, and she grabbed Jacky. Yes; it comes back to me; she told me she seen me the time we got ducked. 'Course, I gave her the gla.s.sy eye, and said I didn't remember the gentleman in the boat with her. And she caught on that I lived here? Well, now, ain't the world small?"

"d.a.m.ned small," Maurice said, dryly.