The Vehement Flame Part 41

"I can't be too patient with her when she's forlorn, because I--I haven't played the game with her."

"It's up to her to forgive that!"

"She doesn't know it."

"Maurice! You haven't a secret from Eleanor?"

Her dismay was like a stab. "Edith, I can't help it! It was a long time ago--but it would upset her to know that I'd--well, failed her in any way." His face was so wrung that Edith could have cried; but she said what she thought:

"Secrets are horrid, Maurice. You've made a mistake."

"A 'mistake'?" He almost laughed at the devilish humor of that little word 'mistake,' as applied to his ruined life. "Well, yes, Edith; I made a 'mistake,' all right."

"Oh, I don't mean a 'mistake' as to this thing you say that Eleanor wouldn't like," Edith said. "I mean not telling her."

He shook his head; with that nagging thought of Jacky in the back of his mind, it was impossible not to smile at her dogmatic ignorance.

"Because," Edith explained, "secrets trip you into fibbing."

"You bet they do! I'm quite an accomplished liar."

Edith did not smile; she spoke with impatient earnestness: "That's perfectly silly; you are not a liar! You couldn't lie to save your life, and you know it." Maurice laughed. "Why, Maurice, don't you suppose I know you, through and through? _I_ know what you are!--a 'perfec' gentil knight.'"

She laughed, and Maurice threw up his hands.

"Bouquets," Edith conceded, grinning; "but I won't hand out any more, so you needn't fis.h.!.+ Well, I don't know what on earth you've done, and I don't care; and you can't tell me, of course! But one thing I do know; it isn't fair to Eleanor not to tell her, because--"

"My dear child--"

"Because she wouldn't really mind, she's so awfully devoted to you. Oh, Maurice, do tell Eleanor!" Then, even as she spoke, she was frightened; what was this thing that he did not dare to tell Eleanor?--"or me?"

Edith thought. It couldn't be that Maurice--was not good? Edith quailed at herself. She had a quick impulse to say, "Forgive me, Maurice, for even thinking of such a horrid thing!" But all she said, aloud, briefly, was, "As I see it, telling Eleanor would be playing the game."

Maurice put his hand over her fist, clenched with conviction on her knee. "Skeezics," he said, "you are the soundest thing the Lord ever made! As it happens, it's a thing I can't talk about--to anybody. But I'll never forget this, Edith. And ... dear, I'm glad you're going to be happy; you deserve the best man on earth, and old Johnny comes mighty darned near being the best!"

Edith, frowning, rose abruptly. "Please don't talk that way. I hate that sort of talk! Johnny is my friend; that's all. So, please never--"

"I won't," Maurice said, meekly; but some swift exultation made him add to himself, "Poor old Johnny!" His face was radiant.

As for Edith, she hardly spoke all the way back to the house. But not because of "poor old Johnny"! She was absorbed by that intuition--which she did not, she told herself, believe. Yet it clamored in her mind: Maurice had done something wrong. Something so wrong, that he couldn't speak of it, even to her! Then it must be--? "No! _that's_ impossible!"

But with this recoil from a disgusting impossibility, came an upsurge of something she had never felt in her life--something not unlike that emotion she had once called Bingoism--a resentful consciousness that Maurice had not been as completely and confidentially her friend as she was his!

But Edith hadn't a mean fiber in her! Instantly, on the heels of that small pain came a greater and n.o.bler pain: "I can't bear it if he has done anything wrong! But if he has, it's some wicked woman's fault." As she said that, anger at an injury done to Maurice made her almost forget that first virginal repulsion--and made her entirely forget that fleeting pain of knowing that she had not meant as much to him as he meant to her! "But he _hasn't_ done anything wrong," she insisted; "he wouldn't look at a horrid? woman!"

"For Heaven's sake, Edith," Maurice remonstrated; "this isn't any Marathon! Go slow. I'm not in any hurry to get home."

"I am," Edith said, briefly. She was in a great hurry! She wanted to be alone, and argue to herself that she had been guilty of a dreadful disloyalty to him.... "Maurice? Why! He would be the last man in the world to--to do _that_,--darling old Maurice! He has simply had a crush on somebody, and likes her better than he likes Eleanor--or me; but _that's_ nothing. Eleanor deserves it; and very likely I do, too! But he's so frightfully honorable about Eleanor--he's a perfect crank on honor!--that he blames himself for even that." By this time the possibility that the unknown somebody was "horrid" had become unthinkable; she was probably terribly attractive, and Maurice had a crush on ... "though, of course, she can't be really nice," Edith thought; "Maurice simply doesn't see through her. Boys are so stupid!

They don't know girls," Again there was a Bingo moment of hot dislike for the "girl," whoever she was!--and she walked faster and faster.

Maurice, striding along beside her, was thinking of the irony of the "bouquet" she had thrown at him, and the innocence of that "Tell Eleanor"! "What a child she is still! And she's not in love with Johnny--" He didn't understand his exhilaration when he said that, but, except when he reproached her for tearing ahead, it kept him silent...

Supper was ready when they got home, so Edith had no chance to be solitary, and after supper Johnny Bennett dropped in. When he took his reluctant departure ("Confound him!" Maurice thought, impatiently, "he has on his sitting breeches to-night!") Maurice told Edith to come into the garden with him, and listen to the evening primroses; "They 'blossom with a silken burst of sound'--they _do_!" he insisted, for she jeered at the word "listen."

"They don't!" she said, and ran down the steps, flitting ahead of him in the dusk like a white moth. In their preoccupation, they neither of them looked at Eleanor; sitting silently on the porch between Mr. and Mrs.

Houghton. They went, between the box hedges, to the primrose border, and Maurice quoted:

"Silent they stood.

Hand clasped in hand, in breathless hush around!

And saw her shyly doff her soft green hood, And blossom--with a silken burst of sound!

"Let's clasp hands," Maurice suggested.

"No, thank you," said Edith. And so they watched and listened. A tightly twisted bud loosened half a petal--then another half--and another--until it was all a s.h.i.+mmering whorl of petals, each caught at one side to the honeyed crosspiece of the pistil; then: "_There!_" said Maurice. "Did you hear it?"--all the silken disks were loose, and the flower cup, silver-gilt, spilled its fragrance into the stillness!

"It was the dream of a sound," she admitted

Her voice was a dream sound, too, he thought; a wordless tenderness for her flooded his mind, as the perfume of the primroses flooded the night.

It seemed as if the lovely ignorance of her was itself a perfume! "'Tell Eleanor'! She doesn't know the wickedness of the world, and I don't want her to." He put his hand on her shoulder in the old, brotherly way--but drew it back as if something had burned him! That recoil should have revealed things to him, but it didn't. So far as his own consciousness went, he was too intent on what he called "the square deal" for Eleanor, to know what had happened to him; all he knew was that Edith, all of a sudden, was grown up! Her childishness was gone. He mustn't even put his hand on her shoulder! He had an uneasy moment of wondering--"Girls are so darned knowing, nowadays!"--whether she might be suspicious as to what that secret was, which she had advised him to "tell Eleanor"? But that was only for a moment; "Edith's not that kind of a girl. And, anyway, she'd never think of such a thing of me--which makes me all the more rotten!" So he clutched at Edith's undeserved faith in him, and said, "She'll never think of _that_." Still, she was grown up ... and he mustn't touch her. (This was one of the times when he was not worrying about Jacky!)

Edith, talking animatedly of primroses, had her absorbing thoughts, too; they were nothing but furious denial! "Maurice--horrid? Never!" Then, on the very breath of "Never," came again the insistent reminder: "But he could tell _me_ anything, except--" So, thinking of just one thing, and talking of many other things, she walked up and down the primrose path with Maurice. They neither of them wanted to go back to the three older people: the father and mother--and wife.

Eleanor, on the porch, strained her eyes into the dusk; now and then she caught a glimmer of the dim whiteness of Edith's skirt, or heard Maurice's voice. She was suffering so that by and by she said, briefly, to her hosts--her trembling with unshed tears--"Good night," and went upstairs, alone--an old, crying woman. Eleanor had been unreasonable many times; but this time she was not unreasonable! That night anyone could have seen that she was, to Maurice, as nonexistent as any other elderly woman might have been. The Houghtons saw it, and when she went into the house Mary Houghton said, with distress:

"She suffers!"

Her husband nodded, and said he wished he was asleep. "Why," he demanded, "are women greater fools about this business than men? Poor Maurice ventures to talk to Edith of 'shoes and s.h.i.+ps and sealing wax,'--and Eleanor weeps! Why are there more jealous women than men?"

"Because," Mary Houghton said, dryly, "more men give cause for jealousy than women."

"_Touche! Touche!_" he conceded; then added, quickly, "But Maurice isn't giving any cause."

"Well, I'm not so sure," she said.

Up in her own room, Eleanor, sitting in the dark by the open window, stared out into the leafy silence of the night. Once, down in the garden, Maurice laughed;--and she struck her clenched hand on her forehead:

"I can't bear it!" she said, gaspingly, aloud; "I can't bear it--_she interests him_!" His pleasure in Edith's mind was a more scorching pain to her than the thought of Lily's body....

Later, when Maurice and Edith came up from the garden darkness, they found a deserted porch. "Let's talk," he said, eagerly.

Edith shook her head. "Too sleepy," she said, and ran upstairs. He called after her, "Quitter!" But it provoked no retort, and he would have gone back to walk up and down alone, by the primroses, and worry over Jacky's future, if a melancholy voice had not come from the window of their room: "Maurice.... It's twelve o'clock." And he followed Edith indoors....

Edith had been sharply anxious to be by herself. She could not sit on the porch with Maurice, and not burst out and tell him--what? Tell him that nothing he had done could make the slightest difference to her! "He has probably met some awfully nice girl and likes her--a good deal. As for there being anything wrong, I don't believe it! That would be horrible. I'm a beast to have thought of such a thing!" She decided to put it out of her mind, and went to her desk, saying, "I'll straighten out my accounts."

She began, resolutely; added up one column, and subtracted the total from another; said: "Gos.h.!.+ I'm out thirty dollars!" nibbled the end of her pen, and reflected that she would have to work on her father's sympathies;--then, suddenly, her pen still in her hand, she sat motionless.

"Even if there _was_ anything--bad, I'd forgive him. He's a lamb!" But as she spoke, childishness fell away--she was a deeply distressed woman.

Maurice was suffering. And she knew, in spite of her a.s.sertions to the contrary, that it wasn't because of any slight thing; any "crush" on a girl--nice or otherwise! He was suffering because he had done wrong--and she couldn't tear downstairs and say: "Maurice, never mind! I love you just as much; I don't care what you've done!" Why couldn't she say that?

Why couldn't she go now, and sit on the porch steps beside him, and say--anything? She got up and began to walk about the room; her heart was beating smotheringly. "Why shouldn't I tell him I love him so that I'd forgive--_anything_? He knows I've always loved him!--next to father and mother. Why can't I tell him so, now?" Then something in her breast, beating like wings, made her know why she couldn't tell him!