The Vehement Flame Part 51

By this time, of course, Edith's one thought was to get away, with dignity; but dignity, when you've had your face slapped, is almost impossible. So Edith (being Edith!) chose Truth, and didn't trouble herself with dignity! "Eleanor," she said, "I know it's me you don't want. I felt it last night. I'm afraid I've done something that has offended you. Have I? Truly, Eleanor, I haven't meant to! What is it?

Let's talk it out. Eleanor, what _have_ I done?" She put her hands down on Eleanor's, clasped rigidly on the table.

"Please!" Eleanor said, and drew her hands away.

"Oh," Edith said, pitifully, "you are troubled!"

Eleanor said, with a gasp: "Not at all ... Edith, I am afraid I must ask you to ... excuse me. I'm busy."

Edith was too amazed to speak; she could not, indeed, think of anything to say! This wasn't "dislike." "Why, she _hates_ me!" she thought. "Why does she hate me? Shall I not notice it? Shall I talk about something else?" But she could not talk of anything else; she could only speak her swift, honest thought: "Eleanor, why do you dislike me? Maurice and I have been friends--we have been like brother and sister--ever since I can remember. Oh, Eleanor, I want _you_ to like me, too! Please don't keep me away from you and Maurice!"

Eleanor said, rapidly: "He's not your brother; and it would be difficult to keep you away from him. You go to his office to find him."

There was a dead silence. Edith grew very pale. At last she understood.

Eleanor was jealous ... Of her! They looked at each other, the angry woman and the dumfounded girl. "Jealous? Of _me_?" Edith thought. "Why _me_? Maurice only cares for me as if I was his sister! ... And I don't do Eleanor any harm by--loving him." ... Eleanor was gasping out a torrent of a.s.sailing words:

"Girls are different from what they were in my day. Then, they didn't openly run after men! Now, apparently, they do. Certainly _you_ do. You always have. I'm not blind, Edith. I have known what was going on; when you were living with us and I had a headache, you used to talk to him, and try and be clever--to make him think I was dull, when it was only that--I was too ill to talk! And you kept him down in the garden until midnight, when he might have been sitting with me on the porch. And you made him go skating. And now you _look_ at him! I know what that means.

A girl doesn't look that way at a man, unless--"

There was dead silence.

"Unless she's in love with him. But don't think that, though you are in love with him, he cares for _you_! He does not. He cares for no one but me. He told me so."

Silence.

"Can you deny that you care for my husband?" Edith opened her lips--and closed them again. "You don't deny it," Eleanor said; "you _can't_." She put her head down on her arms on the table; her fifty years engulfed her. She said, in a whisper, "He doesn't love me."

Instantly Edith's arms were around her. "Eleanor, dear! Don't--don't! He does love you--he does! I'd perfectly hate him if he didn't! Oh, Eleanor, poor Eleanor! Don't cry; Maurice _does_ love you. He doesn't care a copper for me!" The tears were running down her face. She bent and kissed Eleanor's hands, clenched on the table, and then tried to draw the gray head against her tender young breast.

Eleanor put out frantic hands, as if to push away some suffocating pressure. Both of these women--Lily, with her car fare and her handkerchief; Edith, with her impudent "advice" to Maurice not to have secrets from his wife--pitied her! She would not be pitied by them!

"Don't touch me!" she said, furiously; "_you love my husband_."

Edith heard her own blood pounding in her ears.

"Don't you?" said Eleanor; her face was furrowed with pain; "Don't you?"

It was a moment of naked truth. "I have loved Maurice," Edith said, steadily, "ever since I was a child. I always shall. I would like to love you, too, Eleanor, if you would let me. But nothing--_nothing_!

shall ever break up my ... affection for Maurice."

"You might as well call it love."

Edith, rising, said, very low: "Well, I will call it love. I am not ashamed. I am not wronging you. You have no need to be jealous of me, Eleanor. He cares nothing for me."

Eleanor struck the table with her clenched fists. "You shall never have him!" she said.

Edith turned, silently, and went up the veranda stairs and out of the house.

CHAPTER x.x.xIII

When Eleanor got her breath, after that crazy outbreak, she rushed up to her own room, bolted the door, fell on her knees at her bedside, and told herself in frantic gasps, that she would _fight_ Edith Houghton!

Grapple with her! Beat her away from Maurice! "I must _do_ something--do something--"

But what? There was only one weapon with which she could vanquish Edith--Maurice's love for his son. _Jacky!_ She must have Jacky ...

But how could she get him?

She knew she couldn't get him with Lily's consent. Frantic with jealousy as she was, she recognized that! Yet, over and over, during the week that followed that hour in the garden with Edith, she said to herself, "If Maurice had Jacky, Edith would be nothing to him." ... It was at this point that one day something made her add, "_Suppose he had Lily, too?_" Then he could have Jacky.

"If I were dead, he could marry Lily."

At first this was just one of those vague thoughts that blew through her mind, as straws and dead leaves blow down a dreary street. But this straw caught, so to speak, and more straws gathered and heaped about it.

The idea lodged, and another idea lodged with it: If, to get his child, he married Jacky's mother, Edith would never reach him! And if, by dying, Eleanor gave Maurice his child, he would always love her for her gift; she would always be "wonderful." And Edith? Why, he couldn't, he _couldn't_--if his wife died to give him Jacky--think of Edith again!

Jacky, Eleanor thought, viciously, "would slam the door in Edith's face!"

Perhaps, if Maurice had been at home, instead of being obliged to prolong that western business trip, the sanity of his presence would have swept the straws and dead leaves away and left Eleanor's mind bleak, of course, with disappointment about Jacky and dread of Edith--but sound. As it was, alone in her melancholy, uncomfortable house, tiny innumerable "reasons" for considering the one way by which Maurice could get Jacky, heaped and heaped above common sense: ten years ago Mrs. Newbolt said that if Eleanor had not "caught" Maurice when he was young, he would have taken Edith; that was a straw. Two years ago a woman in the street car offered her a seat, because she looked as old as _her_ mother. Another straw! Lily supposed she was Maurice's mother! A straw.... Edith admitted--had impudently flung into Eleanor's face!--the confession that she was "in love with him!"--and Edith was to be in town for three months. Oh, what a sheaf of straws! Edith would see him constantly. She would "look at him"! Could Maurice stand that? Wouldn't what little love he felt for his old wife go down under the wicked a.s.sault of those "looks"?--unless he had Jacky! Jacky would "slam the door."

Eleanor said things like this many times a day. Straws! Straws! And they showed the way the wind was blowing. Sometimes, in the suffocating dust of fear that the wind raised she even forgot her purpose of making Maurice happy, in a violent urge to make it impossible for Edith Houghton to triumph over her. But the other thought--the crazy, n.o.bler thought!--was, on the whole, dominant: "Maurice would be happy if he had a child. I couldn't give him a child of my own, but I can give him Jacky." Yet once in a while she balanced the advantages and disadvantages of the one way in which Jacky could be given: _Lily_?

Could Maurice endure Lily? She thought of that parlor, of Lily's vulgarity, of the raucous note in her voice when those flashes of anger pierced like claws through the furry softness of her good nature; she thought of the reek of scent on the handkerchief. Could he endure Lily?

Yet she was efficient; she would make him comfortable. "I never made him comfortable," she thought. "And he doesn't love her; so I wouldn't so terribly mind her being here--any more than I'd mind a housekeeper.

But I wouldn't want her to call him 'Maurice.' I think I'll put that into my letter to him. I'll say that I will ask, as a last favor, that he will not let her call him 'Maurice.'"

For by this time she had added another straw to the pile of rubbish in her mind: _she would write him a letter_. In it she would tell him that she was going to ... die, so that he could marry Lily and have Jacky!

Then came the mental postscript, which would not, of course, be written; she would make it possible for him to marry Lily--_and impossible for him to marry Edith_! And by and by she got so close to her mean and n.o.ble purpose--a gift in one dead hand and a sword in the other!--that she began to think of ways and means. How could she die? She couldn't buy morphine without a prescription, and she couldn't possibly get a prescription. But there were other things that people did,--dreadful things! She knew she couldn't do anything "dreadful." Maurice had a revolver in his bureau drawer, upstairs--but she didn't know how to make it "go off"; and if she had known, she couldn't do it; it would be "dreadful." Well; a rope? No! Horrible! She had once seen a picture ... she shuddered at the memory of that picture. _That_ was impossible! Sometimes any way--every way!--seemed impossible. Once, wandering aimlessly about the thawing back yard, she stood for a long time at the iron gate, staring at the glimmer, a block away, of the river--"our river," Maurice used to call it. But in town, "their"

river--flowing!--flowing! was filmed with oil, and washed against slimy piles, and carried a hideous flotsam of human rubbish; once down below the bridge she had seen a drowned cat slopping back and forth among orange skins and straw bottle covers. The river, in town, was as "dreadful" as those other impossible things! Back in the meadows it was different--brown and clear where it rippled over shallows and lisped around that strip of clean sand, and darkly smooth out in the deep current;--the deep current? Why! _that_ was possible! Of course there were "things" in the water that she might step on--slimy, creeping things!--which she was so afraid of. She remembered how afraid she had been that night on the mountain, of snakes. But the water was clean.

She must have stood there a long time; the maids, in the bas.e.m.e.nt laundry, said afterward that they saw her, her white hands clutching the rusty bars of the gate, looking down toward the river, for nearly an hour. Then Bingo whined, and she went into the house to comfort him; and as she stroked him gently, she said, "Yes, ... our river would be possible." But she would get so wet! "My skirts would be wet ..."

So three days went by in profound preoccupation. Her mind was a battlefield, over which, back and forth, reeling and trampling, Love and Jealousy--old enemies but now allies!--flung themselves against Reason, which had no support but Fear. Each day Maurice's friendly letters arrived; one of them--as Jealousy began to rout Reason and Love to cast out Fear--she actually forgot to open! Mrs. Newbolt called her up on the telephone once, and said, "Come 'round to dinner; my new cook is pretty poor, but she's better than yours."

Eleanor said she had a little cold. "Cold?" said Mrs. Newbolt. "My gracious! don't come near _me_! I used to tell your dear uncle I was more afraid of a cold than I was of Satan! He said a cold _was_ Satan; and I said--" Eleanor hung up the receiver.

So she was alone--and the wind blew, and the straws and leaves danced over that battlefield of her empty mind, and she said:

"I'll give him Jacky," and then she said, "Our river." And then she said, "But I must hurry!" He had written that he might reach home by the end of the week. "He might come to-night! I must do it--before he comes home." She said that while the March dawn was gray against the windows of her bedroom, and the house was still. She lay in bed until, at six, she heard the creak of the attic stairs and Mary's step as she crept down to the kitchen, the silver basket clattering faintly on her arm.

Then she rose and dressed; once she paused to look at herself in the gla.s.s: those gray hairs! ... Edith had called his attention to them so many years ago! It was a long time since it had been worth while to pull them out. ... All that morning she moved about the house like one in a dream. She was thinking what she would say in her letter to him, and wondering, now and then, vaguely, what it would be like, _afterward_?

She ate no luncheon, though she sat down at the table. She just crumbled up a piece of bread; then rose, and went into the library to Maurice's desk... She sat there for a long time, making idle scratches on the blotting paper; her elbow on the desk, her forehead in her hand, she sat and scrawled his initials--and hers--and his. And then, after about an hour, she wrote:

... I want you to have Jacky. When I am dead you can get him, because you can marry Lily. Of course I oughtn't to have married you, but--

Here she paused for a long time.

I loved you. I'd rather she didn't call you Maurice. But I want you to have Jacky; so marry her, and you will have him. I am not jealous, you see. You won't call me jealous any more, will you? And, besides, I love little Jacky, too. See that he has music lessons.

Another pause... Many thoughts... Many straws and dead leaves... "Edith will never enter the house, if Lily is here--with Jacky.... Oh--I hate her."