The Vehement Flame Part 16

"They always ask that," she thought; and the momentary reality she had shown hardened into the easy lying of her business: she told this or that--the cruel father of fiction, who tried to drive her into marriage with the rich old man; the wicked lover who destroyed trusting innocence; the inevitable _facilis descensus_--Batty at last. And now the ice-cream parlor in this dirty street, with the clear-eyed, handsome, amused young man, who had forgotten his own anger in the impulse, so frequent in the very young and very upright man, to "save"

some little creature of the gutter! As for Maurice, he said to himself, "She's a sweet little thing; and not really bad."

He was right there: Lily was not bad; she was as far from sin as she was from virtue--just a little, unmoral, very amiable animal.

As for Maurice, he continued to discuss her future of rect.i.tude and honor--his imagination reaching in a bound amazing heights. Why not be a trained nurse?--and have a hospital of her own, and gather about her, as a.s.sistants, girls who--"well, had had a tough time of it," he said, delicately. As he talked, fatigue at the boredom of his highly moral sentiments crept into her face. She swallowed an occasional yawn, and murmured to most of his statements, "Is that so?" She was sleepy, and wished he would stop talking....

"Guess I'll be going along," she said, good-naturedly.

"I'll come and see you to-morrow," Maurice said, impa.s.sioned with the idea of saving her; "then I'll tell you what my wife will do for you."

They went out together and walked toward Lily's rooms; but somehow they both fell silent. Lily was again afraid of Batty, and Maurice's exhilaration had begun to ebb; there came into his mind the bleak remembrance of the overturned table and Eleanor's sobs....

At the door of the apartment house where Lily lived, she said, nervously, "I'd ask you to come in, but he--"

"Oh, I understand; I've no desire to meet the gentleman! What time will I come to-morrow, when he's not around?"

She reflected, uneasily: "Well, I ain't sure--"

Before she could finish, Batty loomed up beside them. He was plainly drunk. "I lost my key," he said; "and I've been waiting--"

"Good night, Miss Lily," Maurice said,--"If he's nasty to her, I'll go back," he thought. He was only halfway down the block when he heard a little piping scream--"O-o-o-w! O-o-o-w!" He turned, and saw her trying to pull her hand away from Batty's twisting grip: he was at her side in a moment: "Here! _Drop_ it!" he said, sharply--and landed an extremely neat blow on the drunken man's jaw. Batty, rubbing his cheek, and staring at this very unexpected a.s.sailant in profound and giggling astonishment, slouched into the house.

"He 'most twisted my hand off!" Lily said; "oh, ain't he the beast?" She cringed and shook her bruised wrist, then gave Maurice an admiring look.

"My soul and body! you lit into him good!" she said; "what am I going to do? I'm afraid to go in."

"If I had a house of my own," Maurice said, "I'd take you home, and my wife would look after you. But we are boarding.... Haven't you some friend you could go to for to-night? ... To-morrow my wife will come and see you," he declared.

"Oh, gracious me, no!" In the midst of her anger she couldn't help laughing. ("He's a reg'lar baby!" she thought.) "No; your wife's a busy society lady, I'm sure. Don't bother about me. I'll just wait round till he goes to sleep." She dabbed at her eyes with a little wet ball of a handkerchief.

"Here, take mine," he said. And with this larger and dryer piece of linen, she did manage to make her face more presentable.

"When he's asleep, I'll slip in," she said.

"Well, let's go and sit down somewhere," Maurice suggested. She agreed, and there was some haphazard wandering about in the darkness, then a weary sitting on a bench in the park, marking time till Batty would surely be asleep.

"You sure handed one out to him," Lily said.

Maurice chuckled at the role of knight-errant which she seemed to discern in him, but he talked earnestly of her future, and once or twice, soothed by his voice, she dozed--but he didn't know it. Indeed, he told himself afterward that her silences showed how his words were sinking in! "It only goes to prove," he thought, when at midnight he left her at her own door, "that the _flower_ is in all of them! If you only go about it right, you can bring their purity to the surface! She felt all I said. Eleanor will be awfully interested in her."

He was quite sure about Eleanor; he had entirely forgiven her; he wanted to wake her up, and sit on the edge of her bed, and tell her of his evening, and what a glorious thing it would be to lift one lovely young soul from the gutter.

CHAPTER X

But Eleanor would not "wake up." Within an hour of her foolish outbreak she had begun to listen for his returning step. Then she went to bed and cried and cried, "He doesn't love me," she said, over and over; and once she said, "it is because I am--" But she didn't finish this; she just got up and went over to the bureau and stared into the mirror; she even lit a candle and held it close to the gla.s.s; after a while she saw what she was looking for. "Edith tried to make him notice them, that first summer at Green Hill," she thought.

At eleven she went to the window and watched, her eyes straining into the darkness. When, far down the street, a man's figure came in range, she held her breath until it walked into and out of the circling glare of the arc light--not Maurice! It was after twelve when she saw him coming--and instantly she flew back to her bed. When he entered the faintly lighted room, Eleanor was, apparently, sound asleep.

"Star?"

No answer.

He leaned over, saw the droop of her lip and the puffed eyelids--and drew back. Perhaps, if he had kissed her, the soft lead pencil might not have acted as Destiny; she might have melted under the forlorn story he was so eager to tell her. But her tear-stained face did not suggest a kiss.

In the morning Eleanor had what she called a "bilious headache," and when Maurice skirted the subject of the "_flower_," she was too physically miserable to be interested. When she was well again, the opportunity--if it was an opportunity!--was lost; her interest in Lily was not needed, because a call at the apartment house showed Maurice that Batty was forgiven. So he forgot his desire to lift the fallen, in more of those arid moments with Eleanor; reproaches--and reconciliations! Tears--and fire! But fires gradually die down under tears, no matter how one spends one's breath blowing loving words on the wet embers! Enough tears will put out any fire.

Lily, too, was shedding angry tears in those days, and they probably had their effect in cooling Batty's heart; for his unpleasantness finally culminated in his leaving her, and by October she was living in the yellow-brick apartment house alone, and very economically--yet not so economically that she did not buy hyacinth bulbs for the blue and purple gla.s.ses on her sunny window sill.

Once Maurice, remembering with vague amus.e.m.e.nt his reformatory impulse, went to see her; but he did not talk to Eleanor about the call. By this time there were days when he talked as little as possible to Eleanor about anything,--not because he was secretive--he hated secrecy! "It's next door to lying," he thought, faintly disgusted at himself,--but because she seemed to feel hurt if he was interested in anyone except herself. Maurice had pa.s.sed the point which had seemed so terrible at Green Hill, where he had called his wife "silly." He never called her silly now. He merely, over and over, called himself a fool.

"I've made an a.s.s of myself," he used to think, sorting out his cards for solitaire and looking furtively at the thin face, with its lines of wistful and faded beauty. At forty-two, a happy, busy woman, with a sound digestion, will not look faded; on the contrary, she is at her best--as far as looks are concerned! Eleanor was not happy; her digestion was uncertain; she did not go into society, and she had no real occupation, except to go every day to Mrs. O'Brien's and take Bingo for a walk. Even her practicing had been pretty much given up, for fear of disturbing the people on the floor below her.

"Why don't you have some plants around?" Maurice suggested; "they'd give you something to do! I saw a lot of hyacinths growing in gla.s.ses, once; I'll buy some bulbs for you."

"Oh, I'm one of the people flowers won't grow for," she said.

Mrs. Newbolt made a suggestion, too. "Pity you can't have Bingo to keep you company. That's what comes of boarding. I knew a woman who boarded, and she lost her teeth. Chambermaid threw 'em away. Come in and see me any evening when Maurice is out."

As Maurice was frequently out, the invitation was sometimes accepted, and it was on one of these occasions that Mrs. Newbolt, spreading out her cards on the green baize of her solitaire table with fat, beringed hands, made her suggestion:

"Eleanor, you've aged. I believe you're unhappy?"

"No, I'm not! Why should I be?"

"Well, I wouldn't blame you if you were," Mrs. Newbolt said. "'Course you'd have brought it on yourself; I could have told you what to expect!

Your dear uncle Thomas used to say that, after a thing happened, I was the one to tell people that they might have expected it. You see, I made a point of bein' intelligent; of course I wasn't _too_ intelligent. A man doesn't like that. You're gettin' gray, Eleanor. Pity you haven't children. _He_ doesn't look very contented!--but men are men," said Mrs.

Newbolt.

"He _ought_ to be contented," Eleanor said, pa.s.sionately; "I adore him!"

"You've got to interest him," her aunt said; "that's more important than adorin' him! A man can buy a certain kind of adoration, but he can't purchase interest."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Eleanor said, trembling.

"Well, if you don't, I'm sure I can't tell you," Mrs. Newbolt said, despairingly; but she made one more attempt: "My dear father used to say that the finest tribute a man could put on his wife's tombstone would be, '_She was interestin' to live with_.' So I tell you, Eleanor, if you want to hold that boy, _make him laugh_!" She was so much in earnest that for a few minutes she actually stopped talking!

Eleanor could not make Maurice laugh--she never made anybody laugh! But for a while she did "hold him"--because he was a gallant youngster, making the best of his bargain. That he had begun to know it was a bad bargain did not lessen his regret for his wife's childlessness, which he knew made her unhappy, nor his pity for her physical forlornness--which he blamed largely on himself: "She almost died that night on the mountain, to save my life!"

But he had ceased to be touched by her reiterated longing for children; he was even a little bored by it. And he was very much bored by her reproaches, her faint tempers and their following ardors of repentant love--bitternesses, and cloying sweetnesses! Yet, in spite of these things, the boarding-house marriage survived the lengthening of the fifty-four minutes of ecstasy into three years. But it might not have survived its own third winter had it not been that Maurice's unfaithfulness enforced his faithfulness. For by spring that squabble about lead pencils, which had turned his careless steps toward the bridge, had turned his life so far from Eleanor's that he had been untrue to her.

He had not meant to be untrue; nothing had been farther from his mind or purpose. But there came a bitter Sunday afternoon in March ...

Eleanor, saying he did not "understand her," cried about something--afterward Maurice was not sure just what--perhaps it was a question from one of the other boarders about the early 'eighties, and she felt herself insulted; "As if I could remember!" she told Maurice; but whatever it was, he had tried to comfort her by joking about it.

Then she had reproached him for his unkindness--to most crying wives a joke is unkind. Then she had said that he was tired of her! At which he took refuge in silence--and she cried out that he acknowledged it!