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THE VEHEMENT FLAME
A NOVEL
BY MARGARET DELAND
AUTHOR OF DR. LAVENDAR'S PEOPLE, OLD CHESTER TALES, ETC.
1922
TO LORIN:
Together, so many years ago--seven, I think, or eight--you and I planned
this story. The first chapters had the help of your criticism ... then,
I had to go on alone, urged by the memory of your interest. But all the
blunders are mine, not yours; and any merits are yours, not mine. That
it has been written, in these darkened years, has been because your
happy interest still helped me.
MARGARET
_May 12th, 1922_
THE VEHEMENT FLAME
CHAPTER I
_Love is as strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals
thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame._
_THE SONG OF SOLOMON, VIII, 6._
There is nothing in the world nobler, and lovelier, and more absurd,
than a boy's lovemaking. And the joyousness of it!...
The boy of nineteen, Maurice Curtis, who on a certain June day lay in
the blossoming grass at his wife's feet and looked up into her dark
eyes, was embodied Joy! The joy of the warm earth, of the sunshine
glinting on the slipping ripples of the river and sifting through the
cream-white blossoms of the locust which reared its sheltering branches
over their heads; the joy of mating insects and birds, of the whole
exulting, creating universe!--the unselfconscious, irresponsible, wholly
beautiful Joy of passion which is without apprehension or humor. The
eyes of the woman who sat in the grass beside this very young man,
answered his eyes with Love. But it was a more human love than his,
because there was doubt in its exultation....
The boy took out his watch and looked at it.
"We have been married," he said, "exactly fifty-four minutes."
"I can't believe it!" she said.
"If I love you like this after fifty-four minutes of married life, how
do you suppose I shall feel after fifty-four years of it?" He flung an
arm about her waist, and hid his face against her knee. "We are married,"
he said, in a smothered voice.
She bent over and kissed his thick hair, silently. At which he sat up
and looked at her with blue, eager eyes.
"It just came over me! Oh, Eleanor, suppose I hadn't got you? You said
'No' six times. You certainly did behave very badly," he said, showing
his white teeth in a broad grin.
"Some people win say I behaved very badly when I said 'Yes.'"
"Tell 'em to go to thunder! What does Mrs. Maurice Curtis (doesn't that
sound pretty fine?) care for a lot of old cats? Don't we _know_ that we
are in heaven?" He caught her hand and crushed it against his mouth. "I
wish," he said, very low, "I almost wish I could die, now, here! At your
feet. It seems as if I couldn't live, I am so--" He stopped. So--what?
Words are ridiculously inadequate things!... "Happiness" wasn't the name
of that fire in his breast, Happiness? "Why, it's God," he said to
himself; "_God._" Aloud, he said, again, "We are married!"
She did not speak--she was a creature of alluring silences--she just put
her hand in his. Suddenly she began to sing; there was a very noble
quality in the serene sweetness of her voice:
"O thou with dewy locks, who lookest down
Through the clear windows of the morning, ten
Thine angel eyes upon our western isle,
Which in full choir hails thy approach, O Spring!"
That last word rose like a flight of wings into the blue air. Her
husband looked at her; for a compelling instant his eyes dredged the
depths of hers, so that all the joyous, frightened woman in her
retreated behind a flutter of laughter.
"'O Spring!'" he repeated; "_we_ are Spring, Nelly--you and I.... I'll
never forget the first time I heard you sing that; snowing like blazes
it was,--do you remember? But I swear I felt this hot grass then in
Mrs. Newbolt's parlor, with all those awful bric-à-brac things around!
Yes," he said, putting his hand on a little sun-drenched bowlder jutting
from the earth beside him; "I felt this sun on my hand! And when you
came to 'O Spring!' I saw this sky--" He stopped, pulled three blades of
grass and began to braid them into a ring. "Lord!" he said, and his
voice was suddenly startled; "what a darned little thing can throw the
switches for a man! Because I didn't get by in Math. D and Ec 2, and had
to crawl out to Mercer to cram with old Bradley--I met you! Eleanor!
Isn't it wonderful? A little thing like that--just falling down in
mathematics--changed my whole life?" The wild gayety in his eyes
sobered. "I happened to come to Mercer--and, you are my wife." His
fingers, holding the little grassy ring, trembled; but the next instant
he threw himself back on the grass, and kicked up his heels in a
preposterous gesture of ecstasy. Then caught her hand, slipped the
braided ring over that plain circle of gold which had been on her finger
for fifty-four minutes, kissed it--and the palm of her hand--and said,
"You never can escape me! Eleanor, your voice played the deuce with me.
I rushed home and read every poem in my volume of Blake. Go on; give us
the rest."
She smiled;
".... And let our winds
Kiss thy perfumed garments; let us taste
Thy morn and evening breath!..."
"Oh--_stop_! I can't bear it," he said, huskily; and, turning on his
face, he kissed the grass, earth's "perfumed garment," snow-sprinkled
with locust blossoms....
But the moment of passion left him serious. "When I think of Mrs.
Newbolt," he said, "I could commit murder." In his own mind he was
saying, "I've rescued her!"
"Auntie doesn't mean to be unkind," Eleanor explained, simply; "only,
she never understood me--Maurice! Be careful! There's a little
ant--don't step on it."
She made him pause in his diatribe against Mrs. Newbolt and move his
heel while she pushed the ant aside with a clover blossom. Her anxious
gentleness made him laugh, but it seemed to him perfectly beautiful.
Then he went on about Mrs. Newbolt:
"Of course she couldn't understand _you_! You might as well expect a
high-tempered cow to understand a violin solo."
"How mad she'd be to be called a cow! Oh, Maurice, do you suppose she's
got my letter by this time? I left it on her bureau. She'll rage!"
"Let her rage. Nothing can separate us now."
Thus they dismissed Mrs. Newbolt, and the shock she was probably
experiencing at that very moment, while reading Eleanor's letter
announcing that, at thirty-nine, she was going to marry this very young
man.
"No; nothing can part us," Eleanor said; "forever and ever." And again
they were silent--islanded in rippling tides of wind-blown grass, with
the warm fragrance of dropping locust blossoms infolding them, and in
their ears the endless murmur of the river. Then Eleanor said, suddenly:
"Maurice!--Mr. Houghton? What will _he_ do when he hears? He'll think an
'elopement' is dreadful."
He chuckled. "Uncle Henry?--He isn't really my uncle, but I call him
that;--he won't rage. He'll just whistle. People of his age have to
whistle, to show they're alive. I have reason to believe," the cub said,
"that he 'whistled' when I flunked in my mid-years. Well, I felt sorry,
myself--on his account," Maurice said, with the serious and amiable
condescension of youth. "I hated to jar him. But--gosh! I'd have flunked
A B C's, for _this_. Nelly, I tell you heaven hasn't got anything on
this! As for Uncle Henry, I'll write him to-morrow that I had to get
married sort of in a hurry, because Mrs. Newbolt wanted to haul you off
to Europe. He'll understand. He's white. And he won't really mind--after
the first biff;--that will take him below the belt, I suppose, poor old
Uncle Henry! But after that, he'll adore you. He adores beauty."
Her delight in his praise made her almost beautiful; but she protested
that he was a goose. Then she took the little grass ring from her finger
and slipped it into her pocketbook. "I'm going to keep it always," she
said. "How about Mrs. Houghton?"
"She'll love you! She's a peach. And little Skeezics--"
"Who is Skeezics?"
"Edith. Their kid. Eleven years old. She paid me the compliment of
announcing, when she was seven, that she was going to marry me when she
grew up! But I believe, now, she has a crush on Sir Walter Raleigh.
She'll adore you, too."
"I'm afraid of them all," she confessed; "they won't like--an
elopement."
"They'll fall over themselves with joy to think I'm settled for life!
I'm afraid I've been a cussed nuisance to Uncle Henry," he said,
ruefully; "always doing fool things, you know,--I mean when I was a boy.
And he's been great, always. But I know he's been afraid I'd take a wild
flight in actresses."
"'_Wild_' flight? What will he call--" She caught her breath.
"He'll call it a 'wild flight in angels'!" he said.
The word made her put a laughing and protesting hand (which he kissed)
over his lips. Then she said that she remembered Mr. Houghton: "I met
him a long time ago; when--when you were a little boy."
"And yet here you are, 'Mrs. Maurice Curtis!' Isn't it supreme?"
he demanded. The moment was so beyond words that it made him
sophomoric--which was appropriate enough, even though his freshman year
had been halted by those examinations, which had so "jarred" his
guardian. "I'll be twenty in September," he said. Evidently the thought
of his increasing years gave him pleasure. That Eleanor's years were
also increasing did not occur to him; and no wonder, for, compared to
people like Mr. and Mrs. Houghton, Eleanor was young enough!--only
thirty-nine. It was back in the 'nineties that she had met her husband's
guardian, who, in those days, had been the owner of a cotton mill in
Mercer, but who now, instead of making money, cultivated potatoes (and
tried to paint). Eleanor knew the Houghtons when they were Mercer mill
folk, and, as she said, this charming youngster--living then in
Philadelphia--had been "a little boy"; now, here he was, her husband for
"fifty-four minutes." And she was almost forty, and he was nineteen.
That Henry Houghton, up on his mountain farm, pottering about in his
big, dusty studio, and delving among his potatoes, would whistle, was to
be expected.
"But who cares?" Maurice said. "It isn't his funeral."
"He'll think it's yours," she retorted, with a little laugh. She was not
much given to laughter. Her life had been singularly monotonous and,
having seen very little of the world, she had that self-distrust which
is afraid to laugh unless other people are laughing, too. She taught
singing at Fern Hill, a private school in Mercer's suburbs. She did not
care for the older pupils, but she was devoted to the very little girls.
She played wonderfully on the piano, and suffered from indigestion; her
face was at times almost beautiful; she had a round, full chin, and a
lovely red lower lip; her forehead was very white, with soft, dark hair
rippling away from it. Certainly, she had moments of beauty. She talked
very little; perhaps because she hadn't the chance to talk--living, as
she did, with an aunt who monopolized the conversation. She had no close
friends;--her shyness was so often mistaken for hauteur, that she did
not inspire friendship in women of her own age, and Mrs. Newbolt's
elderly acquaintances were merely condescending to her, and gave her
good advice; so it was a negative sort of life. Indeed, her sky terrier,
Bingo, and her laundress, Mrs. O'Brien, to whose crippled baby grandson
she was endlessly kind, knew her better than any of the people among
whom she lived. When Maurice Curtis, cramming in Mercer because Destiny
had broken his tutor's leg there, and presenting (with the bored
reluctance of a boy) a letter of introduction from his guardian to Mrs.
Newbolt--when Maurice met Mrs. Newbolt's niece, something happened.
Perhaps because he felt her starved longing for personal happiness, or
perhaps her obvious pleasure in listening, silently, to his eager talk,
touched his young vanity; whatever the reason was, the boy was
fascinated by her. He had ("cussing," as he had expressed it to himself)
accepted an invitation to dine with the "ancient dame" (again his
phrase!)--and behold the reward of merit:--the niece!--a gentle,
handsome woman, whose age never struck him, probably because her mind
was as immature as his own. Before dinner was over Eleanor's
silence--silence is very moving to youth, for who knows what it
hides?--and her deep, still eyes, lured him like a mystery. Then, after
dinner ("a darned good dinner," Maurice had conceded to himself) the
calm niece sang, and instantly he knew that it was Beauty which hid in
silence--and he was in love with her! He had dined with her on Tuesday,
called on Wednesday, proposed on Friday;--it was all quite like Solomon
Grundy! except that, although she had fallen in love with him almost as
instantly as he had fallen in love with her, she had, over and over
again, refused him. During the period of her refusals the boy's love
glowed like a furnace; it brought both power and maturity into his
fresh, ardent, sensitive face. He threw every thought to the
winds--except the thought of rescuing his princess from Mrs. Newbolt's
imprisoning bric-a-bràc. As for his "cramming" the tutor into whose
hands Mr. Houghton had committed his ward's very defective trigonometry
and economics, Mr. Bradley, held in Mercer because of an annoying
accident, said to himself that his intentions were honest, but if Curtis
didn't turn up for three days running, he would utilize the time his
pupil was paying for by writing a paper on "The Fourth Dimension."
Maurice was in some new dimension himself! Except "old Brad," he knew
almost no one in Mercer, so he had no confidant; and because his
passion was, perforce, inarticulate, his candid forehead gathered
wrinkles of positive suffering, which made him look as old as Eleanor,
who, dazed by the first very exciting thing that had ever happened to
her,--the experience of being adored (and adored by a boy, which is a
heady thing to a woman of her age!)--Eleanor was saying to herself a
dozen times a day: "I _mustn't_ say 'yes'! Oh, what _shall_ I do?" Then
suddenly there came a day when the rush of his passion decided what she
would do....
Her aunt had announced that she was going to Europe. "I'm goin' to take
you," Mrs. Newbolt said. "_I_ don't know what would become of you if I
left you alone! You are about as capable as a baby. That was a great
phrase of your dear uncle Thomas's--'capable as a baby,' I'm perfectly
sure the parlor ceilin' has got to be tinted this spring. When does your
school close? We'll go the minute it closes. You can board Bingo with
Mrs. O'Brien."
Eleanor, deeply hurt, was tempted to retort with the announcement that
she needn't be "left alone"; she might get married! But she was silent;
she never knew what to say when assailed by the older woman's tongue.
She just wrote Maurice, helplessly, that she was going abroad.
He was panic-stricken. Going abroad? Uncle Henry's ancient dame was a
she-devil, to carry her off! Then, in the midst of his anger, he
recognized his opportunity: "The hell-cat has done me a good turn, I do
believe! I'll get her! Bless the woman! I'll pay her passage myself, if
she'll only go and never come back!"
It was on the heels of Mrs. Newbolt's candor about Eleanor's
"capableness" that he swept her resistance away. "You've _got_ to marry
me," he told her; "that's all there is to it." He put his hand in his
pocket and pulled out a marriage license. "I'll call for you to-morrow
at ten; we'll go to the mayor's office. I've got it all fixed up. So,
you see there's no getting out of it."
"But," she protested, dazzled by the sheer, beautiful, impertinence of
it, "Maurice, I can't--I won't--I--"
"You _will_," he said. "To-morrow's Saturday," he added, practically,
"and there's no school, so you're free." He rose.... "Better leave a
letter for your aunt. I'll be here at five minutes to ten. Be ready!" He
paused and looked hard at her; caught her roughly in his arms, kissed
her on her mouth, and walked out of the room.
The mere violence of it lifted her into the Great Adventure! When he
commanded, "Be ready!" she, with a gasp, said, "Yes."
Well; they had gone to the mayor's office, and been married; then they
had got on a car and ridden through Mercer's dingy outskirts to the end
of the route in Medfield, where, beyond suburban uglinesses, there were
glimpses of green fields.
Once as the car rushed along, screeching around curves and banging over
switches, Eleanor said, "I've come out here four times a week for four
years, to Fern Hill."
And Maurice said: "Well, _that's_ over! No more school-teaching for
you!"
She smiled, then sighed. "I'll miss my little people," she said.
But except for that they were silent. When they left the car, he led the
way across a meadow to the bank of the river; there they sat down under
the locust, and he kissed her, quietly; then, for a while, still dumb
with the wonder of themselves, they watched the sky, and the sailing
white clouds, and the river--flowing--flowing; and each other.
"Fifty-four minutes," he had said....
So they sat there and planned for the endless future--the "fifty-four
years."
"When we have our golden wedding," he said, "we shall come back here,
and sit under this tree--" He paused; he would be--let's see: nineteen,
plus fifty, makes sixty-nine. He did not go farther with his mental
arithmetic, and say thirty-nine plus fifty; he was thinking only of
himself, not of her. In fifty years he would be, he told himself, an old
man.
And what would happen in all these fifty golden years? "You know, long
before that time, perhaps it won't be--just us?" he said.
The color leaped to her face; she nodded, finding no words in which to
expand that joyous "perhaps," which touched the quick in her. Instantly
that sum in addition which he had not essayed in his own mind, became
unimportant in hers. What difference did the twenty severing years make,
after all? Her heart rose with a bound--she had a quick vision of a
little head against her bosom! But she could not put it into words. She
only challenged, him:
"I am not clever like you. Do you think you can love a stupid person for
fifty years?"
"For a thousand years!--but you're not stupid."
She looked doubtful; then went on confessing: "Auntie says I'm a dummy,
because I don't talk very much. And I'm awfully timid. And she says I'm
jealous."
"You don't talk because you're always thinking; that's one of the most
fascinating things about you, Eleanor,--you keep me wondering what on
earth you're thinking about. It's the mystery of you that gets me! And
if you're 'timid'--well, so long as you're not afraid of me, the more
scared you are, the better I like it. A man," said Maurice, "likes to
feel that he protects his--his wife." He paused and repeated the glowing
word ... "his wife!" For a moment he could not go on with their careless
talk; then he was practical again. That word "protect" was too robust
for sentimentality. "As for being jealous, that, about me, is a joke!
And if you were, it would only mean that you loved me--so I would be
flattered. I hope you'll be jealous! Eleanor, _promise_ me you'll be
jealous?" They both laughed; then he said: "I've made up my mind to one
thing. I won't go back to college."
"Oh, Maurice!"
He was very matter of fact. "I'm a married man; I'm going to support my
wife!" He ran his fingers through his thick blond hair in ridiculous
pantomime of terrified responsibility. "Yes, sir! I'm out for dollars.
Well, I'm glad I haven't any near relations to get on their ear, and try
and mind my business for me. Of course," he ruminated, "Bradley will
kick like a steer, when I tell him he's bounced! But that will be on
account of money. Oh, I'll pay him, all same," he said, largely. "Yes;
I'm going to get a job." His face sobered into serious happiness. "My
allowance won't provide bones for Bingo! So it's business for me."
She looked a little frightened. "Oh, have I made you go to work?" She
had never asked him about money; she had plunged into matrimony without
the slightest knowledge of his income.
"I'll chuck Bradley, and I'll chuck college," he announced, "I've got
to! Of course, ultimately, I'll have plenty of money. Mr. Houghton has
dry-nursed what father left me, and he has done mighty well with it; but
I can't touch it till I'm twenty-five--worse luck! Father had theories
about a fellow being kept down to brass tacks and earning his living,
before he inherited money another man had earned--that's the way he put
it. Queer idea. So, I must get a job. Uncle Henry'll help me. You may
bet on it that Mrs. Maurice Curtis shall not wash dishes, nor yet feed
the swine, but live on strawberries, sugar, and--What's the rest of it?"
"I have a little money of my own," she said; "six hundred a year."
"It will pay for your hairpins," he said, and put out his hand and
touched her hair--black, and very soft and wavy "but the strawberries
I shall provide."
"I never thought about money," she confessed.
"Of course not! Angels don't think about money."
* * * * *
"So they were married"; and in the meadow, fifty-four
minutes later, the sun and wind and moving shadows, and the
river--flowing--flowing--heralded the golden years, and ended
the saying: "_lived happy ever afterward_."