But the time arrived when Mrs. Houghton was certain that she "liked"
Maurice's wife. It would have come sooner if Eleanor's real sweetness
had not been hidden by her tiresome timidity ... a thunderstorm sent
her, blanched and panting, to sit huddled on her bed, shutters closed,
shades drawn; she schemed not to go upstairs by herself in the dark; she
was preoccupied when old Lion took them off on a slow, jogging drive,
for fear of a runaway.
Everybody was aware of her nervousness. Until it bored him, Henry
Houghton was touched by it;--probably there is no man who is so
intelligent that the Clinging Vine makes no appeal to him. Mrs. Houghton
was impatient with it. Edith, who could not understand fear in any form,
tried, in her friendly little way, to reason Eleanor out of one panic or
another. The servants joked among themselves at the foolishness of "Mrs.
Maurice"; and the monosyllabic Johnny Bennett, when told of some of
Eleanor's scares, was bored. "Let's play Indian," said Johnny.
It was only Maurice who found all the scares--just as he found the
silences and small jealousies--adorable! The silences meant unspeakable
depths of thought; the jealousies were a sign of love. The terrors
called for his protecting strength! One of the unfair irrationalities
of love is that it may, at first, be attracted by the defects of the
beloved, and later repelled by them. Maurice loved Eleanor for her
defects. Once, when he and Edith were helping Mrs. Houghton weed her
garden, he stopped grubbing, and sat down in the gold and bronze glitter
of coreopsis, to expatiate upon the exquisiteness of the defects. Her
wonderful mind: "She doesn't talk, because she is always thinking; her
ideas are way over _my_ head!" Her funny timidity: "She wants me to
take care of her!" Her love: "She's--it sounds absurd!--but she's
jealous, because she's so--well, fond of me, don't you know, that she
sort of objects to having people round. Did you ever hear of anything so
absurd?"
"I certainly never did," his old friend said, dryly.
"Well, but"--Maurice defended his wife--"it's because she cares about
me, don't you know? She--well, this is in confidence--she said once that
she'd like to live on a desert island, just with me!"
"So would I," said Edith. Her mother laughed:
"Tell her desert islands have to have a 'man Friday'--to say nothing of
a few 'women Thursdays'!"
Eleanor was, Maurice said, like music heard far off, through mists and
moonlight in a dark garden, "full of--of--what are those sweet-smelling
things, that bloom only at night?" (Mary Houghton looked fatigued.)
"Well, anyway, what I mean is that she isn't like ordinary people, like
me--"
"Or Johnny," Edith broke in, earnestly.
"Johnny? Gosh! Why, Mrs. Houghton, things that don't touch most human
beings, affect her terribly. The dark, or thunderstorms, or--or
anything, makes her nervous. You understand?"
Mrs. Houghton said yes, she understood, but she would leave the rest of
the weeding to her assistants ... In the studio, dropping her dusty
garden gloves on a fresh canvas lying on the table, she almost wept:
"Henry, it is _too_ tragic! She is such a goose, and he is so silly
about her! What shall we do?"
"I'll tell you what not to do--spoil my new canvas! If you _really_ want
my advice:--tell Eleanor that the greatest compliment any husband can
pay his wife is contained in four words: 'You never bore me'; and that
if she isn't careful Maurice will never compliment her."
Down in the garden, no one was aware of any tragedy. "When I go to Fern
Hill," Edith said, "I'm going to tell all the girls _I know Eleanor_!
I'm 'ordinary,' too, beside her. And so is mother."
Maurice agreed. "We are all crude, compared to her."
Edith sighed with joy; if she had had any inclination to be contemptuous
of Eleanor's timidity, it vanished when it was pointed out to her that
it was really a sign of the Bride's infinite superiority.... So the
three Houghtons accepted--one with amused pity, and the other with
concern, and the third with admiration of such super-refinement,--the
fact that Eleanor was a coward. Yet if she had not been a coward,
something she did would not have been particularly brave, nor would it
have wrung from Mary Houghton the admission: "I _like_ her!"
The conquering incident happened in August. The hut up in the woods
meant to Maurice and Edith and Johnny that eager grasping at hardship
with which Age has no sympathy, but which is the very essence of Youth.
Within a week of her arrival at Green Hill, Eleanor (who did not like
hardship;) had been carried off for a day of eating smoky food, cooked
on a camp fire, and watching cloud shadows drift across the valley and
up and over the hills; she had wondered, silently, why Maurice liked
this very tiring sort of thing?--and especially why he liked to have
Edith go along! "A child of her age is such a nuisance," Eleanor
thought. But he did like it, all of it!--the fatigue, and the smoke, and
the grubby food--and Edith!--he liked it so much that, just before the
time set for their departure for Mercer--and the position in a
real-estate office, which had been secured for Maurice--he said:
"Nelly, let's camp out up in the cabin for our last week, all by
ourselves!"
Edith's face fell, and so, for that matter, did the Bride's. Edith said,
"By yourselves? Not Johnny and me, too?" And Eleanor said, "_At night?_
Oh, Maurice!"
"It will be beautiful," he said; "there'll be a moon next week, and
we'll sit up there and look down into the valley, and see the treetops
lift up out of the mist--like islands from the foam of 'faerylands
forlorn'! You'll love it."
"I'm crazy about camping," said Edith, eagerly;--and waited for an
invitation, which was not forthcoming. Instead, Maurice, talking his
plans over with her, made it quite clear that her room was better than
her company. It was Edith's first experience in being left out, and it
sobered her a little; but she swallowed the affront with her usual good
sense:
"I guess he likes Eleanor more 'an me, so, 'course, it's nice to be by
himself with her."
The prospect of being "by themselves" for a week was deeply moving to
Maurice. And even Eleanor, though she quaked at the idea of spiders or
thunderstorms, thought of the passion of it with a thrill. "We'll be all
alone!" she said to herself.
The morning that they started gypsying, everything was very impatient
and delightful. The packing, the rolling up of blankets, the stowing of
cooking utensils, the consulting of food lists to make sure nothing was
being forgotten--all meant much tearing about and bossing; then came the
loading the stuff into the light wagon, which, with old Lion, Mr.
Houghton had offered to convey the campers (and a temporary Edith) up to
the top of the mountain. Edith was, of course, frankly envious, but
accepted the privilege of even a day in camp with humble gratitude.
"Rover and Johnny and I will come up pretty often, even if it's only for
an hour, because Eleanor must not hurt her hands by washing dishes," she
said, earnestly (still fishing for an invitation).
But Maurice only agreed, as earnestly: "No! Imagine Eleanor washing
dishes! But I don't want you to stay all night, Buster," he told her,
candidly; then he paused in his work, flung up his arms with a great
breath of joyousness. "Great Scott!" he said. "I don't see why gypsies
_ever_ die!"
Edith felt an answering throb of ecstasy. "Oh, Maurice, I wish you and
I were gypsies!" she said. She did not in the least resent his candor
as to her presence during the week of camping; though just before they
started her feelings really were a little hurt: it happened that in
trying to help Eleanor pack, she was close enough to her to notice a
thread on her hair; instantly, she put out a friendly and officious
thumb and finger to remove it--at which Eleanor winced, and said,
"_Ouch!_"
"I thought it was a white thread," Edith explained, abashed.
Eleanor said, sharply, "Please don't touch my hair!" which conveyed
nothing to Edith except that the Bride--who instantly ran up to her
room--"was mad." When she came back (the "thread" having disappeared)
Edith was full of apologies.
"Awfully sorry I mussed your hair," she said.
She went up the mountain with them, walking on the hard grades, and
trying to placate Eleanor by keeping a hand on Lion's bridle, so that
she might feel sure he wouldn't run away. When at last, rather blown and
perspiring, they reached the camp, Eleanor got out of the wagon and said
she wanted to "help"; but Edith, still contrite about the "thread,"
said: "Not I'm not going to have you hurt your lovely hands!" In the
late afternoon, having saved Eleanor's hands in every possible way, she
left them, and thinking, without the slightest rancor, of the rough
bliss she was not asked to share, went running down the mountain with
Rover at her heels.
Eleanor, wondering at her willingness to take that long road home with
only the lumbering old dog for company, was intensely glad to have her
go.
"Girls of that age are so uninteresting," she told Maurice; "and now
we'll be all by ourselves!"
"Yes; Adam and Eve," he said; "and twilight; and the world spread out
like a garden! Do you see that glimmer over there to the left? That's
the beginning of the river--our river!"
He had made her comfortable with some cushions piled against the trunk
of a tree, and lighted a fire in a ring of blackened stones; then he
brought her her supper, and ate his own on his knees beside her,
watching eagerly for ways to serve her, laughing because she cringed
when, from an overhanging bough, a spider let himself down upon her
skirt, and hurrying to bring her a fresh cup of coffee, because an
unhappy ant had scalded himself to death in her first cup. Afterward he
would not let her "hurt her hands" by washing the dishes. When this was
over, and the dusk was deepening, he went into the woods to the
"lean-to" in which Lion was quartered, to see that the old horse was
comfortable, but a minute later came crashing back through the
underbrush, laughing, but provoked.
"That imp, Edith, didn't hitch him securely, and the old fellow has
walked home, if you please--!"
"Lion--gone? Oh, what shall we do?"
"Ill pull the wagon down when I want to go back for food."
"_Pull_ it?"
"Won't need much pulling! It will go down by itself. If I put you in it,
I'll have to rope a log on behind as a brake, or it would run over me! I
bet I give Edith a piece of my mind, when I get hold of her. But it
doesn't really matter. I think I like it better to have not even Lion.
Just you--and the stars. They are beginning to prick out," he said. He
stretched himself on the ground beside her, his hands clasped under his
head, and his happy eyes looking up into the abyss. "Sing, Star, sing!"
he said. So she sang, softly:
"How many times do I love again?
Tell me how many beads there are
In a silver chain
Of evening rain
Unraveled from the tumbling main
And threading the eye of a yellow star--
So many times--
"It looks," she broke off, "a little black in the west? And--was that
lightning?"
"Only heat lightning. And if it should storm,--I have you here, in my
arms, alone!" He turned and caught her to him, and his mouth crushed
hers. Her eyes closed, and her passion answered his, and all that he
whispered. Yet while he kissed her, her eyes opened and she looked
furtively beyond him, toward that gathering blackness.
They lay there together in the starlit dark, for a long time, his head
on her breast. Sometimes she thrilled at his touch or low word, and
sometimes she held his hand against her lips and kissed it--which made
him protest--but suddenly he said, "By George! Nelly, I believe we are
going to have a shower!"
Instantly she was alert with fright, and sat up, and looked down into
the valley, where the heat lightning, which had been winking along the
line of the hills, suddenly sharpened into a flash. "_Oh!_" she said,
and held her breath until, from very far off, came a faint grumble of
thunder. "Oh, Maurice!" she said, "it is horrible to be out here--if it
thunders!"
"We won't be. Well go into the cabin, and we'll hear the rain on the
roof, and the clash of the branches; and we'll see the lightning through
the chinks--and I'll have you! Oh, Nelly, we shall be part of the
storm!--and nothing in God's world can separate us."
But this time she could not answer with any elemental impulse; she had
no understanding of "being part of the storm"; instead, she watched the
horizon. "Oh!" she said, flinching. "I don't like it. What shall we do?
Maurice, it _is_ going to thunder!"
"I think I did feel a drop of rain," he said,--and held out his hand:
"Yes, Star, rain! It's begun!" He helped her to her feet, gathered up
some of the cushions, and hurried her toward the little shelter. She ran
ahead of him, her very feet reluctant, lest the possible "snake" should
curl in the darkness against her ankles; but once in the cabin, with a
candle lighted, she could not see the lightning, so she was able to
laugh at herself; when Maurice went out for the rest of the cushions,
she charged him to _hurry_! "The storm will be here in a minute!" she
called to him. And he called back:
"I'll only be a second!"
She stood in the doorway looking after him, and saw his figure outlined
against the glimmer of their fire, which had already felt the spatter of
the coming storm and was dying down; then, even as she looked, he seemed
to plunge forward, and fall--the thud of that fall was like a blow on
her throat! She gasped, "Maurice--" And again, "_Maurice!_ Have you hurt
yourself?"
He did not rise. A splash of rain struck her face; the mountain darkness
was slit by a rapier of lightning, and there was a sudden violent
illumination; she saw the tree and the cushions, and Maurice on the
ground--then blackness, and a tremendous crash of thunder.
"Maurice!" she called. "Maurice!" The branches over the roof began to
move and rustle, and there was a sudden downpour of rain; the camp fire
went out, as if an extinguisher had covered it. She stood in the doorway
for a breathless instant, then ran back into the cabin, and, catching
the candle from the table, stepped out into the blackness; instantly the
wind bore the little flame away!--then seemed to grip her, and twist her
about, and beat her back into the house. In her terror she screamed his
name; and as she did so, another flash of lightning showed her his
figure, motionless on the ground.
"_He is dead_" she said to herself, in a whisper. "What shall I do?"
Then, suddenly, she knew what to do: she remembered that she had noticed
a lantern hanging on the wall near the door; and now something impelled
her to get it. In the stifling darkness of the shack she felt her way to
it, held its oily ring in her hand, thought, frantically, of matches,
groped along toward the mantelpiece, stumbled over a chair--and clutched
at the match box! Something made her open the isinglass slide, strike a
match, and touch the blackened wick with the sulphurous sputter of
flame,--the next moment, with the lighted lantern in her hand, she was
out in the sheeting blackness of the rain!--running!--running!--toward
that still figure by the deadened fire. Just before she reached it a
twig rolled under her foot, and she said, "A _snake_,"--but she did not
flinch. As she gained the circle of stones, a flash of lightning, with
its instant and terrific crack and bellow of thunder, showed her a
streak of blood on Maurice's face.... He had tripped and fallen, and his
head had struck one of the blackened stones.
"He is dead," she said again, aloud. She put the lantern on the ground
and knelt beside him; she had an idea that she should place her hand on
his heart to see if he were alive. "He isn't," she told herself; but she
laid her fingers, which were shaking so that she could not unfasten his
coat, somewhere on his left side; she did not know whether there was any
pulse; she knew nothing, except that he was "dead." She said this in a
whisper, over and over. "He is dead. He is dead." The rain came down in
torrents; the trees creaked and groaned in the wind; twice there were
flashes of lightning and appalling roars of thunder. Maurice was
perfectly still. The smoky glimmer of the lantern played on the thin
streak of blood and made it look as though it was moving--trickling--
Then Eleanor began to think: "There ought to be a doctor...." If
she left him, to bring help, he might bleed to death before she
could get back to him. Instantly, as she said that, she knew that
she did not believe that he was dead! She knew that she had hope.
With hope, a single thought possessed her. _She must take him down
the mountain...._ But how? She could not carry him;--she had managed to
prop him up against her knee, his blond head lolling forward, awfully,
on his breast--but she knew that to carry him would be impossible. And
Lion was not there! "I couldn't have harnessed him if he were," she
thought.
She was entirely calm, but her mind was working rapidly: The wagon
was in the lean-to! Could she get him into it? The road was
downhill.... Almost to Doctor Bennett's door....
Instantly she sprang to her feet and, with the pale gleam of the lantern
zigzagging across the path, she ran back to the shed; just as she
reached it, a glimmer of light fell on the soaked earth, and she looked
up with a start and saw the moon peering out between two ragged, swiftly
moving clouds; then all was black again--but the rain was lessening, and
there had been no lightning for several minutes. "He will die; I must
save him," she said, her lips stiff with horror. She lifted the shafts
of the wagon, and gave a little pull; it moved easily enough, and,
guiding it along the slight decline, she brought it to Maurice's side.
There, looking at him, she said again, rigidly:
"He will die; I must save him."
As Henry Houghton said afterward, "It was impossible!--so she did it."
It took her more than an hour to do it, to pull and lift and shove the
inert figure! Afterward she used to wonder how she had done it; wonder
how she had given the final _push_, which got his sagging body up on to
the floor of the wagon! It had strained every part of her;--her shoulder
against his hips, her head in the small of his back, her hands gripping
his heavy, dangling legs. She was soaking wet; her hair had loosened,
and stray locks were plastered across her forehead. She grunted like a
toiling animal.
It seemed as if her heart would crack with her effort, her muscles
tear; she forgot the retreating rumble of the storm, the brooding,
dripping forest stillness; she forgot even her certainty that he would
die. She entirely forgot herself. She only knew--straining, gasping,
sweating--that she must get the body--the dead body perhaps!--into the
wagon. And she did it! Just as she did it, she heard a faint groan. Her
heart stood still with terror, then beat frantically with joy.
_He was alive!_
She ran back to the cabin for the cushions he had saved from the rain,
and pushed them under his head; then tied the lantern to the whip
socket; then recalled what he had said about "roping a log on behind as
a brake." "Of course!" she thought; and managed,--the splinters tearing
her hands--to fasten a fairly heavy piece of wood under the rear axle,
so that it might bump along behind the wagon as a drag. She pondered as
she did these things why she should know so certainly how they must be
done? But when they were done, she said, _"Now!"..._ and went and stood
between the shafts.
It was after midnight when the descent began. The moon rode high among
fleecy clouds, but on either side of the road gulfs of darkness lay
under motionless foliage. Sometimes the smoky light from the swaying
lantern shone on a wet black branch, snapped by the gale and lying in
the path, and Eleanor, seeing it, wedging her heels into the mud and
sliding stones of the road, and straining backward between the shafts,
would say, "A snake.... I must save Maurice." Sometimes she would hear,
above the crunching of the wheels behind her, a faint noise in the
undergrowth: a breaking twig, a brushing sound, as of a furtive
footstep--and she would say, "A man.... I must save Maurice."
The yellow flame of the lantern was burning white in the dawn, as,
holding back against the weight of the wagon--the palms of her bleeding
hands clenched on the shafts, her feet slipping, her ankles twisted and
wrenched--by and by, with the tears of physical suffering streaming down
her face, she reached the foot of the mountain. The, thin, cool air of
morning flowed about her in crystalline stillness; suddenly the sun
tipped the green bowl of the world, and all at once shadows fell across
the road like bars. They seemed to her, in her daze of terror and
exhaustion, insurmountable: the road was level now, but she pulled and
pulled, agonizingly, over those bars of nothingness; then one wheel sank
into a rut, and the wagon came to a dead standstill; but at the same
moment she saw ahead of her, among the trees, Doctor Bennett's dark,
sleeping house. So, dropping the shafts, she went stumbling and running,
to pound on the door, and gasp out:
"Come--help--Maurice--come--"
* * * * *
"I think," she said afterward, lying like a broken thing upon her bed,
"I was able to do it, because I kept saying, 'I must save Maurice.' Of
course, to save Maurice, I wouldn't mind dying."
"My dear, you are magnificent!" Mary Houghton said, huskily. Then she
told her husband: "Henry, I _like_ her! I never thought I would, but I
do."
"I'll never say 'Mr. F.'s aunt' again!" he promised, with real
contrition.
It was Eleanor's conquering moment, for everybody liked her, and
everybody said she was 'magnificent'--except Maurice, who, as he got
well, said almost nothing.
"I can't talk about it," was all he had to say, choking. "She's given
her life for mine," he told the doctor.
"I hope not," Doctor Bennett said, "I _hope_ not. But it will take
months, Maurice, for her to get over this. As for saving your life, my
boy, she didn't. She made things a lot more dangerous for you. She did
the wrong thing--with greatness! You'd have come to, after a while. But
don't tell her so."
"Well, I should say not!" Maurice said, hotly. "She'll never know
_that_! And anyway, sir, I don't believe it. I believe she saved my
life."
"Well, suit yourself," the doctor said, good-naturedly; "but I tell
you one thing: whether she saved your life or not, she did a really
wonderful thing--considering her temperament."
Maurice frowned: "I don't think her temperament makes any difference. It
would have been wonderful for anybody."
"Well, suit yourself," Doctor Bennett said again; "only, if Edith had
done it, say, for Johnny, who weighs nearly as much as you, I wouldn't
have called it particularly wonderful."
"Oh, Edith," Maurice said, grinning; "no; I suppose not. I see what you
mean." And to himself he added: "Edith is like an ox, compared to Star.
Just flesh and blood. No nerves. No soul. Doctor Bennett was right.
Eleanor's temperament does make it more wonderful."