It was after this act of revealing and unnecessary courage, that the
Houghton family entirely accepted Eleanor. There were a few days of
anxiety about her, and about Maurice, too; for, though his slight
concussion was not exactly alarming--yet, "Keep your shirt on," Doctor
Bennett cautioned him; "don't get gay. And don't talk to Mrs. Curtis."
So Maurice lay in his bed in another room, and entered, silently, into a
new understanding of love, which, as soon as he was permitted to see
Eleanor, he tried stumblingly to share with her.
Physically, she was terribly prostrated; but spiritually, feeding on
those stumbling words, she rejoiced like a strong man to run a race! She
saw no confession in the fact that everybody was astonished at what she
had done; she was astonished herself. "I wasn't afraid!" she said,
wonderingly.
"It was because you liked Maurice more than you were scared," Edith
said; she offered this explanation the day that Maurice had been allowed
to come across the hall, rather shakily, to adore his wife.
His first sight of her was a great shock.... The strain of that terrible
night had blanched and withered her face; there were lines on her
forehead that never left it.
Edith, sneaking in behind him, said under her breath: "Goodness! Don't
she look old!"
She did. But as Maurice fell on his knees beside her, it seemed as if
she drank youth from his lips. Under his kisses her worn face bloomed
with joy.
"It was nothing--nothing," she insisted, stroking his thick hair with
her trembling hand, and trying to silence his words of wondering
worship.
"I was not worthy of it.... To think that you--" He hid his face on her
shoulder.
Afterward, when he went back to his own room, she lay, smiling
tranquilly to herself; her look was the look one sees on the face of a
woman who, in that pallid hour after the supreme achievement of birth,
has looked upon her child. She was entirely happy. From the open door of
Maurice's room came, now and then, the murmur of Edith's honest little
voice, or Maurice's chuckle. They were talking about her, she knew, and
the happy color burned in her cheeks. When he came in for his second
visit, late that afternoon, she asked him, archly, what he and Edith had
been talking about so long in his room?
"I believe you were telling her what a goose I am about thunderstorms,"
she said.
"I was not!" he declared--and her eyes shone. But when she urged--
"Well, what _were_ you talking about?" he couldn't remember anything but
a silly story of Edith's hens. He repeated it, and Eleanor sighed; how
could he be interested in anything so childish!
As it happened, he was not; he had scarcely listened to Edith. The only
thing that interested Maurice now, was what Eleanor had done for him!
Thinking of it, he brooded over her, silently, his cheek against hers,
then Mrs. Houghton came in and banished him, saying that Eleanor must go
to sleep; "and you and Edith must keep quiet!" she said.
He was so contrite that, tiptoeing to his own room, he told poor
faithful Edith her voice was too loud: "You disturb Eleanor. So dry up,
Skeezics!"
As he grew stronger, and was able to go downstairs, Edith felt freer to
talk to him--for down on the porch, or out in the garden, her eager
young voice would not reach those languid ears. Then, suddenly, all her
chances to talk stopped: "What's the matter with Maurice?" she pondered,
crossly; "he's backed out of helping me. Why can't he go on shingling
the chicken coop?" For it was while this delightful work was under way
that it, and "talk," came to an abrupt end.
The shingling, begun joyously by the big boy and the little girl on
Monday, promised several delightfully busy mornings.... Of course the
setting out for Mercer had been postponed; there was no possibility of
moving Eleanor for the present; so Maurice's "business career," as he
called it, with grinning pomposity, had to be delayed--Eleanor turned
white at the mere suggestion of convalascing at Green Hill without him!
Consequently Maurice, when not worshiping his wife, had nothing to do,
and Edith had seized the opportunity to make him useful.... "We'll
shingle my henhouse," she had announced. Maurice liked the scheme as
much as she did. The September air, the smell of the fresh shingles, the
sitting with one leg doubled under you, and the other outstretched on
the hot slope of the roof, the tap-tapping of the hammers, the bossing
of Edith, the trying to talk of Eleanor, and thunderstorms, while you
hold eight nails between your lips; then the pause while Edith climbs
down the ladder and runs to the kitchen for hot cookies; all these
things would be a delightful occupation for any intelligent person!
"It'll take three mornings to do it," Edith said, importantly; and
Maurice said:
"It will, because you keep putting the wrong end up! I wish Eleanor was
well enough to do it," he said--and then burst into self-derisive
chuckles: "Imagine Eleanor straddling that ridgepole! It would scare her
stiff!"
It was after this talk that Maurice "backed out" on the job--but Edith
never knew why. She saw no connection between the unfinished roof, and
the fact that that same afternoon, sitting on the floor in the Bride's
room, she had, in her anxiety to be entertaining, repeated Maurice's
remark about the ridgepole. Eleanor, who had had an empty morning,
listening to the distant tapping of hammers, had drooped a weary lip.
"I should hate it. Horrid, dirty work!"
"Oh no! It's nice, clean work," Edith corrected her.
"But _you_ wouldn't like it, of course," she said, with satisfaction;
"you'd be scared! You're scared of everything, Maurice says. You were
scared to death, up on the mountain."
Eleanor was silent.
"He thinks it's lovely for you to be scared; it's funny about Maurice,"
said Edith, thoughtfully; "he doesn't like it when _I'm_ scared--not
that I ever am, now, but I used to be when I was a child."
The color flickered on Eleanor's cheeks: "Edith, I'll rest now," she
said; her voice broke.
Edith looked at her, open-mouthed. "Why, Eleanor!" she said; "what's the
matter? Are you mad at anything? Have you a stomachache? I'll run for
mother!"
"There's nothing the matter. But--but I wish you'd tell Maurice to come
and speak to me."
Edith tore downstairs, and out of the front door: "Maurice! Where are
you?"--then, catching sight of him, reading and smoking in a hammock
slung between two of the big columns on the east porch, she rushed at
him, and pulled him to his astonished feet. "Eleanor wants you!
Something's the matter, and--"
Before she could finish, Maurice was tearing upstairs, two steps at a
time....
And so it was that Edith, sulkily, worked on the roof by herself.
Yet Maurice had not entirely "backed out." ... The very next morning,
before Edith was awake, he had gone out to the henhouse, and, alone,
done more than his share of the shingling.
"But, Maurice, why didn't you wake me?" Edith protested, when she
discovered what he had done. "I'd have gone out, too!"
"I liked doing it by myself," Maurice evaded.
And for five minutes Edith was sulky again. "He puts on airs, 'cause
he's married! Well, I don't care. He can shingle the whole roof by
himself if he wants to! I don't like married men, anyhow."
The married man had, indeed, wanted to be by himself--to put the nails
in his mouth, and to sit on the cold, slippery shingles in the gray
September morning, and to tap-tap-tap--and think, and think.
But he didn't like his thoughts very well....
He thought how he had rushed upstairs, terrified lest Eleanor was
fainting or had a "stomachache," or something--and found her sitting up
in bed, her cheeks red and glazed with tears, her round, full chin
quivering. He thought how he had tried to make out what she was driving
at about Edith, and the chicken coop, and the ridgepole!
"You told Edith I was scared!"
Maurice's bewilderment was full of stumbling questions: "Told Edith?
When? What?"
And as she said "when" and "what," ending with, "You said I am scared!"
Maurice could only say, blankly. "But my darling, you _are_!"
"You may think I am a fool, but to tell Edith so--"
"But Great Scott! I didn't!"
"I won't have you talking me over with Edith; she's a _child_! It was
just what you did when you danced three times with that girl who
said--Edith is as rude as she was!--and she's a _child_. How can you
like to be with a child?" Of course, it was all her fear of Youth,--but
Eleanor did not know that; she thought she was hurt at the boy's
neglect. Her face, wet with tears, was twitching, her voice--that lovely
voice!--was shrill in his astonished ears....
Maurice, on the sloping roof, in the chill September dawn, his fingers
numb on the frosty nails, stopped hammering, and leaned his chin on his
fist, and thought: "She's sick. She almost killed herself to save me; so
her nerve has all gone. That's why she talked--that way." He put a
shingle in its place, and planted a nail; "it was because she was scared
that what she did was so brave! I couldn't make her see that the more
scared she was, the braver she was. It wouldn't have been brave in that
gump, Edith, without a nerve in her body. But why is she down on Edith?
I suppose she's a nuisance to a person with a wonderful mind like
Eleanor's. Talks too much. I'll tell her to dry up when she's with
Eleanor." And again he heard that strange voice: "You like to talk to a
_child_."
Maurice, pounding away on Edith's roof, grew hot with misery, not
because it was so terrible to have Eleanor angry with him; not even
because he had finally got mad, and answered back, and said, "Don't be
silly!" The real misery was something far deeper than this half-amused
remorse. It was that those harmless, scolding words of his held a
perfectly new idea: he had said, "Don't be silly." _Was Eleanor silly?_
Now, to a man whose feeling about his wife has been a sort of awe, this
question is terrifying. Maurice, in his boy's heart, had worshiped in
Eleanor, not just the god of Love, but the love of God. And was
she--_silly_? No! Of course not! He pounded violently, hit his thumb,
put it into his mouth, then proceeded, mumblingly, to bring his god back
from the lower shrine of a pitying heart, to the high alter of a
justifying mind: Eleanor was ill.... She was nervous.... She was an
exquisite being of mist and music and courage and love! So of course she
was sensitive to things ordinary people did not feel. Saying this, and
fitting the shingles into place, suddenly the warm and happy wave of
confident idealism began to flood in upon him, and immediately his mind
as well as his heart was satisfied. He reproached himself for having
been scared lest his star was just a common candle, like himself. He had
been cruel to judge her, as he might have judged her had she been
well--or a gump like Edith! For had she been well, she would not have
been "silly"! Had she been well--instead of lying there in her bed,
white and strained and trembling, all because she had saved his life,
harnessing herself to that wagon, and bringing him, in the darkness,
through a thousand terrors--nonexistent, to be sure, but none the less
real--to safety and life! Oh, how could he have even thought the word
"silly"? He was ashamed and humble; never again would he be cross to
her! "Silly? I'm the silly one! I'm an ass. I'll tell her so! I don't
suppose she'll ever forgive me. She said I 'didn't understand her';
well, I didn't! But she'll never have cause to say it again! I
understand her now," Then, once more, he thought, frowning, "But why is
she so down on Edith?"
That Eleanor's irritation was jealousy--not of Edith, but of Edith's
years--never occurred to him. So all he said was, "She oughtn't to be
down on Edith; _she_ has always appreciated her!" Edith had never said
that Eleanor was "silly"! But so long as it bothered Eleanor (being
nervous) to have the imp round, he'd tell her not to be a nuisance. "You
can say anything to Skeezics; she has sense. She understands."
But all the same, Maurice shingled his part of the henhouse before
breakfast.
Maurice did not call Eleanor "silly" again for a long time. There was
always--when she was unreasonable--the curbing memory that her
reasonableness had been shaken by that assault of darkness and fear, and
the terrible fatigue of saving his robust young life. Furthermore,
Doctor Bennett--telling Henry Houghton that Eleanor had done the worst
possible thing, "magnificently"--told Maurice she had "nervous
prostration,"--a cloaking phrase which kindly doctors often give to
perplexed husbands, so that the egotism of sickly wives may be covered
up! So Maurice, repeating to himself these useful words, saw only ill
health, not silliness, in Eleanor's occasional tears. It was a week
after the shingling of the henhouse, that, leaving her to recuperate
still further at Green Hill, he started in on his job of "office
boy"--his jocose title for his position in the real-estate office in
Mercer. Eleanor did not want to be left, and said so, wistfully.
"I'll come up for Sundays," Maurice comforted her, tenderly.
On these weekly visits the Houghtons were impressed by his tenderness;
he played solitaire with his wife by the hour; he read poetry to her
until she fell asleep; and he told her everything he had done and every
person he had seen, while he was away from her! But the rest of the
household didn't get much enjoyment out of Eleanor. Even the adoring
Edith had moments when admiration had to be propped up by Doctor
Bennett's phrase. As, for instance, on one of Maurice's precious
Sundays, he and she and Johnny Bennett and Rover and old Lion climbed up
to the cabin to make things shipshape before closing the place for the
winter.
"You'll be away from me all day," Eleanor said, and her eyes filled.
Maurice said he hated to leave her, but he had always helped Edith on
this closing-up job.
"Oh, well; go, if you want to," Eleanor said; "but I don't see how you
can enjoy being with a perfect child, like Edith!"
Maurice went--not very happily. But it was such a fine, tingling day of
hard work, in a joyous wind, with resulting appetites, and much yelling
at each other--"Here, drop that!" ... "Hurry up, slow poke!"--that he
was happy again before he knew it. After the work was over they had a
lazy hour before the fire, their eyes stinging with smoke which seemed
to envelop them, no matter on which side they sat; an hour in which
Rover drowsed at Maurice's feet, and Johnny, in spectacles, read _A
Boy's Adventures in the Forests of Brazil_, and Edith gabbled about
Eleanor....
"Oh, I wish _I_ was married," Edith said; "I'd just love to save my
husband's life!"
Maurice said little, except to ask Johnny if he had got to such and such
a place in the _Adventures_, or to assent to Edith's ecstasies; but once
he sighed, and said Eleanor was awfully pulled down by that--that night.
"I should think," Edith said, "you'd feel she'd just about died for you,
like people in history who died for each other."
"I do," Maurice said, soberly.
When they drove home in the dusk, Maurice singing, loudly; Edith, on the
front seat of the wagon, snuggling against him; Johnny standing up,
balancing himself by holding on to their shoulders, and old Rover
jogging along on the footpath,--they were all in great spirits, until a
turn in the road showed them Eleanor, sitting on a log, looking rather
white.
"Suffering snakes!" said Maurice, breaking off in the middle of a word.
Before Lion could quite stop, he was at his wife's side. "Eleanor! How
did you get here? ... You _walked_? Oh, Star, you oughtn't to have done
such a thing!"
"I was frightened about you. It was so late. I was afraid something had
happened. I came to look for you."
Edith and Johnny looked on aghast; then Edith called out: "Why, Eleanor!
I wouldn't let anything happen to Maurice!"
Maurice, kneeling beside his wife, had put his arms around her and was
soothing her with all sorts of gentlenesses: "Dear, you mustn't worry
so! Nelly, don't cry; why, darling, we were having such a good time, we
never noticed that it was getting late ..."
"You forgot me," Eleanor said; "as long as you had Edith, you never
thought how I might worry!" She hid her face in her hands.
Maurice came back to the wagon; "Edith," he said, in a low voice, "would
you and Johnny mind getting out and walking? I'll bring Eleanor along
later. I'm sorry, but she's--she's tired."
Edith said in a whisper, "'Course not!" Then, without a look behind her
at the crying woman on the log, and the patient, mortified boy bending
over her, she, and the disgusted and more deliberate Johnny, ran down
the road into the twilight. Edith was utterly bewildered. With her
inarticulate consciousness of the impropriety of emotion, naked, _in
public_! was the shyness of a child in meeting a stranger--for that
crying woman was practically a stranger. She wasn't the Bride--silent
and lovely! At Johnny's gate she said, briefly, "'Night!" and went on,
running--running in the dusk. When she reached the house, and found her
father and mother on the east porch, she was breathless, which accounted
for her brevity in saying that Maurice and Eleanor were coming--and she
was just starved! In the dining room, eating a very large supper, she
listened for the wheels of the wagon and reflected: "Why was Eleanor mad
at _me_? She was mad at Maurice, too. But most at me. Why?" She took an
enormous spoonful of sliced peaches, and stared blankly ahead of her.
Ten minutes later, hearing wheels grating on the gravel at the front
door, and Maurice's voice, subdued and apologetic, she pushed her chair
away from the table, rushed through the pantry and up the back stairs.
She didn't know why she fled. She only knew that she couldn't face
Eleanor, who would sit with Maurice while he bolted a supper for
which--though Edith didn't know it!--all appetite had gone. In her room
in the ell, Edith shut the door, and, standing with her back against it,
tried to answer her own question:
"Why was Eleanor mad?" But she couldn't answer it. Jealousy, as an
emotion, in herself or anybody else, was absolutely unknown to her.
She had probably never even heard the word--except in the Second
Commandment, or as a laughing reproach to old Rover--so she really did
not know enough to use it now to describe Eleanor's behavior. She only
said, "Maybe it's the nervous prostration? Well, I don't like her very
much. I'm glad she won't be at Fern Hill when I go there." To be a
Bride--and yet to cry before people! "Crying before people," Edith said,
"is just like taking off all your clothes before people--I don't care
how bad her nervous prostration is; it isn't nice! But why is she mad at
me? That isn't sense."
You can't run other people's feelings to cover, and try to find their
cause, without mental and moral development; all this analysis lessened
very visibly Edith's childishness; also, it made her rather rudely cold
to Eleanor, whose effort to reinstate herself in the glories of the
little girl's imagination only resulted in still another and entirely
new feeling in Edith's mind--contempt.
"If she had a right to be mad at me yesterday--why isn't she mad
to-day?" Edith reasoned.
Eleanor was quick to feel the contempt. "I don't care for Edith," she
told Maurice, who looked surprised.
"She's only a child," he said.
Edith seemed especially a child now to Maurice, since he had embarked on
his job at Mercer. Not only was she unimportant to him, but, in spite of
his mortification at that scene on the road, his Saturday-night returns
to his wife were blowing the fires of his love into such a glory of
devotion, that Edith was practically nonexistent! His one thought was to
take Eleanor to Mercer. He wanted her all to himself! Also, he had a
vague purpose of being on his dignity with a lot of those Mercer people:
Eleanor's aunt, just back from Europe; Brown and Hastings--cubs! But
below this was the inarticulate feeling that, away from the Houghtons,
especially away from Edith, he might forget his impulse to use--for a
second time--that dreadful word "silly."
So, as the 20th of October approached--the day when they were to go back
to town--he felt a distinct relief in getting away from Green Hill. The
relief was general. Edith felt it, which was very unlike Edith, who had
always sniffled (in private) at Maurice's departure! And her father and
mother felt it:
"Eleanor's mind," Henry Houghton said, "is exactly like a drum--sound
comes out of emptiness!"
"But Maurice seems to like the sound," Mrs. Houghton reminded him; "and
she loves him."
"She wants to monopolize him," her husband said; "I don't call that
love; I call it jealousy. It must be uncomfortable to be jealous," he
ruminated; "but the really serious thing about it is that it will bore
any man to death. Point that out to her, Mary! Tell her that jealousy
is self-love, plus the consciousness of your own inferiority to the
person of whom you are jealous. And it has the same effect on love that
water has on fire. My definition ought to be in a dictionary!" he added,
complacently.
"What sweet jobs you do arrange for me!" she said; "and as for your
definition, I can give you a better one--and briefer: 'Jealousy is Human
Natur'! But I don't believe Eleanor's jealous, Henry; she's only
conscious, poor girl! of Maurice's youth. But there is something I _am_
going to tell her...."
She told her the day before the bridal couple (Edith still reveled in
the phrase!) started for Mercer. "Come out into the orchard," Mary
Houghton called upstairs to Eleanor, "and help me gather windfalls for
jelly."
"I must pack Maurice's things," Eleanor called over the banisters,
doubtfully; "he's a perfect boy about packing; he put his boots in with
his collars."
"Oh, come along!" said Mrs. Houghton. And Eleanor yielded, scolding
happily while she pinned her hat on before the mirror in the hall.
In the orchard they picked up some apples, then sat down on the bleached
stubble of the mowed hillside and looked over at the dark mass of the
mountain, behind which a red sun was trampling waist deep through leaden
clouds. "How _can_ I bring it in?" Mrs. Houghton thought; "it won't do
to just throw a warning at her!"
But she didn't have to throw it; Eleanor invited it. "I'm glad we're
going to the hotel, just at first," she said; "Auntie says I don't know
anything about keeping house, and I get worried for fear I won't make
Maurice comfortable. I tell him so all the time!"
"I wouldn't put things into his head, Eleanor," Mrs. Houghton said
(beginning her "warning"); "I mean things that you don't want him to
feel. I remember when my first baby was coming--the little boy we
lost--" she stopped and bit her lip; the "baby" had been gone for
nearly twenty years, but he was still her little boy--"I was very
forlorn, and I couldn't do anything, or go anywhere; and Henry stayed at
home with me like a saint. Well, I told my father that I had told Henry
it was hard on him to 'sit at home with an invalid wife.' And father
said, 'If you tell him so often enough, he'll agree with you,' There's a
good deal in that, Eleanor?"
"I suppose there is," Maurice's wife said, vaguely.
"So, if I were you," Mrs. Houghton said, still feeling her way, "I
wouldn't give him the idea that you are any--well, older than he is. A
wife might be fifty years older than her husband, and if her _spirit_
was young, years wouldn't make a bit of difference!"
Eleanor took this somewhat roundabout advice very well. "The only thing
in the world I want," she said, simply, "is to make him happy."
They went back to the house in silence. But that night Eleanor paused in
putting some last things into her trunk, and, going over to Maurice,
kissed his thick hair. "Maurice," she said, "are you happy?"
"You bet I am!"
"You haven't said so once to-day."
"I haven't said I'm alive," he said, grinning. "Oh, Star, won't it be
wonderful when we can go away from the whole caboodle of 'em, and just
be by ourselves?"
"That's what I want!" she said; "just to be alone with you. I wish we
could live on a desert island!..."
Down in the studio, Mr. Houghton, smoking up to the fire limit a cigar
grudgingly permitted by his wife ("It's your eighth to-day," she
reproached him), Henry Houghton, listening to his Mary's account of the
talk in the orchard, told her what he thought of her: "May you be
forgiven! Your intentions are doubtless excellent, but your truthfulness
leaves something to be desired: 'Years won't make any difference'? Mary!
Mary!"
But she defended herself: "I mean, 'years' can't kill love--the highest
love--the love that grows out of, _and then outgrows_, the senses! The
body may be just an old glove--shabby, maybe; but if the hand inside
the glove is alive, what real difference does the shabbiness make? If
Eleanor's mind doesn't get rheumatic, _and if she will forget
herself_!--they'll be all right. But if she thinks of herself--" Mary
Houghton sighed; her husband ended her sentence for her:
"She'll upset the whole kettle of fish?"
"What I'm afraid of," she said, with a troubled look, "is that you are
right:--she's inclined to be jealous, I saw her frown when he was
playing checkers with Edith. I wanted to tell her, but didn't dare to,
that jealousy is as amusing to people who don't feel it, as it is
undignified in people who do."
"My darling, you are a brute," said Mr. Houghton; "I have long suspected
it, _in re_ tobacco. As for Eleanor, _I_ would never have such cruel
thoughts! _I_ belong to the gentler sex. I would merely refer her to Mr.
F.'s aunt."