Yet Henry Houghton had moments of fearing that he would lose his bet,
for Maurice was such a very damned fool! One might have guessed as much
when he would not admit that Lily was lying. She might be blackmailing
him, he said; she might be a "crow"; but she wasn't lying. When his
guardian had talked it all out with him, and written a letter which
Maurice was to take to a lawyer ("she'll want to get rid of the child;
they always want to get rid of the child; so she may let you off easier
if you say you'll see that it is cared for; and we'll have Hayes put it
in black and white") when all these arrangements had been made, Maurice
almost dished the whole thing (so Mr. Houghton expressed it) by
saying--again as if the words burst up from some choked well of
truthfulness:
"Uncle Henry, it isn't blackmail; and--and I've got to be half decent!"
Down from the upper hall came a sweet, anxious voice: "Maurice, darling!
It's twelve o'clock! What _are_ you doing?"
Mr. Houghton called back: "We're talking business, Eleanor. I'll send
him up in a quarter of an hour. Don't lose your beauty sleep, my dear.
(Mary _must_ tell her not to be such an idiot!)" Then he looked at
Maurice: "My boy, you can't be decent with a leech. You've got to leave
this to Hayes."
"She isn't a leech. I ought to help her, I'll see her myself."
"My dear fellow, don't be a bigger ass than you can help! You can meet
what you see fit to call your responsibilities, as a few other
conscientious fools have done before you; though," he added, heavily,
"I hope she won't suck you dry! How you are going to squeeze out the
money, _I_ don't know! I can't help you much. But you mustn't appear in
this for a single minute. Hayes will see her, and buy her off."
Maurice shook his head, despairingly: "Uncle Henry, she's common; but
she's not vicious. She's a nice little thing. I know Lily! I'll see her.
_I'll have to!_ I'll tell her I'll--I'll help her." No wonder poor Henry
Houghton feared he would lose his bet! "I know you think I'm easy meat,"
Maurice said; "but I'm not. Only," his face was anguished, "I've _got_
to be half decent."
It was after one o'clock when the two men went upstairs, though there
had been another summons over the banisters: "Maurice! Why don't you
come to bed?" When they parted at Maurice's door, Mr. Houghton struck
his ward on the shoulder and whispered, "You're more than half decent.
I'll bet on you!" and Maurice whispered back:
"You're _white_, Uncle Henry!"
He went into his room on tiptoe, but Eleanor heard him and said,
sleepily, "What on earth have you been talking about?"
"Business," Maurice told her.
"Who was your lavender-colored letter from?" Eleanor said, yawning; "I
forgot to ask you. It was awfully scented!"
There was an instant's pause; Maurice's lips were dry;--then he said:
"From a woman... About a house. (My God! I've _lied_ to her!)" he said
to himself...
Mary Houghton, reading comfortably in bed, looked up at her old husband
over her spectacles. "I've heated some cocoa, dear," she said. "Drink it
before you undress; you are worn out. What kept you downstairs until
this hour?"
"Business."
Mary Houghton smiled: "Might as well tell the truth."
"Oh, Kit, it's a horrid mess!" he groaned; "I thought that boy had got
to the top of Fool Hill when he married Eleanor! But he hadn't."
"Can't tell me, I suppose?"
"No. Mary, mayn't I have a cigar? I'm really awfully used up, and--"
"Henry! You are perfectly depraved! No; you may _not_. Drink your cocoa,
honey. And consider the stars;--they shine, even above Fool Hill. And
'messes' look mighty small beside the Pleiades!" Then she turned a page
of her novel, and added, "Poor Eleanor."
"I don't know why you say 'Poor Eleanor'!"
"Because I know that Maurice isn't sharing his 'mess' with her."
"You are uncanny!" Henry Houghton said, stirring his cocoa and looking
at her admiringly.
"No; merely intelligent. Henry, don't let him have any secrets from
Eleanor! Tell him to _tell_ her. She'll forgive him."
"She's not that kind, Mary."
"Dear, _almost_ every woman is 'that kind'! It's deception, not
confession, that makes them--the other kind. If Maurice will confess--"
"I haven't said there was anything to confess," he protested, in alarm.
"Oh no; certainly not. You haven't said a word! (Well; you may have just
one of those _little_ cigars--you poor dear!) Henry, listen: If Maurice
hangs a secret round his neck it will drown him."
"If Eleanor would make cocoa for him at one o'clock in the morning there
would be no chance for secrets. Kit, I have long known that you are the
wisest, as well as the most virtuous and most lovable of your sex, and
that I shall only get to heaven by hanging on to your petticoats; but in
this one particular I am much more intelligent than you."
"Heaven send you a good opinion of yourself!" his wife murmured.
But he insisted. "On certain subjects women prefer to be lied to."
"Did any woman ever tell you so?" she inquired, dryly.
He shrugged his shoulders, put his cup down, and came over to give her a
kiss.
"Which is to say, 'Hold your tongue'?" his Mary inquired.
"Oh, never!" he said, and in spite of his distress he laughed; but he
looked at her tenderly. "The Lord was good to me, Mary, when He made you
take me."
That talk in the studio marked the moment when Maurice Curtis turned his
back on youth. It was the beginning of the retreat of an ardent and
gayly candid boy into the adult sophistications of Secrecy. The next day
when he and Eleanor returned to Mercer, he sat in the car watching with
unseeing eyes the back of her head,--her swaying hat, the softly curling
tendrils of dark hair in the nape of her neck--and he saw before him a
narrow path, leading--across quaking bogs of evasions!--toward a goal of
always menaced safety. Mr. Houghton had indicated the path in that
midnight talk, and Maurice's first step upon it would be his promise to
relieve Lily of the support of her child--"_on condition that she would
never communicate with him again_." After that, Henry Houghton said,
"the lawyer will clinch things; and nobody will ever be the wiser!"
Because Eleanor was the woman she was, he saw no way of escape for
Maurice, except through this bog of secrecy, where any careless step
might plunge him into a lie. He had not dared to point out that other
path, which his Mary thought so much safer than the sucking shakiness of
the swamp--the rough and terrible path of confession, which lies across
the firm aridities of Truth, and leads to that orderly freedom of the
stars to which Maurice had once aspired! So now the boy was going back
to Mercer to plunge into the pitfalls and limitless shades of
concealment. He did it with a hard purpose of endurance, without hope,
and also without complaint.
"If I can just avoid out-and-out lying," he told himself, "I can take my
medicine. But if I have to lie--!"
He knew the full bitterness of his medicine when he went to see Lily...
He went the very next day, after office hours... There had been a
temptation to postpone the taking of the medicine, because it had been
difficult to escape from Eleanor. The well-ordered household at Green
Hill had fired her with an impulse to try housekeeping again, and she
wanted to urge the idea upon Maurice:
"We would be so much more comfortable; and I could have little Bingo!"
"We can't afford it," he said. (Oh, how many things he wouldn't be able
to afford, now!)
"It wouldn't cost much more. I'll come down to the office this afternoon
and walk home with you, and tell you what I've thought out about it."
Maurice said he had to--to go and see an apartment house at five.
"That's no matter! I'll meet you and walk along with you."
"I have several other places to go."
That hurt her. "If you don't want me--"
He was so absorbed that her words had no meaning to him. "Good-by," he
said, mechanically--and the next moment he was on his way.
At the office his employer gave him a keen glance. "You look used up,
Curtis; got a cold?" Mr. Weston asked, kindly.
Maurice, sick in spirit, said, "No, sir; I'm all right."
And so the minutes of the long day ticked themselves away, each a
separate pang of disgust and shame, until five o'clock came, and he
started for Lily's.
While he waited in the unswept vestibule of an incredibly ornate frame
apartment house for the answer to his ring, and the usual: "My goodness!
Is that you? Come on up!" he had the feeling of one who stands at a
closed door, knowing that when he opens it and enters he will look upon
a dead face. The door was Lily's, and the face was the face of his dead
youth. Carelessness was over for Maurice, and irresponsibility. And
hope, too, he thought, and enthusiasm, and ambition. All over! All dead.
All lying stiff and still on the other side of a shiny golden-oak door,
with its half window hung with a Nottingham lace curtain. When he
started up the three flights of stairs to that little flat where he was
to look upon his dead, he was calm to the point of listlessness. "My own
fault. My own fault," he said.
She was waiting for him on the landing, her fresh cleanness in fragrant
contrast to the forlorn untidiness of the stairways. They went into her
parlor together and he began to speak at once.
"I got your letter. No; I won't sit down. I--"
"My soul and body! You're all in!" Lily said, startled, "Let me get you
some whisky--"
"No, please, nothing! Lily, I'm ... awfully sorry, I--I'll do what I can.
I--"
She put her hands over her face; he went on mechanically, with his
carefully prepared sentences, ending with:
"There's no reason why we should meet any more. But I want you to know
that the--the--_it_, will be taken care of. My lawyer will see you about
it; I'll have it placed somewhere."
She dropped her hands and looked at him, her little, pretty face amazed
and twitching: "Do you mean you'll take my baby?"
"I'll see that it's provided for."
"I ain't that kind of a girl!" They were standing, one on either side of
a highly varnished table, on which, on a little brass tray, a cigarette
stub was still smoldering. "_I_ don't want anything out of you"--Lily
paused; then said, "Mr. Curtis"--(the fact that she didn't call him
"Curt" showed her recognition of a change in their relationship)--"I'm
not on the grab. I can keep on at Marston's for quite a bit. All I want
is just if you can help me in February? But I'll never give my baby up!
My first one died."
"Your _first_--"
"So I'll never, never give it up!" Her shallow, honest, amber-colored
eyes overflowed with bliss. "I'll just love it!" she said.
Maurice felt an almost physical collapse; neither he nor Henry Houghton
had reckoned on maternal love. Mr. Houghton had implied that Lily's kind
did not have maternal love. "She'll leave it on a convenient
doorstep--unless she's a white blackbird," Henry Houghton had said.
Maurice, too, had taken for granted Lily's eagerness to get rid of the
child. In his amazement now, at this revelation of an unknown Lily--a
white blackbird Lily!--he began, angrily, to argue: "It is impossible
for you to keep it! Impossible! I won't permit it--"
"I wouldn't give it up for anything in the world! I'll take care of it.
You needn't worry for fear I'll put it onto you."
"But I won't have you keep it! I promise you I'll look after it. You
must go away, somewhere. Anywhere!"
"But I don't want to leave Mercer," she said, simply.
In his despairing confusion, he sat down on the little bowlegged sofa
and looked at her; Lily, sitting beside him, put her hand on his--which
quivered at the touch. "Don't you worry! I'd never play you any mean
trick. You treated me good, and I'll never treat you mean; I 'ain't
forgot the way you handed it out to Batty! I'll never let on to anybody.
Say--I believe you're afraid I'll try a hold-up on you some day? Why,
Mr. Curtis, _I_ wouldn't do a thing like that--no, not for a million
dollars! Look here; if it will make you easy in your mind, I'll put it
down in writing; I'll say it _ain't_ yours! Will that make you easy in
your mind?" Her kind eyes were full of anxious pity for him. "I'll do
anything for you, but I won't give up my baby."
She was trying to help him! He was so angry and so frightened that he
felt sick at his stomach; but he knew that she was trying to help him!
"You see," she explained, "the first one died; now I'm going to have
another, and you bet I'm going to have things nice for her! I'm going to
buy a parlor organ. And I'll have her learned to play. It's going to be
a girl. Oh, won't I dress her pretty! But I'll never come down on you
about her. Now, don't you worry."
The generosity of her! She'd "put it down in writing"! "I _told_ Uncle
Henry she was white," he thought. But in spite of her whiteness his blue
eyes were wide with horror; all those plans, of Lily in another city,
and an unacknowledged child, in still another city--for of course _it_
could not be in Mercer any more than Lily could!--all these safe
arrangements faded into a swift vision of Lily, in this apartment, with
_it_! Lily, meeting him on the street!--a flash of imagination showed
him Lily, pushing a baby carriage! For just a moment sheer terror made
that dead Youth of his stir.
"You can't keep it!" he said again, hoarsely; "I tell you, I won't allow
it! I'll look after it. _But I won't have it here!_ And I won't ever see
you."
"You needn't," she said, reassuringly; "and I'll never bother you. That
ain't me!"
He was dumb.
"An' look," she said, cheerfully; "honest, it's better for you. What
would you do, looking after a little girl? Why, you couldn't even curl
her hair in the mornings!" Maurice shuddered. "And I'll never ask you
for a cent, if you can just make it convenient to help me in February?"
"Of course I'll help you," he said; then, suddenly, his anger fell into
despair. "Oh, what a damned fool I was!"
"All gentlemen are," she tried to comfort him. Her generosity made him
blush. Added to his shame because of what he had done to Eleanor, was a
new shame at his own thoughts about this little, kind, bad, honest
woman! "Look here," Lily said; "if you're strapped, never mind about
helping me. They'll take you at the Maternity free, if you _can't_ pay.
So I'll go there; and I'll say I'm married; I'll say my husband was Mr.
George Dale, and he's dead; I'll never peep your name. Now, don't you
worry! I'll keep on at Marston's for four months, anyway. Yes; I'll buy
me a ring and call myself Mrs. Dale; I guess I'll say Mrs. Robert Dale;
Robert's a classier name than George. And nobody can say anything to my
baby."
"Of course I'll give you whatever you need for--when--when it's born,"
he said. He was fumbling with his pocketbook; he had nothing more to say
about leaving Mercer.
She took the money doubtfully. "I won't want it yet awhile," she said.
"I'll make it more if I can," he told her; he got up, hesitated, then
put out his hand. For a single instant, just for her pluck, he was
almost fond of her. "Take care of yourself," he said, huskily; and the
next minute he was plunging down those three flights of unswept stairs
to the street. "My own fault--my own fault," he said, again; "oh, what a
cussed, cussed, cussed fool!"
It was over, this dreadful interview! this looking at the dead face of
his Youth. Over, and he was back again just where he was when he came
in. Nothing settled. Lily--who was so much more generous than he!--would
still be in Mercer, waiting for this terrible child. His child!
He had accomplished nothing, and he saw before him the dismaying
prospect of admitting his failure to Mr. Houghton. The only comfort in
the whole hideous business was that he wouldn't have to pull a lawyer
into it, and pay a big fee! He was frantic with worry about expense.
Well, he must strike Mr. Weston for a raise!... which he wouldn't tell
Eleanor about. A second step into the bog of Secrecy!
When he got home, Eleanor, in the dingy third-floor front, was waiting
for him, alert and tender, and gay with purpose: "Maurice! I've counted
expenses, and I'm sure we can go to housekeeping! And I can have little
Bingo. Mrs. O'Brien says he's just pining away for me!"
"We can't afford it," he said again, doggedly.
"I believe," she said, "you like this horrid place, because you have
people to talk to!"
"It's well enough," he said. He was standing with his back to her, his
clenched hands in his pockets, staring out of the window. His very
attitude, the stubbornness of his shoulders, showed his determination
not to go to housekeeping.
"What _is_ the matter, Maurice?" she said, her voice trembling. "You are
not happy! Oh, what _can_ I do?" she said, despairingly.
"I am as happy as I deserve to be," he said, without turning his head.
She came and stood beside him, resting her cheek on his shoulder. "Oh,"
she said, passionately, "if I only had a child! You are disappointed
because we have no--"
His recoil was so sharp that she could not finish her sentence, but
clutched at his arm to steady herself; before she could reproach him for
his abruptness he had caught up his hat and left the room. She stood
there quivering. "He _would_ be happier and love me more, if we had a
child!" she said again. She thought of the joy with which, when they
first went to housekeeping, she had bought that foolish, pretty nursery
paper--and again the old disappointment ached under her breastbone.
Tears were just ready to overflow; but there was a knock at the door and
old Mrs. O'Brien came in with her basket of laundry; she gave her
beloved Miss Eleanor a keen look "It's worried you are, my dear? It
ain't the wash, is it?"
Eleanor tried to laugh, but the laugh ended in a sob. "No. It's--it's
only--" Then she said something in a whisper.
"No baby? Bless you, _he_ don't want no babies! What would a handsome
young man like him be wanting a baby for? No! And it would take your
good looks, my dear. Keep handsome, Miss Eleanor, and you needn't worry
about _babies_! And say, Miss Eleanor, never let on to him if you see
him give a look at any of his lady friends. I'm old, my dear, but I
noticed, with all my husbands--and I've had three--that if you tell'em
you see'em lookin' at other ladies, _they'll look again_!--just to spite
you. Don't notice'em, and they'll not do it. Men is children."
Eleanor, laughing in spite of her pain, said Mr. Curtis didn't "look at
other ladies; but--but," she said, wistfully, "I hope I'll have a baby."
Then she wiped her eyes, hugged old O'Brien, and promised to "quit
worrying." But she didn't "quit," for Maurice's face did not lighten.
Henry Houghton, too, saw the aging heaviness of the young face when,
having received the report of that interview with Lily, he came down to
Mercer to go over the whole affair and see what must be done. But there
was nothing to be done. Up in his room in the hotel he and Maurice
thrashed it all out:
"She prefers to stay in Mercer," Maurice explained; "and she'll stay.
There's nothing I can do; absolutely nothing! But she'll play fair. I'm
not afraid of Lily."
If Mr. Houghton wished, uneasily, that his ward was afraid of Lily, he
did not say so. He only told Maurice again that he was "betting on him."
"You won't lose," Maurice said, laconically.
"Perhaps," Henry Houghton said, doubtfully, "I ought to say that Mrs.
Houghton--who is the wisest woman I know, as well as the best--has an
idea that in matters of this sort, frankness is the best course. But in
your case (of which, of course, she knows nothing) I don't agree with
her."
"It would be impossible," Maurice said, briefly. And his guardian, whose
belief in secrecy had been shaken, momentarily, by his Mary's opinion,
felt that, so long as he had quoted her, his conscience was clear. So he
only told the boy again he was _sure_ he could bet on him! And because
shame, and those bleak words "my own fault," kept the spiritual part of
Maurice alive,--(and because Lily was a white blackbird!) the bet stood.
But he made no promises about the future. However much of a liar
Maurice was going to be, to Eleanor, he would not, he told himself, lie
to this old friend by saying he would never see Lily again. The truth
was, some inarticulate moral instinct made him know that there would
come a time when he would _have_ to see her... During all that winter,
when he sat, night after night, at Miss Ladd's dinner table, and Eleanor
fended off Miss Moore and the widow, or when, in those long evenings in
their own room they played solitaire, he was thinking of Lily, thinking
of that inner summons to what he called "decency," which would, he knew,
drive him--in three months--in two months--in one month!--to Lily's
door. By and by it was three weeks--two weeks--one week! Then came days
when he said, in terror, "I'll go to-morrow." And again: "To-morrow, I
_must_ go. Damn it! I must!" So at last, he went, lashed and driven by
that mastering "decency"!
He had bought a box of roses, and, looping two fingers through
its strings, he walked twice around the block past the ugly apartment
house before he could make up his mind to enter. He wondered whether
Lily had died? Women do die, sometimes. "Of course I don't want anything
to happen to her; but--" Then he wondered, with a sudden pang of hope,
if anything had happened to--_It_? "They're born dead, sometimes!"
Nothing wrong in wishing that, for the Thing would be better off dead
than alive. He wished he was dead himself! ... The third time he came
to the apartment house the string of the box was cutting into his
fingers, and that made him stop, and set his teeth, and push open the
door of the vestibule. He touched the button under the name "Dale," and
called up, huskily, "Is Miss--Mrs. Dale in?" A brisk voice asked his
name. "A friend of Mrs. Dale's," he said, very low. There seemed to be
a colloquy somewhere, and then he was told to "come right along!" He
turned to the stairway, and as he walked slowly up, it came into his
mind that this was the way a man might climb the scaffold steps:
Step... Step... Step--his very feet refusing! Step... Step--and Lily's
door. The nurse, who met him on the landing, said Mrs. Dale would be
glad to see him....
She was in bed, very white and radiant, and with a queer, blanketed
bundle on one arm; if she was, as the nurse said, "glad to see him," she
did not show it. She was too absorbed in some gladness of her own to
feel any other kind of gladness. As Maurice handed her the box of roses,
she smiled vaguely and said. "Why, you're real kind!" Then she said,
eagerly, "He was born the day the pink hyacinth came out! Want to see
him?" Her voice thrilled with joy. Without waiting for his answer--or
even giving a look at the roses the nurse was lifting out of their waxed
papers, she raised a fold of the blanket and her eyes seemed to feed on
the little red face with its tightly shut eyes and tiny wet lips.
Maurice looked--and his heart seemed to drop, shuddering, in his breast.
"How nasty!" he thought; but aloud he said, stammering, "Why it's--quite
a baby."
"You may hold him," she said; there was a passionate generosity in her
voice.
Maurice tried to cover his recoil by saying, "Oh, I might drop it."
Lily was not looking at him; it seemed as if she was glad not to give up
the roll of blankets, even for a minute. "He's perfectly lovely. He's a
reg'lar rascal! The doctor said he was a wonderful child. I'm going to
have him christened Ernest Augustus; I want a swell name. But I'll call
him Jacky." She strained her head sidewise to kiss the red, puckered
flesh, that looked like a face, and in which suddenly a little orifice
showed itself, from which came a small, squeaking sound. Maurice, under
the shock of that sound, stood rigid; but Lily's feeble arms cuddled the
bundle against her breast; she said, "Sweety--Sweety--Sweety!"
The young man sat there speechless.... This terrible squirming piece of
flesh--was part of himself! "I wouldn't touch it for a million dollars!"
he was thinking. He got up and said: "Good-by. I hope you--"
Lily was not listening; she said good-by without lifting her eyes from
the child's face.
Maurice stumbled out to the staircase, with little cold thrills running
down his back. The experience of recognizing the significance of what he
had done--the setting in motion that stupendous and eternal
_Exfoliating_, called; Life; the seeing a Thing, himself, separated from
himself! himself, going on in spite of himself!--brought a surge of
engulfing horror. This elemental shock is not unknown to men who look
for the first time at their first-born; instantly the feeling may
disappear, swallowed up in love and pride. But where, as with Maurice,
there is neither pride nor love, the shock remains. His organic dismay
was so overwhelming that he said to himself he would never see Lily
again--because he would not see It!--which was, in fact, "_he_," instead
of the girl Lily had wanted. But though his spiritual disgust for what
he called, in his own mind, "the whole hideous business," did not
lessen, he did, later, through the pressure of those heavy words, "my
own fault," go to see Lily--she had taken a little house out in
Medfield--just to put down on the table, awkwardly, an envelope with
some bills in it. He didn't inquire about It, and he got out of the
house as quickly as possible.
Lily had no resentment at his lack of feeling for the child; the baby
was so entirely hers that she did not think of it as his, too. This
sense of possession, never menaced on Maurice's part by even a flicker
of interest in the little thing, kept them to the furtive and very
formal acquaintance of giving and receiving what money he could
spare--or, oftener, _couldn't_ spare! As a result, he thought of Jacky
only in relation to his income. Every time some personal expenditure
tempted him, he summed up the child's existence in four disgusted and
angry words, "I can't afford it." But it was for Lily's sake, not
Jacky's, that he economized! He was wretchedly aware that if it had not
been for Jacky, Lily might still be a "saleslady" at Marston's, earning
good wages. Instead, she was taking lodgers--and it was not easy to get
them!--so that she could be at home and look after the baby.
Maurice aged ten years in that first winter of rigid and unexplainable
penuriousness, and of a secrecy which meant perilous skirtings of
downright lying; for Eleanor occasionally asked why they had so little
money to spend? He had requested a raise--and not mentioned to Eleanor
the fact that he had got it. When she complained because his salary was
so low, he told her Weston was paying him all he was worth, and he
_wouldn't_ strike for more! "So it's impossible to go to housekeeping,"
he said--for of course she continued to urge housekeeping, saying that
she couldn't understand why they had to be so economical! But he
refused, patiently. To be patient, Maurice did not need, now, to remind
himself of the mountain and her faithfulness to him; he had only to
remind himself of the yellow-brick apartment house, and his
faithlessness to her. "I've got to be kind, or I'd be a skunk," he used
to think. So he was very kind. He did not burst out at her with
irritated mortification when she telephoned to the office to know if
"Mr. Curtis's headache was better";--he had suffered so much that he had
gone beyond the self-consciousness of mortification;--and he walked with
her in the park on Sunday afternoons to exercise Bingo; and on their
anniversary he sat beside her in the grass, under the locust tree, and
watched the river--their river, which had brought Lily into his
life!--and listened to the lovely voice:
"O thou with dewy locks who lookest down!"