Edith's flight to one of the schoolhouses was not the entire release
that Eleanor expected.
"Look here, Skeezics," Maurice had announced; "you can't turn me down
this way! You've got to come to supper every Sunday night!--when I'm at
home. Isn't that so, Nelly?"
Eleanor said, bleakly: "Why, if Edith would _like_ to, of course. But I
shouldn't think she'd care to come in to town at six, and rush out to
Medfield right after supper."
"I don't mind," Edith said.
"You bet she won't rush off right after supper!" Maurice said; "I won't
let her. And if she doesn't get in here by three o'clock, I'll know the
reason why!"
So Edith came in every Sunday afternoon at three--and Eleanor never left
her alone with Maurice for a moment! She sat and watched them; saw
Edith's unconcealed affection for Maurice, saw Maurice's pleasure in
Edith, saw his entire forgetfulness of herself,--and as she sat,
silently, watching, watching, jealousy was like a fire in her breast.
However, in spite of Eleanor, sitting on the other side of the fire, in
bitter silence, those Sunday afternoons were delightful to Edith. She
and Maurice were more serious with each other now. His feeling about her
was that she was a mighty pretty girl, who had sense, and who, as he
expressed it, "spoke his language." Her feeling about him was a frankly
expressed appreciation which Eleanor called "flattery." She had an eager
respect for his opinions, based on admiration for what she called to
herself his hard-pan goodness. "How he keeps civil to Eleanor, _I_ don't
know!" Edith used to think. Sometimes, watching his civility--his
patience, his kindness, and especially his ability to hold his tongue
under the provocation of some laconic and foolish criticism from
Eleanor--Edith felt the old thrill of the Sir Walter Raleigh moment.
Yes; there was no one on earth like Maurice! Then she thought,
contritely, of good old Johnny. "If I hadn't known Maurice, I might have
liked Johnny," she thought; "he _is_ a lamb." When she reflected upon
Eleanor, something in her generous, careless young heart hardened:
"She's not nice to Maurice!" She had no sympathy for Eleanor. Youth,
having never suffered, is brutally unsympathetic. Edith had known
nothing but love,--given and received; so of course she could not
sympathize with Eleanor!
When the Sunday-night suppers were over, Eleanor and Maurice escorted
their guest back to Fern Hill; Edith always said, "Don't bother to go
home with me, Eleanor!" And Maurice always said, "I'll look after the
tyke, Nelly, you needn't go"; and Eleanor always said, "Oh, I don't
mind." Which was, of course, her way of "locking the door" to keep her
cat from a roof that became more alluring with every bolt and bar which
shut him from it.
On these trolley rides through Medfield Maurice was apt to be rather
silent, and he had a nervous way of looking toward the rear platform
whenever the car stopped to take on a passenger--"although," he told
himself, "what difference would it make if Lily did get on board? She's
so fat now, Edith wouldn't know her. And as for Lily, she's white. She'd
play up, like a 'perfect lady'!"
He was quite easy about Lily. He hadn't seen her for more than a year,
and she made no demands on him. She was living in the two-family house
on Ash Street, with the dressmaker and her three children and
feeble-minded father, in the lower flat. There was the desired back yard
for Jacky, where a thicket of golden glow lounged against the fence, and
where, tinder stretching clothes lines, a tiny garden overflowed with
color and perfume. Every day little Lily would leave her own work (which
was heavy, for she had several "mealers") and run downstairs to help
Mrs. Hayes wash and dress the imbecile old man. And she kept a pot of
hyacinths blooming on his window sill.
Maurice (with grinding economies) sent her a quarterly money order, and
felt that he was, as he expressed it to himself, "square with the
game,"--with the Lily-and-Jacky game. He could never be square with the
game he played with Eleanor; and as for his own "game," his steadily
pursued secretiveness was a denial of his own standards which
permanently crippled his self-respect. Though, curiously enough, these
years of careful lying had made him, on every subject except those
connected with the household in Medfield, of a most scrupulous
truthfulness. Indeed, the office still called him "G. Washington."
Jacky was six that winter--a handsome, spoiled little boy. He looked
like Maurice--the same friendly, eager, very bright blue eyes and the
same shock of blond hair. Lily's ideas of discipline were, of course,
ruining him, to which fact Maurice was entirely indifferent; his feeling
about Jacky was nothing but a sort of spiritual nausea; Jacky was not
only an economic nuisance, but he had made him a liar! He said to
himself that of course he didn't want anything to happen to the brat
("that would break Lily's heart!"), but--
Then in March, something did happen to him. It was on a Sunday that the
child came down with scarlet fever, and Lily, in her terror, did the one
thing that she had never done, and that Maurice, in his certainty of her
"whiteness," felt sure she never would or could do: she sent a
telegram--_to his house_!
It had been a cold, sunny day. Just before luncheon Eleanor had been
summoned to Mrs. O'Brien's: "_Donny is kind of pining; do please come
and sing to him, Miss Eleanor_," the worried grandmother wrote, and
Eleanor hadn't the heart to refuse. "I suppose," she thought, looking at
Maurice and Edith, "they'll be glad to get rid of me!" They were
squabbling happily as to whether altruism was not merely a form of
selfishness; Edith had flung, "_Idiot!_" at Maurice; and Maurice had
retorted, "I never expect a woman to reason!" It was the kind of
squabbling which is the hall mark of friendship and humor, and it would
have been impossible between Eleanor and her husband.... She left them,
burning with impatience to get down to Mrs. O'Brien's and back again in
the shortest possible time. As soon as she was out of the house Maurice
disposed of altruism by a brief laying down of the law:
"There's no such thing as disinterestedness. You never do anything for
anybody, except for what you get out of it for yourself.... Let's go
skating?"
The suggestion was not the result of premeditation; Maurice, politely
opening the front door for his wife, had realized, as he stood on the
threshold and a biting wind flung a handful of powdery snow in his
face,--the sparkling coldness of the day; and he thought to himself,
"this is about the last chance for skating! There'll be a thaw next
week." So, when he came back, whistling, to the library, he said: "Are
you game for skating? It's cold as blazes!"
And Edith said: "You bet I am! Only we'll have to go to Fern Hill for my
skates!"
Maurice said, "All right!" and off they went, the glowing vigor and
youth of them a beauty in itself!
So it was that when Eleanor got home, after having gently and patiently
sung to poor Donny for nearly an hour, the library was empty; but a note
on the mantelpiece said: "We've gone skating.--E. and M." "She waited
until I went out," Eleanor thought; "_then_ she suggested it to him!"
She sat down, huddling over the fire, and thinking how Maurice neglected
her; "He doesn't want me. He likes to go off with Edith, alone!" They
had probably gone to the river--"our river!"--that broad part just below
the meadow, where there was apt to be good skating. That made her
remember the September day and the picnic, when Edith had talked about
jealousy--"Bingoism," she had called it. "She tried to attract him by
being _smart_. I detest smartness!" The burning pain under her
breastbone was intolerable. She thought of the impertinent things Edith
had said that day--and the ridiculous inference that if the person of
whom you were jealous, was more attractive in any way than you were
yourself, it was unreasonable to be jealous;--"get busy, and _be_
attractive!" Edith had said, with pert shallowness. "She doesn't know
what she's talking about!" Eleanor said; and jealousy seared her mind as
a flame might have seared her flesh. "I haven't skated since I was a
girl.... I--I believe next winter I'll take it up again." The tears
stood in her eyes.
It was at that moment that the telegram was brought into the library.
"Mr. Curtis isn't in," Eleanor told the maid; then she did what anyone
would do, in the absence of the person to whom the dispatch was
addressed; signed for it ... opened it ... read it.
_Jacky's sick; please come over quick.
L. D_.
"There's no answer," she said. When the maid had left the room,
Maurice's wife moistened the flap of the flimsy brown envelope--it had
been caught only on one side; got up, went into the hall, laid the
dispatch on the table, came back to the library, and fainted dead away.
No one heard her fall, so no one came to help her--except her little
dog, scrabbling stiffly out of his basket, and coming to crouch,
whining, against her shoulder. It was only a minute before her eyelids
flickered open;--closed--opened again. After a while she tried to rise,
clutching with one hand at the rung of a chair, and with the other
trying to prop herself up; but her head swam, and she sank back. She lay
still for a minute; then realized that if Maurice came in and found her
there on the floor, he would know that she had read the telegram.... So
again she tried to pull herself up; caught at the edge of his desk,
turned sick, saw everything black; tried again; then, slowly, the room
whirling about her, got into a chair and lay back, crumpled up, blindly
dizzy, and conscious of only one thing: she must get upstairs to her own
room before Edith and Maurice came home! She didn't know why she wanted
to do this; she was even a little surprised at herself, as she had been
surprised when, that night on the mountain, "to save Maurice," she had,
instinctively, done one sensible thing after another. So now she knew
that, when he came home with Edith, Maurice must be saved "a scene." He
must not discover, yet, that ... _she knew_.
For of course now, it was knowledge, not suspicion: Maurice was summoned
to see a sick boy called Jacky; Jacky was the child of L. D.; and L. D.
was the Dale woman, who had lived in the house on Maple Street. Her
shameful suspicion had not been shameful! It had been the recognition of
a fact.... Clutching at supporting chairs, Eleanor, somehow, got out of
the library; saw that brown envelope in the hall, stopped (holding with
one hand to the table), to make sure it was sealed. Bingo, following
her, whimpered to be lifted and carried upstairs, but she didn't notice
him. She just clung to the banisters and toiled up to her room. She
pushed open her door and looked at her bed, desiring it so passionately
that it seemed to her she couldn't live to reach it--to fall into it, as
one might fall into the grave, enamored with death. Down in the hall the
little dog cried. She didn't faint again. She just lay there, without
feeling, or suffering. After a while she heard the front door open and
close; heard Edith's voice: "Hullo, Eleanor! Where are you? We've had a
bully time!" Heard Maurice: "Headache, Nelly? Too ba--" Then silence; he
must have seen the envelope--picked it up--read it.... That was why he
didn't finish that word--so hideously exact!--"_bad_." After a while he
came tiptoeing into the room.
"Headache? Sorry. Anything I can do?"
"No."
He did not urge; he was too engrossed in the shock of an escaped
catastrophe; _suppose Eleanor had read that dispatch_! Good God! Was
Lily mad? He must go and see her, quick, and say--He grew so angry as he
thought of what he was going to say that he did not hear Edith's
friendly comments on "poor dear Eleanor."
"Edith," he said, "that--that dispatch: I've got to see somebody on
business. Awfully sorry to take you out to Fern Hill before supper, but
I'm afraid I've got to rush off--"
"'Course! But don't bother to take me home. I can go by myself."
"No. It's all right. I have time; but I've got to go right off. I hate
to drag you away before supper--"
"That's of no consequence!" she said, but she gave Maurice a swift look.
What was the matter with him? His forehead, under that thatch of light
hair, was so lined, and his lips were set in such a harsh line, that he
looked actually _old_! Edith sobered into real anxiety. "I wish," she
said, "that you wouldn't go out to Fern Hill; you'll have to come all
the way back to town for your appointment!"
He said, "No: the--the appointment is on that side of the river." On the
trolley there was no more conversation than there might have been if
Eleanor had been present. At Edith's door he said, "'Night--"
But as he turned away, she called to him, "Maurice!" Then ran down the
steps and put her hand on his arm: "Maurice, look here; is there
anything I can do? You're bothered!"
He gave a grunt of laughter. "To be exact, Edith, I'm damned bothered.
I've been several kinds of a fool."
"You haven't! And it wouldn't make any difference if you had. Maurice,
you're a perfect _lamb_! I won't have you call yourself names! Why"--her
eyes were passionate with tenderness, but she laughed--"I used to call
you 'Sir Walter Raleigh,' you know, because you're great, simply great!
Maurice, I bet on you every time! Do tell me what's the matter? Maybe I
can help. Father says I have lots of sense."
Maurice shook his head. "You do have sense! I wish I had half as much.
No, Skeezics; there's nothing anybody can do. I pay as I go. But you're
the dearest girl on earth!"
She caught at his hand, flung her arm around his shoulder, and kissed
him: "You are the dearest boy on earth!" Before he could get his breath
to reply, she flew into the house--flew upstairs--flew into her own
room, and banged the door shut. "_Maurice is unhappy!_" she said. The
tears started, and she stamped her foot. "I can't _bear_ it! Old darling
Maurice--what makes him unhappy? I could kill anybody that hurts
Maurice!" She began to take off her hat, her fingers trembling--then
stopped and frowned: "I believe Eleanor's been nasty to him? I'd like to
choke her!" Suddenly her cheeks burned; she stood still, and caught her
lower lip between her teeth; "I don't care! I'm _glad_ I did it. I--I'd
do it again! ... Darling old Maurice!"