When Maurice got back to the firelit library, he said, filling his pipe
with rather elaborate attention, and trying to speak with good-natured
carelessness, "I'm afraid Edith thought you didn't want her, Nelly." He
was sorry the next moment that he had said even as much as that: Eleanor
was breathing quickly, and her dark, sad eyes were hard with anger.
"I don't," she said
Maurice said, sharply, "You have never liked her!"
"Why should I like her? She talks to you incessantly. And now, she
_looks_ at you; here--before me! Looks at you."
"Eleanor, what on earth--"
"Oh, I saw her, when you were talking over there by the window; I
watched her. She looked at you! I am not blind. I understand what it
means when a girl looks at a man that way. And now she's planning to be
in Mercer for three months? Well, that's simply to be near you. She'd
like to live in the same house with you, I suppose! If it wasn't for me,
she'd be in love with you--perhaps she is, anyhow? Yes, I think she is."
There was a sick silence. "And, perhaps," she said, with a gasp, "you
are in love with her?"
He was dumb. The suddenness of the attack completely routed him--its
suddenness; but more than its suddenness was a leaping question in his
own mind. When she said, "You are in love with her?" an appalled "Am I?"
was on his lips. Instantly he knew, what he had not known, at any rate
articulately, that he was in love with Edith. His thoughts broke in
galloping confusion; his hand, holding the hot bowl of his pipe,
trembled. He tried to speak, stammered, said, with a sort of gasp,
"Don't--don't say a thing like that!" Then he got his breath, and ended,
with a composure that kept his words slow and his voice cold, "It is
terrible to say a thing like that to me."
She flung out her hands. "What more can I do for you than I have done?
Oh, Maurice--Maurice, no woman could love you more than I do?... _Could
they_?"
"I am grateful; I--" He tried to speak gently, but his voice had begun
to shake with angry terror; it was abominable, this thing she had said!
(But ... it was true.) "No; no woman could have done more for me than
you have, Eleanor; I am grateful."
"Grateful? Yes. You give me gratitude." Maurice was speechless. "I
thought, perhaps, you loved me," she said. A minute later he heard her
going upstairs to her own room.
He stood staring after her, open-mouthed. Then he said, under his
breath, "Good God!" After a while he went over to the fireplace,
and, standing with one hand on the mantelpiece, he kicked the charred
logs on the hearth together. "This room is cold. I must build the fire
up.... Yes, it's true.... The wood is too green to burn. I'll order from
another man next time.... I suppose I've been in love with her for a
good while. I wonder if it began that night Jacky was sick ... and she
kissed me? No; it must have been before that." He stooped and mended the
fire, piling the logs together with slow exactness: "What life might
have been!" He took up the bellows and urged a little flame to rise and
flicker and lap the wood, then burst to crackling blaze. After a while
he said, "Poor Nelly!" But he had himself in hand by that time, and,
though this terrifying knowledge was surging in him, he knew that his
voice would not betray him. He went upstairs to comfort her with kindly
assurances that she was wrong. ("More lies," he thought, wearily.)
But apparently she didn't need comforting! She was smoothing her hair
before the glass, and seemed perfectly calm. He had expected tears, and
violent reproaches, which he was prepared to meet with either
good-natured ridicule or quiet falsehood, as the occasion might demand.
But nothing was demanded. She continued to brush her hair; so he found
it quite easy to come up behind her and lay a hand on her shoulder, and
say, "Nelly, dear, that wasn't a nice thing to say!"
She did not meet his eyes in the mirror; she only said (she was
trembling), "I suppose it wasn't."
Maurice was puzzled, but he said, casually, that he was sorry to have to
rush off that night. "I've got to take the Limited for St. Louis. Mr.
Weston wants some papers put through. I hate to leave you."
She made no answer.
"I shall be gone a week, maybe more; because if I don't pull the
chestnut out of the fire in St. Louis, I'll have to go to some other
places."
She hardly heard him; she was saying to herself: "I _oughtn't_ to have
told him she was in love with him; it may make him think so, himself!"
"Guess I'll pack my grip now," he said.
"Maurice," she said, breathlessly, "I didn't mean--" She was so
frightened that she couldn't finish her sentence; but he said, with
kindly understanding:
"Of course you didn't!"
It flashed into her mind that if she left him alone, he would know that
what she had said was so meaningless that she didn't think it worth
talking about. "I--I'm going to Auntie's to dinner," she told him, on
the spur of the moment. "Do you mind?"
"No; of course not. Wait a second, and I'll walk round with you."
She said, unsteadily, "Oh no; you've got your packing to do--" Then she
kissed him swiftly, and hurried downstairs.
"But Eleanor, wait!" he called; "I'll go with--"
She had gone. He heard the front door close. He stood still in his
perplexity. What was the matter? She had got over that jealousy of
Edith in an instant; got over it, and accepted his departure without all
those wearying protestations of love and loneliness to which he was
accustomed. "Is she angry," he told himself; "or just ashamed of having
been so foolish?" Mechanically, he picked out some neckties from his
drawer, and paused.... "But she wasn't foolish. I do love Edith.... How
did she get on to it? She is so good to me about Jacky--and I love
Edith!" He went on packing his grip. "I wonder if any man ever paid as I
am paying?--I'll call her up at Mrs. Newbolt's, before I go, and say
good-by."
No doubt he would have done so, but when he went downstairs he found
Johnny Bennett, smoking comfortably before that very cheerful little
fire.
"I dropped in," said Johnny, "to ask for some dinner."
"If you'll take pot luck," said Maurice; "Eleanor isn't at home, and I
don't know what the lady below stairs will work off on us." (It would be
a relief, he thought, to have somebody at table, so that he would not be
alone with his own confusion.)
"I came," Johnny said, "to tell you I'm off."
"Off? When? Where to? I thought your electric performances were panning
out so well--"
"Oh, they're panning out all right," John said; "but they'll pan out
better in South America. I'm going the first of the month."
"South America! What's the matter with Pennsylvania?"
"Well," Johnny said; "I thought I'd light out--"
Then they began to talk climate, and consulates, which carried them
through dinner, and went on in the library, and Maurice's surface
interest in Johnny's affairs, at least kept him from thinking of his own
dismay.
"But I supposed," he said, and paused, "I sort of thought you--had
reasons for staying round here?"
"There's no use hanging round," John said; "it's better to pull out
altogether. It's easier that way," he said, simply. "So I'm off for a
year. They wanted me to sign for three years, but I said, 'one.' Things
may look better for me when I get home."
Maurice, standing with his back to the fire, his hands in his pocket,
looked down at the steady youngster--looked at the mild eyes behind
those large spectacles, looked at the clean, strong lines of the jaw and
forehead. A good fellow. A very good fellow. He wondered why Edith
wouldn't take him? ("It couldn't make any difference to me," he thought;
"and I want her to be happy.")
"Johnny," he said, "you can say, 'Mind your business,' before I begin,
if you want to. But I don't think anybody's cutting you out? Better
'try, try again.'"
Johnny took his pipe from his mouth, bent forward to shake the ashes out
of it, and stared into the fire. Then he said, clearing his throat once
or twice: "I've bothered her, 'trying,' I thought I'd start on a new
tack."
"You'll get her yet!" Maurice encouraged him. He wondered, as he spoke,
how he could speak so lightly, urging old Johnny to go ahead and make
another stab at it, and, maybe, "get her"! He wondered if he was looking
at things the way the dead look at the living? He was not, he thought,
suffering, as he had suffered in those first moments when Eleanor had
flung the truth at him. "You'll get her yet," he said, vaguely.
Johnny took out his tobacco pouch, and began to fill his pipe, poking
his thumb down into the bowl with slow precision, then holding it on a
level with his eyes and squinting at it, to make sure it was smooth; he
seemed profoundly engrossed by that pipe--but he put it in his mouth
without lighting it.
"Well, I don't know," he said; "I haven't an awful lot of hope that I'll
ever get her. But I thought I'd try this way. Maybe, if she doesn't see
me for a year...."
"There's nobody ahead of you, anyway," Maurice said, absently.
"Well, I don't know," John Bennett said again.
His voice was so harsh that Maurice's preoccupation sharpened into
uneasy attention. Johnny's hopes and fears had not really touched him.
His encouraging platitudes were only a way of smothering his own
thoughts. But that, "Well, I don't know--" woke a keenly attentive fear:
_was_ there anybody else? ("Not that that could make any difference to
me.")
"You 'don't know'?" he said; "how do you mean? You think there _is_
somebody?"
Johnny Bennett was silent; he had an impulse to say "you are several
kinds of a fool, old man." But he was silent.
"Why, Great Scott!" Maurice protested. "Buried up there in the
mountains, she hardly knows a fellow--except you!--and me," he added,
with a laugh.
"I think," said John, huskily, "she has ... some kind of an ideal up her
sleeve. And I don't fill the bill. Imagination, you know. A--a sort of
Sir Walter Raleigh business. Remember how she was always sort of dotty
on Sir Walter Raleigh? An ideal, don't you know"; Johnny rambled on:
"Girls are that way. Only Edith's the kind that sticks to things."
"'Try, try again,'" said Maurice, mechanically; but his blood suddenly
pounded in his ears.
"I'm going to," Johnny said, calmly; and began to talk South America.
Indeed, he talked so long that Maurice, catching sight of the clock,
exclaimed that he would have to run!
"Johnny, get Eleanor on the wire, will you; at Mrs. Newbolt's, and tell
her I'd have called her up, but I got delayed, and had to leg it to
catch the train? Or maybe you wouldn't mind going round there, and
walking home with her?"
"Glad to," said Johnny.
When Maurice, swinging on to the last platform of the last Pullman, was
able to sit down in his section, he was absorbed in Johnny Bennett's
affairs. "What did he mean by saying that? Did he mean--" Johnny's
enigmatical words rang in his ears; "I said to 'try again; nobody was
cutting him out.' And he said 'She has some kind of an ideal up her
sleeve.' ... 'A Sir Walter Raleigh business' ..."
Johnny Bennett, walking toward Mrs. Newbolt's, was also thinking, in his
calm way, of just what he had said there by Maurice's fireside. "Of
course he doesn't see why she hasn't fallen in love with anybody else.
Any decent fellow would be stupid about that sort of thing. But it's
been that way ever since she was a child. And I've loved her ever since
then, too. All the same, I'll only sign up for a year. Then I'll make
another stab at it ..."
When he rang Mrs. Newbolt's doorbell, and was told that Eleanor had not
been there, he was perplexed. "I must have misunderstood Maurice," he
thought.