Eleanor, letting herself into her silent house, saw, with relief, that
the library was dark, and knew that Maurice had gone to the station and
she could be alone. She felt her way into the room, blundering against
his big chair; the fire was almost out, and without waiting to turn on
the light she thrust some kindling under a charred log and knelt down
and took up the bellows. A spark brightened, ran backward under the film
of ashes, then a flame hesitated, caught--and there was a little winking
blaze.
"Another failure," Eleanor said. She remembered with what eager hope she
had started for Lily's house; "I was going to 'bring him home' with me!
What a fool I was! ... I always fail," she said. Once more, she had
"marched up a hill--and--then--marched--down--again"! Her sense of
failure was like a dragging weight under her breastbone! She had not
made Maurice happy; she had not given him children; she had not kept
Edith out of his life. Failure! Failure! "But he loves me; he said so,
when I told him I forgave him about Lily. Of course I oughtn't to have
married him. But I loved him ... so much. And I did want to have just a
little happiness! I never had had any." She sat there, the bellows in
her white, ineffectual hands, looking into the fire; how capable Lily's
hands were! She remembered the sturdy left hand, and that shiny band of
gold ... Then she looked at her own slender wedding ring, and that made
her think of the circle of braided grass; and the locust blossoms; and
the field--and the children who were to come there on the wedding
anniversaries! And now--Maurice's child called another woman
"mother"!... Well, she had tried to bring him back to Maurice; tried,
and failed, with hideous humiliation--for, instead of bringing Jacky
back, this "mother" had brought her back!... "_And she paid my car
fare!_" It was intolerable. "I must send her five cents, somehow!"
She sat on the floor, leaning against Maurice's chair, until midnight;
the log burned through, broke apart, and smoldered into ashes. Once she
put her cheek down on the broad arm of the chair, then kissed it--for
his hand had rested on it!--his dear young hand--In the deepening
chilliness, watching the ashes, she ached with the sense of her last
failure; but most of the time she thought of Edith, and of what she
believed she had read in those humorous, candid eyes. "She dared,
_before me_!--to show him that she was in love with him! He doesn't care
for her--I know that. But I won't have her come here, to my own house,
and make love to him. How can I keep her from coming? Oh, if I could
only get Jacky!"
But she couldn't get him. She had accepted that as final. The talk in
Lily's parlor proved that there was not the slightest hope of getting
Jacky. So the only thing for her to do was to keep Edith out of her
house. When, at nearly one o'clock, shivering, she went up to her room,
she was absorbed in thinking how she could do this. With any other girl
it would have been simple enough; never invite her! But not Edith. Edith
came without an invitation. Edith had, Eleanor thought, "no delicacy."
She had always been that way. She had always lacked ordinary refinement!
From the very first, she had run after Maurice. "She is capable of
_kissing_ him," Eleanor told herself; "and saying she did it because he
was like a brother!" Strangely enough, in this blaze of jealousy she had
no flicker of resentment at Lily! Lily (now that she had seen her) was
to Eleanor merely the woman to whom Jacky belonged. Looking back on
those months that followed her discovery of Lily, and contrasting the
agony she had felt then with her despair about Edith now, she was
faintly surprised at the difference in her pain. This was probably
because faithlessness of the body is not so deadly an insult to Love as
faithlessness of the mind. But Eleanor did not, of course, make any such
explanation. She just said to herself that Maurice had been a boy when
he had been untrue to her, and she herself had been, in some ways, to
blame; and he had confessed, and been forgiven. So Lily was now of no
consequence--except as she interfered with Eleanor's passionate wish to
have Jacky. So she did not hate Lily, or fear her (though she was
humiliated at that car fare!). But she did hate Edith, and fear of her
was agony.... So she would, somehow, keep her out of the house!
Just as she was getting into bed, she wiped her eyes, then cringed at a
gust of perfumery--and realized that she had brought Lily's handkerchief
back with her! It was a last abasement: the woman's horrible
handkerchief. She burst into hysterical weeping.... The next morning,
when she came down to breakfast, her face was haggard with those
ravaging tears, and with the fatigue of hating. Even before she had her
coffee, she burned the scented scrap of machine-embroidered linen,
pressing it down between the logs in the library fireplace; but she
could not burn her hate; it burned her!
She was so worn out that when, a little before luncheon, Edith suddenly
came breezily in, she was, at first, too confused to know what to say to
her.... It was an incredibly mild day; on the shady side of the back
yard there was still a sooty heap of melting snow, but the sky was
turquoise, soaring without a cloud and brimmed with light, so that the
shadows of the bare branches of the poplar, clear-cut like jet,
crisscrossed on the brick path; in the border, the brown fangs of the
tulips had bitten up through the wet earth, and two militant crocuses
had raised their tight-furled purple standards. Eleanor, tempted by the
sunshine, had come here, muffled up in an elderly white shawl, to sit by
the little painted table--built so long ago for Edith's pleasure! She
had put old Bingo's basket in the sun, and stroked him gently; he was
very helpless now, and ate nothing except from her hands.
"Poor little Bingo!" Eleanor said; "dear little Bingo!" Bingo growled,
and Eleanor looked up to see why--Edith was on the iron veranda.
"Hullo!" Edith said, gayly; "isn't it a wonderful day? I just ran in--"
She came down the twisted stairway and, unasked and smiling, sat down at
the table. "Bingo! Don't you know your friends? One would think I was a
burglar! Oh, Eleanor, the tulips are up! Do you remember when Maurice
and I planted them?"
Eleanor's throat tightened. She made some gasping assent.
"I came 'round," Edith said--her frank eyes looked straight into
Eleanor's eyes, dark and agonized--"I ran in, because I'm afraid you
thought, yesterday, that I wanted to quarter myself on you? And I just
wanted to say, don't give it a thought! I perfectly understand that
sometimes it's inconvenient to have company, and--"
"It's not inconvenient to have company," Eleanor said.
Edith stopped short. ("What a dead give-away!" she thought; "she
dislikes me!") Then she tried, generously, to cover the "give-away" up:
She said something about guests and servants: "We're having an awful
time at Green Hill--servants are the limit! When a maid stays six weeks,
we call her an old family retainer!"
Eleanor said, "I have no difficulty with maids. That is not why I prefer
not to have ... company."
By this time, of course, Edith's one thought was to get away, with
dignity; but dignity, when you've had your face slapped, is almost
impossible. So Edith (being Edith!) chose Truth, and didn't trouble
herself with dignity! "Eleanor," she said, "I know it's me you don't
want. I felt it last night. I'm afraid I've done something that has
offended you. Have I? Truly, Eleanor, I haven't meant to! What is it?
Let's talk it out. Eleanor, what _have_ I done?" She put her hands down
on Eleanor's, clasped rigidly on the table.
"Please!" Eleanor said, and drew her hands away.
"Oh," Edith said, pitifully, "you are troubled!"
Eleanor said, with a gasp: "Not at all ... Edith, I am afraid I must ask
you to ... excuse me. I'm busy."
Edith was too amazed to speak; she could not, indeed, think of anything
to say! This wasn't "dislike." "Why, she _hates_ me!" she thought. "Why
does she hate me? Shall I not notice it? Shall I talk about something
else?" But she could not talk of anything else; she could only speak her
swift, honest thought: "Eleanor, why do you dislike me? Maurice and I
have been friends--we have been like brother and sister--ever since I
can remember. Oh, Eleanor, I want _you_ to like me, too! Please don't
keep me away from you and Maurice!"
Eleanor said, rapidly: "He's not your brother; and it would be difficult
to keep you away from him. You go to his office to find him."
There was a dead silence. Edith grew very pale. At last she understood.
Eleanor was jealous ... Of her! They looked at each other, the angry
woman and the dumfounded girl. "Jealous? Of _me_?" Edith thought. "Why
_me_? Maurice only cares for me as if I was his sister! ... And I don't
do Eleanor any harm by--loving him." ... Eleanor was gasping out a
torrent of assailing words:
"Girls are different from what they were in my day. Then, they didn't
openly run after men! Now, apparently, they do. Certainly _you_ do. You
always have. I'm not blind, Edith. I have known what was going on; when
you were living with us and I had a headache, you used to talk to him,
and try and be clever--to make him think I was dull, when it was only
that--I was too ill to talk! And you kept him down in the garden until
midnight, when he might have been sitting with me on the porch. And you
made him go skating. And now you _look_ at him! I know what that means.
A girl doesn't look that way at a man, unless--"
There was dead silence.
"Unless she's in love with him. But don't think that, though you are in
love with him, he cares for _you_! He does not. He cares for no one but
me. He told me so."
Silence.
"Can you deny that you care for my husband?" Edith opened her lips--and
closed them again. "You don't deny it," Eleanor said; "you _can't_." She
put her head down on her arms on the table; her fifty years engulfed
her. She said, in a whisper, "He doesn't love me."
Instantly Edith's arms were around her. "Eleanor, dear! Don't--don't! He
does love you--he does! I'd perfectly hate him if he didn't! Oh,
Eleanor, poor Eleanor! Don't cry; Maurice _does_ love you. He doesn't
care a copper for me!" The tears were running down her face. She bent
and kissed Eleanor's hands, clenched on the table, and then tried to
draw the gray head against her tender young breast.
Eleanor put out frantic hands, as if to push away some suffocating
pressure. Both of these women--Lily, with her car fare and her
handkerchief; Edith, with her impudent "advice" to Maurice not to have
secrets from his wife--pitied her! She would not be pitied by them!
"Don't touch me!" she said, furiously; "_you love my husband_."
Edith heard her own blood pounding in her ears.
"Don't you?" said Eleanor; her face was furrowed with pain; "Don't you?"
It was a moment of naked truth. "I have loved Maurice," Edith said,
steadily, "ever since I was a child. I always shall. I would like to
love you, too, Eleanor, if you would let me. But nothing--_nothing_!
shall ever break up my ... affection for Maurice."
"You might as well call it love."
Edith, rising, said, very low: "Well, I will call it love. I am not
ashamed. I am not wronging you. You have no need to be jealous of me,
Eleanor. He cares nothing for me."
Eleanor struck the table with her clenched fists. "You shall never have
him!" she said.
Edith turned, silently, and went up the veranda stairs and out of the
house.