Maurice, followed by telegrams that never quite overtook him, did, some
forty-eight hours later, get the news that Eleanor had "had an
accident," and was at Mrs. Newbolt's, who thought he had "better return
immediately." His business was not quite finished, but it did not need
Mr. Weston's laconic wire, "Drop Greenleaf matters and come back," to
start him on the next train for Mercer. He had been away nearly two
weeks--two terrible weeks, of facing himself; two weeks of rebellion,
and submission; of tumultuous despair and quiet acceptance. He had
looked faithfully--and very shrewdly--into the "Greenleaf matters"; he
had turned one or two sharp corners, with entirely honest cleverness,
and he was taking back to Mercer some concessions which old Weston had
slipped up on! Yes, he had done a darned good job, he told himself,
lounging in the smoking compartment of one parlor car or another, or
strolling up and down station platforms for a breath of air. And all the
while that he was on the Greenleaf job--in Pullmans, sitting in hotel
lobbies writing letters, looking through title and probate records--his
own affairs raced and raged in his thoughts; they were summed up in one
word: "Edith." He could not get away from Edith! He tripped a Greenleaf
trustee into an admission (and he thought, "so long as she never
suspects that I love her, there's no harm in going along as we always
have"). Then he conceded a point to the Greenleaf interests (and said to
himself, "her hair on her shoulders that day on the lawn was like a
nimbus around the head of a saint. How she'd hate that word 'saint'!").
His chuckle made one of the Greenleaf heirs think that Weston's
representative was a good sort;--"pleasant fellow!" But Maurice,
looking "pleasant," was thinking: "I'd about sell my soul to kiss her
hair ... Oh, I _must_ stop this kind of thing! I swear it's worse than
the Lily and Jacky business...." Then he signed a deed, and the
Greenleaf people felt they had made a good thing of it--but Maurice's
telegram that the deed was signed, caused rejoicing in the Weston
office! "Curtis got ahead of 'em!" said Mr. Weston. While he was
writing that triumphant telegram Maurice was wondering: "Was John
Bennett a complete idiot? ... If things had been different would Edith
have ... cared?" For himself, he, personally, didn't care "a damn,"
whether Weston got ahead of Greenleaf or Greenleaf beat Weston. His own
affairs engrossed him: "my job," he was telling himself, "is to see that
Eleanor doesn't suffer any more, poor girl! And Edith shall never know.
And I'll make a decent man of Jacky--not a fool, like his father." So he
wrote his victorious dispatch, and the Weston office congratulated
itself.
Maurice had been very grateful for his fortnight of absence from
everybody, except the Greenleaf heirs; grateful for a solitude of trains
and lawyers' offices. Because, in solitude, he could, with entirely
hopeless courage, face the future. He was facing it unswervingly the day
he reached Chicago, where he was to get some final signatures; he came
into the warm lobby of the hotel, glad to escape the rampaging lake
wind, and while he was registering the hotel clerk produced the
telegrams which had been held for him. The first, from Mr. Weston, "Drop
Greenleaf," bewildered him until he read the other, "Eleanor has had an
accident." Then he ran his pen through his name, asked for a time-table,
and sent a peremptory wire to Mrs. Newbolt saying that he was on his way
home, and asking that full particulars be telegraphed to him at a
certain point on his journey. "Let me know just what happened, and how
she is," he telegraphed. "It must be serious," he thought, "to send for
me!"
It was hardly an hour before he was on a train for another day of
travel, during which he experienced the irritation common to all of us
when we receive an alarming dispatch, devoid of details. "Economizing on
ten cents! What kind of an 'accident'? How serious is it? When was it?
Why didn't they let me know before?" and so on; all the futile, anxious,
angry questions which a man asks himself under such circumstances. But
suddenly, while he was asking these questions, another question
whispered in his mind; a question to which he would not listen, and
which he refused to answer; but again and again, over and over, it
repeated itself, coming, it seemed, on the rhythmical roll of the
wheels--the wheels which were taking him back to Eleanor! "If--if--if--"
the wheels hammered out; "_if_ anything happens to Eleanor--"? He never
finished that sentence, but the beginning of it actually frightened him.
"Am I as low as this?" he said, frantically, "speculating on the
possibility of anything happening to her?" But he was not so low as
that--he only heard the jar of the wheels: "If--if--if--if--"
When he reached the station to which he had told Mrs. Newbolt to reply,
he rushed out of the car into the telegraph office, and clutched at the
message before the operator could put it into its flimsy brown envelope;
as he read it he said under his breath, "Thank God!" It was from Mary
Houghton:
Accident slight. Slipped into water. All right now except bad cold.
Maurice's hand shook as he folded the message and stuffed it into his
pocket. He had the sense of having escaped from a terror--the terror of
intolerable remorse. For if she had not been "all right," if, instead of
just "a bad cold," the dispatch had said "something had
happened"!--then, for all the rest of his life he would have had to
remember how the wheels had beaten out that terrible refrain:
"If--if--if--"
So he said, "Thank God."
All that day, while Maurice was hurrying back to Mercer, Eleanor lay
very still, and when Mrs. Newbolt or Mrs. Houghton came into the room
she closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep. Edith did not come into
the room; so, in a hazy way, Eleanor took it for granted that she had
left the house. "I should think she would!" Eleanor thought; "she could
hardly have the face to stay in the same house with me." But she did not
think much about Edith; she was absorbed in deciding what she should say
to Maurice. Should she tell him the truth?--or some silly story of a
walk to their meadow? The two alternatives flew back and forth in her
mind like shuttlecocks. There was one thing she felt sure of: that
letter--which Mrs. Houghton had brought from her desk, which Maurice was
to have read when she had done what she set out to do, but which now she
kept clutched in her hand, or hidden under her pillow--_Maurice must not
see that letter!_ If he read it, now, while she was (she told herself)
still half sick from those drenched hours of the trolley ride and the
dark wanderings from Mrs. O'Brien's to Mrs. Newbolt's, the whole thing
would seem simply ridiculous. Some time, he must know that she loved him
enough to buy Jacky for him, by dying--or trying to die! She would tell
him, _some time_; because her purpose (even if it had failed) would
measure the heights and depths of her love as nothing else could; but he
must not know it now, because she hadn't carried it out. That first
night, when she had found herself safe and warm (oh, warm! She had
thought she never would be warm any more!)--when she had found herself
in Mrs. Newbolt's spare room in the four-poster with its chintz hangings
and its great soft pillows, she had been glad she had not carried it
out. Glad not to be dead. As she lay there, shivering slowly into
delicious comfort, and fending off Mrs. Newbolt's distracted questions,
she had had occasional moments of a sense of danger escaped; perhaps it
_would_ have been wrong to--to lie down there in the river? People call
it wicked Mrs. Newbolt, for a single suspicious instant ("She forgot it
right off," Eleanor said; "she just thought we'd quarreled!"); but Mrs.
Newbolt had said it was "wicked." "But I didn't do it!" Eleanor told
herself in a rush of gratitude. She hadn't been "wicked"! Instead, she
was in Mrs. Newbolt's spare room, looking dreamily at the old French
clock on the mantelpiece, whose tarnished gilt face glimmered between
two slender black-marble columns; sometimes she counted the tick-tock of
the slowly swinging pendulum; sometimes, toward dawn, she watched the
foggy yellow daylight peer between the red rep curtains; but counting,
and looking, and drowsing, she was glad to be alive. It was not until
the next afternoon that she began to be faintly mortified at being
alive. It was then that she had felt that she _must_ get that
letter--Maurice mustn't see it! Little by little, humiliation at her
failure to be heroic, grew acute. Maurice wouldn't know that she loved
him enough to give him Jacky; he would just know that she was silly. She
had got wet; and had a cold in her head. Snuffles--not Death. He
might--_laugh_!... It was then that she implored Mrs. Houghton to get
the letter out of her desk.
Yet when it was given to her she held it in her hand under the
bedclothes, saying to herself that she would not destroy it, yet,
because, even though she _had_ failed, there might come a time when it
would prove to Maurice how much she loved him. She was so absorbed in
this thought that she did not grieve much for Bingo. "Poor little
Bingo," she said, vaguely, when Mrs. Houghton told her that the little
dog was dead; "he was so jealous." Now, with Maurice coming nearer every
hour, she could not think of Bingo; she was face to face with a
decision! What should she tell him about the "accident"?
It was in the afternoon of the day that Maurice was to arrive,--he had
telegraphed that he would reach Mercer in the evening;--that she had a
sudden panic about Edith. "She was here that night and saw me. I know
she laughed at me because I hadn't any hat on! She may--suspect? If she
does, she'll tell him! What shall I do to stop her?" She couldn't think
of any way to stop her! She couldn't hold her thoughts steady enough to
reach a decision. First would come gladness of her own comfort and
safety, and the warm, warm bed; then shame, that she had faltered and
run away from a chance to do a great thing for Maurice; then terror that
Edith would make her ridiculous to Maurice. Then all these thoughts
would whirl about, run backward: First, terror of Edith! then shame!
then comfort! Suddenly the terror thought held fast with a question.
"Suppose I make her promise not to tell Maurice anything? I think she
would keep a promise...." It would be dreadful to ask the favor of
secrecy of Edith--just as she had asked the same sort of favor of
Lily--but to seem silly to Maurice would be more dreadful than to ask a
favor! She held to this purpose of humiliating self-protection, long
enough to ask Mrs. Houghton when Edith was coming down from Green Hill.
"Why, she's here, now, in the house!" Edith's mother said.
"_Here?_" Eleanor said, despairingly. If Edith was here, then Maurice,
when he came, would see her and she would tell him! "She would make a
funny story of it," Eleanor thought; "I know her! She would make him
laugh. I can't bear it! ... I would like to speak to Edith," she told
Mrs. Houghton, faintly.
Edith, summoned by her mother, stood for a rigid moment outside
Eleanor's door, trying to get herself in hand. In these anxious days,
Edith's youth had been threatened by assailing waves of a remorse that
at times would have engulfed it altogether, but for that unflinching
reasonableness which made her the girl she was. "It may be," Edith had
said to herself; "it _may_ be that what I said to her in the garden made
her so angry that she tried to kill herself; but why should it have made
her angry? I didn't injure her. Besides, she dragged it out of me! I
couldn't lie. She said, 'You love him.' I _would_ not lie, and say I
didn't! But what harm did it do her?" So she reasoned; but reason did
not keep her from suffering. "Did _I_ drive her to it?" Edith said,
over and over. So when her mother told her Eleanor wanted to speak to
her, she grew a little pale. When she entered Eleanor's room her heart
was beating so hard she felt smothered, but she was perfectly matter of
fact. "Anything I can do for you, Eleanor?" she said. She stood at the
foot of the bed, holding on to the carved bed post.
Eleanor looked at her for a silent moment, then gathered herself
together. "Edith," she said (she was very hoarse and spoke with
difficulty), "I don't want to bother Maurice about--about my accident.
So I am going to ask you, please, not to refer to it to him. Not to tell
him anything about it. _Anything._ Promise me."
"Of course I won't!" Edith said. As she spoke she forgot herself in pity
for the scared, haggard face. ("Oh, _was_ it my fault?" she thought,
with a real pang.) And before she knew it her coldness was all gone and
she was at Eleanor's side; she sat down on the edge of the bed and
caught her hand impulsively. "Eleanor," she said, "I've been awfully
unhappy, for fear anything I said--that morning--troubled you? Of course
there was no sense in talking that way, for either of us. So please
forgive me! _Was_ it what I said, that made you--that bothered you, I
mean? I'm so unhappy," Edith said, and caught her lip between her teeth
to keep it steady; her eyes were bright with tears. "Eleanor, truly I am
_nothing_ to--to anybody. Nobody cares a copper for me! Do be kind to
me. Oh--I've been awfully unhappy; and I'm _so_ glad you're better."
Instantly the smoldering fire broke into flame: "I'm _not_ better,"
Eleanor said, "and you wouldn't be glad if I were."
It was as if she struck her hand upon those generous young lips. Edith
sprang to her feet. "Eleanor!"
Eleanor sat up in bed, her hands behind her, propping her up; her cheeks
were dully red, her eyes glowing. "All this talk about making me unhappy
means nothing at all. You have always made me unhappy. And as for
anybody's caring for you--they _don't_; you are quite right about that.
Quite right! And I want to tell you something else: If anything happens
to me, I _want_ Maurice to marry again. But he won't marry you."
"Eleanor," Edith said, "you wouldn't say such a thing, or think such a
thing, if you weren't sick. I'm sorry I came in. I'll go right away,
and--"
"No," she said; "don't go away,"--her arms had begun to tremble with
strain of supporting her, she spoke in whispered gasps: "I am going to
speak," she said; "I prefer to speak. I want you to know that if I
die--"
"You are not going to die! You are going to get well."
"Will you _please_ not keep interrupting? It is so hard for me to get my
breath. I want you to know that he will marry--that Dale woman. Because
it is right that he should. Because of the little boy. His little boy."
Edith was dumb.
"So you see, he can't marry _you_," Eleanor said, and fell back on her
pillows, her eyes half closed.
There was a long silence, just the ticking of the Empire clock and the
faint snapping of the fire. Edith felt as if some iron hand had gripped
her throat. For a moment it was impossible for her to speak; then the
words came quietly: "Eleanor, I'm glad you told me this. You are going
to get well, and I'm glad, _glad_ that you are! But I must tell you: If
anything had happened to you, I would have moved heaven and earth to
have kept Maurice from marrying that woman. Oh, Eleanor, how can you say
you love him, and yet plan such terrible unhappiness for him?"
She turned and ran out of the room, up another flight of stairs to her
own bedroom. There she fell down on her bed and lay tense and rigid, her
face hidden in her hands. This, then, was what Maurice had meant? She
saw again the wood path, and the tall fern breaking under Maurice's
racquet; she saw the flecks of sunshine on the moss--she heard him say
he "hadn't played the game with Eleanor." Oh, he hadn't, he hadn't! Then
she thought of the Dale woman. The accident on the river. The stumble
at the gate and of Maurice's child in Lily's arms. "Oh, poor Eleanor!
poor Eleanor! ... All the same, she is wicked, to be so cruel to him.
She is taking her revenge. Jealousy has made her wicked. But, oh, I wish
I hadn't hurt her in the garden! But how _could_ Maurice--that little,
common woman! How _could_ he?" She shook with sobs: "Poor, poor
Eleanor ..."
Eleanor, on her big bed, lay panting with anger and fright. "_Now_
she'll know I'm hiding something from him!" she thought; "I've put
myself in her power by having a secret with her; just as I put myself in
Lily's power by asking her not to tell Maurice I had been there. Well,
Edith is in _my_ power!--because I've made her know he'll never care for
her. And she'll keep her word; she'll not tell him about the river."
The relief of this was so great that she could almost forget her
humiliation; she gave herself up to thinking what she herself must do
to keep Maurice in ignorance. "Auntie will be sure to say something. But
he knows how silly she is. She thought we'd quarreled, and that I had
tried ... I might tell Maurice that? And he'll make fun of her, and won't
believe anything she says! I might say that I went out to--to see our
river, and slipped and got wet, and that Auntie thought we'd quarreled,
and that I had ... had tried to ... to--And he'll say, 'What a joke!'
But maybe he'll say, 'Why did you go out to Medfield so late?' And I'll
say, 'Oh, well, I got delayed.' ... Yes, that's the thing to do."
So, around and around, her poor, frantic thoughts raced and trampled one
another. When Mrs. Newbolt interrupted them with a tray and some supper,
Eleanor, with eyes closed, motioned her away: "My head aches. I can't
eat anything. I'm going to try and get a little sleep."
By and by, through sheer fatigue, she did drowse, and when the wheels of
Maurice's cab grated against the curb, she was asleep.
Edith, upstairs in her own room, heard the front door close sharply. "I
_can't_ see him!" she said; "I mustn't see him." But she wanted to see
him; she wanted to say to him: "Maurice, you can make it all up to
Eleanor! You can make her happy. _Don't_ despair about it--we'll all
help you make it up to her!" She wanted to say: " Oh,Maurice, you _will_
conquer. I know you will!" If she could only see him and tell him these
things! "If I didn't love him, I could," she thought....
Maurice came hurrying into the parlor, with the anxious, "How is she?"
on his lips; and Mrs. Newbolt and Mrs. Houghton were full of
reassurances, and suggestions of food, which he negatived promptly.
"Tell me about Eleanor! What happened?"
"She's asleep," Mrs. Newbolt said. "You must have something to eat--"
She was in such a panic of uncertainty as to what must and must not be
said to Maurice that she clutched at supper as a perfectly safe topic.
"I--I--I'll go and see about your supper," said Mrs. Newbolt, and
trundled off to hide herself in the dining room.
Mary Houghton could not hide, but she would have been glad to! "Eleanor
is sleepy, now, Maurice," she said; "but she'll want to have just a
glimpse of you--"
"I'll go right up!"
"Maurice, wait one minute. If I were you, I wouldn't get Eleanor to
talking, to-night; she's a little feverish--"
"Mrs. Houghton!" he broke in, "Eleanor's all right, isn't she?" His face
was furrowed with alarm. (If that wicked rhythm of the wheels should
begin again!)
"Oh yes; I--I think so. She hasn't quite got over the shock yet, but--"
"What shock? Nobody's told me yet what it was! Your dispatch only said
she'd slipped into the water. What water?"
"We don't really know," said Mrs. Houghton; "and she mustn't be worried
with questions, the doctor says. You see, she got dripping wet, somehow,
and then had a long trolley ride--and she had a cold to start with--"
"I'll just crawl upstairs, and see if she's awake," said Maurice. "I
won't disturb her."
As he started softly upstairs, Mrs. Newbolt opened the dining-room door
a crack, and peered in at Mary Houghton. "Did you tell him?" she said,
in a wheezing whisper.
Mrs. Houghton shook her head.
"Well, I can tell you who won't tell him," said Eleanor's aunt; "me! To
tell a man that his wife--"
"Hush-sh!" said Mrs. Houghton; "he's coming downstairs. Besides, we
don't know that she did--"
The dining-room door closed softly on the whispered words: "Puffect
nonsense. Of course we know."
Maurice, tiptoeing into Eleanor's room, thought she was asleep, and was
backing out again, when she opened drowsy eyes and said, faintly,
"Hullo."
He bent over to kiss her. "Well, you're a great girl, to cut up like
this when I'm away from home!"
She smiled, closed her eyes, and he tiptoed out of the room....
Back again in the parlor, he began, "Mrs. Houghton, for Heaven's sake,
tell me the whole thing!" He wasn't anxious now; as far as he could see,
Eleanor was "all right"--just sleepy. But what on earth--
She told him what she knew; what she suspected, she kept to herself. But
she might as well have told it all. For, as he listened, his face
darkened with understanding.
"The river? In Medfield? But, why--?"
"Edith says you and she had a good deal of sentiment about the river,
and--"
"At six o'clock, on a March evening?" said Maurice. He put his hands in
his pockets and began to walk up and down. Mrs. Houghton had nothing
more to say; the room was so silent that the dining-room door opened a
furtive crack--then closed quickly! Mrs. Houghton began to talk about
Maurice's journey, and Maurice asked whether Eleanor could be taken home
the next day--at which the dining-room door opened broadly, and Mrs.
Newbolt said:
"If you ask _me_, I'd say 'no'! If you want to know what I think, I
think she's got a temperature! And she oughtn't to stir out of this
house till it's normal."
"Mrs. Newbolt," said Maurice, pausing in his tramping up and down the
room; "why did Eleanor go out to Medfield?"
"Perhaps she was lookin' for a cook! I--I think I'll go to bed!" said
Mrs. Newbolt--and almost ran out of the room.
Maurice looked down at Mrs. Houghton, and laughed, grimly: "You might as
well tell me?"
"My dear fellow, we have nothing to tell! We don't know anything--except
that Eleanor has added to her cold, and is very nervous," She paused;
could she give him an idea of the extent of Eleanor's "nervousness," and
yet not tell him what they all felt sure of? "Why, Maurice," she said;
"just to show you how hysterical Eleanor is, she told me--" Mrs.
Houghton dropped her voice, and looked toward the dining-room door; but
Mrs. Newbolt's ponderous step made itself heard overhead. "She said--Oh,
Maurice, this is too foolish to repeat; but it just shows how Eleanor
loves you. She implied that she didn't want to get well, so that you
could--could get the little boy, by marrying his mother!"
Maurice sat down and stared at her, open-mouthed. "_Marry?_ I, marry
Lily?" He actually gasped under the impact of a perfectly new idea; then
he said, very softly, "Good God."
Mrs. Houghton nodded. "Her one thought," she said (praying that, without
breaking her word to Eleanor, and betraying what was so terribly
Eleanor's own affair, she might make Maurice's heart so ready for the
pathos that he would not be repelled by the folly), "her one desire is
that you should have your little boy."
Maurice walked over to the fireplace and kicked two charred pieces of
wood together between the fire irons. In the crash of Mary Houghton's
calm words, the rhythm of the wheels was permanently silenced.
It was about four o'clock the next morning that the change came: Eleanor
had a violent chill.
"I thought we were out of the woods," the doctor said, frowning; "but I
guess I was too previous. There's a spot in the left lung, Mr. Curtis."