The Vehement Flame

During the next two days at Green Hill, Eleanor's dislike of Edith had no chance to break into silent flames, for the girl was so quiet that not even Eleanor could see anything in her behavior to Maurice to criticize. It was Maurice who did the criticizing!

"Edith, come down into the garden; I want to read something to you."

"Can't. Have to write letters."

"Edith, if you'll come into the studio I'll play you something I've patched up."

"I'm a heathen about music. Let's sit with Eleanor."

"Skeezics, what's the matter with you? Why won't you come and walk? You're getting lazy in your old age!"

"Busy," Edith said, vaguely.

At this point Maurice insisted, and Edith sneaked out to the back entry and telephoned Johnny Bennett: "Come over, lazybones, and take some exercise!"

John came, with leaps and bounds, so to speak, and Maurice said, grumpily:

"What do you lug Johnny in for?"

So, during the rest of her visit (with John Bennett as Maurice's chaperon!) Eleanor merely ached with dislike of Edith; but, even so, she had the small relief of not having to say to herself: "Is he seeing Mrs. Dale, now? ... Did he go to her house yesterday?" Of course, as soon as she went back to Mercer those silent questions began again; and her audible question nagged Maurice whenever he was in the house: "Did you go to the theater last night? ... Yes? Did you go alone? ... Will you be home to-night to dinner? ... No? Where are you going?"

Maurice, answering with bored patience, thought, with tender amusement, of Edith's advice, "Tell Eleanor." How little she knew!

He did not see Edith very often that next winter, "which is just as well," he thought. But his analysis stopped there; he did not ask himself why it was just as well. She made flying visits to Mercer, for shopping or luncheons, so he had glimpses of her, and whenever he saw her he was conscious of a little wistful change in her, for she was shy with him—Edith, shy!—and much gentler. When they discussed the Eternities or the ball game, she never pounded his arm with an energetic and dissenting fist, nor was there ever the faintest suggestion of the sexless "rough-house" of their old jokes! As for coming to town, she explained that she was too busy; she had taken the burden of housekeeping from her mother, and she was doing a good deal of hard reading preparatory to a course of technical training in domestic science, to which she was looking forward when she could find time for it. But whenever she did come to Mercer, she did her duty by rushing in to see Eleanor! Eleanor's criticisms of her, when she rushed out again, always made Maurice silently, but deeply, irritated. The criticisms lessened in the fall, because Eleanor had the pitiful preoccupation of watching poor Don O'Brien fade out of the world; and when he had gone she had to push her own misery aside while his grandmother's heart broke into the meager tears of age upon her "Miss Eleanor's" breast. But, besides that, she did not have the opportunity to criticize Edith, for the Houghtons went abroad.

So the rest of that year went dully by. To Eleanor, it was a time of spasmodic effort to regain Maurice's love; spasmodic, because when she had visions—hideous visions! of Maurice and the "other woman,"—then, her aspirations to regain his love, which had been born in that agony of recognized complicity in his faithlessness, would shrivel up in the vehement flame of jealousy. To Maurice, it was a time of endurance; of vague thoughts of Edith, but of no mental disloyalty to his wife. Its only brightness lay in those rare visits to Medfield, when Jacky looked at him like a worshiping puppy, and asked forty thousand questions which he couldn't answer! They were very careful visits, made only when Maurice was sure Eleanor would not be going to "look for a cook." He always balanced his brief pleasure of an hour with his little boy by an added gentleness to his wife—perhaps a bunch of violets, bought at the florist's on Maple Street where Lily got her flower pots or her bulbs. He was very lonely, and increasingly bothered about Jacky. ... "Lily will let him go plumb to hell. But I put him on the toboggan! ... I'm responsible for his existence," he used to think. And sometimes he repeated the words he had spoken that night when he had felt the first stir of fatherhood, "My little Jacky."

He would hardly have said he loved the child; love had come so gradually, that he had not recognized it! Yet it had come. It had been added to those other intimations of God, which also he had not recognized. Personal Joy on his wedding day had been the first; and the next had come when he looked up at the heights of Law among the stars, and then there had been the terrifying vision of the awfulness of Life, at Jacky's birth. Now, into his soul, arid with long untruth, came this flooding in of Love—which in itself is Life, and Joy, and the fulfilling of Law! Or, as he had said, once, carelessly, "Call it God."

This pursuing God, this inescapable God! was making him acutely uncomfortable now, about Jacky. Maurice felt the discomfort, but he did not recognize it as Salvation, or know Whose mercy sent it! He merely did what most of us do when we suffer: he gave the credit of his pain to the devil—not to Infinite Love. "Oh," the poor fellow thought, coming back one day from a call at the little secret house on Maple Street, "the devil's getting his money's worth out of me; well, I won't squeal about that! But he's getting his money's worth out of my boy, too. She's ruining him!"

He said this once when he had been rather recklessly daring in seeing "his boy." It was Saturday afternoon, and Jacky was free from his detested school. Maurice had given him a new sled, and then had "fallen," as he expressed it, to the little fellow's entreaty: "Mr. Curtis, if you'll come up to the hill, I'll show you how she'll go!" But before they started Maurice had a disagreeable five minutes with Lily. She had told him, tears of laughter running down her rosy cheeks, of some performance of Jacky's. He had asked her, she said, about his paw; "and I said his name was Mr. George Dale, and he died ten or eleven years ago of consumption—had to tell him something, you know! An' he says,—he's great on arithmetic,—'Poor paw!' he says, 'how many years was that before I was born?' I declare, I was all balled up!" Then, as she wiped her laughing eyes, she had grown suddenly angry: "I'm going to take him away from his new Sunday school; the teacher—it was her did the Paul Pry act, and asked him about his father;—well, I guess she ain't much of a lady; I never see her name in the Sunday papers;—she came down on Jacky because he told her a 'lie'; that's what she called it, 'a lie'! Said he'd go to hell if he told lies. I said, 'I won't have you threatening my child!' I declare I felt like saying, 'You go to hell yourself!' but of course I don't say things that ain't refined."

"Well, but Lily, the little beggar must tell the truth—"

"Mr. Curtis, Jacky didn't say anything but what you or me would say a dozen times a day. He just told her he hadn't a library book out, when he had. Seems he forgot to bring it back, so, 'course, he just said he hadn't any book. Well, this teacher, she put the lie onto him. It's a vulgar word, 'lie.' And as for hell, they say society people don't believe there is such a place any more."

When he and his little son walked away (Jacky dragging his magnificent sled), Maurice was nervously anxious to counteract such views.

"Jacobus," he said, "I'm going to tell you something: Big men never say anything that isn't so! Do you get on to that?" (In his own mind he added, "I'm a sweet person to tell him that!") "Promise me you'll never say anything that isn't just exactly so," said Maurice.

"Yes, sir," said Jacky. "Say, Mr. Curtis, have you got teeth you can take out?" When Maurice said, rather absently, that he had not, Jacky's dismay was pathetic. "Why, maw can do that," he said, reproachfully. It was the first flaw in his idol. It took several minutes to recover from the shock of disappointment; then he said: "Lookee here!" He paused beside a hydrant, and with his mittened hand broke off a long icicle, held it up and turned it about so that the sun flashed on it. "Handsome, ain't it?" he asked, timidly.

Maurice said yes, it was "handsome";—"but suppose you say 'isn't it' instead of 'ain't it.' 'Ain't' is not a nice word. And remember what I told you about telling the truth."

"Yes, sir," said Jacky, and trudged along, pulling his sled with one hand and carrying his icicle in the other.

After this paternal effort, Maurice stood in the snow watching the crowd of children—red-cheeked, shrill-voiced—sliding down Winpole Hill and yelling and snow-balling each other as they pulled their sleds up to the top of the slope again. It was during one of these panting tugs uphill, that Jacky saw fit to slap a fellow coaster, a little, snub-nosed girl with a sniffling cold in her head, and all muffled up in dirty scarves. Instantly Maurice, striding in among the children, took his son by the arm, and said, sharply:

"Young man, apologize! Quick! Or I'll take you home!"

Jacky gaped. "Pol'gize?"

"Say you're sorry! Out with it. Tell the little girl you're sorry you hit her."

"But I ain't," Jacky explained, anxiously; "an' you said I mustn't say what ain't so."

"Well, tell her you won't do it again," Maurice commanded, evading, as perplexed fathers must, moral contradictions.

Jacky, bewildered, said to his howling playmate, "I don't like you, but I won't hit you again, less I have to; then I'll lick the tar out of you!" He paused, rummaged in his pocket, produced a horrid precious little gray lump of something, and handed it to her. "Gum," he said, briefly.

Maurice, taking another step into paternal wisdom, was deaf to the statute of limitation in the apology; but walking home with the little boy, he said to himself, "She's ruining him!" and fell into such moody silence that he didn't even notice Jacky's obedient struggles with "isn't." Once, a week later, as a result of this experience, he tried to make some ethical suggestions to Lily. She was displaying her latest triumph—a rosebush, blossoming in February! And Maurice, duly admiring the glowing flower, against its background of soot-speckled snowdrift on the window sill, began upon Jacky's morals. Lily's good-humored face hardened.

"Mr. Curtis, you don't need to worry about Jacky! He don't steal, and he don't swear,—much; and he's never been pinched, and he's awful handsome; and, my God! what more do you want? I ain't going to make his life miserable by tellin' him to talk grammar, or do the polite act!"

"Lily, I only mean I want him to turn out well, and he won't unless he tells the truth—"

"He'll turn out good. You needn't worry. Anybody's got to have sense about telling the truth; you can't just plunk everything out! I—I believe I'll go and live in New York."

Instantly Maurice was silenced. "She mustn't take him away!" he thought, despairingly.

His fear that she would do so was a constant worry.... His work in the Weston real-estate office involved occasional business trips of a few days, and his long hours on trains were filled with this increasing anxiety about Jacky. "If she takes him away from Mercer, and I can't ever see him, nothing can save him! But, damn it! what can I do?" he would say. He tried to reassure himself by counting up Lily's good points; her present uprightness; her honest friendliness to him; her almost insane devotion to Jacky, and her pathetic aspiration for respectability, which was summed up in that one word of collective emptiness,—"Society." But immediately her bad points clamored in his mind; her ignorance and unmorality and vulgarity. "Truth is just a matter of expediency with her. If he gets to be a liar, I'll boot him!" Maurice would think of these bad points until he got perfectly frantic! His sense of wanting advice was like an ache in his mind—for there was no one who could advise him. Then, quite unexpectedly, advice came....

In the fall the Houghtons got back from Europe. Maurice saw them only between trains in Mercer, for Henry Houghton was in a great hurry to get up to Green Hill, and Edith, too, was exercised about her trunks and the unpacking of her treasures of reminiscence. But Mrs. Houghton said: "We shall be coming down to do some shopping before Christmas. No! We'll not inflict ourselves upon Eleanor! We'll go to the hotel; you will both take dinner with us."

They came, and Maurice and Eleanor dined with them, as Mrs. Houghton had insisted that they should; but only Mrs. Houghton accepted Eleanor's repaying hospitality.

"Mother has virtue enough for the family," Edith said; "I'm going to stay here with father."

"It will be a jewel in your crown," Henry Houghton told his Mary.

"Why not collect jewels for your crown?" she inquired. "Henry, Maurice looks troubled. What do you suppose is the matter?"

"He does look seedy," he agreed; "poke about and find out what's wrong. You can do it better if your inelegant offspring isn't around, and if I'm not there, either. He won't open his lips to me! I think it's money. He's carrying a pretty heavy load. But he never peeps.... I wish he wouldn't economize on cigars, though; he offered me one yesterday, and politeness compelled me to smoke it!"

"'Peeps'!" said Edith; "how elegant!"

So that was how it happened that Mary Houghton went alone to dine with Maurice and Eleanor. But she couldn't discover, in Maurice's talk or Eleanor's silences, any hint of financial anxiety. "So," she said to herself, "it isn't money that worries him." When he walked back with her to the hotel after dinner, he was thinking, "She'd know what to do about Jacky." But of course he couldn't ask her what to do! He could never ask anybody—except, perhaps, Mr. Houghton; and what would he, an old man, know about bringing up a little boy? He was listening, not very closely, to Mrs. Houghton's talk of the Custom House; but when she said, "John Bennett met us on the dock," he was suddenly attentive.

"Has Edith—?" he began.

She laughed ruefully. "No. Young people are not what they were in my day. Edith is not a bit sentimental."

Maurice was silent. When they reached the hotel, they went upstairs into a vast, bleak parlor, and steered their way among enormous plush armchairs to a sofa. A few electric bulbs, glaring among the glass prisms of a remote chandelier, made a dim light—but not too dim for Mary Houghton to see that Maurice's face was drawn and worried; involuntarily she said:

"You dear boy, I wish you didn't look so careworn!"

"I'm bothered about something," he said.

"Your uncle Henry told me to 'poke around,' and see if you were troubled about money?" she said, smiling.

"Oh, not especially. I'm always more or less strapped. But money isn't worth bothering about, really."

"If you 'consider the stars,' you will find very few things are worth bothering about! Except, of course, wrongdoing."

And, to his own astonishment, he found himself saying, "I'm afraid that's where I come in!" As he spoke, he remembered that night of the eclipse—oh, those moon-washed depths, those stupendous serenities of Law and Beauty which, together, are Truth! How passionately he had desired Truth. And now Mrs. Houghton was saying "Consider the stars." "If I could only tell her!" he thought.

"If the wrongdoing is behind you," said Mary Houghton, "let it go."

"It won't let me go," he said, with nervous lightness. "Though it's behind me, all right!"

Which made her say, gently, "Maurice, perhaps I know what troubles you?" His start made her add, quickly: "Your uncle Henry has never betrayed your confidence; but ... I guessed, long ago, that something had gone wrong. I don't know how wrong—"

"Oh, Mrs. Houghton," he said, despairingly, "awfully wrong! Awfully—awfully wrong!" He put his elbow on his knee, and rested his chin on his clenched fist; she was silent. Then he said: "You've always been an angel to me. I am glad you guessed. Because—I don't know what to do."

"About the woman?"

"No. The boy."

"Oh!" she said; "a child!"

Her dismay was like a blow. "But you said you had 'guessed'?"

"I guessed that there was a woman; but I didn't know—" She put her arm over his shoulders and kissed him. "My poor Maurice!" The tears stood in her eyes.

"I told you it was 'awful,'" he said, simply; "yes, it is my little boy; I'm worried to death about him. Lily—that's her name—is perfectly all right; she means well, and adores him, and all that; but—" Then he told her what Jacky's mother had been and what she was now; and the illustrations he gave of Lily's ignorance of ethical standards made Mary Houghton cringe. "She's ruining the little fellow," he said; "he's not mean nor a coward—I'll say that for him! But he lies whenever he feels like it, and honesty only means not getting 'pinched.' She's awfully ambitious for him; but her idea of success is what she calls 'Society,' Oh, it's such a relief to speak to you, Mrs. Houghton! I haven't a soul I can talk to."

"Maurice, can't you get him?" Her voice was shocked.

He almost laughed. "Wild horses wouldn't drag him from Lily!"

She was silent before the complexity of the situation—the furtive paternity, with its bewildered sense of responsibility, in conflict with the passion of the dam!

"I have to be so infernally secret," Maurice said. "If it wasn't for that, I could train him a little, because he's fond of me," he explained—and for a moment his face relaxed into one of his old charming smiles. "He really is an awfully fine little beggar. I swear I believe he's musical! And he's confoundedly clever. Why, he said—" Mrs. Houghton could have wept with the pitifulness of it! For Maurice went on, like any proud young father, with a story of how his little boy had said this or done that. "But he's fresh, sometimes, and he's the kind that, if he got fresh, ought to be licked. She can't make him mind; but"—here the poor, shamed pride shone again in his blue eyes—"he minds me!"

Mary Houghton was silent; she tried to consider the stars, but her dismay at a child endangered, came between her and the eternal tranquillities. "The boy must be saved," she thought, "at any cost! It isn't a question of Maurice's happiness; it's a question of his obligation."

"This thing of having a secret hanging round your neck is hell!" Maurice told her. "Every minute I think—'Suppose Eleanor should find out?'"

Mrs. Houghton put her hand on his knee. "The only way to escape from the fear of being found out, Maurice, is to be found out. Get rid of the millstone. Tell Eleanor."

"You don't know Eleanor," he said, dryly.

"Yes, I do. She loves you so much that she would forgive you. And with forgiveness would come helpfulness with the little boy. The child is the important one—not you, nor Eleanor, nor the woman. Oh, Maurice, a child is the most precious thing in the world! You must save him!"

"Don't you suppose I want to? But, good God! I'm helpless."

"If you tell Eleanor, you won't be 'helpless.'"

"You don't understand. She's jealous of—of everybody."

"Telling her will prove to her she needn't be jealous of—this person. And the chance to do something for you would mean so much to her. She will forgive you—Eleanor can always do a big thing! Remember the mountain? Maurice! Let her do another great thing for you. Let her help you save your child, by making it possible for you to be open and aboveboard, and see him all you want to—all you ought to. Oh, Maurice dear, it would have been better, of course, if you had told Eleanor at first. You wouldn't have had to carry this awful load for all these years. But tell her now! Give her the chance to be generous. Let her help you to do your duty to the little boy. Maurice, his character, and his happiness, are your job! Just as much your job as if he had been Eleanor's child, instead of the child of this woman. Perhaps more so, for that reason. Don't you see that? Tell Eleanor, so that you can save him!"

The appeal was like a bugle note. Maurice—discouraged, thwarted, hopeless—heard it, and his heart quickened. This inverted idea of recompense—of making up to Eleanor for having secretly robbed her, by telling her she had been robbed!—stirred some hope in him. He did not love his wife; he was profoundly tired of her; but suppose, now, he did throw himself upon her generosity and give her a chance to prove that love which was a daily fatigue to him? Mere Truth would, as Mrs. Houghton said, go far toward saving Jacky. He was silent for a long time. Then Mary Houghton said:

"I ought to tell you, Maurice, that Henry—who is the very best man in the world, as well as the wisest!—doesn't agree with me about this matter of confession. He doesn't understand women! He thinks you ought not to tell Eleanor."

"I know. He said so. That first night, when I told him the whole hideous business, he said so. And I thought he was right. I'm afraid I still think so."

"He was wrong. Maurice, save the child! Tell Eleanor."

"That is what Edith said."

"Edith!" Mary Houghton was stupefied.

"Oh, not about this. I only mean Edith said once, 'Don't have a secret from Eleanor.'"

"She was right," Edith's mother said, getting her breath.

Then they were silent again. A distant measure of ragtime floated up from the lobby; once, as a heavy team passed down in the street, the chandelier swayed, and little lights flickered among the faintly clicking prisms. Mrs. Houghton looked at him—and looked away. Maurice was thirty-one; his face was patient and melancholy; the old crinkling laughter rarely made gay wrinkles about his eyes, yet wrinkles were there, and his lips were cynical. Suddenly, he turned and struck his hand on hers:

"I'll do it," he said....

Late that night Henry Houghton, listening to his Mary's story of this talk, looked almost frightened. "Mary, it's an awful risk—Eleanor will never stand up to it!"

"I think she will."

"My dear, when it comes to children, you—with your stars!—get down to the elemental straighter than I do; I know that! And I admit that it is terrible for Maurice's child to be scrapped, as he will be if he is brought up by this impossible person. But as for Eleanor's helping Maurice to save him from the scrap heap, you overlook the fact that to tell a jealous woman that she has cause for jealousy is about as safe as to take a lighted match into a powder magazine. There'll be an explosion."

"Well," she said, "suppose there is?"

"Good heavens, Mary! Do you realize what that means? She'll leave him!"

"I don't believe she will," his wife said, "but if she does, he can at least see all he wants of the boy. He seems to be an unusually bright child."

Her husband nodded. "Yes; Nature isn't shocked at illegitimacy; and God doesn't penalize it."

"But you do," she said, quickly, "when you won't admit that Jacky is the crux of the whole thing! It isn't poor Maurice who ought to be considered, nor that sad, tragic old Eleanor; nor the dreadful person in Medfield. But just that little child—whom Maurice has brought into the world."

"Do you mean," her husband said, aghast, "that if Eleanor saw fit to divorce him, you think he should marry this 'Lily,' so that he could get the child?"

She did shrink at that. "Well—" she hesitated.

He saw his advantage, and followed it: "He couldn't get complete possession in any other way! Unless he were legally the father, the woman could, at any minute, carry off this—what did you say his name was?—Jacky?—to Kamchatka, if she wanted to! Or she might very well marry somebody else; that kind do. Then Maurice wouldn't have any finger in the pie! No; really to get control of the child, he'd have to marry her, which, as you yourself admit, is impossible."

"I don't admit it."

"Mary! You must be reasonable; you know it would be shocking! So why not keep things as they are? Why run the risk of an explosion, by confessing to Eleanor?"

Mary Houghton pondered, silently.

"Kit," he said, "this is a 'condition and not a theory'; the woman was—was common, you know. Maurice doesn't owe her anything; he has paid the piper ten times over! Any further payment, like ruining his career by 'making an honest woman' of her,—granting an explosion and then Eleanor's divorcing him,—would be not only wrong, but ridiculous; which is worse! Maurice is an able fellow; I rather expect to see him go in for politics one of these days. Imagine this 'Lily' at the head of his table! Or even imagine her as a fireside companion!"

"It would be terrible," she admitted—her voice trembled—"but Jacky's life is more important than Maurice's dinner table. And fireside happiness is less important than the meeting of an obligation! Henry, Maurice made a bad woman Jacky's mother; he owes her nothing. But do you mean to say that you don't think he owes the child a decent father?"

"My darling," Henry Houghton said, tenderly, "you are really a little crazy. You are like your stars, you so 'steadfastly pursue your shining,' that you fail to see that, in this dark world of men, there has to be compromise. If this impossible situation should arise—which God forbid!—if the explosion should come, and Eleanor should leave him, of course Maurice wouldn't marry the woman! I should consider him a candidate for an insane asylum if he thought of such a thing. He would simply do what he could for the boy, and that would be the end of it."

"Oh," she said, "don't you see? It would be the beginning of it!—The beginning of an evil influence in the world; a bad little boy, growing into a bad man—and his own father permitting it! But," she ended, with a sudden uplifted look, "the 'situation,' as you call it, won't arise; Eleanor will prevent it! Eleanor will save Jacky."

Walking home that night, with Mrs. Houghton's "tell Eleanor" ringing in his ears, Maurice imagined a "confession," and he, too, used Mr. Houghton's words, "'there will be an explosion!' But I'll gamble on it; I'll tell her. I promised Mrs. Houghton I would," Then, very anxiously, he tried to decide how he should do it; "I must choose just the right moment," he thought.

When, three months later, the moment came, he hardly recognized it. He had been playing squash and had given his knee a nasty wrench; the ensuing synovitis meant an irritable fortnight of sitting at home near the telephone, with his leg up, fussing about office work. And when he was not fussing he would look at Eleanor and say to himself, "How can I tell her?" Then he would think of his boy developing into a little joyous liar—and thief! The five cents that purchased the jew's-harp, instead of going into the missionary box, was intensely annoying to him. "But the lying is the worst. I can stand anything but lying!" the poor lying father thought. It was then that Eleanor caught his eye, a half-scared, appraising, entreating eye—and stood still, looking down at him.

"Maurice, you want something? What is it?"

"Oh, Nelly!" he said; "I want—" And the thing tumbled from his lips in six words: "I want you to forgive me."

Eleanor put her hand to her throat; then she said, "I know, Maurice."

Silence tingled between them. Maurice said, "You know?"

She nodded. He was too stunned to ask how she knew; he only said, "I've been a hound."

Instantly, as though some locked and bolted door had been forced, her heart was open to him. "Maurice! I can bear it—if only you don't lie to me!"

"I have lied," he said; "but I can't go on lying any more! It's been hell. Of course you'll never forgive me."

Instantly she was on her knees beside him, and her lips trembled against his cheek; but she was silent. She was agonizing, not for herself, but for him; he had suffered. And when that thought came, Love rose like a wave and swept jealousy away! It was impossible for her to speak. Over in his basket old Bingo growled.

"It was years ago," he said, very low; "I haven't—had anything to do with her since; but—"

She said, gasping, "Do you ... love her still?"

"Good God! no; I never loved her."

"Then," she said, "I don't mind."

His arms went about her, his head dropped on her shoulder. The little dog, unnoticed, barked angrily. For a few minutes neither of them could speak. To him, the unexpectedness of forgiveness was an absolute shock. Eleanor, her cheek against his hair, wept. Happy tears! Then she whispered:

"There is ... a child?"

He nodded speechlessly.

"Maurice, I will love it—"

He was too overcome to speak. Here she was, this irritating, foolish, faithful woman, coming, with outstretched, forgiving arms—to rescue him from his long deceit!

"I have known it," she said, "for nearly two years."

"And you never spoke of it!"

"I couldn't."

"I want to tell you everything, Eleanor. It was—that Dale woman."

She pressed very close to him: "I know."

He wondered swiftly how she knew, but he did not stop to ask; his words rushed out; it was as if the jab of a lancet had opened a hidden wound: "I never cared a copper for her. Never! But—it happened. I was angry about something, and,—Oh, I'm not excusing myself. There isn't any excuse! But I met her, and somehow—Oh, Eleanor!"

"Maurice, ... what does she call you?"

"Call me? What do you mean?"

"What name?"

"Why, 'Mr. Curtis,' of course."

"Not 'Maurice'? Oh—I'm so glad! Go on."

"Well, I never saw her again until she wrote to me about ... this child. Eleanor! I tried to tell you. Do you remember? One night in the boarding house—the night of the eclipse? I thought you'd never forgive me, but I tried to tell you ... Oh, Star, you are wonderful!"

It was an amazing moment; he said to himself: "Mrs. Houghton was right. Edith was right. How I have misjudged her!" He went on, Eleanor still kneeling beside him, sometimes holding his hand to her lips, sometimes pressing her wet cheek against his; once her graying hair fell softly across his eyes ... "Then," he said, "then ... the baby was born."

"Oh, we had no children!"

His arms comforted her. "I didn't care. I have never cared. I hated the idea of children, because of ... this child."

"Is his name Jacky?"

"That's what she called him. I never really noticed him, until winter before last; then I kind of—" He paused, then rushed on; it was to be Truth henceforward between them! "I sort of—got fond of him." He waited, holding his breath; but there was no "explosion"! She just pressed his hand against her breast.

"Yes, Maurice?"

"He was sick and she sent for me—"

"I know. That's how I knew. The telegram came, and I—Oh," she interrupted herself, "I wasn't prying!" She was like a dog, shrinking before an expected blow.

The fright in her face went to his heart; what a brute he must have been to have made her so afraid of him!

"It was all right to open it! I'm glad you opened it. Well, he was pretty sick, and I had to get him into the hospital; and after that I began to get sort of—interested in him. But now I'm worried to death, because—" Then he told why he was worried; he told her almost with passion!... "For he's an awfully fine little chap! But she's ruining him." It was amazing how he was able to pour himself out to her! His anxiety about Jacky, his irritation at Lily—yet his appreciation of Lily; he wouldn't go back on Lily! "She wasn't bad—ever. Just unmoral."

"I understand."

"Oh, Eleanor, to be able to talk to you, and tell you!" So he went on telling her: he told her of his faint, shy pride in his little son; told her a funny speech, and she laughed. Told her Jacky had seen a rainbow in the gutter and said it was "handsome." "He really notices Beauty!" Told her of Lily's indignation at the Sunday-school teacher, and his own effort to make Jacky tell the truth, "I have a tremendous influence over him. He'll do anything for me; only, I see him so seldom that I can't counteract poor old Lily's influence. She hasn't any idea of our way of looking at things."

"You must counteract her! You must see him all the time."

"Eleanor," he said, "I have never known you!"

He tried to lift her and hold her in his arms, but she was terrified about his knee.

"No! Don't move! You'll hurt your knee. Maurice, can't I see him?"

"What! Do you really want to?" he said, amazed "Eleanor, you are wonderful!"

That whole evening was entire bliss—as much to Maurice as to Eleanor; to him, it was escape from the bog of secrecy in which, soiled with self-disgust, he had walked for nearly nine years; and with the clean sense of touching the bedrock of Truth was an upspringing hope for his little boy, who "noticed Beauty"! He would be able to see Jacky, and train him, and gain his affection, and make a man of him. He had a sudden vision of companionship. "He'll be in business with me." But that made him smile at himself. "Well, we'll go to ball games, anyway!"

To Eleanor, the evening was a mountain peak; from the sun-smitten heights of a forgiveness that knew itself to be Love, and forgot that it forgave, she looked out, and saw—not that grave where Truth and Pride were buried, but a new heaven and a new earth; Maurice's complete devotion. And his child,—whom she could love.

Those next weeks were full of plans and hopes on Eleanor's part, and gratitude on Maurice's part. But she would not let him say that he was grateful, or that she was generous; he had told her, of course, how Mrs. Houghton had guessed long ago what had happened, and how she had urged him to trust his wife's nobility—but Eleanor would not let him call her "noble"; "Don't say it! And don't be 'grateful,' I just love you," she said; "and if you only knew what it means to me to be able to do anything for you! It's so long since you've needed me, Maurice."

The pathos of her sense of uselessness made his eyes sting. "I couldn't get along without you," he told her.

Once, on a rainy April Sunday morning, when they were talking about Jacky (Maurice had gone to see him the day before, and was gnashing his teeth over some cheerful obliquity on the part of Lily)—Maurice said, emphatically: "Gosh! Nelly, I don't know what I'd do without you!"

She, sitting on a stool at his side (and looking, poor woman! old enough to be his mother), was radiant.

"And you don't enjoy talking to Lily?" she said—just for the happiness of hearing, again, his horrified protest, "I should say not! There's nothing she can talk about."

"She doesn't know about books and things? She hasn't—brains?"

"Brains? She probably never read anything in her life! She has lots of sense, but no intellect. She hasn't an idea beyond food and flowers—and Jacky."

"I wish I had her idea about food," Eleanor said, simply.

It was her fairness toward Lily that amazed him; it made him reproach himself for his stupidity in not having confessed to her long ago! "Why was I such a fool, Eleanor, as not to know that you were a big woman? Mrs. Houghton knew it. Why, even Edith knew it! She told me you'd forgive anything."

"What!" She rose abruptly and stood looking at him with suddenly angry eyes. "Does Edith know?" she said.

"No! Of course she doesn't know—this! But one day she and I were taking a walk, and I was thinking what a devilish mess I was in.... And I suppose Edith saw I was down by the head, and she got to talking about you—"

"You let her talk about me!"

"She was saying how perfectly fine you had been about the mountain—"

"I don't need Edith Houghton's approval of my conduct, Maurice." She was trembling, and her face was quite pale. He rushed in deeper than ever:

"I was only saying I felt so—badly, because I had failed to make you happy. Of course I didn't say how! And she said, 'Don't have any secrets from Eleanor!'"

"So it was Edith who made you—"

For a moment Maurice was too dismayed to speak; besides, he didn't know what to say. What he did say was that she misunderstood him. "Good heavens! Eleanor, you didn't think I'd tell Edith a thing like that? Or that I'd tell any woman, when I didn't tell you? But Edith knew you better than I did; she said no matter what I'd done (I just happened to say I was a skunk), you loved me enough to forgive me. And you have forgiven me."

"Yes," she said, in a whisper; "I've forgiven you."

She went over to the window, and stood perfectly silent. It was raining steadily; the river, a block away, was hidden in the yellow fog; down in the yard, the tables and chairs under the poplar dripped and dripped. As for Maurice, it was as if some dark finger had stretched out and touched a bubble.... She was the same Eleanor.

But he did not dwell upon this revealing moment; it was enough that at last he could stop lying, and that Eleanor would help him about Jacky! He called her back from the window and made her sit down again beside him, pretending not to see how her hands were trembling. Then he went on talking about Jacky.

"His latest achievement is an infernal mouth harmonicon."

She said, listlessly, "I wish I could give him music lessons."

"He's crazy about music; trails hand organs all over Medfield!" Maurice said, with a great effort to be cheerfully casual; "but, Heaven knows, I'd be glad if you could give him lessons in anything! Manners, for instance. He hasn't any. Or grammar; I told him not to say 'ain't,' and, if you please! he told his mother she mustn't say it! Lily got on her ear."

She smiled faintly. "I wish I could see him," she said.

She had urged this more than once, but it had not seemed practicable. "I can't bring him here," Maurice explained; "he'd blurt out to Lily where he'd been, and she'd get uneasy. Even as it is, I live in dread that she'll pack up and clear out with him."

"She shan't take him away!" Eleanor said; she was eager again;—after all, Edith, for all her impertinence in advising Maurice how to treat his wife!—Edith could not break in upon an intimacy like this!

Her incessant talk about Jacky (which might have bored Maurice just a little, if it had not touched him) gave her, in some subtle, spiritual way, a sense of approaching motherhood: she made preparations! She planned little gifts for him;—Maurice had told her of Jacky's lively interest in benefits to come; once, she thought, "I suppose he's too old to have one of those funny papers in his room? I saw such a pretty one to-day, little rabbits in trousers!"—For by this time she had determined that, somehow, she would get possession of him! In these maternal moments she feared no rivalry from Edith Houghton. Jacky would save her from Edith!

"Oh, Maurice! I must see him," she said once.

"I'll fix it so you can," he told her. But it was two months before he was able to fix it; then "Forepaws" came to town, and the way was clear! He would take Jacky, and Eleanor should go and have a seat near by, and come up and speak to the youngster, as any admiring stranger might, and, indeed, often did, for Jacky was a striking child—his eyes blue and keen, his skin very clear, and his cheeks glowing with health. "If he goes home and tells Lily a lady spoke to him," Maurice said, "she won't think anything of it."

"May I give him some candy?"

"No; he has too much of it as it is; get one of those tin horns for him. He'll raise Cain for Lily, I suppose; but we won't have to listen to him!" (That "we" so fed Eleanor's starved soul, that she thought of Edith Houghton with a sort of gay contempt: "I'm not afraid of her!")

The plan for seeing Jacky went through easily enough. "I'll take that boy of yours to the circus," Maurice told Lily, carelessly, one day.

"Why, that's awful kind in you, Mr. Curtis; but ain't you afraid somebody'll see you luggin' a child around?"

"Lots of men take kids to the circus—just as an excuse to go themselves."

So Maurice and the eight-year-old Jacky, in a new sailor suit, and a face so clean that it shone, walked in among the gilded cages, felt the sawdust under their feet, smelled the wild animals, heard the yelps of the jackals, the booming roar of lions, and the screeching chatter of the monkeys. And as Jacky dragged his father from cage to cage, a yard or two behind them came Eleanor.... Now and then, over Jacky's head, she caught Maurice's eye; and they both smiled.

When a speechless Jacky was taken into the central tent to sit on a narrow bench, and drink pink lemonade and eat peanuts, Eleanor was quite near him. He was unconscious of her presence—unconscious of everything! except the blare of the band, the elephants, the performing dogs—especially the poor, strained performing dogs! He never spoke once; his eyes were fixed on the rings; he didn't see his father watching him, amused and proud; still less did he see the lady who had been at his heels in the animal tent, and who now kept her mournful dark eyes on his face. When the last horse gave the last kick and trotted out through the exit, with its mysterious canvas walls, Jacky was in a daze of bliss. He sat, open-mouthed, staring at the empty, trampled sawdust.

"Come along, young man!" Maurice said; "do you want to stay here all night?"

"I'm going to be a circus rider," said Jacky, solemnly.

It was then that the "lady" spoke to him—her voice broke twice: "Well, little boy, did you like the circus?" the lady said. She was so pale that Maurice put his hand on her arm.

"Better sit down, Nelly," he said, kindly, under his breath.

She shook her head. "No ... Jacky, don't you want to tell me your name?"

"But you know my name," said Jacky, with a bored look.

Maurice gave her a warning glance, and she tried to cover her blunder: "I heard your father—I mean this gentleman—call you 'Jacky,'" she explained—panting, for Maurice's quick frown frightened her. "Here's a present for you," she said.

"Present!" said Jacky—and made a joyous grab at the horn, which he immediately put to his lips; but before it could emit its ear-piercing screech, Maurice struck it down.

"Where are your manners? Say 'Thank you' to the lady."

Jacky sighed, but murmured, "'Ank you."

Eleanor, her chin trembling, said: "May I kiss him?"

"'Course," Maurice said, huskily.

She bent down and kissed him with trembling lips—"Ach!—you make me all wet," Jacky said, frowning at her tears on his rosy cheek.

Later, as Maurice pulled his reluctant son out on to the pavement, he was so moved that he almost forgot that she was still the old Eleanor; he didn't even listen to his little boy's passionate assertion that he would be a flying-trapeze man. As he walked along beside his wife to put her on the car he spoke with great tenderness:

"I'll leave him at Lily's, and then I'll come right home, dear, and we'll talk things over."

When he and his son got back to Maple Street, Jacky was blowing that infernal horn so that the whole neighborhood was aware of his ecstasy. Lily, waiting for them at the gate, put her hands over her ears.

"My soul and body! For the land's sake, stop! Who give you that horrid thing?"

"An old lady," said Jacky—and blew a shattering screech on Eleanor's horn.

From the day of the circus, Jacky became, to Eleanor, not a symbol of Maurice's unfaithfulness, but a hope for the future. The thought of his mother was only the scar of a wound, which Maurice, in some single slashing moment, had made in her heart. She was crippled by it, of course. But the wound had healed so she could forget the scar—because Maurice had never loved Lily, never found her "interesting," never wanted to wander about with her, in a dark garden, and talk