CHAPTER XVI
"What a kid Johnny Bennett is!" Maurice told Eleanor. He was detailing toher, while he was scrubbing the stickiness of the kitchen festivitiesoff his hands, what had happened downstairs. "But do you know, I believehe's soft on Edith! How old is he?"
"He's nearly nineteen. Children, both of them."
"Nineteen?" Maurice said, astounded. Nineteen! Johnny? "Why, _I_ wasnineteen, when--" He paused. She was silent. Suddenly Maurice felt_pity_. He had run the gamut of many emotions in the last fouryears--love, and fright, and repentance, and agonies of shame, andsometimes anger; but he had never touched pity. It stabbed him now, andits dagger blade was sawtoothed with remorse. He looked at his wife,lying there with closed eyes, her pillow damp where the wet handkerchiefhad slipped from her temples, and her beautiful mouth sagging with pain."Oh, I must be nice to her, poor thing!" he thought. Aloud he said,"Poor Eleanor!"
Instantly her dark eyes opened in startled joy; his tenderness liftedher into indifference to that throbbing in her temples. "I don't mindanything," she said, "if you love me."
"Can't I do something for your head?"
"Just kiss me, darling," she said.
He kissed her, for he was sorry for her. But he was thinking of himself."I was Johnny Bennett's age, when ... And I _wanted_ to kiss her! MyGod! I may have to keep up this kissing business for--for forty years!"And whenever he was kissing her, he would have to think how he wasdeceiving her; he would have to think of Lily. Yes; he had been a "kid,"like Johnny! How _could_ she have done it! Pity sharpened into anger:How could she have taken advantage of a boy? Well; he had had hisfling. To be sure, he was paying for it now, not only in anxiety aboutmoney, but in shame, and furtiveness, and the corroding consciousness ofbeing a liar, and in the complete shipwreck of every purpose andambition that a young man ought to have. "And that day, in the field, Icalled it _love_!" He would have been amused at the cynical memory, ifhe had not been so bitter. "Love? Rot! Still, I ought to be kinder toher;--but I can't bear to look at her. She's an old woman."
Eleanor put out her hot, trembling hand and groped for his. "Good night,darling," she said; "my head's better."
"So glad," he said.
The next morning, as Eleanor, rather white and shaky, was dressing, shesaid, "Edith doesn't seem to realize that she is too old to be so freeand easy with Johnny Bennett--and you."
"She's getting mighty good looking," Maurice said.
"She has too much color," Eleanor said, quickly.
Maurice was right. During Edith's second winter in Mercer she grewprettier all the time; poor, speechless Johnny, looking at her throughhis spectacles, was quite miserable. He told some of his intimatefriends that life was a bad joke.
"I shall never marry; just do some big work, and then get out. There isnothing really worth while. Mere looks in a woman don't attract me,"Johnny said.
But that Maurice found "looks" attractive, began to be obvious toEleanor, who, night after night, at the dinner table, watched thesmiling, shining, careless thing--Youth!--sitting there on Maurice'sright, and felt herself withering in the dividing years. As a result,the annoyance which, when Edith was a child, she had felt at herchildishness, began to harden into irritation at her womanliness. "I_wish I_ could get her out of the house!" she used to think, helplessly.
She felt this irritation especially when they all went, one night, todine with Tom Morton, who had just married and gone to housekeeping. Itwas a somewhat looked-forward-to event, although Eleanor thought Edithtoo young to dine out, and also the shabbiness of Maurice's eveningclothes was on her mind. "Do get a new dress suit!" she urged; and hegave the stereotyped answer: "Can't afford it."
They started for the Mortons' gayly enough; but Maurice's gayety wentout like a candle in the wind when, as he followed Eleanor and Edithinto the parlor, he saw, and after a puzzled moment recognized, thethird man in the Morton dinner of six--the man who had stood in Lily'slittle hall and said that the child would "pull through." ... Thespiritual squalor of that scene flashed back in sharp visualization: thedoctor; Lily, her amber eyes overflowing with tears, kissing his hand;Jacky's fretful cry from upstairs.... Here he was! that same kindlymedical man, "getting off some guff to Mrs. Morton," Maurice toldhimself, in agonized uncertainty as to what he had better do. Should herecognize him? Or pretend not to know him? It galloped through his mindthat if he did "know" him, Eleanor would ask questions. Oh, he knewEleanor's questions! But if he didn't "know" him, Doctor Nelson wouldknow that questions might be asked. The instant's hesitation between thetwo risks was decided by Doctor Nelson. He put out his hand and said,"Oh, how are you?" So Maurice said, "Oh, how are you?" as carelessly asanybody else.
Eleanor, when the doctor was introduced, said, a little surprised, "Youknow my husband?"
"I think I've met Mr. Curtis somewhere," Doctor Nelson said, vaguely.
"He knows so many people I don't," she thought, but she said nothing. Noone noticed her silence--or Maurice's, either! The doctor, and Morton,and the handsome bride, were listening to Edith, amused, apparently, ather crudity and ignorance.
"Oh yes," Eleanor heard her say; "Eleanor's voice is perfectly _fine_,father says. I'm not musical. Father says I don't know the differencebetween 'Yankee Doodle' and 'Old Hundred.' Father say--" and so on.
"She's tiresome!" Eleanor told herself. Later, as she sat at the littledinner table, all gay with flowers and the bride's new candlesticks andglittering bonbon dishes ("Hetty's showing off our loot," the bridegroomsaid, proudly), Eleanor, looking on, and straining sometimes to be sillylike the rest of them, said to herself, bleakly, that the doctor, wholooked fifty, had been asked on her account. When he began to talk toher it was all she could do to say, "Really?" or, "Of course!" at theproper places; she was absorbed in watching Edith--the vivid face, thebroad smile, the voice so full of preposterous certainties! "I _look_old," she thought; and indeed she did--most unnecessarily! for she wasonly forty-four. Her throat suddenly ached with unshed tears of longingto be young. Yet if she had not been so bitter she would have seen thatMaurice looked almost as old as she did! And no wonder. Hisconsternation at the sight of Doctor Nelson had been panic! He couldhardly eat. Naturally, the preoccupation of the two Curtises threw theburden of talk upon the others. Doctor Nelson gave himself up to hishostess, and Morton found Edith's ardors, upon every subject underheaven, most diverting; he teased her and baited her, and her eyes grewmore shining, and her cheeks pinker, and her gayety more contagious withevery repartee she flung back at him. Mrs. Morton struggled heroicallywith Maurice's heaviness, but she told her husband afterward, that Mr.Curtis was nearly as dull as his wife! "I _couldn't_ make him talk!" shesaid. After a while she gave up trying to make him talk, and listened toEdith's story of what happened when she was a little girl and came toMercer with her father:
"A terrible shipwreck!" Edith said; "I remember it because of Maurice'sgallantry in giving the flopping girl his coat--he was a perfect SirWalter Raleigh! Remember, Maurice?"
Maurice said, briefly, that he "remembered"; "if she says Dale, I'mdished," he thought; aloud, he said that the river was growingimpossible for boating; which caused them to drop the subject of theflopping girl, and talk about Mercer's increasing dinginess, at whichEdith said, eagerly:
"You ought to see our mountains--no smoke there!"
Then, of course, came tales of camping, and, most animatedly, the storyof Eleanor's wonderful rescue of Maurice.
"She pulled that great big Maurice all the way down to Doctor Bennett's!And we were all so proud of her!"
Eleanor protested: "It was nothing at all." Maurice, in his own mind,was saying, "I wish she'd left me there!"
When the ladies left the gentlemen to their cigars, Edith was bubblingover with anxiety to confide to Mrs. Morton the joke about the "lady'scheeks coming off," and that gave the married women the chance toexpress melancholy convictions as to the wickedness of the world, towhich Edith listened with much interest.
"I think my painted lad
y lives in Medfield," she said.
"Why, how do you know?" Eleanor exclaimed, surprised.
"Why, don't you remember the time I saw her, with that blue-eyed baby?She was just going into a house on Maple Street."
It was at this moment that the gentlemen entered, so there was nofurther talk of painted ladies; and, besides, Maurice was alert to catchEleanor's eye, and go home! "Edith is capable of saying anything!" hewas thinking, desperately.
However, Edith said nothing alarming, and Maurice was able to get hersafely away from the powder magazine in the shape of the amiable doctor,who, following them a few minutes later, was saying to himself: "Howscared he was! Yet he looks like a good fellow at bottom. A rum world--arum world!"
The "good fellow" hurried his womenkind down the street in angrypreoccupation. As soon as he and Eleanor were alone, he said, "When doesEdith graduate?"
"She has two years more."
"Oh, _Lord_!" Maurice said, despairingly; "has she got to be around fortwo years?" Eleanor's face lightened, but Maurice was instantlyrepentant. "I ought to be ashamed of myself for saying that! Edith'sfine; and she has brains; but--"
"She monopolized the conversation to-night," Eleanor said; "Maurice, itis very improper for her to keep talking all the time about that horridwoman!"
The sharpness of his agreement made her look at him in surprise. "She_mustn't_ talk about Mrs. Dale!" he said, angrily.
"Dale? Is that her name?" said Eleanor.
"I don't know. I think so; didn't Edith call her that? Well, anyway, shemustn't keep talking about her!"
His irritation was so marked, that Eleanor's heart warmed; but she said,wearily, "I'll be glad myself when she graduates."
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