The Vehement Flame. Margaret Wade Campbell Deland

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СКАЧАТЬ said, joyously. Her misgivings had vanished like dew in the hot sun. Old Mrs. O'Brien had done her part in dissipating them. While Maurice was bearding his tutor, Eleanor had gone across town to her laundress's, to ask if Mrs. O'Brien would take Bingo as a boarder—. "I can't have him at the hotel," she explained, and then told the great news:—"I'm going to live there, because I—I'm married,"—upon which she was kissed, and blessed, and wept over! "The gentleman is a little younger than I am," she confessed, smiling; and Mrs. O'Brien said:

      "An' what difference does that make? He'll only be lovin' ye hotter than an old fellow with the life all gone out o' him!"

      Eleanor said, laughing, "Yes, that's true!" and cuddled the baby grandson's head against her breast.

      "You'll be happy as a queen!" said Mrs. O'Brien; and "in a year from now you'll have something better to take care of than Bingo—he'll be jealous!"

      But she hardly heeded Mrs. O'Brien and her joyful prophecy of Bingo's approaching jealousy; having taken the dive, she had risen into the light and air, and now she forgot the questioning depths! She was on the crest of contented achievement. She even laughed to think that she had ever hesitated about marrying Maurice. Absurd! As if the few years between them were of the slightest consequence! Mrs. O'Brien was right. … So she smoothed over Maurice's first bad moment with an indifference as to Mr. Bradley's opinion which was most reassuring to him. (Yet once in a while she thought of Mr. Houghton, and bit her lip.)

      The next bad moment neither she nor Maurice could dismiss so easily; it came in the interview with her astounded aunt, whose chief concern (when she read the letter which Eleanor had left on her pincushion) was lest the Houghtons would think she had inveigled the boy into marrying her niece. To prove that she had not, Mrs. Newbolt told the bride and groom that she would have nothing more to do with Eleanor! It was when the fifty-four minutes had lengthened into three days that they had gone, after supper, to see her. Eleanor, supremely satisfied, with no doubts, now about the wisdom of what she had done, was nervous only as to the effect of her aunt's temper upon Maurice; and he, full of a bravado of indifference which confessed the nervousness it denied, was anxious only as to the effect of the inevitable reproaches upon Eleanor. Their five horrid minutes of waiting in the parlor for Mrs. Newbolt's ponderous step on the stairs, was broken by Bingo's dashing, with ear-piercing barks, into the room: Eleanor took him on her knee, and Maurice, giving the little black nose a kindly squeeze, looked around in pantomimic horror of the obese upholstery, and Rogers groups on the tops of bookcases full of expensively bound and unread classics.

      "How have you stood it?" he said to his wife; adding, under his breath, "If she's nasty to you, I'll wring her neck!"

      She was very nasty. "I'm not a party to it," Mrs. Newbolt said; she sat, panting, on a deeply cushioned sofa, and her wheezy voice came through quivering double chins; her protruding pale eyes snapped with anger. "I shall tell you exactly what I think of you, Eleanor, for, as my dear mother used to say, if I have a virtue it is candor; I think you are a puffect fool. As for Mr. Curtis, I no more thought of protectin' him than I would think of protectin' a baby in a perambulator from its nursemaid! Bingo was sick at his stomach this mornin'. You've ruined the boy's life." Eleanor cringed, but Maurice was quite steady:

      "We will not discuss it, if you please. I will merely say that I dragged Eleanor into it; I made her marry me. She refused me repeatedly. Come, Eleanor."

      He rose, but Mrs. Newbolt, getting heavily on to her small feet, and talking all the time, walked over to the doorway and blocked their retreat. "You needn't think I'll do anything for you!" she said to her niece; "I shall write to Mr. Houghton and tell him so. I shall tell him he isn't any more disgusted with this business than I am. And you can take Bingo with you!"

      "I came to get him," Eleanor said, faintly.

      "Come, Eleanor," Maurice said; and Mrs. Newbolt, puffing and talking, had to make way for them. As they went out of the door she called, angrily:

      "Here! Stop! I want to give Bingo a chocolate drop!"

      They didn't stop. In the street on the way to Bingo's new home, Eleanor, holding her little dog in her arms, was blind with tears, but Maurice effervesced into extravagant ridicule. His opinion of Mrs. Newbolt, her parlor, her ponderosity, and her missing g's, exhausted his vocabulary of opprobrious adjectives; but Eleanor was silent, just putting up a furtive handkerchief to wipe her eyes. It was dark, and he drew her hand through his arm and patted it.

      "Don't worry, Star. Uncle Henry is white! She can write to him all she wants to! I'm betting that we'll get an invitation to come right up to Green Hill."

      She said nothing, but he knew she was trembling. As they entered Mrs. O'Brien's alley, they paused where it was dark enough, halfway between gaslights, for a man to put his arm around his wife's waist and kiss her. (Bingo growled.)

      "Eleanor! I've a great mind to go back to that hell-cat, and tell her what I think of her!"

      "No. Very likely she's right. I—I have injured you. Oh, Maurice, if I have—"

      "You'd have injured me a damn sight more if you hadn't married me!" he said.

      But for the moment her certainty that her marriage was a glorious and perfect thing, collapsed; her voice was a broken whisper:

      "If I've spoiled your life—she says I have;—I'll … kill myself, Maurice." She spoke with a sort of heavy calmness, that made a small, cold thrill run down his back; he burst into passionate protest:

      "All I am, or ever can be, will be because you love me! Darling, when you say things like—like what you said, I feel as if you didn't love me—"

      Of course the reproach tautened her courage; "I do! I do! But—"

      "Then never say such a wicked, cruel thing again!"

      It was when Bingo had been left with Mrs. O'Brien that, on their way back to the hotel, Maurice, in a burst of enthusiasm, invited his third bad moment: "I am going to have a rattling old dinner party to celebrate your escape from the hag! How about Saturday night?"

      She protested that he was awfully extravagant; but she cheered up. After all, what difference did it make what a person like Auntie thought! "But who will you ask?" she said. "I suppose you don't know any men here? And I don't, either."

      He admitted that he had only two or three acquaintances in Mercer—"but I have a lot in Philadelphia. You shan't live on a desert island, Nelly!"

      "Ah, but I'd like to—with you! I don't want anyone but you, in the world," she said, softly.

      He thrilled at the wonder of that: she would be contented, with him—on a desert island! Oh, if he could only always be enough for her! He vowed to himself, in sudden boyish solemnity, that he would always be enough for her. Aloud, he said he thought he could scratch up two or three fellows.

      Then Eleanor's apprehension spoke: "What will Mr. Houghton say?"

      "Oh, he's all right," Maurice said, resolutely hiding his own apprehension. He could hide it, but he could not forget it. Even while arranging for his dinner party, and plunging into the expense of a private dining room, he was thinking, of his guardian; "Will he kick?" Aloud he said, "I've asked three fellows, and you ask three girls."

      "I don't know many girls," she said, anxiously.

      "How about that girl you spoke to on the street yesterday? (If Uncle Henry could СКАЧАТЬ