What could he do but be silent, too? What could he do but choke down the confessing, redeeming words that were on his lips? So he did choke them down, turning his back on the clean freedom of Truth; and the burden of his squalid secret, which he had been ready to throw away forever, was again packed like some corroding thing in his soul....
When, late in August, he and Eleanor went to Green Hill for a few days vacation, the effect of this repression was marked. There were wrinkles on his forehead under the thatch of his blond hair; his blue eyes were dulled, and he was taciturn to the point of rudeness—except to Eleanor. He was very polite to Eleanor. He never, now, amused himself by imagining how he could disappear if he had the luck to be in a theater fire. He knew that because he had enslaved himself to a lie, he had lost the right even to dream freedom. So there were no more "fool thoughts" as to how a man might "kick over the traces." There was nothing for him to do, now (he said), but "play the game." The Houghtons were uneasily aware of a difference in him; and Edith, fifteen now, felt that he had changed, and had fits of shyness with him. "He's like he was that night on the river," she told herself, "when he gave the lady his coat." She sighed when she said this, and it occurred to her that she would be a missionary. "I won't get married," she thought; "I'll go and nurse lepers. He's exactly like Sir Walter Raleigh."
But of course she had moments of forgetting the lepers—moments when she came down to the level of people like Johnny Bennett. When this happened, she thought that, instead of going to the South Seas, she would become a tennis star and figure in international tournaments; even Johnny admitted that she served well—for a girl. One day she confessed this ambition to Maurice, but he immediately beat her so badly that she became her old childlike, grumpy self, and said Johnny was nicer for singles; which enabled Maurice to turn her loose on John and go off alone to climb the mountain. He had a dreary fancy for looking at the camp, and living over again those days when he was still young—and a fool, of course; but not so great a fool as now, with Lily living in a little flat in Mercer. Batty's lease had expired, and she had moved into a cheaper, but still ornate, apartment house on the other side of the river. Well! Lily had floated into his life as meaninglessly as a mote floats into a streak of light, and then floated out again. He hadn't seen her since—since that time in May.
"Ass—ass!" he said to himself. "If Eleanor knew," he thought, "there'd be a bust-up in two minutes." He even smiled grimly to think of that evening of the eclipse when, shaken by the awful beauty of eternal order, he had, for just one high moment, dreamed that he, too, could attain the orderliness of Truth—and tell Eleanor. "Idiot!" he said, contemptuously. Probably Maurice touched his lowest level when he said that; for to be ashamed of an aspiration, to be contemptuous of emotion, is to sin against the Holy Ghost.
When Maurice reached the camp he stood for a while looking about him. The shack had not wintered well: the door sagged on a broken hinge, and the stovepipe had blown over and lay rusting on the roof. In the blackened circle of stones were some charred logs, which made him think of the camp fire on that night of Eleanor's courage and love and terror. He even reverted to those first excuses for her: "She nearly killed herself for me. Nervous prostration, Doctor Bennett said. I suppose a woman never gets over that. Poor Eleanor!" he said, softening; "it would kill her ... if she knew." He sat down and looked off across the valley ... "What am I going to do?" he said to himself. "I can't make her happy; I'd like to, but you can't reason with her any more than if she was a child. Edith has ten times her sense! How absurd she is about Edith. Lord! what would she do if she knew about Lily!"
He reflected, playing with the mere horror of the thought, upon just how complete the "bust-up" would be if she knew! He realized that he had undeserved good luck with Lily; she hadn't fastened herself on him. She was decent about that; if she'd been a different sort, he might have had a nasty time. But Lily was a sport—he'd say that for her; she hadn't clawed at him! And she had protested that she didn't want any money, and wouldn't take it! And she hadn't taken it. He had made some occasional presents, but nothing of any value. He had given her nothing, hardly even a thought (except the thought that he was an ass), since last May. Thinking of her now, he had another of those pangs of shame which had stabbed him so at first, but to which of late he had grown callous. The shame of having been the one—after all his goody-goody talk!—to pull her off the track; still, she was straight again now. He was quite sure of that. "You can tell when they're straight," he thought, heavily. Perhaps, in the winter, he would send her some flowers. He thought of the bulbs on the window sill of Lily's parlor, and tried to remember a verse; something about—about—what was it?
If of thy store there be
But left two loaves,
Sell one, and with the dole
Buy hyacinths to feed thy soul."
He laughed; Lily, feeding her "soul"! "Well, she has more 'soul,' with her flower pots and her good cooking, than some women who wouldn't touch her with a ten-foot pole! Still, I'm done with her!" he thought. But he had no purpose of "uplift"; the desire to reform Lily had evaporated. "Queer; I don't care a hoot," he told himself, watching with lazy eyes the smoke from his pipe drift blue between himself and the valley drowsing in the heat. "I'd like to see the little thing do well for herself—but really I don't give a damn." His moral listlessness, in view of the acuteness of that first remorse, and especially of that moment among the stars, when he had stretched out hands passionately eager for the agonizing sacrament of confession, faintly surprised him. How could he have been so wrought up about it? He looked off over the valley—saw the steely sickle of the river; saw a cloud shadow touch the shoulder of a mountain and move down across the gracious bosom of its forests. Below him, chestnuts twinkled and shimmered in the sun, and there were dusky stretches of hemlocks, then open pastures, vividly green from the August rains.... "It ought to be set to music," he thought; the violins would give the flicker of the leaves—"and the harps would outline the river. Eleanor's voice is lovely ... she looks fifty. How," he pondered, interested in the mechanics of it, "did she ever get me into that wagon?" Then, again, he was sorry for her, and said, "Poor girl!" Then he was sorry for himself. He knew that he was tired to death of Eleanor—tired of her moods and her lovemaking. He was not angry with her; he did not hate her;—he had injured her too much to hate her; he was simply unutterably tired of her—what he did hate, was this business of lugging a secret around! "I feel," he said to himself, "like a dog that's killed a hen, and had the carcass tied around his neck." His face twitched with disgust at his own simile. But as for Eleanor, he had been contemptibly mean to her, and, "By God!" he said to himself, "at least I'll play the game. I'll treat her as well as I can. Other fools have married jealous women, and put up with them. But, good Lord!" he thought, with honest perplexity, "can't the women see how they push you into the very thing they are afraid of, because they bore you so infernally? If I look at a woman, Eleanor's on her ear.... Queer," he pondered; "she's good. Look how kind she is to old O'Brien's lame child. And she can sing." He hummed to himself a lovely Lilting line of one of Eleanor's songs. "Confound it! why did I meet Lily? Eleanor is a million times too good for me...."
Far off he heard a sound and, frowning, looked toward the road: yes; somebody was coming! "Can't a man get a minute to himself?" Maurice thought, despairingly. It was the mild-eyed and spectacled Johnny Bennett, and behind him, Edith, panting and perspiring, and smiling broadly.
"Hello!" she called out, in cheerful gasps; "thought we'd come up and walk home with you!"