The Vehement Flame | Page 6

his own modest prosperity, never
made up to him for the career of a struggling and probably unsuccessful
artist--which he might have had. He ran his cotton mill, and supported
all the family undesirables until, gradually, death and marriage took the
various millstones from around his neck; then he retired, as the saying
is--although it was really setting sail again for life--to his studio (with a
farmhouse attached) in the mountains. There had been a year of
passionate work and expectation--but his pictures were dead. "I sold
my birthright for a bale of cotton," he said, briefly.
But he still stayed on the farm, and dreamed in his studio and tried to
teach his little, inartistic Edith to draw, and mourned. As for business,
he said, "Go to the devil!"--except as he looked after Maurice Curtis's
affairs; this because the boy's father had been his friend. But it was the
consciousness of the bartered birthright and the dead pictures in his
studio which kept him from "whistling" very often. However, on this
June morning, plodding along between blossoming fields, climbing
wooded hills, and clattering through dusky covered bridges, he was not
thinking of his pictures; so, naturally enough, he whistled; a very
different whistling from that which Maurice, lying in the grass beside
his wife of fifty-four minutes, had foreseen for him--when the mail
should be distributed! Once, just from sheer content, he stopped his:

"Did you ever ever ever In your life life life See the devil devil devil Or
his wife wife wife--"
and turned and looked at his Mary.
"Nice day, Kit?" he said; and she said, "Lovely!" Then she brushed her
elderly rosy cheek against his shabby coat and kissed it. They had been
married for thirty years, and she had held up his hands as he placed
upon the altar of a repugnant duty, the offering of a great renunciation.
She had hoped that the birth of their last, and only living, child, Edith,
would reconcile him to the material results of the renunciation; but he
was as indifferent to money for his girl as he had been for himself.... So
there they were, now, living rather carefully, in an old stone farmhouse
on one of the green foothills of the Allegheny Mountains. The thing
that came nearest to soothing the bruises on his mind was the
possibilities he saw in Maurice.
"The inconsequence of the scamp amounts to genius!" he used to tell
his Mary with admiring displeasure at one or another of Maurice's
scrapes. "Heaven knows what he'll do before he gets to the top of Fool
Hill, and begins to run on the State Road! Look at this mid-year
performance. He ought to be kicked for flunking. He simply dropped
everything except his music! Apparently he _can't_ study. Even
spelling is a matter of private judgment with Maurice! Oh, of course, I
know I ought to have scalped him; his father would have scalped him.
But somehow the scoundrel gets round me! I suppose its because,
though he is provoking, he is never irritating. And he's as much of a
fool as I was at his age! That keeps me fair to him. Well, he has stuff in
him, that boy. He's as truthful as Edith; an appalling tribute, I
know--but you like it in a cub. And there's no flapdoodle about him;
and he never cried baby in his life. And he has imagination and music
and poetry! Edith is a nice little clod compared to him."
The affection of these two people for Maurice could hardly have been
greater if he had been their son. "Mother loves Maurice better 'an she
loves me," Edith used to reflect; "I guess it's because he never gets
muddy the way I do, and tracks dirt into the house. He wipes his feet."

"What do you suppose," Mrs. Houghton said, remembering this
summing up of things, "Edith told me this morning that the reason I
loved Maurice more than I loved her--"
"What!"
"Yes; isn't she funny?--was because he 'wiped his feet when he came
into the house.'"
Edith's father stopped whistling, and smiled: "That child is as practical
as a shuttle; but she hasn't a mean streak in her!" he said, with
satisfaction, and began to whistle again. "Nice girl," he said, after a
while; "but the most rationalizing youngster! I hope she'll get foolish
before she falls in love. Mary, one of these days, when she grows up,
perhaps she and Maurice--?"
"Matchmaker!" she said, horrified; then objected: "Can't she rationalize
and fall in love too? I'm rather given to reason myself, Henry."
"Yes, honey; you are _now_; but you were as sweet a fool as anybody
when you fell in love, thank God." She laughed, and he said, resignedly,
"I suppose you'll have