The Vehement Flame. Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
and delightful. The packing, the rolling up of blankets, the stowing of cooking utensils, the consulting of food lists to make sure nothing was being forgotten—all meant much tearing about and bossing; then came the loading the stuff into the light wagon, which, with old Lion, Mr. Houghton had offered to convey the campers (and a temporary Edith) up to the top of the mountain. Edith was, of course, frankly envious, but accepted the privilege of even a day in camp with humble gratitude.
"Rover and Johnny and I will come up pretty often, even if it's only for an hour, because Eleanor must not hurt her hands by washing dishes," she said, earnestly (still fishing for an invitation).
But Maurice only agreed, as earnestly: "No! Imagine Eleanor washing dishes! But I don't want you to stay all night, Buster," he told her, candidly; then he paused in his work, flung up his arms with a great breath of joyousness. "Great Scott!" he said. "I don't see why gypsies ever die!"
Edith felt an answering throb of ecstasy. "Oh, Maurice, I wish you and I were gypsies!" she said. She did not in the least resent his candor as to her presence during the week of camping; though just before they started her feelings really were a little hurt: it happened that in trying to help Eleanor pack, she was close enough to her to notice a thread on her hair; instantly, she put out a friendly and officious thumb and finger to remove it—at which Eleanor winced, and said, "Ouch!"
"I thought it was a white thread," Edith explained, abashed.
Eleanor said, sharply, "Please don't touch my hair!" which conveyed nothing to Edith except that the Bride—who instantly ran up to her room—"was mad." When she came back (the "thread" having disappeared) Edith was full of apologies.
"Awfully sorry I mussed your hair," she said.
She went up the mountain with them, walking on the hard grades, and trying to placate Eleanor by keeping a hand on Lion's bridle, so that she might feel sure he wouldn't run away. When at last, rather blown and perspiring, they reached the camp, Eleanor got out of the wagon and said she wanted to "help"; but Edith, still contrite about the "thread," said: "Not I'm not going to have you hurt your lovely hands!" In the late afternoon, having saved Eleanor's hands in every possible way, she left them, and thinking, without the slightest rancor, of the rough bliss she was not asked to share, went running down the mountain with Rover at her heels.
Eleanor, wondering at her willingness to take that long road home with only the lumbering old dog for company, was intensely glad to have her go.
"Girls of that age are so uninteresting," she told Maurice; "and now we'll be all by ourselves!"
"Yes; Adam and Eve," he said; "and twilight; and the world spread out like a garden! Do you see that glimmer over there to the left? That's the beginning of the river—our river!"
He had made her comfortable with some cushions piled against the trunk of a tree, and lighted a fire in a ring of blackened stones; then he brought her her supper, and ate his own on his knees beside her, watching eagerly for ways to serve her, laughing because she cringed when, from an overhanging bough, a spider let himself down upon her skirt, and hurrying to bring her a fresh cup of coffee, because an unhappy ant had scalded himself to death in her first cup. Afterward he would not let her "hurt her hands" by washing the dishes. When this was over, and the dusk was deepening, he went into the woods to the "lean-to" in which Lion was quartered, to see that the old horse was comfortable, but a minute later came crashing back through the underbrush, laughing, but provoked.
"That imp, Edith, didn't hitch him securely, and the old fellow has walked home, if you please—!"
"Lion—gone? Oh, what shall we do?"
"Ill pull the wagon down when I want to go back for food."
"Pull it?"
"Won't need much pulling! It will go down by itself. If I put you in it, I'll have to rope a log on behind as a brake, or it would run over me! I bet I give Edith a piece of my mind, when I get hold of her. But it doesn't really matter. I think I like it better to have not even Lion. Just you—and the stars. They are beginning to prick out," he said. He stretched himself on the ground beside her, his hands clasped under his head, and his happy eyes looking up into the abyss. "Sing, Star, sing!" he said. So she sang, softly:
How many times do I love again?
Tell me how many beads there are
In a silver chain
Of evening rain
Unraveled from the tumbling main
And threading the eye of a yellow star—
So many times—
"It looks," she broke off, "a little black in the west? And—was that lightning?"
"Only heat lightning. And if it should storm—I have you here, in my arms, alone!" He turned and caught her to him, and his mouth crushed hers. Her eyes closed, and her passion answered his, and all that he whispered. Yet while he kissed her, her eyes opened and she looked furtively beyond him, toward that gathering blackness.
They lay there together in the starlit dark, for a long time, his head on her breast. Sometimes she thrilled at his touch or low word, and sometimes she held his hand against her lips and kissed it—which made him protest—but suddenly he said, "By George! Nelly, I believe we are going to have a shower!"
Instantly she was alert with fright, and sat up, and looked down into the valley, where the heat lightning, which had been winking along the line of the hills, suddenly sharpened into a flash. "Oh!" she said, and held her breath until, from very far off, came a faint grumble of thunder. "Oh, Maurice!" she said, "it is horrible to be out here—if it thunders!"
"We won't be. Well go into the cabin, and we'll hear the rain on the roof, and the clash of the branches; and we'll see the lightning through the chinks—and I'll have you! Oh, Nelly, we shall be part of the storm!—and nothing in God's world can separate us."
But this time she could not answer with any elemental impulse; she had no understanding of "being part of the storm"; instead, she watched the horizon. "Oh!" she said, flinching. "I don't like it. What shall we do? Maurice, it is going to thunder!"
"I think I did feel a drop of rain," he said—and held out his hand: "Yes, Star, rain! It's begun!" He helped her to her feet, gathered up some of the cushions, and hurried her toward the little shelter. She ran ahead of him, her very feet reluctant, lest the possible "snake" should curl in the darkness against her ankles; but once in the cabin, with a candle lighted, she could not see the lightning, so she was able to laugh at herself; when Maurice went out for the rest of the cushions, she charged him to hurry! "The storm will be here in a minute!" she called to him. And he called back:
"I'll only be a second!"
She stood in the doorway looking after him, and saw his figure outlined against the glimmer of their fire, which had already felt the spatter of the coming storm and was dying down; then, even as she looked, he seemed to plunge forward, and fall—the thud of that fall was like a blow on her throat! She gasped, "Maurice—" And again, "Maurice! Have you hurt yourself?"
He did not rise. A splash of rain struck her face; the mountain darkness was slit by a rapier of lightning, and there was a sudden violent illumination; she saw the tree and the cushions, and Maurice on the ground—then blackness, and a tremendous crash of thunder.
"Maurice!" she called. "Maurice!" The branches over the roof began to move and rustle, and there was a sudden downpour of rain; the camp fire went out, as if an extinguisher had covered it. She stood in the doorway for a breathless instant, then ran back into the cabin, and, catching the candle from the table, stepped out into the blackness; instantly the wind bore the little flame away!—then seemed to grip her, and twist her about, and beat her back into the house. In her terror she screamed his name; and as she did so, another flash of lightning showed her his figure, motionless on the ground.
"He is dead" she said to herself, in a whisper. "What shall I do?" Then, suddenly, she knew what to do: she remembered that she had noticed a lantern