The Iron Woman Part 17

Robert Ferguson, putting on his hat with all possible expedition, got out of the house almost as quickly as she did. "I'd like to choke her!" he said to himself. He felt the desire to choke Mrs.

Maitland several times that evening as he sat in his library pretending to read his newspaper. "She ought to be ashamed of herself! Mrs. Richie will think I have been--heaven knows what she will think!"

But the truth was, Mrs. Richie thought nothing at all; she forgot the incident entirely. It was Robert Ferguson who did the embarra.s.sed thinking.

As for Mrs. Maitland, she went home through Mercer's mire and fog, her iron face softening into almost feminine concern. She was saying to herself that if Nannie didn't care, why, she didn't care! "But if she hankers after him"--Mrs. Maitland's face twinged with annoyance; "if she hankers after him, I'll make it up to her in some way. I'll give her a good big check!" But she must make sure about the "hankering." It would not be difficult to make sure. In these silent years together, the strong nature had drawn the weak nature to it, as a magnet draws a speck of iron. Nannie, timid to the point of awe, never daring even in her thoughts to criticize the powerful personality that dominated her daily life, nestled against it, so to speak, with perfect content. Sarah Maitland's esthetic deficiencies which separated her so tragically from her son, did not alienate Nannie. The fact that her stepmother was rich, and yet lived in a poverty-stricken locality; that the inconvenience of the old house amounted to squalor; that they were almost completely isolated from people of their own cla.s.s;--none of these things disturbed Nannie. They were merely "Mamma's ways," that was all there was to say about them. She was not confidential with Mrs. Maitland, because she had nothing to confide. But if her stepmother had ever asked any personal question, she would have been incapable of not replying.

Mrs. Maitland knew that, and proposed to satisfy herself as to the "hankering."

Supper was on the table when she got home, and though while bolting her food she glanced at Nannie rather keenly, she did not try to probe her feelings. "But she looks down in the mouth,"

Sarah Maitland thought. There must have been delicacy somewhere in the big nature, for she was careful not to speak of Elizabeth's engagement before Harris, for fear the girl might, by some involuntary tremor of lip or eyelid, betray herself.

"I'll look in on you after supper," she said.

Nannie, with a start, said, "Oh, thank you, Mamma."

When Mrs. Maitland, with her knitting and a fistful of unopened letters, came over to the parlor, she had also, tucked into her belt, a check.

It had never occurred to Nannie, in all these years and with a very liberal allowance, to mitigate her parlor. It was still a place of mirrors, grown perhaps a little dim; of chandeliers in balloons of brown paper-muslin, which, to be sure, had split here and there with age, so that a glimmer of cut gla.s.s sparkled dimly through the cracks; a place of marble-topped tables, and crimson brocade curtains dingy with age and soot; a place where still the only human thing was Nannie's drawing-board. She was bending over it now, copying with a faithful pencil a little picture of a man and a maid, and a dove and a Love. She was going to give the drawing to Elizabeth; in fact, she had begun it several days ago with joyous antic.i.p.ation of this happy happening. But now, as she worked, her hand trembled. She had had a letter from Blair, and all her joyousness had fled:

"_The Dean is an a.s.s, of course; but mother'll get excited about it, I'm afraid. Do smooth her down, if you can._"

No wonder Nannie's hand trembled!

Mrs. Maitland, putting her letters on the table, sat down heavily and began to knit. She glanced at Nannie over her spectacles.

"Better get through with it," she said to herself. Then, aloud, "Well, Nannie, so David and Elizabeth have made a match of it?"

For a minute Nannie's face brightened. "Yes! Isn't it fine? I'm so pleased. David has been crazy about her ever since he was a boy."

Well! She was heart-whole! There was no doubt of that; Mrs.

Maitland, visibly relieved, dismissed from her mind the whole foolish business of love-making. She began to read her letters, Nannie watching her furtively. When the third letter was taken up--a letter with the seal of the University in the upper left- hand corner of the envelope--Blair's sister breathed quickly.

Mrs. Maitland, ripping the envelope open with a thrust of her forefinger, read it swiftly; then again, slowly. Then she said something under her breath and struck her fist on the table.

Nannie's fingers whitened on her pencil. Sarah Maitland got up and stood on the hearth-rug, her back to the fire.

"I'll have to go East," she said, and began to bite her forefinger.

"Oh, Mamma," Nannie broke out, "I am sure there isn't anything really wrong. Perhaps he has been--a little foolish. Men are foolish in college. David got into hot water lots of times. But Blair hasn't done anything really bad, and--"

Mrs. Maitland gave her a somber look. "He wrote to you, did he?"

she said. And Nannie realized that she had not advanced her brother's cause. Mrs. Maitland picked up her letters and began to sort them out. "When is he going to grow up?" she said. "He's twenty-four; and he's been dawdling round at college for the last two years! He's not bad; he hasn't stuff enough in him to be bad.

He is just lazy and useless; and he's had every chance young man could have!"

"Mamma!" Nannie protested, "it isn't fair to speak that way of Blair, and it isn't true, not a word of it!" Nannie, the 'fraid- cat of twenty years ago,--afraid still of thunder-storms and the dark and Sarah Maitland, and what not,--Nannie, when it came to defending Blair, had all the audacious courage of love. "He is not lazy, he is not useless; he is--he is--" Nannie stammered with angry distress; "he is dear, and good, and kind, and never did any harm in his life. Never! It's perfectly dreadful, Mamma, for you to say such things about him!"

"Well, well!" said Sarah Maitland, lifting an amused eyebrow. It was as if a humming-bird had attacked a steel billet. Her face softened into pleased affection. "Well, stick up for him," she said; "I like it in you, my dear, though what you say is foolish enough. You remind me of your mother. But your brother has brains. Yes, I'll say that for him,--he's like me; he has brains.

That's why I'm so out of patience with him," she ended, lapsing into moody displeasure again. "If he was a fool, I wouldn't mind his behaving like a fool. But he has brains." Then she said, briefly, "'Night," and tramped off to the dining room.

The next morning when Nannie, a little pale from a worried night, came down to breakfast, her stepmother's place was empty.

"Yes," Harris explained; "she went off at twelve, Miss Nannie.

She didn't let on where. She said you'd know."

"I know," poor Nannie said, and turned paler than ever.

CHAPTER XI

After Mrs. Maitland had had an interview with the Dean, she went off across the yard, under the great elms dripping in the rainy January thaw. Following his directions, she found her way through the corridors of a new building whose inappropriate expensiveness was obvious at every turn. Blair had rooms there, as had most of the sons of rich fathers. The whole place smelt of money! In Blair's apartment money was less obvious than beauty--but it was expensive beauty. He had a few good pictures, and on one wall a wonderful tapestry of forest foliage and roebucks, that he had picked up in Europe at a price which added to the dealer's affection for traveling Americans. The furnishing was in quiet and, for that period, remarkably good taste; masculine enough to balance a certain delicacy of detail--exquisite Tanagra figures, water-colors and pastels of women in costumes of rose and violet gauze, incense smoldering in an ivory jar, and much small bijouterie that meant an almost feminine appreciation of exquisite and costly prettiness.

Mrs. Maitland came tramping down the hall, her face set and stern; but suddenly, almost at Blair's door, she paused. Some one was singing; she knew the voice--beautiful, joyous, beating and pulsating with life:

"Drink to me only with thine eyes, And I will pledge with mine."

She moved over to a window that lit the long corridor, and listened:

"Or leave a kiss ..."

Sarah Maitland stared out into the rain; the bare branches of the trees whipped against one another in the wind, but she did not see them. She leaned her forehead on the gla.s.s, listening to the golden voice. A warm wave seemed to rise in her breast, a wave of cosmic satisfaction in this vitality that was _hers_, because he was hers! Her eyes blurred so with emotion that she did not see the rocking branches in the rain. All the hardness of her face melted, under those melting cadences into exultant maternity:

"Or leave a kiss but in the cup, And I'll not look for wine; The thirst that from the soul--"

She smiled, then turned and knocked peremptorily at her son's door.

Blair, pausing in his song to comment on a thirst that rises otherwhere than in the soul, roared out a jolly command to "come in!" but for an instant he did not realize who stood on the threshold; nor was his mother able to distinguish him in the group of men lounging about a room dim with tobacco smoke. He was standing with his back to the door, pulling a somewhat reluctant cork from a bottle of sherry gripped between his knees.

Blair was immensely popular at college, not only because of the easy generosities of his wealth,--which were often only a pleasant form of selfishness that brought the fellows about him as honey brings flies, but because of a certain sympathetic quality of mind, a genius for companionship that was almost a genius for friendship. Now, his room was full of men. One of his guests was sitting on the window-sill, kicking his heels and swaying rhythmically back and forth to the tw.a.n.g of his banjo.

One had begun to read aloud with pa.s.sionate emphasis a poem, of which happily Mrs. Maitland did not catch the words; all of them were smoking. The door opened, but no one entered. One of the young men, feeling the draught, glanced languidly over his shoulder,--and got on his feet with extraordinary expedition! He said something under his breath. But it was the abrupt silence of the room that made Blair turn round. It did not need his stammering dismay, his half-cringing--"Clear out, will you, you fellows "--to get the men out of the room. They did not know who she was, but they knew she was Somebody. She did not speak, but the powerful personality seemed to sweep in and clear the atmosphere of its sickly triviality. She stood blocking up the doorway, looking at them; they were mostly Seniors, but there was not a man among them who did not feel foolish under that large and quiet look. Then she stepped a little aside. The movement was unmistakable. They jostled one another like a flock of sheep in their effort to get away quickly. Somebody muttered, "Good afternoon--" but the others were speechless. They left a speechless host behind them.

Mrs. Maitland, her rusty bonnet very much on one side, watched them go; then she closed the door behind them, and stood looking at her son who was still holding the corkscrew in his hands. Her feet were planted firmly wide apart, her hands were on her hips; her eyebrow was lifting ominously. "Well?" she said; with the echo of that golden voice still in her ears, her own voice was, even to herself, unexpectedly mild.

"I didn't expect you," Blair managed to say.

"I inferred as much," she said dryly; "so this is the way you keep up with your cla.s.ses?"

"There are no lectures at this time of day," he said. "If you had been so kind, my dear mother, as to let me know you were coming"-- he spoke with that exaggerated and impertinent politeness that confesses fright; "I would have met you. Instead of that, you-- you--you burst in--" he was getting whiter and whiter. The thought that the men had seen the unkempt figure, the powerful face, the straggling locks of hair, the bare hands,--seen, in fact, the unlovely exterior of a large and generous nature, a nature which, alas, he, her son, had never seen; that they had seen her, and guessed, of course, that she was his mother, was positively unendurable to Blair. He tried to speak, but his voice shook into silence. His dismay was not entirely ign.o.ble; the situation was excruciating to a man whose feeling for beauty was a form of religion; his mortification had in it the element of horror for a profaned ideal; his mother was an esthetic insult to motherhood.

"I've no fault to find with your friends being here, if they don't interfere with your studies," Mrs. Maitland said.

"Oh," he said rather blankly; then his shame of her stung him into fury: "why didn't you tell me that you--"

"I've been to see the Dean," she said; "sit down there and listen to me. Here, give me a chair; not that pincushion thing! Give me a chair fit for a man to sit on,--if you've got one in this upholstery shop."

Blair, with trembling hands, pushed a mahogany chair to her side.

He did not sit down himself. He stood with folded arms and downcast eyes.

She was not unkind; she was not even ungentle. She was merely explicit: _he was a fool_. All this business,--she pointed to the bottle and the empty gla.s.ses; all this business was idiotic, it was a boy's foolishness. "It shows how young you are, Blair," she said kindly, "though the Lord knows you are old enough in years to have some sense!" But if he kept the foolishness up, and this other tomfoolery on account of which she had had to leave the Works and spend her valuable time talking to the Dean, why, he might be expelled. He would certainly be suspended. And that would put off his getting into business for still another year. "And you are twenty-four!" she said.

While she talked she looked about her, and the mother-softness began to die out of her eyes. Sarah Maitland had never seen her son's room; she saw, now, soft-green hangings, great bowls of roses, a sideboard with an array of gla.s.ses, a wonderfully carved ivory jar standing on a teak-wood table whose costliness, even to her uneducated eyes, was obvious. Suddenly she put on her spectacles, and still talking, rose, and walked slowly about the room glancing at the water-colors. By and by, just at the end of her harangue,--to which Blair had listened in complete silence,-- she paused before a row of photographs on the mantelpiece; then, in the midst of a sentence, she broke off with an exclamation, leaned forward, and seizing a photograph, tore it in two, across the smiling face and the bare bosom, across the lovely, impudent line of the thigh, and flung it underfoot. "Shame on you! to let your mother see a thing like that!"