The Iron Woman Part 18

"I didn't ask my mother to see it."

"If you have thoughts like this," she said, "Elizabeth did well to throw you over for David."

Blair lifted one eyebrow with a glimmer of interest. "Oh, David has got her, has he?"

"At any rate, he's a _man!_ He doesn't live like this"--she made a contemptuous gesture; "muddling with silks and paintings, and pictures of bad women! What kind of a room is this for a man?

Full of flowers and stinking jars, and cushions, and truck? It's more fit for a--a creature like that picture"--she set her heel on the smiling face; "than for a man! I ought never to have sent you here. I ought to have put you to puddling." She looked at him in growing agitation. "My G.o.d! Blair, what are you--living this way, with silks and perfumery and clay baby dolls? You've got no guts to you! I didn't mind your making a fool of yourself; that's natural; n.o.body can get to be a man till he's been a fool; but this--" She stood there, with one hand on the mantelpiece beside the row of photographs and bits of carving and little silver trinkets, and looked at him in positive fright. "And you are _my_ son," she said.

The torrent of her angry shame suddenly swept Blair's manhood of twenty-four years away; her very power stripped him bare as a baby; it almost seemed as if she had sucked his masculinity out of him and incorporated it into herself. He stood there like a cringing schoolboy expecting to be whipped. "One of the men gave me that picture; I--"

"You ought to have slapped his face! Listen to me: you are going to be looked after,--do you hear me? You are going to be watched.

Do you understand?" She gathered up the whole row of photographs, innocent and offensive together, and threw them into the fire.

"You are going to walk straight, or you are coming home, and going to work."

It was a match to gunpowder; in an instant Blair's temper, the terrific temper of the uniformly and lazily amiable man, flashed into furious words.

Stammering with rage, he told her what he thought of her; to record his opinion is not for edification. Even Sarah Maitland flinched before it. She left him with a bang. She saw the Dean again, and her recommendations of espionage were so extreme and so unwise that he found himself taking Blair's part in his effort to save the young man from the most insolent intrusion upon his privacy. She went back to Mercer in a whirl of anger but in somber silence. She had scorched and stung under the truths her son told her about herself; she had bled under the lies she had told him as to her feeling for him. She looked ten years older for that hour in his room. But she had nothing to say. She told poor, frightened Nannie that she had "seen Master Blair"; she added that he was a fool. To Robert Ferguson she was a little more explicit:

"Blair has not been behaving himself; he's in debt; he has been gambling. See that all these bills are paid. Tell Watson to give him a hundred dollars more a month; I won't have him running in debt in this way. Now what about the Duluth order?"

CHAPTER XII

Mr. Ferguson made no protest in regard to Blair's increased allowance. "If his mother wants to ruin him, it isn't my business," he said. The fact was, he had not recovered from his astonished resentment at Sarah Maitland's joke in Mrs. Richie's parlor. He thought about it constantly, and asked himself whether he did not owe his neighbor an apology of some kind. The difficulty was to know what kind, for after all _he_ was perfectly innocent! "Such an idea never entered my head," he thought angrily; "but of course, if there has been anything in my conduct to put it into Mrs. Maitland's head, I ought to be thrashed! Perhaps I'd better not go in next door more than two or three times a week?" So, for once, Robert Ferguson was distinctly out with his employer, and when she told him to see that Blair had a hundred dollars more a month, he said, in his own mind, "be hanged to him! What difference does it make to me if she ruins him?" and held his tongue--until the next day. Then he barked out a remonstrance: "I suppose you know your own business, but if _I_ had a boy I wouldn't increase his allowance because he was in debt."

"I want to keep him from getting in debt again," she explained, her face falling into troubled lines.

"If you will allow me to say so--having been a boy myself, that's not the way to do it."

Sarah Maitland flung herself back in her chair, and struck the desk with her fist. "I am at my wit's end to know what to do about him! My idea has been to make a man of him, by giving him what he wants, not making him fuss over five-cent pieces. He's had everything; he's never heard '_no_' in his life. And yet--look at him!"

"That's the trouble with him. He's had too much. He needs a few no's. But he's like most rich boys; there isn't one rich man's son in ten who is worth his salt. If he were _my_ boy," said Robert Ferguson, with that infallibility which everybody feels in regard to the way other people's children should be brought up, "if he were my son, I'd put him to work this summer."

Mrs. Maitland blew her lips out in a great sigh; then nibbled her forefinger, staring with blank eyes straight ahead of her. She was greatly perplexed. "I'll think it over," she said; "I'll think it over. Hold on; what's your hurry? I want to ask you something: your neighbor there, Mrs. Richie, seems to be a very attractive woman; 'fair and forty,' as the saying is--only I guess she's nearer fifty? But she's mighty good-looking, whatever her age is."

The color came into Robert Ferguson's face; this time he was really offended. Mrs. Maitland was actually venturing--"I have never noticed her looks," he said stiffly, and rose.

"It just struck me when I caught you in there the other day," she ruminated; "what do you know about her?" Buried deep in the casual question was another question, but Robert Ferguson did not hear it; she was _not_ going to venture! He was so relieved, that he was instantly himself again. He told her briefly what little he knew: Mrs. Richie was a widow; husband dead many years.

"I have an idea he was a crooked stick,--more from what she hasn't said than what she has said. There's a friend of hers I meet once in a while at her house, a Doctor King, and he intimated to me that her husband was a bad lot. It appears he hurt their child, when he was drunk. She never forgave him. I don't blame her, I'm sure; the baby died. It was after the death of the husband that she adopted David. She has no relations apparently; some friends in Old Chester, I believe; this Doctor King is one of 'em."

"Is she going to marry him?" Mrs. Maitland said.

"There might be objections on the part of the present inc.u.mbent,"

he said, with his meager smile.

Mrs. Maitland admitted that the doctor's wife presented difficulties; "but perhaps she'll die," she said, cheerfully; "I'm interested to know that Mrs. Richie has friends; I was wondering--" She did not say what she wondered. "She's a nice woman, Robert Ferguson, and a good woman, _and_ a good- looking woman, too; 'fair and'--well, say 'fifty'! And if you had any sense--"

But this time Robert Ferguson really did get out of the office.

His advice about Blair, however, seemed superfluous. So far as behavior went, Mrs. Maitland had no further occasion to increase his allowance. His remaining months in the university were decorous enough, though his scholarship was no credit to him. He "squeaked through," as he expressed it to his sister, gaily, when she came east to see him graduate, three years behind the cla.s.s in which he had entered college. But as to his conduct, that domiciliary visit had hardened him into a sort of contemptuous common sense. And his annoyed and humiliated manhood, combined with his esthetic taste, sufficed, also, to keep things fairly peaceful when he was at home, which was rarely for more than a week or two at a time. Quarrels with his mother had become excruciating experiences, like discords on the piano; they set his teeth on edge, though they never touched his heart. To avoid them, he would, he told Nannie, chuckling at her horror,--"lie like the devil!" His lying, however, was nothing more serious than a careful and entirely insincere politeness; but it answered his purpose, and "rows," as he called them, were very rare; although, indeed, his mother did her part in avoiding them, too.

To Sarah Maitland, a difference with her son meant a pang at the very center of her being--her maternity; her heart was seared by it, but her taste was not offended because she had no taste. So, for differing reasons, peace was kept. The next fall, after a summer abroad, Blair went back to the university and took two or three special courses; also he began to paint rather seriously; all of which was his way of putting off the evil day of settling down in Mercer.

Meantime, life grew quite vivid to his sister. Elizabeth had once said that Nannie was "born an old maid"; and certainly these tranquil, gently useless years of being very busy about nothing, and living quite alone with her stepmother, had emphasized in her a simplicity and literalness of mind that was sometimes very amusing to the other three friends. At any rate, hers was a pallid little personality--perhaps it could not have been anything else in the household of a woman like Sarah Maitland, with whom, domestically, it was always either peace, or a sword!

Nannie was incapable of anything but peace. "You are a 'fraid- cat," Elizabeth used to tell her, "but you're a perfect dear!"

"Nannie is unscrupulously good," Blair said once; and her soft stubbornness in doing anything she conceived to be her duty, warranted his criticism. But during the first year that David and Elizabeth were engaged, her stagnant existence in the silent old house began to stir; little shocks of reality penetrated the gentle primness of her thought, and she came creeping out into the warmth and sunshine of other people's happiness; indeed, her shy appreciation of the lovers' experiences became almost an experience of her own, so closely did she nestle to all their emotions! It was a real blow to her when it was decided that David should enter a Philadelphia hospital as an interne. "Won't he be at home even for the long vacations?" Nannie asked, anxiously; when she was told that hospitals did not give "vacations," her only consolation was that she would have to console Elizabeth.

But when Robert Ferguson heard what was going to happen, he had nothing to console him. "I'll have a love-sick girl on my hands,"

he complained to Mrs. Richie. "You'll have to do your share of it," he barked at her. He had come in through the green door in the garden wall, with a big clump of some perennial in his hands, and a trowel under one arm. "Peonies have to be thinned out in the fall," he said grudgingly, "and I want to get rid of this lot. Where shall I put 'em?"

It was a warm October afternoon, and Mrs. Richie, who had been sitting on the stone bench under the big hawthorn in her garden, reading, until the dusk hid her page, looked up gratefully. "You are robbing yourself; I believe that is your precious white peony!"

"It's only half of it, and I get as much good out of it here as in my own garden," he grunted (he was sitting on his heels digging a hole big enough for a clump of peonies with a trowel, so no wonder he grunted); "besides, it improves my property to plant perennials; my next tenant may appreciate flowers," he ended, with the reproving significance which had become a joke between them.

"Oh," said Mrs. Richie, sighing, "I don't like to think of that 'next tenant.'"

He looked up at her a little startled. "What do you mean? You are not going to Philadelphia with David next April?"

"Why, you didn't suppose I would let David go alone?"

"What! You will leave Mercer?" he said. In his dismayed astonishment he dropped his trowel and stood up. "Will you please tell me why I should stay in Mercer, when David is in Philadelphia?"

Robert Ferguson was silent; then he tramped the earth in around the roots of the white peony, and said, sullenly, "It never occurred to me that you would go, too."

"You'll have to be extra nice to Elizabeth when we are not here,"

Mrs. Richie instructed him. David's mother was very anxious to be nice to Elizabeth herself; which was a confession, though she did not know it, of her old misgivings as to David's choice.

"Be nice? _I_?" said Mr. Ferguson, and snorted; "did you ever know me 'nice'?"

"Always," she said, smiling.

But he would not smile; he went back to his garden for some more roots; when he returned with a wedge taken from his bed of lemon- lilies, he said crossly, "David can manage his own affairs; he doesn't need ap.r.o.n-strings! I think I've mentioned that to you before?"

"I think I recall some such reference," she admitted, her voice trembling with friendly amus.e.m.e.nt.

But he went on growling and barking: "Foolish woman! to try the experiment at your age, of living in a strange place!"

At that she laughed outright: "That is the nicest way in the world to tell a friend you will miss her."

Robert Ferguson did not laugh. In fact, as the winter pa.s.sed and the time drew near for the move to be made, n.o.body laughed very much. Certainly not the two young people; since David had left the medical school he had worked in Mercer's infirmary, and now they both felt as if the world would end for them when they ceased to see each other several times a day. David did his best to be cheerful about it; in fact, with that common sense of his which his engagement had accentuated, he was almost too cheerful.

The hospital service would be a great advantage, he said, So great that perhaps the three years' engagement to which they were looking forward,--because David's finances would probably not be equal to a wife before that; the three years might be shortened to two. But to be parted for two years--it was "practically parting," for visits don't amount to anything; "it's tough," said David. "It's _terrific!_" Elizabeth said.

"Oh, well," David reminded her, "two years is a lot better than three."

It was curious to see how Love had developed these two young creatures: Elizabeth had sprung into swift and glowing womanhood; with triumphant candor her conduct confessed that she had forgotten everything but Love. She showed her heart to David, and to her little world, as freely as a flower that has opened overnight--a rose, still wet with dew, that bares a warm and fragrant bosom to the sun. David had matured, too; but his maturity was of the mind rather than the body; manhood suddenly fell upon him like a cloak, and because his sense of humor had always been a little defective, it was a somewhat heavy cloak, which hid and even hampered the spontaneous freedom of youth. He was deeply and pa.s.sionately in love, but his face fell into lines of responsibility rather than pa.s.sion; lines, even, of care. He grew markedly older; he thought incessantly of how soon he would be able to marry, and always in connection with his probable income and his possible expenses. Helena Richie was immensely proud of this sudden, serious manhood; but Elizabeth's uncle took it as a matter of course:--had he not, himself, ceased to be an a.s.s at twenty? Why shouldn't David Richie show some sense at twenty-five!

As for Elizabeth, she simply adored. Perhaps she was, once in a while, a little annoyed at the rather ruthless power with which David would calmly override some foolish wish of hers; and sometimes there would be a gust of temper,--but it always yielded at his look or touch. When he was not near her, when she could not see the speechless pa.s.sion in his eyes, or feel the tremor of his lips when they answered the demand of hers, then the anger lasted longer. Once or twice, when he was away from home, his letters, with their laconic taking of her love for granted, made her sharply displeased; but when he came back, and kissed her, she forgot everything but his arms. Curiously enough, the very completeness of her surrender kept him so entirely reverent of her that people who did not know him might have thought him cold-- but Elizabeth knew! She knew his love, even when, as she fulminated against the misery of being left alone, David merely said, briefly, "Oh, well, two years is a lot better than three."