The Iron Woman Part 25

David only chuckled, and pulled Blair into a corner to talk. "You girls keep on your own side; don't interrupt serious conversation," he said. "Blair, I want to ask you--" And in a minute the two young men were deep in their own affairs. It was amusing to see how quickly all four of them fell back into the comfortable commonplace of old friendship, the men roaring over some college reminiscences, and the two girls grumbling at being left out. "Really," said Mrs. Richie, "I should think none of you were more than fifteen!"

That night, when he took his sister home, Blair was very silent.

Her little trickle of talk about David and Elizabeth was apparently unheard. As they turned into their own street, the full moon, just rising out of the river mists, suddenly flooded the waste-lands beyond the Works; the gaunt outlines of the Foundry were touched with ethereal silver, and the Maitland house, looming up in a great black ma.s.s, made a gulf of shadow that drowned the dooryard and spread half-way across the squalid street. Beyond the shadow, Shantytown, in the quiet splendor of the moon, seemed as intangible as a dream.

"Beautiful!" Blair said, involuntarily. He stood for a silent moment, drinking the beauty like wine, perhaps it was the exhilaration of it that made him say abruptly: "Perhaps I'll not go abroad. Perhaps I'll pitch in."

Nannie fairly jumped with astonishment. "Blair! You mean to go into the Works? This summer? Oh, how pleased Mamma would be! It would be perfectly splendid. _Oh_!" Nannie gave his arm a speechless squeeze.

"If I do, it will be because Mrs. Richie bolstered me up. Of course I would hate it like the devil; but perhaps it's the decent thing to do? Oh, well; don't say anything about it. I haven't made up my mind--this is an awful place!" he said, with a shiver, looking across at Shantytown and remembering what was hidden under the glamor of the moon. "The smell of it! Democracy is well enough, Nancy--until you smell it."

"But you could live at the hotel," Nannie reminded him, as he pulled out his latch-key.

"You bet I would," her brother said, laughing. "My dear, not even your society could reconcile me to the slums. But I don't know whether I can screw myself up to the Works, anyhow. David won't be in town, and that would be a nuisance. Well, I'll think it over; but if I do stay, I tell you what it is!--you two girls will have to make things mighty agreeable, or I'll clear out."

He did think it over; but Blair had never been taught the one regal word of life, he had never learned to say "I _ought_."

Therefore it needed more talks with Mrs. Richie, more days with Elizabeth--David, confound him! wouldn't come, because he had to pack, but Nannie tagged on behind; it needed the "bolstering up"

of much approval on the part of the onlookers, and much self- approval, too, before the s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g-up process reached a point where he went into his mother's office in the Works and told her that if she was ready to take him on, he was ready to go to work.

Mrs. Maitland was absolutely dumb with happiness. He wanted to go to work! He asked to be taken on! "What do you say _now_, friend Ferguson?" she jeered; "you thought he was going to play at his painting for another year, and you wanted me to put his nose to the grindstone, and make him earn the money to pay for that fool picture. Isn't it better to have him come to it of his own accord? I'd pay for ten pictures, if they made him want to go to work. As for his painting, it will be his father over again.

My husband had his fancies about it, too, but he gave it all up when he married me; marriage always gives a man common sense,-- marriage and business. That's how it's going to be with Blair,"

she ended complacently. "Blair has brains; I've always said so."

Robert Ferguson did not deny the brains, but he was as astonished as she.

"I believe," he challenged Mrs. Richie, "_you_ put him up to it? You always could wind that boy round your finger."

"I did talk to him," she confessed; it was their last interview, for she and David were starting East that night, and Mr. Ferguson had come in to say good-by. "I talked to him--a little. Mrs.

Maitland's disappointment about him went to my heart. Besides, I am very fond of Blair; there is a great deal of good in him. You are prejudiced."

"No I'm not. I admit that as his mother says, 'he's no fool'; but that only makes his dilly-dallying so much the worse. Still, I believe that if she were to lose all her money, and he were to fall very much in love and be refused, he might amount to something. But it would need both things to make a man of him."

Robert Ferguson sighed, and Mrs. Richie left the subject of the curative effect of unsuccessful love, with nervous haste. "I am going to charge Elizabeth and Nannie to do all they can to make it pleasant for him, so that he won't find the Works too terrible," she said. At which reflection upon the Works, Mr.

Ferguson barked so fiercely that she felt quite at ease with him.

But his barking did not prevent her from telling the girls that business would be very hard for Blair, and they must cheer him up: "Do try to amuse him! You know it is going to be very stupid for him in Mercer."

Nannie, of course, needed no urging; as for Elizabeth, she was a little contemptuous. Oh yes; she would do what she could, she said. "Of course, I'm awfully fond of Blair, but--"

The fact was, she was contrasting in her own mind the man who had to be "amused" to keep him at his work, with David--"working himself to death!" she told Nannie, proudly. And Nannie, quick to feel the slur in her words, said:

"Yes, but it is quite different with Blair. Blair doesn't _have_ to do anything, you know."

Still, thanks to Mrs. Richie, he was at least going to pretend to do something. And so, at a ridiculously high salary, he entered, as he told Elizabeth humorously, "upon his career." The only thing he did to make life more tolerable for himself was to live in the hotel instead of in his mother's house. But it was characteristic of him that he left the wonderful old canvas--the "fourteen by eighteen inch" picture, hanging on the wall in Nannie's parlor. "You ought to have something fit for a civilized eye to rest upon," he told her, "and I can see it when I come to see you." If his permanent departure for the River House wounded his mother, she made no protest; she only lifted a pleased eyebrow when he dropped in to supper, which, she noticed, he was apt to do whenever Elizabeth happened to take tea with Nannie.

When he did come, Sarah Maitland used to look about the dining- room table, with its thick earthenware dishes--the last of the old Canton service had found its way to the ash-barrel; she used to glance at the three young people with warm satisfaction. "Like old times!" she would say kindly; "only needs David to make it complete."

Mrs. Maitland was sixty-two that spring, but there was no stoop of the big shoulders, no sign of that settling and shrinking that age brings. She was at the full tide of her vigor, and her happiness in having her son beside her in the pa.s.sion of her life, which was second only to her pa.s.sion for him, showed itself in clumsy efforts to flaunt her contentment before her world.

Every morning, with varying unpunctuality, Blair came into her office at the Works where she had had a desk placed for him. He was present, because she insisted that he should be, at the regular conferences which she held with the heads of departments.

She made a pretense of asking his advice, which was as amusing to Mr. Ferguson and the under-superintendents as it was tiresome to Blair. For after his first exhilaration in responding to Mrs.

Richie's high belief in him, the mere doing of duty began gradually to pall. Her belief helped him through the first four or five months, then the whole thing became a bore. His work was ludicrously perfunctory, and his listlessness when in the office was apparent to everybody. At the bottom of her heart, Sarah Maitland must have known that it was all a farce. Blair was worth nothing to the business; his only relation to it was the weekly drawing of an unearned "salary." Perhaps if Mrs. Richie had been in Mercer, to make again and again the appeal of confident expectation, that little feeble sense of duty which had started him upon his "career," might have struck a root down through feeling, into the rock-bed of character. But as it was, not even the girls' obedience to her order, "to amuse Blair," made up for the withdrawal of her own sustaining inspiration.

But at least Nannie and Elizabeth kept him fairly contented out of business hours; and so long as he was contented, things were smooth between him and his mother. There was, as Blair expressed it, "only one rumpus" that whole summer, and it was a very mild one, caused by the fact that he did not go to church. On those hot July Sunday mornings, his mother in black silk, and Nannie in thin lawn, sat in the family pew, fanning themselves, and waiting; Nannie, constantly turning to look down the aisle; Sarah Maitland intent for a familiar step and a hand upon the little baize-lined door of the pew. The "rumpus" came when, on the third Sunday, Blair was called to account.

It was after supper, in the hot dusk in Nannie's parlor; Elizabeth was there, and the two girls, in white dresses, were fanning themselves languidly; Blair, at the piano, was playing the Largo, with much feeling. The windows were open. It was too warm for lamps, and the room was lighted only by the occasional roar of flames, breaking fan-like from the tops of the stacks in the Yards. Suddenly, in the midst of their idle talk, Mrs.

Maitland came in; she paused for a moment before the dark oblong of canvas on the wall beside the door. Of course, in the half- light, the little dim Mother of G.o.d--immortal maternity!--could scarcely be seen.

"Umph," she said, "a dirty piece of canvas, at about twenty dollars a square inch!" No one spoke. "Let's see;" she calculated;--"ore is $10 a ton; 20 tons to a car; say one locomotive hauls 25 cars. Well, there you have it: a trainload of iron ore, to pay for _this_!" she snapped a thumb and finger against the canvas. Blair jumped--then ran his right hand up the keyboard in a furious arpeggio. But he said nothing. Mrs.

Maitland, moving away from the picture, blew out her lips in a loud sigh. "Well," she said; "tastes differ, as the old woman said when she kissed her cow."

Still no one spoke, but Elizabeth rose to offer her a chair.

"No," she said, coming over and resting an elbow on the mantelpiece, "I won't sit down. I'm going in a minute."

As she stood there, unrest spread about her as rings from a falling stone spread on the surface of a pool. Blair yawned, and got up from the piano; Elizabeth fidgeted; Nannie began to talk nervously.

"Blair," said his mother, her strident voice over-riding the girls' chatter, "why don't you come to church?"

His answer was perfectly unevasive and entirely good-natured.

"Well, for one thing, I don't believe the things the church teaches."

"What do you believe?" she demanded. And he answered carelessly, that really, he hardly knew.

It was, of course, the old difference of the generations; but it was more marked because these two generations had never spoken the same language, therefore quiet, sympathetic disagreement was impossible. It was impossible, too, because the actual fact was that neither her belief nor his disbelief were integral to their lives. Her creed was a barbarous anthropomorphism, which had created an offended and puerile G.o.d--a G.o.d of foreign missions and arid church-going and eternal d.a.m.nation. The fear of her G.o.d (such as he was) would, no doubt, have protected her against certain physical temptations, to which, as it happened, her temperament never inclined; but he had never safeguarded her from the temptation of cutthroat compet.i.tion, or even of business shrewdness which her lawyer showed her how to make legal. Blair, on the contrary, had long ago discarded the naive brutalities of Presbyterianism; church-going bored him, and he was not interested in saving souls in Africa. But, like most of us--like his mother, in fact, he had a G.o.d of his own, a G.o.d who might have safeguarded him against certain intellectual temptations; cheating at cards, or telling the truth, if the truth would compromise a woman. But as he had no desire to cheat at cards, and the women whom he might have compromised did not need to be lied about, his G.o.d was of as little practical value to him as his mother's was to her. So they were neither of them speaking of realities when Mrs. Maitland said: "What do you believe? What have you got instead of G.o.d?"

"Honor," Blair said promptly. "What do you mean by honor?" she said, impatiently.

"Well," her son reflected, "there are things a man simply can't do; that's all. And that's honor, don't you know. Of course, religion is supposed to keep you from doing things, too. But there's this difference: religion, if you pick pockets--I speak metaphorically; threatens you with h.e.l.l. Honor threatens you with yourself." As he spoke he frowned, as if a disagreeable idea had occurred to him.

His mother frowned, too. That h.e.l.l and a man's self might be the same thing had never struck Sarah Maitland. She did not understand what he meant, and feeling herself at a disadvantage, retaliated with the reproof she might have administered to a boy of fifteen: "You don't know what you are talking about!"

The man of twenty-five laughed lazily. "Your religion is very amusing, my dear mother."

Her face darkened. She took her elbow from the mantelpiece, and seemed uncertain what to do. Blair sprang to open the door, but she made an irritated gesture. "I know how to open doors," she said. She threw a brief "good-night" to Elizabeth, and turned a cheek to Nannie for the kiss that had fallen there, soft as a little feather, in all the nights of all the years they had lived together. "'Night, Blair," she said shortly; then hesitated, her hand on the door-k.n.o.b. There was an instant when the command _"Go to church!"_ trembled upon her lips, but it was not spoken. "I advise you," she said roughly, "to get over your conceit, and try to get some religion into you. Your father and your grandfather didn't think they could get along without it; they went to church! But you evidently think you are so much better than they were that you can stay away,"

The door slammed behind her. Blair whistled. "Poor dear mother!"

he sighed; and turned round to listen to the two girls. "Can you be ready to start on the first?" Elizabeth was asking Nannie, evidently trying to cover up the awkwardness of that angry exit.

"Start where?" Blair asked.

"Why, East! You know. I told you ages ago," Nannie explained.

"Elizabeth and I are going to stay with Mrs. Richie at the seash.o.r.e."

"You never said a word about it," Blair said disgustedly. His annoyance knew no disguise. "I call it pretty shabby for you two to go off! What's going to happen to me?"

"Business, Blair, business!" Elizabeth mocked. But Nannie was plainly conscience-stricken. "I'll not go, if you'd rather I didn't, Blair."

"Nonsense!" her brother said shortly, "of course you must go, but--" He did not finish his thought, whatever it was; he went back to the piano and began to drum idly. His face was sharply annoyed. That definition of his G.o.d which he had made to his mother, had aroused a nameless uneasiness. It occurred to him that perhaps he was "picking a pocket," in finding such emphatic satisfaction in Elizabeth's society. Now, abruptly, at the news of her approaching absence, the uneasiness sharpened into faintly recognizable outlines.

He struck a jarring chord on the piano, and told himself not to be a fool. "She's mighty good fun. Of course I shall miss her or any other girl, in this G.o.dforsaken hole! That's all it amounts to. Anyhow, she's dead in love with David." Sitting there in the hot dusk, listening to the voices of the girls, Blair felt suddenly irritated with David. "Darn him, why does he go off and leave her in this way? Not but what it is all right so far as I am concerned; only--" Then, wordlessly, his G.o.d must have accused him, for he winced. "I am _not_, not in the least!" he said.

The denial confessed him to himself, and there was an angry bang of discordant octaves. The two girls called out in dismay.