The Iron Woman Part 26

"Oh, _do_ stop!" Elizabeth said. Blair got up from the piano-stool and came over to them silently. His thoughts were in clamoring confusion. "I am _not_," he said again to himself.

"I like her, but that's all." There was a look of actual panic on his lazily charming face. He glanced at Elizabeth, who, her head on Nannie's shoulder, was humming softly: "'Oh, won't it be joyful--joyful-joyful--'" and clenched his hands.

He was very silent as he walked home with her that night. When they reached her door, Elizabeth looked up at the closed shutters of Mrs. Richie's house, and sighed. "How dreary a closed house looks!" she said. "I almost wish Uncle would rent it, but he won't. _I_ think he is keeping it for Mrs. Richie to live in when David and I settle down in Philadelphia."

Blair was apparently not interested in Mrs. Richie's future. "I wish," he said, "that I'd gone to Europe this summer."

"Well, that's polite, considering that Nannie and I have spent our time making it agreeable for you."

"I stayed in Mercer because I thought I'd like a summer with Nannie," he defended himself; he was just turning away at the foot of the steps, but he stopped and called back: "with Nannie- _and you."_

Elizabeth, from the open door, looked after him with frank astonishment. "How long since Nannie and I have been so much appreciated?"

"I think I began to appreciate you a good while ago, Elizabeth,"

he said, significantly; but she did not hear him. "Perhaps it's just as well she's going," he told himself, as he went slowly back to the hotel. "Not that I'm smitten; but I might be. I can see that I might be, if I should let myself go." But he was confident that allegiance to his G.o.d would keep him from ever letting himself go.

The girls went East that week, and when they did, Blair took no more meals in the office-dining-room.

It was a very happy time that the inland girls spent with Mrs.

Richie, in her small house on the Jersey sh.o.r.e. It happened that neither of them had ever seen the ocean, and their first glimpse of it was a great experience. Added to that was the experience, new to both of them, of daily companionship with a serene nature.

Mrs. Richie was always a little remote, a little inclined to keep people at arm's-length; there were undercurrents of sadness in her talk, and she was perhaps rather absorbed in her own supreme affair, maternal love. Also, her calm outlook upon heavenly horizons made the affairs of the girls seem sometimes disconcertingly small, and to realize the smallness of one's affairs is in itself an experience to youth. But in spite of the ultimate reserves they felt in her, Mrs. Richie was sympathetic, and full of soft gaieties, with endless patience for people and events. Elizabeth's old uneasy dislike of her had long since yielded to the fact that she was David's mother, and so must be, and in theory was, loved. But the love was really only a faint awe at what she still called "perfection"; and during the two months of living under the same roof with her, Elizabeth felt at times a resentful consciousness that Mrs. Richie was afraid of that ungovernable temper, which, the girl used to say, impatiently, "never hurts anybody but myself!" Like most high- tempered people, Elizabeth, though penitent and more or less mortified by her outbursts of fury, was always a little astonished when any one took them seriously; and Mrs. Richie took them very seriously.

Nannie, being far simpler than Elizabeth, was less impressed by Mrs. Richie than by her surroundings;--the ocean, the whole gamut of marine sights and happenings; Mrs. Richie's housekeeping; the delicate food and serving (what would Harris have thought of that table!)-all these things, as well as David's fortnightly visits, and Elizabeth's ardors and gay coldnesses, were delights to Nannie. Both girls had an absorbingly good time, and when the last day of the last week finally arrived, and Mr. Robert Ferguson appeared to escort them home, they were both of them distinctly doleful.

"Every perfect thing stops!" Elizabeth sighed to David. They had left the porch, and gone down on to the sands flooded with moonlight and silence. The evening was very still and warm, and the full blue pour of the moon made everything softly unreal, except the glittering path of light crossing the breathing, black expanse of water. David had hesitated when she had suggested leaving the others and coming down here by themselves,--then he had looked at Nannie, sitting between Robert Ferguson and his mother, and seemed to rea.s.sure himself; but he was careful to choose a place on the beach where he could keep an eye on the porch. He was talking to Elizabeth in his anxious way, about his work, and how soon his income would be large enough for them to marry. "The minus sign expresses it now," he said; "I could kick myself when I think that, at twenty-six, my mother has to pay my washwoman!" Their engagement had continued to accentuate the difference in the development of these two; David's manhood was more and more of the mind; Elizabeth's womanhood was most exquisitely of the body. When he spoke of his shame in being supported by his mother, she leaned her cheek on his shoulder, careless of the three spectators on the porch, and said softly, "David, I love you so that I would like to scrub floors for you."

He laughed; "I wouldn't like to have you scrub floors, thank you!

Why in thunder don't I get ahead faster," he sighed. Then he told her that the older men in the profession were "so darned mean, even the big fellows, 'way up," that they kept on practising when they could just as well sit back on their hind legs and do nothing, and give the younger men a chance.

"They are nothing but money-grabbers," Elizabeth agreed, burning with indignation at all successful physicians. "But David, we can live on very little. Corn-beef is very cheap, Cherry-pie says.

So's liver."

Up on the porch the conversation was quite as practical as it was down by the moonlit water:

"Elizabeth is to have a little bit of money handed over to her on her next birthday," Mr. Ferguson was saying; then he twitched the black ribbon of his gla.s.ses and brought them tumbling from his nose; "it's an inheritance from her father."

"Oh, how exciting!" said Nannie. "Will it make it possible for them to be married any sooner?"

"They can't marry on the interest on it," he said, with his meager laugh; "it's only a nest-egg."

Mrs. Richie sighed. "Well, of course they must be prudent, but I am sorry to have them wait. It will be some time before David's practice is enough for them to marry on. He is so funny in planning their housekeeping expenses," she said, with that mother-laugh of mockery and love. "You should hear the economies they propose!" And she told him some of them. "They make endless calculations as to how little they can possibly live on. You would never suppose they _could_ be so ignorant as to the cost of things! Of course I enlighten them when they deign to consult me. I do wish David would let me give him enough to get married on," she ended, a little impatiently.

"I think he's right not to," Robert Ferguson said.

"David is so queer about money," Nannie commented; and rose, saying she wanted to go indoors to the lamplight and her book.

"Pity Blair hasn't some of David's 'queerness,'" Mr. Ferguson barked, when she had vanished into the house.

Mrs. Richie looked after her uneasily, missing her protecting presence. But in Mr. Ferguson's matter-of-fact talk he seemed just the same harsh, kind, unsentimental neighbor of the last seventeen years; "he's forgotten his foolishness," she thought, and resigned herself, comfortably, to Nannie's absence. "Does Elizabeth know about the legacy?" she asked.

"No, she hasn't an idea of it. I was bound that the expectation of money shouldn't spoil her."

"Well," she jeered at him, "I do hope you are satisfied _now_, that she is not spoiled by money or anything else!

How afraid you were to let yourself really love the child--poor little Elizabeth!"

"I had reason," he insisted doggedly. "Life had played a trick on me once, and I made up my mind not to build on anybody again, until I was sure of them." Then, without looking at her, he said, as if following out some line of thought, "I hope you have come to feel that you will marry me, Mrs. Richie?"

"_Oh!_" she said, in dismay.

"I don't see why you can't make up your mind to it," he continued, frowning; "I know"--he stopped, and put on his gla.s.ses carefully with both hands--"I know I am a bear, but--"

"You are not!"

"Don't interrupt. I am. But not at heart. Listen to me, at my age, talking about 'hearts'!" They both laughed, and then Mr.

Ferguson gave a snort of impatience. "Look at those two youngsters down there, engaged to be married, and swearing by the moon that n.o.body ever loved as they do. How absurd it is! A man has to be fifty before he knows enough about love to get married."

"Nonsense!"

"I cannot take youth seriously," he ruminated; "its behavior, yes; that may be serious enough! Youth is always firing the Ephesian dome; but youth itself, and its opinions, always seem to me a little ridiculous. Yet those two infants seem to think that they have discovered love! Well," he interrupted himself, in sudden somber memory, "I felt that way once myself. And yet _now_, I know--"

Mrs. Richie said hurriedly something about its being too damp for Elizabeth on the sand. "Do call them in!"

He laughed. "No; you don't need 'em. I won't say any more--to- night."

"Here they come!" Mrs. Richie said in a relieved voice.

A minute before, David, looking up at the porch, and discovering Nannie's absence, had said, "Let's go in." "Oh, must we?"

Elizabeth said, reluctantly. "I'd so much rather sit down here and have you kiss me." But she came, perforce, for David, in his anxiety not to leave his mother alone with Mr. Ferguson, was already halfway up the beach.

"Do tell Elizabeth about the money now," Mrs. Richie said.

"I will," said Robert Ferguson; but added, under his breath, "I sha'n't give up, you know." Mrs. Richie was careful not to hear him.

"Elizabeth!" she said, eagerly. "Your uncle has some news for you." And Mr. Ferguson told his niece briefly, that on her birthday in December she would come into possession of some money left her by her father.

"Don't get up your expectations, it's not much," he said, charily, "but it's something to start on."

"Oh, Uncle! how splendid!" she said, and caught David's hand in both of hers. "David!"--her face was radiantly unconscious of the presence of the others: "perhaps we needn't wait two years?"

"I'm afraid it won't make much difference." David spoke rather grimly; "I must be able to buy your shoestrings myself, you know, before we can be married."

Elizabeth dropped his hand, and the dimple straightened in her cheek.

Mrs. Richie smiled at her. "Young people have to be prudent, dear child."

"How much money shall I have, Uncle?" Elizabeth asked coldly.

He told her. "Not a fortune; but David needn't worry about your shoestrings."

"Yes, I will," he broke in, with a laugh. "She'll have to go barefoot, if I can't get 'em for her!"