The Iron Woman Part 33

In the midst of this angry justifying of herself, tramping up and down the long room, she stopped suddenly and looked about her; where was her knitting? Her thoughts were in such a distracted tangle that the accustomed automatic movement of her fingers was imperative. She tucked the grimy pink ball of zephyr under her arm, and tightening her fingers on the bent and yellowing old needles, began again her fierce pacing up and down, up and down.

But the room seemed to cramp her, and by and by she went across the hall into Nannie's parlor, where the fire had sprung into cheerful flames; here she paused for a while, standing with one foot on the fender, knitting rapidly, her unseeing eyes fixed on the needles. Yes; Blair had had no cares, no responsibilities,-- and as for money! With a wave of resentment, she thought that she would find out in the morning from her bookkeeper just how much money she had given him since he was twenty-one. It was then that a bleak consciousness, like the dull light of a winter dawn, slowly began to take possession of her: _money_. She had given him money; but what else had she given him? Not companionship; she had never had the time for that; besides, he would not have wanted it; she knew, inarticulately, that he and she had never spoken the same language. Not sympathy in his endless futilities; what intelligent person could sympathize with a man who found serious occupation in buying--well, china beetles? Or pictures! She glanced angrily over at that piece of blackened canvas by the door, its gold frame glimmering faintly in the firelight. He had spent five thousand dollars on a picture that you could cover with your two hands! Yes; she had given him money; but that was all she had given him. Money was apparently the only thing they had in common.

Then came another surge of resentment,--that pitiful resentment of the wounded heart; Blair had never cared how hard she worked to make money for him! It occurred to her, perhaps for the first time in her life, that she worked very hard; she said to herself that sometimes she was tired. Yes, she had never thought of it before, but she was sometimes very tired. But what did Blair care for that? What did he care how hard she worked? Even as she said it, with that anger which is a confession of something deeper than anger, her mind retorted that if he had never cared how hard she worked for their money, she had never cared how easily he spent it. She had been irritated by his way of spending it, and she had been contemptuous; but she had never really cared. So it appeared that they did not have even money in common. The earning had been all hers; the spending had been all his. If she had liked to buy gimcracks, they would have had that in common, and perhaps he would have been fond of her? "But I never knew how to be a fool," she thought, simply. Yes; she didn't know how to spend, she only knew how to earn. Of course, if he had had to earn what he spent, they would have had work as a bond of sympathy. Work! Blair had never understood that work was the finest thing in the world. She wondered why he had not understood it, when she herself had worked so hard--worked, in fact, so that he might be beyond the need of working. As she said that, her fingers were suddenly rigid on her needles; it seemed as if her soul had felt a jolt of dismay; why didn't her son understand the joy of work? Because she had spared him all necessity for it!-- for the work she had given him to do was not real, and they both knew it. Spared him? Robbed him! "_Who hath sinned, this man or his parents?_" "This man," her selfish, indolent, dishonorable son, or she herself, whose hurry to possess the one thing she wanted, that finest thing in the world, Work!--had pushed him into the road of pleasant, shameful idleness, the road that always leads to dishonor? Good G.o.d! what a fool she had been not to make him work.

Sarah Maitland, tramping back and forth, the ball of pink worsted dragging behind her in a grimy tangle, thought these things with a sledge-hammer directness that spared herself nothing. She wanted the truth, no matter how it made her cringe to find it!

She would hammer out her very heart to find the truth. And the truth she found was that she had never allowed Blair to meet the negations of life--to meet those _No's_, which teach the eternal affirmations of character. He had had everything; he had done nothing. The result was as inevitable as the action of a law of nature! In the illuminating misery of this terrible night, she saw that she had given her son, as Robert Ferguson had said to her once, "fullness of bread and abundance of idleness." And now she was learning what bread and idleness together must always make of a man.

Walking up and down the dimly lighted room, she had a vision of her sin that made her groan. _She_ had made Blair what he was: because it had been easy for her to make things easy for him, she had given him his heart's desire, and brought leanness withal to his soul. In satisfying her own hunger for work, she had forgotten to give it to him, and he had starved for it! She had left, by this time, far behind her the personal affront to her of his reserves; she took meekly the knowledge that he did not love her: she even thought of his marriage as unimportant, or as important only because it was a symptom of a condition for which she was responsible. And having once realized and accepted this fact, there was only one solemn question in her mind:

"What am I going to do about it?"

For she believed, as other parents have believed before her--and probably will go on believing as long as there are parents and sons--she believed that she could, in some way or other, by the very strength of her agonizing love, force into her son's soul from the outside that Kingdom of G.o.d which must be within. "Oh, what am I going to do?" she said to herself.

She stood still and covered her face with her hands. "G.o.d," she said, "don't punish him! It's my fault; punish me."

Perhaps she had never really prayed before.

CHAPTER XX

Robert Ferguson, in his library, and poor Miss White in the hall, listened with tense nerves for the wheels of the carriage that was to bring David Richie "to breakfast."

"Send him in to me," Mr. Ferguson had said; and then had shut himself into his library.

Miss White was quivering with terror when at last she heard the carriage door bang. David came leaping up the steps, his face rosy as a girl's in the raw morning air--it was a lowering Mercer morning, with the street lamps burning at eight o'clock in a murk of smoke and fog. He raked the windows with a smiling glance, and then stood, laughing for sheer happiness, waiting for _her_ to open the door to him.

David had had a change of spirit, if not of mind, since he wrote his eminently sensible letter to Elizabeth. He had been able to sc.r.a.pe up enough money of his own to pay at least one of his bills, and things had gone better with him at the hospital, so he no longer felt the unreasonable humiliation which Elizabeth's proposal had accentuated in him. The reproach which his mood had read into her letter had vanished after a good night's sleep and a good day's work; now, it seemed to him only an exquisite expression of most lovely love, which brought the color into his face, and made his lips burn at the thought of her lips! Of course her idea of marrying on her little money was not to be thought of--he and Mr. Ferguson would laugh over it together; but what an angel she was to think of it! All that night, in the journey over the mountains, he had lain in his berth and looked out at the stars, cursing himself joyously for a dumb fool who had had no words to tell her how he loved her for that sweet, divinely foolish proposal, which was "not to be thought of"! "But when I see her, I'll make her understand; when I hold her in my arms--" he told himself, with all the pa.s.sion of twenty-six years which had no easy outlet of speech.

When Robert Ferguson's door opened, his heart was on his lips.

"Eliz--" he began, and stopped short. "Oh, Miss White. Good morning, Miss White!" And before poor Cherry-pie knew it, he had given her a great hug; "Where is Elizabeth? Not out of bed yet?

Oh, the lazybones!" He was so eager that, until he was fairly in the hall, with the front door shut, and his overcoat almost off, he did not notice her silence. Then he gave her a startled look.

"Miss White! is anything the matter? Is Elizabeth ill?"

"No; oh, no," she said breathlessly; "but--Mr. Ferguson will tell you. No, she is not sick. Go, he will tell you. In the library."

The color dropped out of his face as a flag drops to half-mast.

"She is dead," he said, with absolute finality in his voice.

"When did she die?" He stood staring straight ahead of him at the wall, ghastly with fright.

"No! no! She is not dead; she is well. Quite well; oh, very well.

Go, David, my dear boy--oh, my _dear_ boy! Go to Mr.

Ferguson. He will tell you. But it is--terrible, David."

He went, dazed, and saying, "Why, but what is it? If she is not-- not--"

Robert Ferguson met him on the threshold of the library, drew him in, closed the door, and looked him full in the face. "No, she isn't dead," he said; "I wish to G.o.d she were." Then he struck him hard on the shoulder. "David," he said harshly, "be a man; they've played a d.a.m.ned dirty trick on you. Yesterday she married Blair Maitland.... Take it like a man, and be thankful you are rid of her." He wheeled about and stood with his back to his niece's lover. He had guided the inevitable sword, but he could not witness the agony of the wound. There was complete stillness in the room; the ticking of the clock suddenly hammered in Robert Ferguson's ears; a cinder fell softly from the grate. Then he heard a long-drawn breath:

"Tell me, if you please, exactly what has happened."

Elizabeth's uncle, still with his back turned, told him what little he knew. "I don't know where they are," he ended; "I don't want to know. The scoundrel wrote to Nannie, but he gave no address. Elizabeth's letter to me is on my table; read it."

He heard David move over to the library table; he heard the rustle of the sheet of paper as it was drawn out of the envelope.

Then silence again, and the clamor of the clock. He turned round, in time to see David stagger slightly and drop into a chair; perspiration had burst out on his forehead. He was so white around his lips that Robert Ferguson knew that for a moment his body shared the awful astonishment of his soul. "There's some whiskey over there," he said, nodding toward a side table. David shook his head. Then, still shuddering with that dreadful sickness, he spoke.

"She ... has married--Blair? _Blair_?" he repeated, uncomprehendingly. He put his hand up to his head with that strange, cosmic gesture which horrified humanity has made ever since it was capable of feeling horror.

"Yes," Mr. Ferguson said grimly; "yes, Blair--your friend! Well, you are not the first man who has had a sweetheart--and a 'friend.' A wife, even--and a 'friend.' And then discovered that he had neither wife nor friend. d.a.m.n him."

"d.a.m.n him?" said David, and burst into a scream of laughter. He was on his feet now, but he rocked a little on his shaking legs.

"d.a.m.nation is too good for him; may G.o.d--" In the outburst of fury that followed, even Robert Ferguson quailed and put up a protesting hand.

"David--David," he stammered, actually recoiling before that storm of words. "David, he will get what he deserves. She was worthless!" David stopped short. At the mention of Elizabeth, his hurricane of rage dropped suddenly into the flat calm of absolute bewilderment. "Do not speak of Elizabeth in that way, in my presence," he said, panting.

"She is her mother's daughter! She is bad, through and through.

She--"

"Stop!" David cried, violently; "what in h.e.l.l do you keep on saying that for? I will not listen--I will not hear." ... He was beside himself; he did not know what he said.

But Robert Ferguson was silenced. When David spoke again, it was in gasps, and his words came thickly as if his tongue were numb: "What--what are we to do?"

"Do? There is nothing to do, that I can see."

"She must be taken away from him!"

"n.o.body knows where they are. But if I did know, I wouldn't lift my hand to get her away. She has made her bed--she can lie in it, so far as I am concerned."

"But she didn't!" David groaned; "you don't understand. I am the one to curse, not Elizabeth."

"What are you talking about?"

"I did it."

The older man looked at him with almost contemptuous incredulity.

"My dear fellow, what is the use of denying facts? You can't make black white, can you? Day before yesterday you loved this--this,"

he seemed to search for some epithet; glanced at David, and said, almost meekly: "girl. Day before yesterday she expected to marry you. To-day she is the wife of another man. Have you committed any crime in the last three days which justifies that?"

"Yes," David said, in a smothered voice, "I have." Then he handed back to the shamed and angry man the poor, pitiful little letter.

"Don't you see? She says, 'David didn't want'"--he broke off, unable to speak. A moment later he added, "'E. _F_.' She isn't used to the--the other, yet," he said, again with that bewildered look.

But Elizabeth's uncle was too absorbed in his own humiliation to see confession in that tragic initial. "What is that nonsense about your not wanting her?"

"She thought so. She had reason to think so."

"You had better explain yourself, David."

"She wrote to me," David said, after a pause; "she told me she would have that money of hers on her birthday. She said we could be married then." He reddened to his temples. "She asked me to marry her that day; _asked_ me, you understand." He turned on his heel and went over to the window; he stood there for some minutes with his back to Robert Ferguson. The green door in the wall between the two gardens was swinging back and forth on sagging hinges; David watched it with unseeing eyes; suddenly a sooty pigeon came circling down and lit just inside the old arbor, which was choked with snow shovelled from the flagstones of the path. Who can say why, watching the pigeon's teetering walk on the soot-specked snow, David should smell the fragrance of heliotrope hot in the sunshine, and see Elizabeth drawing Blair's ring from her soft young bosom? He turned back to her uncle, with a rigid face: "Well, _I--I_ said--'no' to her letter. Do you understand? I told her 'no.' '_No_,' to a girl like Elizabeth! Because, in my--my filthy pride--" he paused, picked up a book, turned it over and over, and then put it straight edge to edge with the table. His hand was trembling violently. When he could speak again it was in a whisper. "My cursed pride. I didn't want to marry until I could do everything.