The Iron Woman Part 37

Through it all, her jailer, insulted, commanded, threatened, never lost a gentleness that had sprung up in him side by side with love. It was, of course, the gentleness of power, although he did not realize that, for he was abjectly frightened; he never stopped to rea.s.sure himself by remembering that, after all, rave as she might, she was his! He was incredibly soft with her--up to a certain point: "I will never let you go!" If his G.o.d spoke, the whisper was drowned in that gale of selfishness. Elizabeth, now, was the flint, striking that she might kindle in Blair some fire of anger which would burn up the whole edifice of her despair.

But he opposed to her fiercest blows of terror and entreaty nothing but this softness of frightened love and unconscious power. He cowered at the thought of losing her; he entreated her pity, her mercy; he wept before her. The whole scene in that room in the inn, with the silent whirl of snow outside the windows, was one of dreadful abas.e.m.e.nt and brutality on both sides.

"I am a bad woman. I will not stay with you. I will kill myself first. I am going away. I am going away to-night."

"Then you will kill me. Elizabeth! Think how I love you; think!

And--_he_ wouldn't want you, since you threw him over. You couldn't go back to him."

"Go back to David? now? How can you say such a thing! I am dead, so far as he is concerned. Oh--oh--oh,--why am I not dead? Why do I go on living? I will kill myself rather than stay with you!" It seemed to Elizabeth that she had forgotten David; she had forgotten that she had meant to write him a terrible letter. She had forgotten everything but the blasting realization of what had happened to her. "Do not dare to speak his name!" she said, frantically. "I cannot bear it! I cannot bear it! I am dead to him. He despises me, as I despise myself. Blair, I can't--I can't live; I can't go on--"

In the end he conquered. There were two days and nights of struggle; and then she yielded. Blair's reiterated appeal was to her sense of justice. Curiously, but most characteristically, through all the clamor of her despair at this incredible thing that she had done, justice was the one word which penetrated to her consciousness. Was it fair, she debated, numbly, in one of their long, aching silences, was it just, that because she had ruined herself, she should ruin him?

She had locked herself in her room, and was sitting with her head on her arms that were stretched before her on a little table.

Blair had gone out for one of his long, wretched walks through the snow; sometimes he took the landlord's dog along for company, and on this particular morning, a morning of brilliant sunshine and cold, insolent wind, he had stopped to buy a bag of nuts for the hungry squirrels in the woods. As he walked he was planning, planning, planning, how he could make his misery touch Elizabeth's heart; he was all unconscious that her misery had not yet touched his heart. But Elizabeth, locked in her room, was beginning to think of his misery. Dully at first, then with dreary concentration, she went over in her mind his arguments and pleadings: he was satisfied to love her even if she didn't love him; he had known what stakes he played for, and he was willing to abide by them; she ought to do the same; she had done this thing--she had married him, was it fair, now, to destroy him, soul and body, just because she had acted on a moment's impulse?

In a crisis of terror, his primitive instinct of self- preservation had swept away the acquired instinct of chivalry, and like a brutal boy, he had reminded her that she was to blame as well as he. "You did it, too," he told her. sullenly. She remembered that he had said he had not fully understood that it was only impulse on her part; "I thought you cared for me a little, or else you wouldn't have married me." In the panic of the moment he really had not known that he lied, and in her absorption in her own misery she did not contradict him. She ought, he said, to make the best of the situation; or else he would kill himself. "Do you want me to kill myself?" he had threatened. If she would make the best of it, he would help her.

He would do whatever she wished; he would be her friend, her servant,--until she should come to love him.

"I shall never love you," she told him. "I will always love you!

But I will not make you unhappy. Let me be your servant; that's all I ask."

"I love David. I will always love him."

He had been silent at that; then broke again into a cry for mercy. "I don't care if you do love him! Don't destroy me, Elizabeth."

He had had still one other weapon: _they were married_.

There was no getting round that. The thing was done; except by Time and the outrageous scandal of publicity, it could not be undone. But this weapon he had not used, knowing perfectly well that the idea of public shame would be, just then, a matter of indifference to Elizabeth?-perhaps even a satisfaction to her, as the sting of the penitential whip is a satisfaction to the sinner. All he said was summed up in three words: "Don't destroy me."

There was no reply. She had fallen into a silence which frightened him more than her words. It was then that he went out for that walk on the creaking snow, in the sunshine and fierce wind, taking the bag of nuts along for the squirrels. Elizabeth, alone, her head on her arms on the table, went over and over his threats and entreaties, until it seemed as if her very mind was sore. After a while, for sheer weariness, she left the tangle of motives and facts and obligations, and began to think of David.

It was then that she moaned a little under her breath.

Twice she had tried to write to him to tell him what had happened. But each time she cringed away from her pen and paper.

After all, what could she write? The fact said all there was to say, and he knew the fact by this time. When she said that, her mind, drawn by some horrible curiosity, would begin to speculate as to how he had heard the fact? Who told him? What did he say?

How did he--? and here she would groan aloud in an effort _not_ to know "how" he took it! To save herself from this speculation which seemed to dig into a grave, and touch and handle the decaying body of love, she would plan what she should say to him when, after a while, "to-morrow," perhaps, she should be able to take up her pen: "David,--I was out of my head. Think of me as if I were dead." ... "David,--I don't want you to forgive me. I want you to hate me as I hate myself." ...

"David,--I was not in my right mind--forgive me. I love you just the same. But it is as if I were dead." Again and again she had thought out long, crying, frightened letters to him; but she had not written them. And now she was beginning to feel, vaguely, that she would never write them. "What is the use? I am dead."

The idea of calling upon him to come and save her, never occurred to her. "I am dead," she said, as she sat there, her face hidden in her arms; "there is nothing to be done."

After a while she stopped thinking of David and the letter she had not been able to write; it seemed as if, when she tried to make it clear to herself why she did not write to him, something stopped in her mind--a cog did not catch; the thought eluded her.

When this happened--as it had happened again and again in these last days; she would fall to thinking, with vague amazement, that this irremediable catastrophe was out of all proportion to its cause. It was monstrous that a crazy minute should ruin a whole life--two whole lives, hers and David's. It was as if a pebble should deflect a river from its course, and make it turn and overflow a landscape! It was incredible that so temporary a thing as an outbreak of temper should have eternal consequences. She gasped, with her face buried in her arms, at the realization-- which comes to most of us poor human creatures sooner or later-- that sins may be forgiven, but their results remain. As for sin-- but surely that meaningless madness was not sin? "It was insanity," she said, shivering at the memory of that hour in the toll-house--that little mad hour, that brought eternity with it!

She had had other crazy hours, with no such weight of consequence. Her mind went back over her engagement: her love, her happiness--and her tempers. Well, nothing had come of them.

David always understood. And still further back: her careless, fiery girlhood--when the knowledge of her mother's recreancy, undermining her sense of responsibility by the condoning suggestion of heredity, had made her quick to excuse her lack of self-control. Her girlhood had been full of those outbreaks of pa.s.sion, which she "couldn't help"; they were all meaningless, and all harmless, too; at any rate they were all without results of pain to her.

Suddenly it seemed to her, as she looked across the roaring gulf that separated her from the past, that all her life had been just a sunny slope down to the edge of the gulf. All those "harmless"

tempers which had had no results, had pushed her to this result!

Her poor, bright, shamed head lay so long and so still on her folded arms that one looking in upon her might have thought her dead. Perhaps, in a way, Elizabeth did die then, when her heart seemed to break with the knowledge that it is impossible to escape from yesterday. "Oh," she said, brokenly, "why didn't somebody tell me? Why didn't they stop me?" But she did not dwell upon the responsibility of other people. She forgot the easy excuse of 'heredity.' This new knowledge brought with it a vision of her own responsibility that filled her appalled mind to the exclusion of everything else. It is not the pebble that turns the current--it is the easy slope that invites it. All her life Elizabeth had been inviting this moment; and the moment, when it came, was her Day of Judgment. What she had thought of as an incredible injustice of fate in letting a mad instant turn the scales for a whole life, was merely an inevitable result of all that had preceded it. When this fierce and saving knowledge came to her, she thought of Blair. "I have spoiled my own life and David's life. I needn't spoil Blair's. He said if I left him, it would destroy him.... Perhaps if I stay, it will be my punishment. I can never be punished enough."

When Blair came home, she was standing with her forehead against the window, her dry eyes watching the dazzling white world.

Coming up behind her, he took her hand and kissed it humbly. She turned and looked at him with somber eyes.

"Poor Blair," she said.

And Blair, under his breath, said, "Thank G.o.d!"

CHAPTER XXIV

The coming back to Mercer some six weeks later was to Blair a miserable and skulking experience. To Elizabeth it was almost a matter of indifference; there is a shame which goes too deep for embarra.s.sment. The night they arrived at the River House, Nannie and Miss White were waiting for them, tearful and disapproving, of course, but distinctly excited and romantic. After all, Elizabeth was a "bride!" and Cherry-pie and Nannie couldn't help being fluttered. Blair listened with open amus.e.m.e.nt to their half-scared gossip of what people thought, and what the newspapers had said, and how "very displeased" his mother had been; but Elizabeth hardly heard them. At the end of the call, while Blair was bidding Nannie tell his mother he was coming to see her in the morning. Miss White, kissing her "lamb" good night, tried to whisper something in her ear: "_He_ said to tell you--" "No--no--no,--I can't hear it; I can't bear it yet!"

Elizabeth broke in; she put her hands over her eyes, shivering so that Cherry-pie forgot David and his message, and even her child's bad behavior.

"Elizabeth! you've taken cold?"

Elizabeth drew away, smiling faintly. "No; not at all. I'm tired.

Please don't stay." And with the message still unspoken, Miss White and Nannie went off together, as fluttering and frightened as when they came.

The newspaper excitement which had followed the announcement of the elopement of Sarah Maitland's son, had subsided, so there was only a brief notice the morning after their arrival in town, to the effect that "the bride and groom had returned to their native city for a short stay before sailing for Europe." Still, even though the papers were inclined to let them alone, it would be pleasanter, Blair told his wife, to go abroad.

"Well," she said, dully. Elizabeth was always dull now. She had lifted herself up to the altar, but there was no exaltation of sacrifice; possibly because she considered her sacrifice a punishment for her sin, but also because she was still physically and morally stunned.

"Of course there is n.o.body in Mercer for whose opinion I care a copper," Blair said. They were sitting in their parlor at the hotel; Elizabeth staring out of the window at the river, Blair leaning forward in his chair, touching once in a while, with timid fingers, a fold of her skirt that brushed his knee. "Of course I don't care for a lot of gossiping old hens; but it will be pleasanter for you not to be meeting people, perhaps?" he said gently.

There was only one person whom he himself shrank from meeting-- his mother. And this shrinking was not because of the peculiar shame which the thought of Mrs. Richie had awakened in him that morning in the woods, when the vision of her delicate scorn had been so unbearable; his feeling about his mother was sheer disgust at the prospect of an interview which was sure to be esthetically distressing. While he was still absent on what the papers called his "wedding tour," Nannie had written to him warning him what he might expect from Mrs. Maitland:

"Mamma is terribly displeased, I am afraid, though she hasn't said a word since the night I told her. Then she said very severe things--and oh, Blair, dear, why _did_ you do it the way you did? I think Elizabeth was perfectly--" The unfinished sentence was scratched out. "You _must_ be nice to Mamma when you come home," she ended.

"She'll kick," Blair said, sighing; "she'll row like a puddler!"

In his own mind, he added that, after all, no amount of kicking would alter the fact. And again the little exultant smile came about his lips. "As for being 'nice,' Nannie might as well talk about being '_nice_' to a circular saw," he said, gaily. His efforts to be gay, to amuse or interest Elizabeth, were almost pathetic in their intensity. "Well! the sooner I'll go, the sooner I'll get it over!" he said, and reached for his hat; Elizabeth was silent. "You might wish me luck!" he said. She did not answer, and he sighed and left her.

As he loitered down to Shantytown, lying in the muddy drizzle of a midwinter thaw, he planned how soon he could get away from the detestable place. "Everything is so perfectly hideous," he said to himself, "no wonder she is low-spirited. When I get her over in Europe she'll forget Mercer, and--everything disagreeable."

His mind shied away from even the name of the man he had robbed.

At his mother's house, he had a hurried word with Nannie in the parlor: "Is she upset still? She mustn't blame Elizabeth! It was all my doing. I sort of swept Elizabeth off her feet, you know.

Well--it's another case of getting your tooth pulled quickly.

Here goes!" When he opened the dining-room door, his mother called to him from her bedroom: "Come in here," she said; and there was something in her voice that made him brace himself.

"I'm in for it," he said, under his breath.

For years Sarah Maitland's son had not seen her room; the sight of it now was a curious shock that seemed to push him back into his youth, and into that old embarra.s.sment which he had always felt in her presence. The room was as it had been then, very bare and almost squalid; there was no carpet on the floor, and no hint of feminine comfort in a lounge or even a soft chair. That morning the inside shutters on the lower half of the uncurtained windows were still closed, and the upper light, striking cold and bleak across the dingy ceiling, glimmered on the gla.s.s doors of the bookcases behind which, in his childhood, had lurked such mysterious terrors. The narrow iron bed had not yet been made up, and the bedclothes were in confusion on the back of a chair; the painted pine bureau was thick with dust; on it was the still unopened cologne bottle, its kid cover cracked and yellow under its faded ribbons, and three small photographs: Blair, a baby in a white dress; a little boy with long trousers and a visored cap; a big boy of twelve with a wooden gun. They were brown with time, and the figures were almost undistinguishable, but Blair recognized them,--and again his armor of courage was penetrated.

"Well, Mother," he said, with great directness and with at least an effort at heartiness, "I am afraid you are rather disgusted with me."

"Are you?" she said; she was sitting sidewise on a wooden chair-- what is called a "kitchen chair"; she had rested her arm along its back, and as Blair entered, her large, beautiful hand, drooping limply from its wrist, closed slowly into an iron fist.

"No, I won't sit down, thank you," he said, and stood, lounging a little, with an elbow on the mantelpiece. "Yes; I was afraid you would be displeased," he went on, good-humoredly; "but I hope you won't mind so much when I tell you about it. I couldn't really go into it in my letter. By the way, I hope my absence hasn't inconvenienced you in the office?"

"Well, not seriously," she said dryly. And he felt the color rise in his face. That he was frightfully ill at ease was obvious in the elaborate carelessness with which he began to inquire about the Works. But her only answer to his meaningless questions was silence. Blair was conscious that he was breathing quickly, and that made him angry. "Why _am_ I such an a.s.s?" he asked himself; then said, with studied lightness, that he was afraid he would have to absent himself from business for still a little longer, as he was going abroad. Fortunately--here the old sarcastic politeness broke into his really serious purpose to be respectful; fortunately he was so unimportant that his absence didn't really matter. "You _are_ the Works, you know, Mother."

"You are certainly unimportant," she agreed. He noticed she had not taken up her knitting, though a ball of pink worsted and a half-finished baby sock lay on the bureau near her; this unwonted quiet of her hands, together with the extraordinary solemnity of her face, gave him a sense of uneasy astonishment. He would almost have welcomed one of those brutal outbursts which set his teeth on edge by their very ugliness. He did not know how to treat this new dignity.