The Iron Woman Part 38

"I would like to tell you just what happened," he began, with a seriousness that matched her own. "Elizabeth had made up her mind not to marry David Richie. They had had some falling out, I believe. I never asked what; of course that wasn't my business.

Well, I had been in love with her for months; but I didn't suppose I had a ghost of a chance; of course I wouldn't have dreamed of trying to--to take her from him. But when she broke with him, why, I felt that I had a--a right, you know."

His mother was silent, but she struck the back of her chair softly with her closed fist: her eyebrow began to lift ominously.

"Well; we thought--I mean I thought; that the easiest way all round was to get married at once. Not discuss it, you know, with people; but just--well, in point of fact, I persuaded her to run off with me!" He tried to laugh, but his mother's face was rigid.

She was looking at him closely, but she said nothing. By this time her continued silence had made him so nervous that he went through his explanation again from beginning to end. Still she did not speak. "You see, Mother," he said, reddening with the discomfort of the moment, "you see it was best to do it quickly?

Elizabeth's engagement being broken, there was no reason to wait.

But I do regret that I could not have told you first. I fear you felt--annoyed."

"Annoyed?" For a moment she smiled. "Well, I should hardly call it 'annoyed.'" Suddenly she made a gesture with her hand, as if to say, stop all this nonsense! "Blair," she said, "I'm not going to go into this business of your marriage at all. It's done."

Blair drew a breath of astonished relief. "You've not only done a wicked thing, which is bad; you've done a fool thing, which is worse. I have some sort of patience with a knave, but a fool-- 'annoys' me, as you express it. You've married a girl who loves another man. You may or may not repent your wickedness--you and I have different ideas on such subjects; but you'll certainly repent your foolishness. When you are eaten up with jealousy of David, you'll wish you had behaved decently. I know what I'm talking about"--she paused, looking down at her fingers picking nervously at the back of the chair; "I've been jealous," she said in a low voice. Then, with a quick breath: "However, wicked or foolish, or both, it's _done_, and I'm not going to waste my time talking about it."

"You're very kind," he said; he was so bewildered by this unexpected mildness that he could not think what to say next. "I very much appreciate your overlooking my not telling you about it before I did it. The--the fact was," he began to stammer; her face was not rea.s.suring; "the fact was, it was all so hurried, I-- "

But she was not listening. "You say you mean to go to Europe; how?"

"How?" he repeated. "I don't know just what you mean. Of course I shall be sorry to leave the Works, but under the circ.u.mstances--"

"It costs money to go to Europe. Have you got any?"

"My salary--"

"How can you have a salary when you don't do any work?"

Blair was silent; then he said, frowning, something about his mother's always having been so kind--

"Kind?" she broke in, "you call it kind? Well, Blair, I am going to be kind now--another way. So far as I'm concerned, you'll not have one dollar that you don't earn."

He looked perfectly uncomprehending.

"I've done being 'kind,' in the way that's ruined you, and made you a useless fool. I'm going to try another sort of kindness.

You can work, my son, or you can starve." Her face quivered as she spoke.

"What do you mean?" Blair said, quietly; his embarra.s.sment fell from him like a slipping cloak; he was suddenly and ruthlessly a man.

She told him what she meant. "This business of your marrying Elizabeth isn't the important thing; that's just a symptom of your disease. It's the fact of your being the sort of man you are, that's important." Blair was silent. Then Sarah Maitland began her statement of the situation as she saw it; she told him just what sort of a man he was: indolent, useless, helpless, selfish. "Until now I've always said that at any rate you were harmless. I can't say even that now!" She tried to explain that when a man lives on money he has not earned, he incurs, by merely living, a debt of honor;--that G.o.d will collect. But she did not know how to say it. Instead, she told him he was a parasite;-- which loathsome truth was like oil on the flames of his slowly gathering rage. He was a man, she said, whose business in life was to enjoy himself. She tried to make clear to him that after youth,--perhaps even after childhood,--enjoyment, as the purpose of effort, was dwarfing. "You are sort of a dwarf, Blair," she said, with curiously impersonal brutality. Any enjoyment, she insisted, that was worthy of a man, was only a by-product, as you might call it, of effort for some other purpose than enjoyment.

"One of our puddlers enjoys doing a good job, I guess;--but that isn't why he does it," she said, shrewdly. Any man whose sole effort was to get pleasure is, considering what kind of a world we live in, a poor creature. "That's the best that can be said for him," she said; "as for the worst, we won't go into that. You know it even better than I do." Then she told him that his best, which had been harmlessness, and his worst, which they "would not go into"--were both more her fault than his. It was her fault that he was such a poor creature; "a pithless creature; I've made you so!" she said. She stopped, her face moving with emotion.

"I've robbed you of incentive; I see that now. Any man who has the need of work taken away from him, is robbed. I guess enjoyment is all that is left for him. I ask your pardon." Her humility was pitiful, but her words were outrageous. "You are young yet," she said; "I _think_ what I am going to do will cure you. If it doesn't, G.o.d knows what will become of you!" It was the cure of the surgeon's knife, ruthless, radical; it was, in fact, kill or cure; she knew that. "Of course it's a gamble,"

she admitted, and paused, nibbling at her finger; "a gamble. But I've got to take it." She spoke of it as she might of some speculative business decision. She looked at him as if imploring comprehension, but she had to speak as she thought, with sledgehammer directness. "It takes brains to make money--I know because I've made it; but any fool can inherit it, just as any fool can accept it. I'm going to give you a chance to develop some brains. You can work or you can starve. Or," she added simply, "you can beg. You have begged practically all your life, thanks to me."

If only she could have said it all differently! But alas!

yearning over him with agonized consciousness of her own wrong- doing, and with singular justice in regard to his, she approached his selfish heart as if it were one of her own "blooms," and she a great engine which could mold and squeeze it into something of value to the world. She flung her iron facts at him, regardless of the bruises they must leave upon that most precious thing, his self-respect. Well; she was going to stop her work of destruction, she said. Then she told him how she proposed to do it: he had had everything--and he was nothing. Now he should have nothing, so that he might become something.

There was a day, many years ago, when this mother and son, standing together, had looked at the fierce beauty of molten iron; then she had told him of high things hidden in the seething and shimmering metal--of dreams to be realized, of splendid toils, of vast ambitions. And as she spoke, a spark of vivid understanding had leaped from his mind to hers. Now, her iron will, melted by the fires of love, was seething and glowing, dazzlingly bright in the white heat of complete self- renunciation; it was ready to be poured into a torturing mold to make a tool with which he might save his soul! But no spark of understanding came into his angry eyes. She did not pause for that; his agreement was a secondary matter. The habit of success made her believe that she could achieve the impossible--namely, save a man's soul in spite of himself; "make," as she had told Robert Ferguson, "a man of her son." She would have been glad to have his agreement, but she would not wait for it.

Blair listened in absolute silence. "Do I understand," he said when she had finished, "that you mean to disinherit me?"

"I mean to give you the finest inheritance a young man can have: _the necessity for work!_--and work for the necessity. For, of course, your job is open to you in the office. But it will be at an honest salary after this; the salary any other unskilled man would get."

"Please make yourself clear," he said laconically; "you propose to leave me no money when you die?"

"Exactly."

"May I ask how you expect me to live?"

"The way most decent men live--_by work_. You can work; or else, as I said, you can starve. There's a verse in the Bible-- you don't know your Bible very well; perhaps that's one reason you have turned out as you have; but there's a verse in the Bible that says if a man won't work, he sha'n't eat. That's the best political economy I know. But I never thought of it before," she said simply; "I never realized that the worst handicap a young man can have in starting out in life is a rich father--or mother.

Ferguson used to tell me so, but somehow I never took it in."

"So," he said--he was holding his cane in both hands, and as he spoke he struck it across his knees, breaking it with a splintering snap; "so, you'll disinherit me because I married the girl I love?"

"No!" she said, eager to make herself clear; "no, not at all!

Don't you understand? (My G.o.d! how can I make him understand?) I disinherit you to make a man of you, so that your father won't be ashamed of you--as I am. Yes, I owe it to your father to make a man of you; if it can be done."

She rose, with a deep breath, and stood for an instant silent, her big hands on her hips, her head bent. Then, solemnly: "That is all; you may go, my son."

Blair got on to his feet with a loud laugh--a laugh singularly like her own. "Well," he said, "I _will_ go! And I'll never come back. This lets me out! You've thrown me over: I'll throw you over. I think the law will have something to say to this disinheritance idea of yours; but until then--take a job in your Works? I'll starve first! So help me G.o.d, I'll forget that you are my mother; it will be easy enough, for the only womanly thing about you is your dress"--she winced, and flung her hand across her face as if he had struck her. "If I can forget that I am your son, starvation will be a cheap price. We've always hated each other, and it's a relief to come out into the open and say so. No more gush for either of us!" He actually looked like her, as he hurled his insults at her. He picked up his coat and left the room; he was trembling all over.

She, too, began to tremble; she looked after him as he slammed the door, half rose, bent over and lifted the splintered pieces of his cane; then sat down, as if suddenly weak. She put her hands over her face; there was a broken sound from behind them.

That night she came into Nannie's parlor and told her, briefly, that she meant to disinherit Blair. She even tried to explain why, according to her judgment, she must do so. But Nannie, appalled and crying, was incapable of understanding.

"Oh, Mamma, don't--don't say such things! Tell Blair you take it back. You don't mean it; I know you don't! Disinherit Blair? Oh, it isn't fair! Mamma, please forgive him, please--please--"

"My dear," said Sarah Maitland patiently, "it isn't a question of forgiving Blair; I'm too busy trying to forgive myself." Nannie looked at her in bewilderment. "Well, well, we won't go into that," said Mrs. Maitland; "you wouldn't understand. What I came over to say, especially, was that if things can go back into the old ways I shall be glad. I reckon Blair won't want to see me for a while, but if Elizabeth will come to the house as she used to, I sha'n't rake up unpleasant subjects. She is your brother's wife, and shall be treated with respect in my house. Tell her so.

'Night."

But Nannie, with a soft rush across the room, darted in front of her and stood with her back against the door, panting. "Mamma!

Wait. You must listen to me!" Her stepmother paused, looking at her with mild astonishment. She was like another creature, a little wild creature standing at bay to protect its young. "You have no right," Nannie said sternly, "you have no right, Mother, to treat Blair so. Listen to me: it was not--not nice in him to run away with Elizabeth; I know that, though I think it was more her fault than his. But it wasn't wicked! He loved her."

"My dear, I haven't said it was wicked," Blair's mother tried to explain; "in fact, I don't think it was; it wasn't big enough to be wicked. No, it was only a dirty, contemptible trick." Nannie cringed back, her hand gripping the k.n.o.b behind her. "If Blair had been a hard-working man, knocking up against other hard- working men, trying to get food for his belly and clothes for his nakedness, he'd have been ashamed to play such a trick--he'd have been a man. If I had loved him more I'd have made a man of him; I'd have made work real to him, not make-believe, as I did. And I wouldn't have been ashamed of him, as I am now."

"I think," said Nannie, with one of those flashes of astuteness so characteristic of the simple mind, "that a man would fall in love just as much if he were poor as if he were rich; and--and you ought to forgive him, Mamma."

Mrs. Maitland half smiled: "I guess there's no making you understand, Nannie; you are like your own mother. Come! Open this door! I've got to go to work."

But Nannie still stood with her hand gripping the k.n.o.b. "I must tell you," she said in a low voice: "I must not be untruthful to you, Mamma: I will give Blair all I have myself. The money my father left me shall be his; and--and everything I may ever have shall be his." Then she seemed to melt away before her stepmother, and the door banged softly between them.

"Poor little soul!" Sarah Maitland said to herself, smiling, as she sat down at her desk in the dining-room. "Exactly like her mother! I must give her a present."

The next day she sent for her general manager and told him what course she had taken with her son. He was silent for a moment; then he said, with an effort, "I have no reason to plead Blair's cause, but you're not fair, you know."

"So Nannie has informed me," she said dryly. Then she leaned back in her chair and tapped her desk with one big finger. "Go on; say what you like. It won't move me one hair."

Robert Ferguson said a good deal. He pointed out that she had no right, having crippled Blair, to tell him to run a race. "You've made him what he is. Well, it's done; it can't be undone. But you are rushing to the other extreme; you needn't leave him millions, of course; but leave him a reasonable fortune."

She meditated. "Perhaps a very small allowance, in fact, to make my will sound I may have to. I must find out about that. But while I'm alive, not one cent. I never expected to be glad his father died before he was born, and so didn't leave him anything, but I am. No, sir; my son can earn what he wants or he can go without. I've got to do my best to make up to him for all the harm I've done him, and this is the way to do it. Now, the next thing is to make my will _sound_. He says he'll contest it"-- she gave her grunt of amus.e.m.e.nt. "Pity I can't see him do it!

I'd like the fun of it. It will be cast-iron. If there was any doubt about it, I would realize on every security I own to-morrow and give it all away in one lump, now, while I'm alive--if I had to go hungry myself afterward! Will you ask Howe and Marston to send their Mr. Marston up here to draw up a new will for me? I want to go to work on it to-night. I've thought it out pretty clearly, but it's a big job, a big job! I don't know myself exactly how much I'm worth--how much I'd clean up to, at any rate. But I've got a list of charities on my desk as long as your arm. Nannie will be the residuary legatee; she has some money from her father, too, though not very much. The Works didn't amount to much when my husband was alive; he divided his share between Nannie and me; he--"; she paused, reddening faintly with that strange delicacy that lay hidden under the iron exterior; "he didn't know Blair was coming along. Well, I suppose Nannie will give Blair something. In fact, she as good as warned me.

Think of Nannie giving _me_ notice! But as I say, she won't have any too much herself. And, Mr. Ferguson, I want to tell you something: I'm going to give David some money now. I mean in a year or two. A lot."