The Iron Woman Part 39

Robert Ferguson's face darkened. "David doesn't take money very easily."

Mrs. Maitland did not ask him to explain. She was absorbed in the most tremendous venture of her life--the saving of her son, and her plan for David was comparatively unimportant. She put through the business of her will with extraordinary despatch and precision, and with a ruthlessness toward Blair that took her lawyer's breath away; but she would not hear one word of protest.

"Your business, sir, is to see that this instrument is unbreakable," she said, "not to tell me how to leave my money."

The day after the will was executed she went to Philadelphia. "I am going to see David," she told her general superintendent; "I want to get this affair off my mind so I can settle down to my work, but I've got to square things up first with him. You'll have to run the shop while I'm off!"

She had written to David briefly, without preface or apology:

"DEAR DAVID,--Come and see me at the Girard House Tuesday morning at 7.45 o'clock."

CHAPTER XXV

Nearly two months had pa.s.sed since that dreadful day when David Richie had gone to his mother to be comforted. In his journey back across the mountains his mind and body were tense with antic.i.p.ation of the letter which he was confident was awaiting him in Philadelphia. He was too restless to lie down in his berth. Once he went into the day coach and wandered up and down the aisle between the rows of huddled and uncomfortable humanity.

Sometimes a sleepy pa.s.senger, hunched up on a plush seat, would swear at him for jostling a protruding foot, and once a drearily crying baby, propped against a fat and sleeping mother, clutched with dirty fingers at his coat. At that little feeble pull he stopped and looked down at the small, wabbling head, then bent over and lifted the child, straightening its rumpled clothes and cuddling it against his shoulder. The baby gurgled softly in his ear--and instantly he remembered the baby he had seen on the raft the night that he first knew he was in love with Elizabeth. When he went back to the smoking-compartment and sat down, his hands deep in his pockets, his head sunk between his shoulders, his hat pulled down over his eyes, he thought of that raft baby and wondered if it were alive. But such thoughts were only in the moments when his bruised mind could not steady itself on what had happened to him. Most of the time he was saying, over and over, just what he was going to do the next morning: he would get into the station; take a cab; drive to the hospital--a dozen times that night his thumb and finger sought his waistcoat pocket for a bill to hasten the driver of that cab! leap out, run up the stairs to the mail-rack beside the receiving clerk's desk, seize Elizabeth's letter--here the pause would come, the moment when his body relaxed, and something seemed to melt within him: suppose the letter was not there? Very well: back to the cab!

another tip; hurry! hurry! hurry! His mother's house, the steps, his key in the lock--again and again his fingers closed on the key-ring in his pocket! letters on the hall table awaiting him-- _her_ letter. Then again the relaxing shock: suppose it was not there? The thought turned him sick; after the almost physical recoil from it, came brief moments of longing for his mother's tender arms, or the remembrance of that baby on the raft. But almost immediately his mind would return to the treadmill of expectation; get into the station--take a cab--rush--So it went, on and on, until, toward dawn, through sheer exhaustion he slept.

That next day was never very clear in David's memory. Only one fact stood out distinctly in the mists: there was no letter.

Afterward, when he tried to recall that time of discovering that she had not written, he was confused by the vision of his mother smiling down at him from the head of the stairs and calling to an unseen maid, "Bring the doctor a cup of coffee, Mary!" He could remember that he stood sorting out the letters on the hall table, running them over swiftly, then going through them slowly, one by one, scanning each address, each post-mark; then, with shaking hands, shuffling and sorting them like a pack of cards, and going through them again. _She had not written_. He could remember that he heard the blood beating in his ears, and at the same time his mother's voice: "Bring the doctor a cup of coffee." ... She had not written.

For months afterward, when he tried to recall that morning, the weak feeling in his knees, the way the letters that were not from her shook in his hand, the sound of his mother's joyous voice-- these things would come into his mind together. They were all he could remember of the whole day; the day when the grave closed over his youth.

After that came hours of expectation, of telegrams back and forth: "Have you heard where they are?" And: "No news." Weeks of letters between Robert Ferguson and his mother: "It is what I have always said, she is her mother's daughter." And: "Oh, don't be so hard on her--and on her poor, bad mother. Find out where she is, and go and see her." And: "I will never see her. I'm done with her." But among all the letters, never any letter from Elizabeth to David.

In those first days he seemed to live only when the mail arrived; but his pa.s.sion of expectation was speechless. Indeed his inarticulateness was a bad factor when it came to recovery from the blow that had been dealt him. At the moment when the wound was new, he had talked to his mother; but almost immediately he retreated into silence. And in silence the worst things in his nature began to grow. Once he tried to write to Elizabeth; the letter commenced with frantic directions to come to his mother "at once!" Then his pen faltered: perhaps she did not care to come? Perhaps she did not wish to leave "him"?--and the unfinished letter was flung into the fire. With suspicion of Elizabeth came a contemptuous distrust of human nature in general, and a shrinking self-consciousness, both entirely foreign to him. He was not only crushed by loss, but he was stinging with the organic mortification of the man who has not been able to keep his woman. It was then that Helena Richie first noticed a harshness in him that frightened her, and a cynical individualism that began to create its own code of morals, or at any rate of responsibilities. But before he shut himself into all this misery, not only of loss, but of suspicion and humiliation, he did say one thing:

"I'm not going to howl; you needn't be afraid. I shall do my work. You won't hear me howl." There were times when she wished he would! She wished it especially when Robert Ferguson wrote that Elizabeth and Blair were going to return to Mercer, that they would live at the River House, and that it was evident that the "annulment," to which at first David's mind had turned so incessantly, was not being thought of. "I understand from Miss White (of course I haven't heard from or written to Mrs. Blair Maitland) that she does not wish to take any steps for a separation," Elizabeth's uncle wrote.

"He _must_ see her when she gets back," Helena Richie said, softly; but David said nothing at all. At that moment his suspicion became a certainty; yes, she had loved the fellow! It had been something else than one of her fits of fury! It had been _love_. ... No wonder, with this poison working in him, that he shut even his mother out of his heart. At times the pitying tenderness of her eyes was intolerable to him; he thought he saw the same pity in everybody's eyes; he felt sure that every casual acquaintance was thinking of what had happened to him: he said to himself he wished to G.o.d people would mind their business, and let him mind his! "I'm not howling," he told himself. He was like a man whose skin has been taken off; he winced at everything, but all the same, he did his work in the hospital with exhausting thoroughness; to be sure he gave his patients nothing but technical care. Whether they lived or died was nothing to David; whether he himself lived or died was still less to him--except, perhaps, that in his own case he had a preference. But work is the only real sedative for grief, and the suffering man worked himself callous, so he had dull moments of forgetfulness, or at any rate of comparative indifference, Yet when he received that note from Mrs. Maitland summoning him to her hotel he flinched under the callousness. However, at a little before eight o'clock on Tuesday morning, he knocked at her bedroom door.

The Girard House knew Sarah Maitland's eccentricities as well as her credit; she always asked for a cheap room, and was always put up under the roof. She had never learned to use her money for her own comfort, so it never occurred to her to have a parlor for herself; her infrequent callers were always shown up here to the top of the house.

On this especial morning she had come directly from the train, and when David arrived she was pacing up and down the narrow room, haggard and disheveled from a night in the sleeping-car; she had not even taken off her bonnet. She turned at his step and stopped short in her tracks--he was so thin, so grim, so old!

"Well, David," she said; then hesitated, for there was just an instant's recoil in David. He had not realized the fury that would leap up and scorch him like a flame at the sight of Blair's mother.

"David, you'll--you'll shake hands with me, won't you?" she said timidly. At the sound of her voice his anger died out; only the cold ashes of misery were left.

"Why, Mrs. Maitland!" he protested, and took her big, beautiful, unsteady hand in both of his.

For a moment neither of them spoke. It was a dark, cold morning; far below them stretched the cheerless expanse of snow-covered roofs; from countless chimneys smoke was rising heavily to the lowering sky, and soot was sifting down; the snow on the window- sill was speckled with black. Below, in the courtyard of the hotel, ice-carts rumbled in and out, and milk-cans were banged down on the cobblestones; a dull day, an empty sky, a futile interview, up here in this wretched little room under the eaves.

David wondered how soon he could get away.

"David," Mrs. Maitland said, "I know I can't make it up to you in any way. But I'd like to."

"You are very kind," he said coldly, "but we won't go into that, if you please, Mrs. Maitland."

"No, we won't talk about it," she said, with evident relief; "but David, I came to Philadelphia to say that I want you to let me be of help to you in some way."

"Help to me?" he repeated, surprised. "I really don't see--"

"Why," she explained, "you want to begin to practise; you don't want to drudge along at a hospital under some big man's thumb. I want to set you up!"

David smiled involuntarily, "But the hospital is my greatest chance, Mrs. Maitland. I'm lucky to have these three years there.

But it's kind in you to think of giving me a hand."

"Nonsense!" she said, quite missing the force of what he said.

"You ought to put out your own shingle. David, you can have all the money you need; it's yours to take."

David started as if she had struck him: "_yours to take_."

Oh, that had been said to him before! "No, I can't, I couldn't take money! You don't understand. I couldn't take money from-- anybody!" he said with a gasp.

She looked at him helplessly, then stretched out her empty hands.

"David," she said pitifully, "money is all I've got. Won't you take it?" The tears were on her cheeks and the big, empty hands shook. "I haven't got anything but money, David," she entreated.

His face quivered; he said some broken, protesting word; then suddenly he put his arms round her and kissed her. Her gray head, in the battered old bonnet, rested a moment on his shoulder, and he felt her sob. "Oh, David," she said, "what shall I do? He--he hates me. He said the only womanly thing about me was ... Oh, can I make a man of him, do you think?" She entirely forgot David's wrongs in her cry for comfort, a cry that somehow penetrated to his benumbed heart, for in his effort to comfort her he was himself vaguely comforted, For a minute he held her tightly in his arms until he was sure he could command himself. When he let her go, she put her hand up in a bewildered way and touched her cheek; the boy had kissed her! But by that time she was able to go back to the purpose that had brought her here; she told him to sit down and then began, dogmatically, to insist upon her plan.

David smiled a little as he explained that, quite apart from any question of income, the hospital experience was valuable to him.

"I wouldn't give it up, Mrs. Maitland, if I had a million dollars!" he said, with a convincing exaggeration that was like the old David. "But it's mighty kind in you. Please believe I do appreciate your kindness."

"No kindness about it," she said impatiently; "my family is in your debt, David." At which he hardened instantly.

"Well," she said; and was silent for awhile, biting her finger and looking down at her boots. Suddenly, with a grunt of satisfaction, she began to hit the arm of her chair softly with her closed fist. "I've got it!" she said. "I suppose you wouldn't refuse the trusteeship of a fund, one of these days, to build a hospital? Near my Works, maybe? I'm all the time having accidents. I remember once getting a filing in my eye, and--and somebody suggested a doctor to take it out. A doctor for a filing! I guess _you'd_ have been equal to that job--young as you are? Still, it wouldn't be bad to have a doctor round, even if he was young, if anything serious happened. Yes, a hospital near the Works--first for my men and then for outsiders.

It is a good idea! I suppose you wouldn't refuse to run such a hospital, and draw your wages, like a man?"

"Well, no, I wouldn't refuse that," he said, smiling. It was many weeks since David had smiled so frankly. A strange thing had happened in that moment when he had forgotten himself in trying to comfort Blair's mother--his corroding suspicion of Elizabeth seemed to melt away! In its place was to come, a little later, the dreadful but far more bearable pain of enduring remorse for his own responsibility for Elizabeth's act. But just then, when he tried to comfort that poor mother, there was only a breaking of the ice about his own heart in a warm gush of pity for her....

"I don't see that there's much chance of funds for hospitals coming my way," he said, smiling.

"You never can tell," said Mrs. Maitland.

CHAPTER XXVI

The morning Blair heard his sentence from his mother, Elizabeth spent in her parlor in the hotel, looking idly out of the window at the tawny current of the river covered with its slipping sheen of oil. Steamboats were pushing up and down or nosing into the sand to unload their cargoes; she could hear the creak of hawsers, the bang of gangplanks thrown across to the sh.o.r.e, the cries and songs of stevedores sweating and toiling on the wharf that was piled with bales of cotton, endless blue barrels of oil, and black avalanches of coal. She did not think of Blair's ordeal; she was not interested in it. She was not interested in anything. Sometimes she thought vaguely of the letter which had never been and would never be written to David, and sometimes of that message from him which she had not yet been able to hear from Miss White's lips; but for the most part she did not think of anything. She was tired of thinking. She sat huddled in a chair, staring dully out of the window; she was like a captive bird, moping on its perch, its poor bright head sinking down into its tarnished feathers. She was so absorbed in the noise and confusion of traffic that she did not hear a knock. When it was repeated, she rose listlessly to answer it, but before she reached the door it opened, and her uncle entered. Elizabeth backed away silently. He followed her, but for a moment he was silent, too--it seemed to Robert Ferguson as if youth had been wiped out of her face. Under the shock of the change in her, he found for a moment nothing to say. When be spoke his voice trembled--with anger, she thought. "Mrs. Richie wrote me that I must come and see you. I told her I would have nothing to do with you."

Elizabeth sat down without speaking.

"I don't see what good it does to come," he said, staring at the tragic face. "Of course you know my opinion of you." She nodded.

"So why should I come?"

"I don't know."

"Well, I--I'm here. And you may come home sometimes, if you want to. Miss White is willing to see you, I believe."