The Iron Woman Part 43

"Well, she's a nice woman," Sarah Maitland said; "and a good woman; I was afraid _you_ were doing the shilly-shallying.

And any man who would hesitate to take her, isn't fit to black her boots. Friend Ferguson, I have a contempt for a man who is more particular than his Creator." Robert Ferguson wondered what she was driving at, but he would not bother her by a question.

"What was that I used to say about her?" the sick woman ruminated, with closed eyes; "'fair and--What was it? Forty? No, that wasn't it."

"Fifty," he suggested, smiling.

She shook her head peevishly. "No, that wasn't it. 'Fair, and, and'--what was it? It puts me out of patience to forget things!

'Fair and--_frail_!' That was it; frail! 'Fair and frail.'"

She did not pause for her superintendent's gasp of protest. "Yes; first time I saw her, I thought there was a n.i.g.g.e.r in the woodpile. She won't marry you, friend Ferguson, because she has something on her conscience. Tell her I say not to be a fool. The best man going is none too good for her!"

Robert Ferguson's heart gave a violent plunge in his breast, but before his angry denial could reach her brain, her thought had wandered. "No! no! no! I won't go to bed. Bed is where people die." She got up from her chair, to walk about and show how well she was; but when she reached the center of the room she seemed to crumple up, sinking and sliding down on to the floor, her back against one of the carved legs of the table. Once there, she would not get up. She became so violently angry when they urged her to let them help her to her feet, that they were obliged to yield. "We will do more harm by irritating her," the doctor said, "than any good we could accomplish by putting her back to bed forcibly." So they put cushions behind her, and there she sat, staring with dim, expectant eyes at the dining room door; sometimes speaking with stoical endurance, intelligently enough; sometimes, when delirious, whimpering with the pain of that terrible arm, swollen now to a monstrous ma.s.s of agony.

Late in the afternoon she said she wanted to see '"that picture"; and Elizabeth knelt beside her, holding the little dark canvas so that she could look at it; she sat staring into it for a long time. "Mary didn't try to keep her baby from the cross,"

she said, suddenly; "well, I've done better than that; I brought the cross to my baby." Her face fell into wonderfully peaceful lines. Just at dusk she tried to sing.

"'Drink to me only with thine eyes'"

she quavered; "my boy sings that beautifully. I must give him a present. A check. I must give him a check."

But when Nannie said, eagerly, "Blair has written Elizabeth that he will be at home to-morrow; I'll tell him you want to see him; and oh, Mamma, won't you please be nice to him?"--she looked perfectly blank. Toward morning she sat silently for a whole hour sucking her thumb. When, abruptly, she came to herself and realized what she had been doing, the shamed color rose in her face. Nannie, kneeling at her side, caught at the flicker of intelligence to say, "Mamma, would you like to see the Rev. Mr.

Gore? He is here; waiting in the parlor. Sha'n't I bring him in?"

Mrs. Maitland frowned. "What does he come for now? I'm sick. I can't see people. Besides, I sent him a check for Foreign Missions last month."

"Oh, Mamma!" Nannie said, brokenly, "he hasn't come for money; I-- I sent for him."

Sarah Maitland's eyes suddenly opened; her mind cleared instantly. "Oh," she said; and then, slowly: "Um-m; I see." She seemed to meditate a moment; then she said, gravely: "No, my dear, no; I won't see little Gore. He's a good little man; a very good little man for missions and that sort of thing. But when it comes to _this_--" she paused; "I haven't time to see to him," she said, soberly. A minute later, noticing Nannie's tears, she tried to cheer her: "Come, come! don't be troubled," she said, smiling kindly, "I can paddle my own canoe, my dear." After that she was herself for nearly half an hour. Once she said. "My house is in order, friend Ferguson." Then she lost herself again.

To those who watched her, huddled on the heap of cushions, mumbling and whimpering, or with a jerk righting her mind into stony endurance, she seemed like a great tower falling and crumbling in upon itself. At that last dreadful touch of decay, when she put her thumb in her mouth like a baby, her stepdaughter nearly fainted.

All that night the mists gathered, and thinned, and gathered again. In the morning, still lying on the floor, propped against all the pillows and cushions of the house, she suddenly looked with clear eyes at Nannie.

"Why!" she said, in her own voice, and frowning sharply, "that certificate of deposit! I got it from the Bank the day of the accident, but I haven't indorsed it! Lucky I've got it here in the house. Bring it to me. It's in the safe in my desk. Take my keys."

Nannie, who for the moment was alone with her, found the key, and opening the little iron door in the desk, brought the certificate and a pen dipped in ink; but even in those few moments of preparation, the mist had begun to settle again: "I told the cashier it was a present I was going to make," she chuckled to herself; "said _he'd_ like to get a present like that. I reckon he would. Reckon anybody would." Her voice lapsed into incoherent murmurings, and Nannie had to speak to her twice before her eyes were intelligent again; then she took the pen and wrote, her lips faintly mumbling: "Pay to the order of--what's the date?" she said, dully, her eyes almost shut. "Never mind; I don't have to date it. But I was thinking: Blair gave me a calendar when he was a little boy. Blair--Blair--" And as she spoke his name, she wrote it: "_Blair Maitland_." But just as she did so, her mind cleared, and she saw what she had written. "Blair Maitland?" she said, and smiled and shook her head. "Oh, I've written that name too many times. Too many times.

Got the habit." She lifted her pen heavily, perhaps to draw it through the name, but her hand sagged.

"Aren't you going to sign it, Mamma?" Nannie asked, breathlessly; and her stepmother turned faintly surprised eyes upon her.

Nannie, kneeling beside her, urged again: "Mamma, you want to give it to Blair! Try, do try--" But she did not hear her.

At noon that day, through the fogged and clogging senses, there was another outburst of the soul. They had been trying to give her some medicine, and each time she had refused it, moving her head back and side-wise, and clenching her teeth against the spoon. Over and over the stimulant was urged and forced upon her; when suddenly her eyes flashed open and she looked at them with the old power that had made people obey her all her life. The mind had been insulted by its body beyond endurance; she lifted her big right hand and struck the spoon from the doctor's fingers: "_I have the right to die_."

Then the flame fluttered down again into the ashes.

When Blair reached the house that afternoon, she was unconscious.

Once, at a stab of pain, she burst out crying with fretful wildness; and once she put her thumb into her mouth.

At six o'clock that night she died.

CHAPTER XXIX

When the doctor came to tell Nannie that Sarah Maitland was dead, he found her in the parlor, shivering up against her brother.

Blair had come to his mother's house early that afternoon; a note from Elizabeth, awaiting him at the River House, had told him of the gravity of Mrs. Maitland's condition, and bidden him "come instantly." As he read it, his face grew tense. "Of course I must go," he said; but there was no softening in his eyes. In all these months, in which his mother's determination had shown no weakening, his anger had deepened into the bitterest animosity.

Yet curiously enough, though he hated her more, he disliked her less. Perhaps because he thought of her as a Force rather than as a mother; a power he was fighting--force against force! And the mere sense of the grapple gave him a feeling of equality with her which he had never had. Or it may have been merely that his eyes and ears did not suffer constant offense from her peculiarities.

He had not forgotten the squalor of the peculiarities, but they did not strike him daily in the face, so hate was not made poignant by disgust. But neither was it lessened by the possibility of her death.

"I wonder if she has changed her will?" he said to himself, with fierce curiosity. But whether she had done so or not, propriety demanded his presence in her house if she were dying. As for anything more than propriety,--well, if by destroying her iniquitous will she had showed proper maternal affection, he would show proper filial solicitude. It struck him, as he stepped into a carriage to drive down to Shanty town, that such an att.i.tude of mind on his part was pathetic for them both. "She never cared for me," he thought; and he knew he had never cared for her. Yes, it was pathetic; if he could have had for a mother such a woman as--he frowned; he would not name David Richie's mother even in his thoughts. But if he could have had a gentle and gracious woman for a mother, how he would have loved her! He had always been motherless, he thought; it was not today which would make him so. Still, it was strangely shaking, this idea of her death. When Nannie came into the parlor to greet him, he was silent while she told him, shivering and crying, the story of the last two weeks.

"She hasn't been conscious since noon," she ended, "but she may call for you; and oh, if she does. Blair, you will be lovely to her, won't you?"

His grave silence seemed an a.s.sent.

"Will you go in and see her?" she said, weeping. But Blair, with the picture she had given him of that awful figure lying on the floor, shook his head.

"I will wait here.--I could not bear to see it," he added, shuddering.

"Elizabeth is with her," Nannie said, "so I'll stay a little while with you. I don't believe it will be before morning."

Now and then they spoke in whispers; but for the most part they were silent, listening to certain sinister sounds that came from the room across the hall.

It was a warm May twilight; above the gaunt outline of the foundry, the dim sickle of a young moon hung in a daffodil sky; the river, running black between banks of slag and cinders, caught the sheen of gold and was transfigured into gla.s.s mingled with fire. Through the open windows, the odor of white lilacs and the acrid sweetness of the blossoming plum-tree, floated into the room. The gas was not lighted; sometimes the pulsating flames, roaring out sidewise from under the half-shut dampers of the great chimneys, lighted the dusk with a red glare, and showed Blair's face set in new lines. He had never been so near the great Reality before; never been in a house where, on the threshold, Death was standing; his personal affairs, angers or anxieties, dropped out of his mind. So sitting and listening and not speaking, the doctor found them.

"She has gone," he said, solemnly. Nannie began to cry; Blair stood up, then walked to the window and looked out at the Yards.

_Dead?_ For a moment the word had no meaning. Then, abruptly, the old, elemental meaning struck him like a blow; that meaning which the animal in us knows, before we know the acquired meanings which grief and faith have put into the word: his mother "was not." It was incredible! He gasped as he stood at the window, looking out over the blossoming lilacs at the Works, black against a fading saffron sky. Ten minutes ago his mother was in the other room, owning those Works; now--? The sheer impossibility of imagining the cessation of such a personality filled him with an extraordinary dismay. He was conscious of a bewildered inability to believe what had been said to him.

Mr. Ferguson, who had been with Sarah Maitland when the end came, followed the doctor into the parlor; but neither he nor Blair remembered personalities. They stood together now, listening to what the doctor was saying; Blair, still dazed and unbelieving, put his arm round Nannie and said, "Don't cry, dear; Mr.

Ferguson, tell her not to cry!" And the older man said, "Make her sit down, Blair; she looks a little white." Both of them had forgotten individual resentments or embarra.s.sments.

When some people die, it is as if a candle flame were gently blown out; but when, on the other side of the hall, this big woman lay dead on the floor, it seemed to the people who stood by as if the whole machinery of life had stopped. It was so absorbing in its astonishment that everything else became simple.

Even when Elizabeth entered, and came to put her arms around Nannie, Blair hardly noticed her. As the doctor and Robert Ferguson spoke together in low tones, of terrible things they called "arrangements," Sarah Maitland's son listened, and tried to make himself understand that they were talking of--his mother!

"I shall stay until everything has been done," Mr. Ferguson said, after the doctor left them. "Blair, you and Elizabeth will be here, of course, to-night? Or else I'll stay. Nannie mustn't be alone."

Blair nodded. "Of course," he said. At which Nannie, who had been crying softly to herself, suddenly looked up.

"I would rather be by myself. I don't want any one here. Please go home with Elizabeth, Blair. Please!"

"But Nannie dear, I want to stay," Blair began, gently; she interrupted him, almost hysterically:

"No! _Please!_ It troubles me. I would rather you didn't. I-- I want to be alone."

"Well," Blair said, vaguely; he was too dazed to protest.

Robert Ferguson yielded too, though with a little surprise at her vehemence. Then he turned to Blair; "I'll give you some telegrams that must be sent," he said, in the old friendly voice. It was only when he wrote a despatch to David's mother that the world was suddenly adjusted to its old levels of anger and contempt.

"I'll send this myself," he said, coldly. Blair, with instant intuition, replied as coldly, "Oh, very well."