The Iron Woman Part 52

At which, smiling all over his face, he growled at her that it was a pretty thing to expect a man to cheer up, with an empty house on his hands. "You seem to think I'm made of money! You take the house _now_; don't wait till that callow doctor is ready to settle down here. If you'll move in now, I'll cheer up-- and give Elizabeth the rent for pin-money." He was really cheerful by this time just because he was able to scold her, but behind his scolding there was always this new gentleness. Later, when he spoke again of the house, her face fell.

"I am doubtful about our coming to Mercer."

"Doubtful?" he said; "what's all this? There never was a woman yet who knew her own mind for a day at a time--except Mrs.

Maitland. You told me that David was coming here next spring, and I've been keeping this house for you; I've lost five months'

rent"--there was a worried note in his voice; "what in thunder?"

he demanded.

Mrs. Richie sighed. "I don't suppose I ought to tell you, but I can't seem to help it. I discovered the other day that David is not heart-whole, yet. He is dreadfully bitter; dreadfully! I don't believe it's prudent for him to live in Mercer. Do you? He would be constantly seeing Elizabeth."

She had had her breakfast, and they had gone into Mr. Ferguson's garden so that he might throw some crumbs to the pigeons and smoke his morning cigar before taking her to the Maitland house.

They were sitting now in the long arbor, where the Isabella grapes were ripening sootily in the spa.r.s.e September sunshine which sifted down between the yellowing leaves, and touched Mrs.

Richie's brown hair; Robert Ferguson saw, with a pang, that there were some white threads in the soft locks. His eyes stung, so he barked as gruffly as he could.

"Well, suppose he does see her? You can't wrap him up in cotton batting for the rest of his life. That's what you've always tried to do, you hen with one chicken! For the Lord's sake, let him alone. Let him take his medicine like any other man. After he gets over the nasty taste of it, he'll find there's sugar in the world yet; just as I did. Only I hope he won't be so long about it as I was."

She sighed, and her soft eyes filled. "But you don't know how he talked. Oh, I can't help thinking it must be my fault! If he had had another kind of a mother, if his own mother had lived--"

"Own grandmother!" said Robert Ferguson, disgustedly; "the only trouble with you as a mother, is that you've been too good to the cub. If you'd knocked his head against the wall once or twice, you'd have made a man of him. My dear, you really must not be a goose, you know. It's the one thing I can't stand. Helena," he interrupted himself, chuckling, "you will be pleased to know that Cherry-pie (begging her pardon!) thinks that David will ultimately console himself by falling in love with Nannie! 'It would be very nice,' she says."

They both laughed, then David's mother sighed: "But just think how delightful to feel that life is as simple as that," she said.

Robert Ferguson picked a grape, and took careful aim at a pigeon; "Helena," he said, in a low voice, "before you see Nannie, perhaps I ought to tell you something. I wouldn't, only I know she will, and you ought to understand it. Can you keep a secret?"

"I can," Mrs. Richie said briefly.

"I believe it," he said, with a sudden dryness. Then he told her the story of the certificate.

"What! Nannie forged? _Nannie!_"

"We don't use that word; it isn't pretty. But that's what it amounts to, of course. And that's where David's money went."

"I suppose Mrs. Maitland changed her mind at the last," Mrs.

Richie said; "well, I'm glad she did. It would have been too cruel if she hadn't given something to Blair."

"I don't think she did," he declared; "changing her mind wasn't her style; she wasn't one of your weak womanish creatures.

_She_ wouldn't have said she was coming to live in Mercer, and then tried to back out of it! No, she simply wrote Blair's name by mistake. Her mind wandered constantly in those last days.

And seeing what she had done, she didn't indorse it."

Mrs. Richie looked doubtful. "I think she meant it for him."

Robert Ferguson laughed grimly. "_I_ think she didn't; but you'll be a great comfort to Nannie. Poor Nannie! She is unhappy, but not in the least repentant. She insists that she did right!

Would you have supposed that a girl of her age could be so undeveloped, morally?"

"She's only undeveloped legally," she amended; "and what can you expect? What chance has she had to develop in any way?"

"She had the chance of living with one of the finest women I ever knew," he said, stiffly, and paused for their usual wrangle about Mrs. Maitland. As they rose to go indoors, he looked at his guest, and shook his head. "Oh, Helena, how conceited you are!"

"I? Conceited?" she said, blankly.

"You think you are a better judge than I am," he complained.

"Nonsense!" she said, blushing charmingly; but she insisted on walking down to Nannie's, instead of letting him take her in the carriage; a carriage is not a good place to ward off a proposal.

At the Maitland house she found poor Nannie wandering vaguely about in the garret. "I am putting away Mamma's clothes," she said, helplessly. But a minute later she yielded, with tears of relief, to Mrs. Richie's placid a.s.sumption of authority;

"I am going to stay a week with you, and to-morrow I'll tell you what to do with things. Just now you must sit down and talk to me."

And Nannie sat down, with a sigh of comfort. There were so many things she wanted to say to some one who would understand! "And you do understand," she said, sobbing a little. "Oh, I am so lonely without Mamma! She and I always understood each other. You know she meant the money for Blair, don't you, Mrs. Richie? Mr.

Ferguson won't believe me!"

"Yes; I am sure she did," Mrs. Richie said, heartily; "but dear, you ought not to have--"

Nannie, comforted, said: "Well, perhaps not; considering that I can give it to him. But I didn't know that, you know, when I did it." Pretty much all that day, poor Nannie poured out her full little heart to her kind listener; they sat down together at the office-dining-room table--at the head of which stood a chair that no one ever dreamed of occupying; and Harris shuffled about as he had for nearly thirty years, serving coa.r.s.e food on coa.r.s.e china, and taking a personal interest in the conversation. After dinner they went into Nannie's parlor that smelt of soot, where the little immortal canvas still hung in its gleaming gold frame near the door, and the cut gla.s.s of the great chandeliers sparkled faintly through slits in the old brown paper-muslin covers.

Sometimes, as they talked, the house would shake, and Nannie's light voice be drowned in the roar of a pa.s.sing train whose trail of smoke brushed against the windows like feathers of darkness.

But Nannie gave no hint that she would ever go away and leave the smoke and noise, and just at first Mrs. Richie made no such suggestion. She did nothing but infold the vague, frightened, unhappy girl in her own tranquillity. Sometimes she lured her out to walk or drive, and once she urged her to ask Elizabeth and Blair to come to supper.

"Oh, Blair won't come while you are here!" Nannie said, simply; and the color came into David's mother's face. "I know," Nannie went on, "that Elizabeth thinks Mamma meant that money for David.

And she is not pleased because Mr. Ferguson won't make the executors give it to him."

Mrs. Richie laughed. "Well, that is very foolish in Elizabeth; n.o.body could give your mother's money to David. I must straighten that out with Elizabeth."

But she did not have a chance to do so; Elizabeth as well as Blair preferred not to come to the old house while David's mother was there. And Mrs. Richie, unable to persuade Nannie to go back to Philadelphia with her, stayed on, in the kindness of her heart, for still another week. When she finally fixed a day for her return, she said to herself that at least Blair and Elizabeth would not be prevented by her presence from doing what they could to cheer Nannie.

"But is she going to live on in that doleful house forever?"

Robert Ferguson protested.

"She's like a poor little frightened snail," Helena Richie said.

"You don't realize the shock to her of that night when she--she tried to do what she thought Mrs. Maitland wanted to have done.

She is scared still. She just creeps in and out of that dingy front door, or about those awful, silent rooms. It will take time to bring her into the sunshine."

"Helena," he said, abruptly--she and Nannie had had supper with him and were just going home; Nannie had gone up-stairs to put on her hat. "Helena, I've been thinking a good deal about your cruelty to me."

She laughed: "Oh, you are impossible!"

"No, I'm only permanent. Don't laugh; just listen to me." He was evidently nervous; the old friendly bullying had been put aside; he was very grave, and was plainly finding it difficult to say what he wanted to say: "I don't know what your reason is for refusing me, but I know it isn't a good reason. You are fond of me, and yet you keep on saying 'no' in this exasperating way;-- upon my word," he interrupted himself, despairingly, "I could shake you, sometimes, it is so exasperating! You like me, well enough; but you won't marry me."

"No, I won't," she a.s.sured him, gently.

"It is so unreasonable of you," he said, simply, "that it makes me think you've got some bee in your bonnet: some silly woman- notion. You think--Heaven knows what you think! perhaps that-- that you ought not to marry because of something--anything--" he stammered with earnestness; "but I want you to know this: that I don't _care_ what your reason is! You may have committed murder, for all the difference it makes to me." The clumsy and elaborate lightness of his words trembled with the seriousness of his voice. "You may have broken every one of the Ten Commandments; _I_ don't care! Helena, do you understand?

It's nothing to me! You may have broken--_all of them_." He spoke with solemn pa.s.sion, holding out his hands toward her; his voice shook, but his melancholy face was serene with knowledge and understanding. "Oh, my dear," he said, "I love you and you are fond of me. That's all I care about! Nothing else, nothing else."

Her start of attention, her dilating eyes, made the tears spring to his own eyes. "Helena, you do believe me, don't you?"

She could not answer him; she had grown pale and then red, then pale again. "Oh," she said in a whisper, "you are a good man!

What have I done to deserve such a friend? But no, dear friend, no."

He struck her shoulder heavily, as if she had been another man.