The Iron Woman Part 53

"Well, anyway," he said, "you'll remember that when you are willing, I am waiting?"

She nodded. "I shall never forget your goodness," she said, brokenly.

He did not try to detain her with arguments or entreaties, but as she turned toward the library door he suddenly pushed it shut, and quietly took her in his arms and kissed her.

She went away quite speechless. She did not even remember to say good-night and good-by to Miss White, although she was to leave Mercer the next morning. When Blair heard that Mrs. Richie was coming to stay with Nannie he said, briefly, "I won't come in while she is here." He wrote to his sister during those three weeks and sent her flowers--kindness to Nannie was a habit with Blair; and indeed he really missed seeing her, and was glad for other reasons than his own embarra.s.sment when he heard that her visitor was going away. "I understand Mrs. Richie takes the 7.30 to-night," he said to his wife. Elizabeth was silent; it did not occur to her to mention that she had seen Nannie and heard that Mrs. Richie had decided to stay over another night. She rarely volunteered any information to Blair.

"Elizabeth," he said, "what do you say to going down to Willis's for supper, and rowing home in the moonlight? We can drop in and see Nannie on the way back to the hotel--after Mrs. Richie has gone." He saw some listless excuse trembling on her lips, and interrupted her: "Do say 'yes'! It is months since we have been on the river."

She hesitated, then seemed to reach some sudden decision. "Yes,"

she said, "I'll go."

Blair's face lighted with pleasure. Perhaps the silence which had hardened between them since the day the question of his money had been discussed would break now.

The late afternoon was warm with the yellow haze of October sunshine when they walked out over the bridge to the toll-house wharf, where Blair hired a boat. He made her as comfortable as he could in the stern, and when he gave her the tiller-ropes she took them in a business-like way, as if really entering into the spirit of his little expedition. A moment later they were floating down the river; there was nearly half a mile of furnaces and slag-banked sh.o.r.e before they left Mercer's smoke and grime behind them and began to drift between low-lying fields or through narrow reaches where the vineyard-covered hills came down close to the water.

"Elizabeth, what do you say to going East next month?" Blair said; "perhaps we can persuade Nannie to go, too."

She was leaning back against the cushions he had arranged for her, holding her white parasol so that it hid her face. "I don't see," she said, "how you can afford to travel much; where will you get the money?"

"Oh, it has all been very easily arranged; Nannie can draw pretty freely against the estate now, and she makes me an 'allowance,'

so to speak, until things are settled; then she'll hand my princ.i.p.al over to me. It's a nuisance not to have it now; but we can get along well enough."

Then Elizabeth asked her question: "And when you get the princ.i.p.al, what will you do with it?"

"Invest it; pretty tough, isn't it, when you think what I ought to have had?"

"And when," said Elizabeth, very softly, "will you build the hospital?" She lifted her parasol slightly, and gave him a look that was like a knife; then lowered it again.

"Build the hospital! What hospital?"

"The hospital near the Works, that your mother put that money aside for."

Blair's hands tightened on his oars. Instinctively he knew that a critical moment was confronting him. He did not know just what the danger in it was, but he knew there was danger. "My mother changed her mind about that, Elizabeth."

She lifted the parasol again, and looked full at him; the white shadow of the silk made the dark amber of her unsmiling eyes singularly luminous. "No," she said; "your mother did not change her mind. Nannie thought she did, but it was not so." She spoke with stern certainty. "Your mother didn't mean you to have that money. She meant it for--a hospital."

Blair stopped rowing and leaned on his oars. "Why don't you speak his name?" he said, between his teeth.

The parasol fell back on her shoulder; she grew very white; the hard line that used to be a dimple was like a gash in her cheek; she looked suddenly old. "I will certainly speak his name: _David Richie_. Your mother meant the money for David Richie."

"That," said Blair, "is a matter of opinion. You think she did. I think she didn't. I think she meant it for the person whose name she wrote on the certificate. That person will keep it."

Elizabeth was silent. Blair began to row again, softly. The anger in his face died out and left misery behind it. Oh, how she hated him; and how she loved--_him_. At that moment Blair hated David as one only hates the human creature one has injured. They did not speak again for the rest of the slow drift down to Willis's. Once Blair opened his lips to bid her notice that the overhanging willows and chestnuts mirrored themselves so clearly in the water that the skiff seemed to cut through autumnal foliage, and the sound of the ripple at the prow was like the rustle of leaves; but the preoccupation in her face silenced him.

It was after four when, brushing past a fringe of willows, the skiff b.u.mped softly against a float half hidden in the yellowing sedge and gra.s.s at Willis's landing. Blair got out, and drawing the boat alongside, held up his hand to his wife, but she ignored his a.s.sistance. As she sprang lightly out, the float rocked a little and the water splashed over the planks. There was a dank smell of wet wood and rankly growing water-weeds. A ray of sunshine, piercing the roof of willow leaves, struck the single blossom of a monkey-flower, that sparkled suddenly in the green darkness like a topaz.

"Elizabeth," Blair said in a low voice--he was holding the gunwale of the boat and he did not look at her; "Elizabeth, all I want money for is to give you everything you want." She was silent. He made the skiff fast and followed her up the path to the little inn on the bank. There were some tables out under the locust-trees, and a welcoming landlord came hurrying to meet them with suggestions of refreshments.

"What will you have?" Blair asked.

"Anything--nothing; I don't care," Elizabeth said; and Blair gave an order he thought would please her.

Below them the river, catching the sunset light, blossomed with a thousand stars. Elizabeth watched the dancing glitter absently; when Blair, forgetting for a moment the depression of the last half-hour, said impulsively, "Oh, how beautiful that is!" she nodded, and came out of her abstraction to call his attention to the reflected gold of a great chestnut on the other side of the stream.

"Are you warm enough?" he asked. He said to himself, with a sigh of relief, that evidently she had dropped the dangerous subject of the hospital. "There is a chill in these October evenings as the sun goes down," he reminded her.

"Yes."

"Elizabeth," he burst out, "why can't we talk sometimes? Haven't we anything in common? Can't we ever talk, like ordinary husbands and wives? You would show more civility to a beggar!" But as he spoke the waiter pushed his tray between them, and she did not answer. When Blair poured out a gla.s.s of wine for her she shook her head.

"I don't want anything."

He looked at her in despair: "I love you. I suppose you wouldn't believe me if I should try to tell you how I love you--and yet you don't give me a decent word once a month!"

"Blair," she said, quietly, "that is final, is it--about the money? You are going to keep it?"

"I am certainly going to keep it."

Elizabeth's eyes narrowed. "It is final," she repeated, slowly.

"You are angry," he cried, "because I won't give the money my mother gave me, all the money I have in the world, to the man whom you threw off like an old glove!"

"No," she said, slowly, "I don't _think_ I am angry. But it seems somehow to be more than I can bear; a sort of last straw, I suppose," she said, smiling faintly. "But I'm not angry, I think. Still, perhaps I am. I don't really know."

Blair struck a match under the table. His hand holding his cigarette trembled. "To the best of my knowledge and belief, Elizabeth, I am honest. I believe my mother meant me to have that money. She did not mean to have it go to--to a hospital."

Elizabeth dug the ferrule of her parasol into the gravel at her feet. "It is David's money. You took his wife. Now you are taking his money... . You can't keep both of them." She said this very gently, so gently that for a moment he did not grasp the sense of her words. When he did it seemed to him that she did not herself realize what she had said, for immediately, in the same calmly matter-of-fact way, she began to speak of unimportant things: the river was very low, wasn't it? What a pity they were cutting the trees on the opposite hill. "They are burning the brush," she said; "do you smell the smoke? I love the smell of burning brush in October." She was simpler and pleasanter than she had been for a long time. But he could not know that it was because she felt, inarticulately, that her burden had been lifted; she herself could not have said why, but she was almost happy. Blair was confused to the point of silence by her abrupt return to the commonplace. He glanced at her with furtive anxiety. "Oh, see the moon!" Elizabeth said, and for a moment they watched the great disk of the Hunter's moon rising in the translucent dusk behind the hills.

"That purple haze in the east is like the bloom on a plum," Blair said.

"I think we had better go now," Elizabeth said, rising. But though she had seemed so friendly, she did not even turn her head to see if he were following her, and he had to hurry to overtake her as she went down the path to the half-sunken float that was rocking slightly in the gra.s.sy shallows. As he knelt, steadying the boat with one hand, he held the other up to her, and this time she did not repulse him; but when she put her hand into his, he kissed it with abrupt, unhappy pa.s.sion,--and she drew it from him sharply. When she took her place in the stern and lifted the tiller-ropes she looked at him, gathering up his oars, with curious gentleness... .

She was sorry for him, for he seemed to care so much;--and this was the end! She had tried to bear her life. n.o.body could imagine how hard she had tried; life had been her punishment, so with all her soul and all her body, she had tried to bear it! But this was the end. It was not possible to try any more. "I have borne it as long as I can," she thought. Yet as she had said, she was not angry. She wondered, vaguely, listening to the dip of the oars, at this absence of anger. She had been able to talk about the bonfires, and she had thought the moon beautiful. No; she was not angry. Or if she were, then her anger was unlike all the other angers that had scourged and torn the surface of her life; they had been storms, all clamor and confusion and blinding flashes, with more or less indifference to resulting ruin. But this anger, which could not be recognized as anger, was a noiseless cataclysm in the very center of her being; a tidal wave, that was lifting and lifting, moving slowly, too full for sound, in the resistless advance of an absorbing purpose of ruin. "I am not angry," she said to herself; "but I think I am dying."

The pallor of her face frightened Blair, who was straining at his oars against the current: "Elizabeth! What is the matter? Shall I stop? Shall we go ash.o.r.e? You are ill!"

"No; I'm not. Go on, please."

"But there is something the matter!"

She shook her head. "Don't stop. We've gone ever so far down- stream, just in this minute."

Blair looked at her anxiously. A little later he tried to make her talk; asked her how she felt, and called her attention to the bank of clouds that was slowly climbing up the sky. But she was silent. As usual, she seemed to have nothing to say to him. He rowed steadily, in long, beautiful strokes, and she sat watching the dark water lap and glimmer past the side of the skiff. As they worked up-stream, the sheen of oil began to show again in faint and rocking iridescence; once she leaned over and touched the water with her fingers; then looked at them with a frown.

"Look out!" Blair said; "trim a little, will you?"

She sat up quickly: "I wonder if it is easy to drown?"