The Iron Woman Part 62

"For a change of heart? It will never come! No, the marriage was a travesty from the beginning, and I ought to have pulled her out of it. I did suggest it to her, but she said she was going to stick it out like a man."

Blair was indeed unhappy. His G.o.d was tormenting him by contrasting Elizabeth's generosity with his selfishness. It was then that he saw, terror-stricken, his opportunity. He tried not to see it. He denied it, he struggled against it; yet all the while he was drawn by an agonized curiosity to consider it.

Finally, with averted eyes, he held out shrinking hands to chance, to see if opportunity would fall into them. This was some six months after she had come back to him; six months on her part of clinging to Mrs. Richie's strength; of wondering if David, working hard in Philadelphia, was beginning to be happier; of wondering if Blair was really any happier for her weariness of soul. Six months on Blair's part, of futile moments of hope because Elizabeth seemed a little kinder;--"perhaps she's beginning to care!" he would say to himself; six months of agonizing jealousy when he knew she did not care; of persistent, useless endeavors to touch her heart; of endless small, pathetic sacrifices; of endless small, pathetic angers and repentances.

"Blair," she used to say, with wonderful patience, after one of these glimmerings of hope had arisen in him because of some careless amiability on her part, "I am sorry to be unkind; I wish you would get over caring about me, but all I can do _ever_ is just to be friends. No, I don't hate you. Why should I hate you? You didn't wrong me any more than I wronged you. We are just the same; two bad people. But I'm trying to be good, truly I am; and--and I'm sorry for you, Blair, dear. That's all I can say."

It was after one of those miserable discussions between the husband and wife that Blair had gone out of the hotel with violent words of despair. He never knew just where he spent that day--certainly not in the office at the Works; but wherever it was, it brought him face to face with his opportunity. Should he accept it? Should he refuse it? He said to himself that he could not decide. Perhaps he was right; he had shirked decisions all his life; perhaps so great a decision was impossible for him. At any rate, he thought it was. Something must decide for him. What should it be? All that afternoon he tried to make a small decision which should settle the great decision. Of course, he might pitch up a penny? no, the swiftness of such judgment seemed beyond endurance; he might say: "if it rains before noon, I'll let her go;" then he could watch the skies, and meet the decision gradually; no; it rained so often in March! If when he got back to the hotel he found her wearing this piece of jewelry or that; if the grimy pigeon, teetering up and down on the granite coping across the street, flew away before he reached the next crossing.

... On and on his mind went, jibing away, terrified, from each suggestion; then returning to it again. It was dusk when he came back to the hotel. David's mother was sitting with Elizabeth, and they were talking, idly, of Nannie's new house, or Cherry-pie's bad cold, or anything but the one thing that was always on their minds, when, abruptly, Blair entered. He flung open the door with a bang,--then stood stock-still on the threshold. He was very pale, but the room was so shadowy that his pallor was not noticed.

"Why are you sitting here in the dark!" he cried out, violently.

"Why don't you light the gas? Good G.o.d!" he said, almost with a sob. Elizabeth looked at him in astonishment; before she could reply that she and Mrs. Richie liked the dusk and the firelight, he saw that she was not alone, and burst into a loud laugh: "Mrs.

Richie here? How appropriate!" He came forward into the circle of flickering light, but he seemed to walk unsteadily and his face was ghastly. Helena Richie gave him a startled look. Blair's gentleness had never failed David's mother before; she thought, with consternation, that he had been drinking. Perhaps her gravity checked his reckless mood, for he said more gently: "I beg your pardon; I didn't see you, Mrs. Richie. I was startled because everything was dark. Outer darkness! Please don't go,-- it's so appropriate for you to be here!" he ended. Again his voice was sardonic. Mrs. Richie said, coldly, that she had been just about to return to her own room. As she left them, she said to herself, anxiously, that she was afraid there was something the matter. She would have been sure of it had she stayed in the twilight with the husband and wife.

"I'll light the gas," Elizabeth said, rising. But he caught her wrist. "No! No! there's no use lighting up now." As he spoke he pulled her down on his knee. "Elizabeth, is there no hope?" he said; "none? _none?_" She was silent. He leaned his forehead on her shoulder for a moment, and she heard that dreadful sound-- a man's weeping. Then suddenly, roughly, he flung his arms about her, and kissed her violently--her lips, her eyes, her neck; the next moment he pushed her from his knee. "Why, why did you sit here in the dark to-night? I never knew you to sit in the dark!"

He got on his feet, leaving her, standing amazed and offended, her hair ruffled, the lace about her throat in disorder; at the window, his back turned to her, he flung over his shoulder: "Look here--you can go. I won't hold you any longer. I suppose your uncle can fix it up; some d.a.m.ned legal quibble will get you out of it. I--I'll do my part."

Before she could ask him what he meant he went out. He had accepted his opportunity!

But it was not until the next day that she really understood.

"He says," Mrs. Richie told Robert Ferguson, "that he will take Nannie and go abroad definitely; she can call it desertion. Yes; on Nannie's money of course; how else could he go? Oh, my poor Blair!"

"'Poor Blair'? He deserves all he gets," Elizabeth's uncle said, after his first astonishment. Then, in spite of himself, he was sorry for Blair. "I suppose he's hard hit," he said, grudgingly, "but as for 'poor Blair,' I don't believe it goes very deep with him. You say he was out of temper because she had not lighted up, and told her she could go? Rather a casual way of getting rid of a wife."

"Robert, how can you be so unjust?" she reproached him. "Oh, perhaps he will be a man yet! How proud his mother would be."

"My dear Helena, one swallow doesn't make a summer." Then, a little ashamed of his harshness, he added, "No, he'll never be very much of a person; but he's his mother's son, so he can't be all bad; he'll just wander round Europe, with Nannie tagging on behind, enjoying himself more or less harmlessly."

"Robert," she said, softly, "I'm not sure that Elizabeth will accept his sacrifice."

"What! Not accept it? Nonsense! Of course she'll accept it. I should have doubts of her sanity if she didn't. If Blair had been half as much of a man as his mother, he'd have made the 'sacrifice,' as you call it, long ago. Helena, you're too extreme. Duty is well enough, but don't run it into the ground."

Mrs. Richie was silent.

"Helena, you _know_ she ought to leave him!"

"If every woman left unpleasant conditions--mind, he isn't unkind or wicked; what would become of us, Robert?"

Elizabeth's uncle would not pursue her logic; his face suddenly softened: "Well, David will come to his own at last! I wonder how soon after the thing is fixed up (_if_ it can be fixed up) they can marry?"

The color rose sharply in her face.

"You think they won't?" he exclaimed.

"I hope not. Oh, I hope not!"

"Why not?" he said, affronted.

"Because I don't want them, just for their own happiness, to do what seems to me wrong."

"Wrong! If the law permits it, you can't say 'wrong.'"

"_I_ think it is," she said timidly; then tried to explain that it seemed to her that no one, for his own happiness, had a right to do a thing which would injure an ideal by which the rest of us live; "I don't express it very well," she said, flushing.

Robert Ferguson snorted. "That's high talk; well enough for angels; but no men and mighty few women are angels. I," he interrupted himself hurriedly, "I don't like angel women myself."

She smiled a little sadly. "And besides that," she said, "it seems to me we ought to take the consequences of our sins. I think they ought, all three of them, to just try and make the best of things. Robert, did it ever strike you that making the best of things was one way of entering the Kingdom of Heaven?"

He gave her a tender look, but he shook his head. "Helena," he said, gently, "do you mind telling me how you finally brought them to their senses that night? Don't if you'd rather not."

Her face quivered. "I would rather. There was only one way; I ...

told them, Robert."

There was a moment of silence, then Robert Ferguson twitched his gla.s.ses off and began to polish them. "You are an angel, after all," he said. Then he lifted a ribbon falling from her waist, and kissed it.

"I sha'n't try to influence either David or Elizabeth," she said; "they will do what they think right; it may not be _my_ right--"

"It won't be," he told her, dryly; "once a man is free to marry his girl, mothers take a back seat."

She smiled wisely.

"Oh, you can smile; but, my dear Helena, the ap.r.o.n-string won't do for a man who is thirty years old. Yes, they'll do as they choose, in spite of either you or me--and _I_ know what it will be!"

"Poor Blair," she said, sighing. "Robert, if she leaves him you will be kind to him, won't you? He's never had a chance--"

But he was not thinking of Blair; he was looking into her face, and his own face moved with emotion: "Helena, don't be obstinate any longer. We have so little time left! I don't ask you to love me, but just marry me, Helena."

"Oh, my dear Robert--"

"Will you?"

"If I lived here," she said breathlessly, "my boy could not come to see me."

"Is that the reason you won't say yes?"

She was silent.

"Will you?" he said again.

Her voice was so low he could hardly hear her answer: "No."

And at that his face glowed with sudden, amazed a.s.surance. "Why,"

he cried, "_you love me!_"

She looked at him beseechingly. "Robert, please--"

"Life has been good to me, after all," he said, joyously: "I've got what I don't deserve!"

Helena was silent.