"Blair told you to," his mother said.
"Yes," Blair blurted out, "it was me told her to."
"People that take things that don't belong to them go to hell," Mrs.Maitland said; "haven't you learned that in Sunday-school?"
Silence.
"You ought to be punished very severely, Blair—and Nannie, too. But I am very busy this morning, so I shall only say"—she hesitated; what on earth should she say! "that—that you shall lose your allowance for this week, both of you."
One of them muttered, "Yes'm."
Mrs. Maitland looked as uncomfortable as they did. She wondered what to do next. How much simpler a furnace was than a child! "Well," she said, "that's all—at present"; it had suddenly occurred to her that apprehension was a good thing; "at present," she repeated darkly; "and Blair, remember; thieves go to hell." She watched them with perplexed eyes as they hurried out of the room; just as they reached the door she called: "Blair!"
The child stopped short in his tracks and quivered.
"Come here." He came, slowly, his very feet showing his reluctance. "Blair," she said—in her effort to speak gently her voice grated; she put out her hand as if to draw him to her, but the child shivered and moved aside. Mrs. Maitland looked at him dumbly; then bent toward him, and her hands, hanging between her knees, opened and closed, and even half stretched out as if in inarticulate entreaty. Nannie, in the doorway, sobbing under her breath, watched with frightened, uncomprehending eyes. "My son," Sarah Maitland said, with as much mildness as her loud voice could express, "what did you mean to do when you ran away?" She smiled, but he would not meet her eyes. "Tell me, my boy, why did you run away?"
Blair tried to speak, cleared his throat, and blurted out four husky words: "Don't like it here."
"Don't like what? Your home?"
Blair nodded.
"Why not?" she asked, astonished.
"Ugly," Blair said, faintly.
"Ugly! What is ugly?"
Blair, without looking up, made a little, swift gesture with his hand. "This," he said; then suddenly he lifted his head, gave her a sidewise, shrinking look, and dropped his eyes. The color flew into Mrs. Maitland's face; with an ejaculation of anger, she got on her feet. "You are a very foolish and very bad little boy," she said; "you don't know what you are talking about. I had meant to increase your allowance, but now I won't do it. Listen to me; it is no matter whether a house, or a—a person, is what you call 'ugly.' What matters is whether they are useful. Everything in the world ought to be useful—like our Works. If I ever hear you saying you don't like a thing because it's ugly, I shall—I shall not give you any money at all. Money!" she burst out, suddenly fluent, "money isn'tpretty! Dirty scraps of paper, bits of silver that look like lead—perhaps you call money 'ugly,' too?"
Her vehemence was a sort of self-defense; it was a subtle confession that she felt in this little repelling personality the challenge of an equal; but Blair only gaped at her in childish confusion; and instantly his mother was herself again. "Clear out, now; and be a good boy." When she was alone, she sat at her desk in the dining-room for several minutes without taking up her pen. Her face burned from the slap of the child's words; but below the scorch of anger and mortification her heart was bruised. He did not like her to put her arm about him! She drew a long breath and began to read her letters; but all the while she was thinking of that scene in the parlor the night before: Blair crouching against Mrs. Richie, clinging to her white hand;—voluntarily Sarah Maitland looked at her own hand; "I suppose," she said to herself, "he thinks hers is 'pretty'! Where does he get such notions? I wonder what kind of a woman she is, anyway; she never says anything about her husband."
There came a day when Miss White's little school in the garret was broken up. Mr. Ferguson declared that David and Blair needed a boot instead of a petticoat to teach them their Latin—and a few other things, too! He had found Mrs. Richie in tears because, under the big hawthorn in her own back yard, David had blacked Blair's eye, and had himself achieved a bloody nose. Mrs. Richie was for putting on her things to go and apologize to Mrs. Maitland, and was hardly restrained by her landlord's snort of laughter.
"Next time I hope he'll give him two black eyes, and Blair will loosen one of his front teeth!" said Mr. Ferguson.
David's mother was speechless with horror.
"That's the worst of trusting a boy to a good woman," he barked, knocking off his glasses angrily; "but I'll do what I can to thwart you! I'll make sure there isn't any young-eyed cherubin business about David. He has got to go to boarding-school, and learn something besides his prayers. If somebody doesn't rescue him from apron-strings, he'll be a 'very, very good young man'—and then may the Lord have mercy on his soul!"
"I didn't know anybody could be too good," Mrs. Richie ventured.
"A woman can't be too good, but a man oughtn't to be," her landlord instructed her.
David's mother was too bewildered by such sentiments to protest—although, indeed, Mr. Ferguson need not have been quite so concerned about David's "goodness." This freckled, clear-eyed youngster, with straight yellow hair and good red cheeks, was just an honest, growly boy, who dropped his clothes about on the floor of his room, and whined over his lessons, and blustered largely when out of his mother's hearing; furthermore, he had already experienced his first stogie—with a consequent pallor about the gills that scared Mrs. Richie nearly to death. But Robert Ferguson's jeering reference to apron-strings resulted in his being sent to boarding school. Blair went with him, "rescued" from the goodwoman regime of Cherry-pie's instruction by Mr. Ferguson's advice to Mrs. Maitland; "although," Robert Ferguson admitted, candidly, "he doesn't need it as poor David does; his mother wouldn't know how to make a Miss Nancy of him, even if she wanted to!" Then, with a sardonic guess at Mrs. Richie's unspoken thought, he added that Mrs. Maitland would not dream of going to live in the town where her son was at school. "She has sense enough to know that Blair, or any other boy worth his salt, would hate his mother if she tagged on behind," said Mr. Ferguson; "of course you would never think of doing such a thing, either," he ended, ironically.
"Of course not," said Mrs. Richie, faintly. So it was that, assisted by her landlord, David's mother thrust her one chicken out into the world unprotected by her hovering wing. About the time Miss White lost her two masculine pupils, the girls began to go to a day-school in Mercer, Cherry-pie's entire deposition as a teacher being brought about because, poor lady! she fumbled badly when it came to a critical moment with Elizabeth. It all grew out of one of the child's innumerable squabbles with David—she got along fairly peaceably with Blair. She and Nannie had been comparing pigtails, and David had asserted that Elizabeth's hair was "the nicest"; which so gratified her that she first hugged him violently, and then invited him to take her out rowing.
"I'll pay for the boat!" she said, and pirouetted around the room, keeping time with:
"'Oh, that will be joyful, joyful, joyful!Oh, that will be—'
"Uncle gave me a dollar yesterday," she interrupted herself, breathlessly.
To this David, patiently straightening his collar after that ecstatic embrace, objected; but his magnanimity was lessened by his explanation that he wasn't going to have anygirlpay for him! This ruffled Elizabeth's pride for a moment; however, she was not averse to saving her dollar, so everything was arranged. David was to row her to Willis's, a country tavern two miles down the river, where, as all middle-aged Mercer will remember, the best jumbles in the world could be purchased at the agreeable price of two for a cent. Elizabeth, who was still congratulating herself on having "nicer hair than Nannie," and who loved the river (and the jumbles), was as punctual as a clock in arriving at the covered bridge where at the toll-house wharf they were to meet and embark. She had even been so forehanded as to bargain with Mrs. Todd for the hire of the skiff, in which she immediately seated herself, the tiller-ropes in her hands, all ready for David to take the oars. "And I've waited, and waited, and waited!" she told herself angrily, as she sat there in the faintly rocking skiff. And after an hour of waiting, what should she see but David Richie racing on the bridge with Blair Maitland! He had just simply forgotten his engagement! (Elizabeth was so nearly a young lady that she said "engagement.")
"I'll never forgive him," she said, and the dimple hardened in her cheek. Sitting in the boat, she looked up at the two boys, David in advance, a young, lithe figure, in cotton small-clothes and jersey, leaping in great, beautiful strides, on and on and on, his face glowing, his eyes like stars; then, alas, he gave a downward glance and there was Elizabeth, waiting fiercely in the skiff! His "engagement" came back to him; there was just one astonished, faltering instant; and in it, of course, Blair shot ahead! It must be confessed that in his rage at being beaten David promptly forgot Elizabeth again, for though she waited still a little longer for him and his apology, no David appeared, he and Blair being occupied in wrangling over their race. She went home in a slowly gathering passion.David had forgotten her!"He likes Blair better than me; he'd rather race with another boy than go out in a boat with me; and I said I'd pay for it—and I've only got one dollar in the whole world!" At that stab of self-pity a tear ran down the side of her nose (and she was still a whole block away from home!); when it reached her lip, she was obliged to put her tongue out furtively and lick it away. But repression made the outbreak, when it came, doubly furious. She burst in upon Miss White, her dry eyes blazing with rage.
"He made me wait; he didn't come; I hate him. I'll never speak to him again. He hurt my feelings. He is a beast."
"Elizabeth! You mustn't use such unladylike words! When I was a young lady I never even heard such words. Oh, my lamb, if you don't control your temper, something dreadful will happen to you some day!"
"I hope something dreadful will happen to him some day," said Elizabeth. And with that came the tears—a torrential rain, through which the lightning played and the thunder crashed. Miss White in real terror, left her, to get some smelling-salts, and the instant she was alone Elizabeth ran across the room and stood before her mirror; then she took a pair of scissors in her shaking hand and hacked off lock after lock, strand after strand, of her shining hair. When it was done, she looked at the russet stubble that was left with triumphant rage. "There, now! I guess he won't think my hair is nicer than Nannie's any more. Ihatehim!" she said, and laughed out loud, her vivid face wet and quivering.
Miss White, hurrying in, heard the laugh, and stood transfixed: "Elizabeth!" The poor, ugly, shorn head, the pile of gleaming hair on the bureau, the wicked, tear-stained, laughing face brought the poor lady's heart into her throat. "Elizabeth!" she faltered again; and Elizabeth ran and flung her arms about her neck.
"David forgot all about me," she sobbed. "He is always hurting my feelings! And I can'tbearto have my feelings hurt. Oh, Cherry-pie, kiss me! Kiss me!"
That was the end of the outburst; the ensuing penitence was unbridled and temporary. The next morning she waylaid David to offer him some candy, which he took with serene unconsciousness of any bad behavior on his part.
"Awfully sorry I forgot about Willis's," he said casually; and took a hearty handful of candy.
Elizabeth, looking into the nearly empty box, winced; then said, bravely, "Take some more." He took a good deal more.
"David, I—I'm sorry I cut my hair."
"Why, I didn't notice," David said, wrinkling up his freckled nose and glancing at her with some interest. "It looks awfully, doesn't it?"
"David, don't tell your mother, will you? She looks so sort of horrified when I've been provoked. It almost makes me mad again," Elizabeth said, candidly.
"Materna thinks it's dreadful in you."
"Do you mind about my hair?" Elizabeth asked.
David laughed uproariously. "Why on earth shouldImind? If I were a girl, you bet I'd keep my hair cut."
"Do you forgive me?" she said, in a whisper; "if you don't forgive me,I shall die."
"Forgive you?" said David, astonished, his mouth full of candy; "why, it's nothing to me if you cut off your hair. Only I shouldn't think you'd want to look so like 'Sam Hill.' But I tell you what, Elizabeth; you're too thin-skinned. What's the use of getting mad over every little thing?"
"It wasn't so very little, to be forgotten."
"Well, yes; I suppose you were disappointed, but—"
Elizabeth's color began to rise. "Oh, I wasn't so terribly disappointed. You needn't flatter yourself. I simply don't like to be insulted."
"Ah, now, Elizabeth," he coaxed, "there you go again!"
"No, I don't. I'mnotangry. Only—you went with Blair; you didn't want—" she choked, and flew back into the house, deaf to his clumsy and troubled explanations.
In Miss White's room, Elizabeth announced her intention of entering a convent, and it was then that Cherry-pie fumbled: she took the convent seriously! The next morning she broke the awful news to Elizabeth's uncle. It was before breakfast, and Mr. Ferguson—who had not time to read his Bible for pressure of business—had gone out into the grape-arbor in his narrow garden to feed the pigeons. There was a crowd of them about his feet, their rimpling, iridescent necks and soft gray bosoms pushing and jostling against one another, and their pink feet actually touching his boots. When Miss White burst out at him, the pigeons rose in startled flight, and Mr. Ferguson frowned.
"And she says," Miss White ended, almost in tears—"she says she is going to enter a convent immejetly!"
"My dear Miss White," said Elizabeth's uncle, grimly, "there's no such luck."
Miss White positively reeled. Then he explained, and Cherry-pie came nearer to her employer in those ten minutes than in the ten years in which she had looked after his niece. "I don't care about Elizabeth's temper; she'll get over that. And I don't care a continental about her hair or her religion; she can wear a wig or be a Mohammedan if it keeps her straight. She has a bad inheritance, Miss White; I would be only too pleased to know that she was shut up in a convent, safe and sound. But this whim isn't worth talking about."
Miss White retired, nibbling with horror, and that night RobertFerguson went in to tell his neighbor his worries.
"WhatamI to do with her?" he groaned. "She cut off her hair?" Mrs.Richie repeated, astounded; "but why? How perfectly irrational!"
"Don't say 'how irrational'; say 'how Elizabeth.'"
"I wish she would try to control her temper," Mrs. Richie said, anxiously.
But Mr. Ferguson was not troubled about that. "She's vain; that's what worries me. She cried all afternoon about her hair."
"She needs a stronger hand than kind Miss White's," Mrs. Richie said; "why not send her to school?" And the harassed uncle sighed with relief at the idea, which was put into immediate execution.
With growing hair and the wholesome companionship of other girls, of course the ascetic impulse died a natural death; but the temper did not die. It only hid itself under that sense of propriety which is responsible for so much of our good behavior. When it did break loose, the child suffered afterward from the consciousness of having made a fool of herself—which is a wholesome consciousness so far as it goes—but it did not go very far with Elizabeth; she never suffered in any deeper way. She took her temper for granted; she was not complacent about it; she did not credit it to "temperament," she was merely matter of fact; she said she "couldn't help it." "I don't want to get mad," she used to say to Nannie; "and of course I never mean any of the horrid things I say. I'd like to be good, like you; but I can't help being wicked." Between those dark moments of being "wicked" she was a joyous, unself-conscious girl of generous loves, which she expressed as primitively as she did her angers; indeed, in the expression of affection Elizabeth had the exquisite and sometimes embarrassing innocence of a child who has been brought up by a sad old bachelor and a timid old maid. As for her angers, they were followed by irrational efforts to "make up" with any one she felt she had wronged. She spent her little pocket-money in buying presents for her maleficiaries, she invented punishments for herself; and generally she confessed her sin with humiliating fullness. Once she confessed to her uncle, thereby greatly embarrassing him:
"Uncle, I want you to know I am a great sinner; probably the chief of sinners," she said, breathing hard. She had come into his library after supper, and was standing with a hand on the back of his chair; her eyes were bright with unshed tears.
"Good gracious!" said Robert Ferguson, looking at her blankly over his glasses, "what on earth have you been doing now?"
"I got mad, and I chopped up the feather in Cherry-pie's new bonnet, and I told her she was a hideous, monstrous old donkey-hag."
"Elizabeth!"
"I did."
"Have you apologized?"
"Yes," said Elizabeth; "but what's the good of 'pologizing?I said it.'Course I 'pologized; and I kissed her muddy rubbers when she wasn't looking; and I gave her all my money for a new feather"—she stopped, and sighed deeply; "and here is the money you gave me to go to the theater. So now I haven't any money at all, in the world."
Poor Robert Ferguson, with a despairing jerk at the black ribbon of his glasses, leaned back in his chair, helpless with perplexity. Why on earth did she give him back his money? He could not follow her mental processes. He said as much to Mrs. Richie the next time he went to see her. He went to see her quite often in those days. For the convenience of David and Elizabeth, a doorway had been cut in the brick wall between the two gardens, and Mr. Ferguson used it frequently. In their five or six years of living next door to each other the acquaintance of these two neighbors had deepened into a sort of tentative intimacy, which they never quite thought of as friendship, but which permitted many confidences about their two children.
And when they talked about their children, they spoke, of course, of the other two, for one could not think of David without remembering Blair, or talk of Elizabeth without contrasting her with Nannie. Nannie had none of that caroling vitality which made the younger girl an acute anxiety and a perpetual delight. She was like a little plant growing in the shade—a gently good child, who never gave anybody any trouble; she continued to be a 'fraid-cat, and looked under the bed every night for a burglar. With Blair at boarding-school her life was very solitary, for of course there was no intimacy between her and her stepmother. Mrs. Maitland was invariably kind to her, and astonishingly patient with the rather dull little mind—one of those minds that are like softly tangled skeins of single zephyr; if you try to unwind the mild, elusive thoughts, they only knot tightly upon themselves, and the result is a half-frightened and very obstinate silence. But Mrs. Maitland never tried to unwind Nannie's thoughts; she used to look at her sometimes in kindly amusement, as one might look at a kitten or a canary; and sometimes she said to Robert Ferguson that Nannie was like her own mother;—"but Blair has brains!" she would say, complacently. School did not give the girl the usual intense friendships, and except for Elizabeth, she had no companions; her one interest was Blair, and her only occupation out of school hours was her drawing—which was nothing more than endless, meaningless copying. It was Nannie's essential child-likeness that kept her elders, and indeed David and Blair too, from understanding that she and Elizabeth were no longer little girls. Perhaps the boys first realized Elizabeth's age when they simultaneously discovered that she was pretty….
Elizabeth's long braids had been always attractive to the masculine eye; they had suggested jokes about pigtails, and much of that peculiar humor so pleasing to the young male; but the summer that she "put up her hair," the puppies, so to speak, got their eyes open. When the boys saw those soft plaits, no longer hanging within easy reach of a rude and teasing hand, but folded around her head behind her little ears; when they saw the small curls breaking over and through the brown braids that were flecked with gilt, and the stray locks, like feathers of spun silk, clustering in the nape of her neck; when David and Blair saw these things—it was about the time their voices were showing amazing and ludicrous register—something below the artless brutalities of the boys' sense of humor was touched. They took abruptly their first perilous step out of boyhood. Of course they did not know it…. The significant moment came one afternoon when they all went out to the toll-house for ice-cream. There was a little delay at the gate, while the boys wrangled as to who should stand treat. "I'll pull straws with you," said Blair; Blair's pleasant, indolent mind found the appeal to chance the easiest way to settle things, but he was always good-natured when, as now, the verdict was against him. "Come on," he commanded, gayly, "I'll shell out!" Mrs. Todd, who had begun to dispense pink and brown ice-cream, for them when they were very little children, winked and nodded as they all came in together, and made a jocose remark about "handsome couples"; then she trundled off to get the ice-cream, leaving them in the saloon. This "saloon" was an ell of the toll-house; it opened on a little garden, from which a flight of rickety steps led down to a float where half a dozen skiffs were tied up, waiting to be hired. In warm weather, when the garden was blazing with fragrant color, Mrs. Todd would permit favored patrons to put their small tables out among the marigolds and zinnias and sit and eat and talk. The saloon itself had Nottingham-lace window-curtains, and crewel texts enjoining remembrance of the Creator, and calling upon Him to "bless our home." The tables, with marble tops translucent from years of spilled ice cream, had each a worsted mat, on which was a glass vase full of blue paper roses; on the ceiling there was a wonderful star of scalloped blue tissue-paper—ostensibly to allure flies, but hanging there winter and summer, year in and year out. Between the windows that looked out on the river stood a piano, draped with a festooning scarf of bandanna handkerchiefs. These things seemed to Blair, at this stage of his esthetic development, very satisfying, and part of his pleasure in "treating" came from his surroundings; he used to look about him enviously, thinking of the terrible dining-room at home; and on sunny days he used to look, with even keener pleasure, at the reflected ripple of light, striking up from the river below, and moving endlessly across the fly-specked ceiling. Watching the play of moving light, he would put his tin spoon into his tumbler of ice-cream and taste the snowy mixture with a slow prolongation of pleasure, while the two girls chattered like sparrows, and David listened, saying very little and always ready to let Elizabeth finish his ice-cream after she had devoured her own.
It was on one of these occasions that Blair, watching that long ripple on the ceiling, suddenly saw the sunshine sparkle on Elizabeth's hair, and his spoon paused midway to his lips. "Oh, say, isn't Elizabeth's hair nice?" he said.
David turned and looked at it. "I've seen lots of girls with hair like that," he said; but he sighed, and scratched his left ankle with his right foot. Blair, smiling to himself, put out a hesitating finger and touched a shimmering curl; upon which Elizabeth ducked and laughed, and dancing over to the old tin pan of a piano pounded out "Shoo Fly" with one finger. Blair, watching the lovely color in her cheek, said in honest delight: "When your face gets red like that, you are awfully good-looking, Elizabeth."
"Good-looking"; that was a new idea to the four friends. Nannie gaped; Elizabeth giggled; David "got red" on his own account, and muttered under his breath, "Tell that to the marines!" But into Blair's face had come, suddenly, a new expression; his eyes smiled vaguely; he came sidling over to Elizabeth and stood beside her, sighing deeply: "Elizabeth, you are an awful nice girl."
Elizabeth shrieked with laughter. "Listen to Blair—he's spoony!"
Instantly Blair was angry; "spooniness" vanished in a flash; he did not speak for fully five minutes. Just as they started home, however, he came out of his glumness to remember Miss White. "I'm going to take Cherry-pie some ice-cream," he said; and all the way back he was so absorbed in trying—unsuccessfully—to keep the pallid pink contents of the mussy paper box from dripping on his clothes that he was able to forget Elizabeth's rudeness. But childhood, for all four of them, ended that afternoon.
When vacation was over, and they were back in the harness again, both boys forgot that first tremulous clutch at the garments of life; in fact, like all wholesome boys of fifteen or sixteen, they thought "girls" a bore. It was not until the next long vacation that the old, happy, squabbling relationship began to be tinged with a new consciousness. It was the elemental instinct, the everlasting human impulse. The boys, hobbledehoys, both of them, grew shy and turned red at unexpected moments. The girls developed a certain condescension of manner, which was very confusing and irritating to the boys. Elizabeth, as unaware of herself as the bud that has not opened to the bee, sighed a good deal, and repeated poetry to any one who would listen to her. She said boys were awfully rough, and their boots had a disagreeable smell, "I shall never get married," said Elizabeth; "I hate boys." Nannie did not hate anybody, but she thought she would rather be a missionary than marry;—"though I'm afraid I'd be afraid of the savages," she confessed, timorously.
David and Blair were confidential to each other about girls in general, and Elizabeth in particular; they said she was terribly stand-offish. "Oh, well, she's a girl," said David; "what can you expect?"
"She's darned good-looking," Blair blurted out. And David said, with some annoyance, "What's that amount to?" He said that, for his part, he didn't mean to fool around after girls. "But I'm older than you, Blair; you'll feel that way when you get to be my age; it's only when a man is very young that he bothers with 'em."
"That's so," said Blair, gloomily. "Well, I never expect to marry." Blair was very gloomy just then; he had come home from school the embodiment of discontent. He was old enough now to suffer agonies of mortification because of his mother's occupation. "The idea of a lady running an Iron Works!" he said to David, who tried rather half-heartedly to comfort him; David was complacently sure thathismother wouldn't run an Iron Works! "I hate the whole caboodle," Blair said, angrily. It was his old shrinking from "ugliness." And everything at home was ugly;—the great old house in the midst of Maitland's Shantytown; the darkness and grime of it; the smell of soot in the halls; Harris's slatternly ways; his mother's big, beautiful, dirty fingers. "When she sneezes," Blair said, grinding his teeth, "I could—swear! She takes the roof off." He grew hot with shame when Mrs. Richie, whom he admired profoundly, came to take supper with his mother at the office table with its odds and ends of china. (As the old Canton dinner service had broken and fire-cracked, Harris had replenished the shelves of the china-closet according to his own taste limited by Mrs. Maitland's economic orders.) Blair found everything hideous, or vulgar, or uncomfortable, and he said so to Nannie with a violence that betrayed real suffering. For it is suffering when the young creature finds itself ashamed of father or mother. Instinctively the child is proud of the parent, and if youth is wounded in its tenderest point, its sense of conventionality—for nothing is as conventional as adolescence—that natural instinct is headed off, and of course there is suffering. Mrs. Maitland, living in her mixture of squalor and dignity, had no time to consider such abstractions. As for there being anything unwomanly in her occupation, such an idea never entered her head. To Sarah Maitland, no work which it was a woman's duty to do could be unwomanly; she was incapable of consciously aping masculinity, but to earn her living and heap up a fortune for her son, was, to her way of thinking, just the plain common sense of duty. But more than that, the heart in her bosom would have proved her sex to her; how she loved to knit the pink socks for dimpled little feet! how she winced when her son seemed to shrink from her; how jealous she was still of that goose Molly,—who had been another man's wife for as many years as Herbert Maitland had been in his grave. But Blair saw none of these things that might have told him that his mother was a very woman. Instead, his conventionality was insulted at every turn; his love of beauty was outraged. As a result a wall was slowly built between the mother and son, a wall whose foundations had been laid when the little boy had pointed his finger at her and said "uggy."
Mrs. Maitland was, of course, perfectly unconscious of her son's hot misery; she was so happy at having him at home again that she could not see that he was unhappy at being at home. She was pathetically eager to please him. Her theory—if in her absorbed life she could be said to have a theory—was that Blair should have everything he wanted, so that he should the sooner be a man. Money, she thought, would give him everything. She herself wanted nothing money could give, except food and shelter; the only use she had for money was to make more money; but she realized that other people, especially young men, like the things it would buy. Twice during that particular vacation, for no cause except to gratify herself, she gave her son a wickedly large check; and once, when Nannie told her that he wanted to pay for some painting lessons, though she demurred just for a moment, she paid the bill so that his own spending-money should not be diminished.
"What on earth does a man who is going to run an Iron Works want with painting lessons?" she said to the entreating sister. But even while she made her grumbling protest, she wrote a check.
As for Blair, he took the money, as he took everything else that she gave him of opportunity and happiness, and said, "Thank you, mother; you are awfully good"; but he shut his eyes when he kissed her. He was blind to the love, the yearning, the outstretched hands of motherhood,—not because he was cruel, or hard, or mean; but because he was young, and delighted in beauty.
Of course his wretchedness lessened after a fortnight or so—habit does much to reconcile us to unpleasantness; besides that, his painting was an interest, and his voice began to be a delight to him; he used to sing a good deal, making Nannie play his accompaniments, and sometimes his mother, working in the dining-room, would pause a moment, with lifted head, and listen and half smile—then fall to work again furiously.
But the real solace to his misery and irritation came to him—a boy still in years—in the sudden realization ofElizabeth!
"I am going to have a party," Blair told Nannie; "I've invited David and Elizabeth, and four fellows; and you can ask four girls."
Nannie quaked. "Do you mean to have them come to supper?"
"You can call it 'supper'; I call it dinner."
"I'm afraid Mamma won't like it; it will disturb the table."
"I'm not going to have it in that hole of a dining-room; I'm going to have it in the parlor. Harris says he can manage perfectly well. We'll hang a curtain across the arch and have the table in the back parlor."
"But Harris can't wait on us in there, and on Mamma in the dining-room," Nannie objected.
"We shall have our dinner at seven, after Harris has given mother her supper on that beautiful table of hers."
"But—" said Nannie.
"You tell her about it," Blair coaxed; "she'll take anything from you."
Nannie yielded. Instructed by Blair, she hinted his purpose to Mrs.Maitland, who to her surprise consented amiably enough.
"I've no objections. And the back parlor is a very sensible arrangement. It would be a nuisance to have you in here; I don't like to have things moved. Now clear out! Clear out! I must go to work." A week later she issued her orders: "Mr. Ferguson, I'll be obliged if you'll come to supper to-morrow night. Blair has some kind of a bee in his bonnet about having a party. Of course it's nonsense, but I suppose that's to be expected at his age."
Robert Ferguson demurred. "The boy doesn't want me; he has asked a dozen young people."
Mrs. Maitland lifted one eyebrow. "I didn't hear about the dozen young people; I thought it was only two or three besides David and Elizabeth; however, I don't mind. I'll go the whole hog. He can have a dozen, if he wants to. As for his not wanting you, what has that got to do with it? I want you. It's my house, and my table; and I'll ask who I please. I've asked Mrs. Richie," she ended, and gave him a quick look.
"Well," her superintendent said, indifferently, "I'll come; but it's hard on Blair." When he went home that night, he summoned Miss White. "I hope you have arranged to have Elizabeth look properly for Blair's party? Don't let her be vain about it, but have her look right." And on the night of the great occasion, just before they started for Mrs. Maitland's, he called his niece into his library, and knocking off his glasses, looked her over with grudging eyes: "Don't get your head turned, Elizabeth. Remember, it isn't fine feathers that make fine birds," he said; and never knew that he was proud of her!
Elizabeth, bubbling with laughter, holding her skirt out in small, white-gloved hands, made three dancing steps, dipped him a great courtesy, then ran to him, and before he knew it, caught him round the neck and kissed him. "You dear, darling,preciousuncle!" she said.
Mr. Ferguson, breathless, put his hand up to his cheek, as if the unwonted touch had left some soft, fresh warmth behind it.
Elizabeth did not wait to see the pleased and startled gesture she gathered up her fluffy tarlatan skirt, dashed out into the garden, through the green gate in the wall, and bursting into the house next door, stood in the hall and called up-stairs: "David! Come! Hurry! Quick!" She was stamping her foot with excitement.
David, who had had a perspiring and angry quarter of an hour with his first white tie, came out of his room and looked over the banisters, both hands at his throat. "Hello! What on earth is the matter?"
"David—see!" she said, and stood, quivering and radiant, all her whiteness billowing about her.
"See what?" David said, patiently.
"A long dress!"
"Awhat?" said David; then looking down at her, turning and twisting and preening herself in the dark hall like some shining white bird, he burst into a shout of laughter.
Elizabeth's face reddened. "I don't see anything to laugh at."
"You look like a little girl dressed up!"
"Little girl? I don't see much 'little girl' about it; I'm nearly sixteen." She gathered her skirt over her arm again, and retreated with angry dignity.
As for David, he went back to try a new tie; but his eyes were dreamy."George! she's a daisy," he said to himself.
When, the day before, Mrs. Richie had told her son that she had been invited to Blair's party, he was delighted. David had learned several things at school besides his prayers, some of which caused Mrs. Richie, like most mothers of boys, to give much time to her prayers. But as a result, perhaps of prayers as well as of education, and in spite of Mr. Ferguson's misgivings as to the wisdom of trusting a boy to a "good woman," he was turning out an honest young cub, of few words, defective sense of humor, and rather clumsy manners. But under his speechlessness and awkwardness, David was sufficiently sophisticated to be immensely proud of his pretty mother; only a laborious sense of propriety and the shyness of his sex and years kept him from, as he expressed it, "blowing about her." He blew now, however, a little, when she said she was going to the party: "Blair'll be awfully set up to have you come. You know he's terribly mashed on you. He thinks you are about the best thing going. Materna, now you dress up awfully, won't you? I want you to take the shine out of everybody else. I'm going to wear my dress suit," he encouraged her. "Why, say!" he interrupted himself, "that's funny—Blair didn't tell me he had asked you."
"Mrs. Maitland asked me."
"Mrs. Maitland!" David said, aghast; "Materna, you don't supposeshe'scoming, do you?"
"I'm sure I hope so, considering she invited me."
"Great Casar's ghost!" said David, thoughtfully; and added, under his breath, "I'm betting on his not expecting her. Poor Blair!"
Blair had need of sympathy. His plan for a "dinner" had encountered difficulties, and he had had moments of racking indecision; but when, on the toss of a penny, 'heads' declared for carrying the thing through, he held to his purpose with a perseverance that was amusingly like his mother's large and unshakable obstinacies. He had endless talks with Harris as to food; and with painstaking regard for artistic effect and as far as he understood it, for convention, he worked out every detail of service and arrangement. His first effort was to make the room beautiful; so the crimson curtains were drawn across the windows, and the cut-glass chandeliers in both rooms emerged glittering from their brown paper-muslin bags. The table was rather overloaded with large pieces of silver which Blair had found in the big silver-chest in the garret; among them was a huge center ornament, called in those days an epergne—an extraordinary arrangement of prickly silver leaves and red glass cups which were supposed to be flowers. It was black with disuse, and Blair made Harris work over it until the poor fellow protested that he had rubbed the skin off his thumb—but the pointed leaves of the great silver thistle sparkled like diamonds. Blair was charmingly considerate of old Harris so long as it required no sacrifice on his own part, but he did not relinquish a single piece of silver because of that thumb. With his large allowance, it was easy to put flowers everywhere—the most expensive that the season afforded. When he ordered them, he bought at the same time a great bunch of orchids for Miss White. "I can't invite her," he decided, reluctantly; "but her feelings won't be hurt if I send her some flowers." As for the menu, he charged the things he wanted to his mother's meager account at the grocery-store. When he produced his list of delicacies, things unknown on that office-dining-room table, the amazed grocer said to himself, "Well,at lastI guess that trade is going to amount to something! Why, damn it," he confided to his bookkeeper afterward, "I been sendin' things up to that there house for seventeen years, and the whole bill ain't amounted to shucks. That woman could buy and sell me twenty times over. Twenty times? A hundred times! And I give you my word she eats like a day-laborer. Listen to this"—and he rattled off Blair's order. "She'll fall down dead when she sees them things; she don't even know how to spell 'em!"
Blair had never seen a table properly appointed for a dinner-party; but Harris had recollections of more elaborate and elegant days, a recollection, indeed, of one occasion when he had waited at a policemen's ball; and he laid down the law so dogmatically that Blair assented to every suggestion. The result was a humorous compound of Harris's standards and Blair's aspirations; but the boy, coming in to look at the table before the arrival of his guests, was perfectly satisfied.
"It's fine, Harris, isn't it?" he said. "Now, light up all the burners on both chandeliers. Harris, give a rub to that thistle leaf, will you? It's sort of dull." Harris looked at his swollen thumb. "Aw', now, Mr. Blair," he began. "Did you hear what I said?" Blair said, icily—and the leaf was polished! Blair looked at it critically, then laughed and tossed the old man a dollar. "There's some sticking-plaster for you. And Harris, look here: those things—the finger-bowls; don't go and get mixed up on 'em, will you? They come last." Harris put his thumb in his mouth; "I never seen dishes like that," he mumbled doubtfully; "the police didn't have 'em."
"It's the fashion," Blair explained; "Mrs. Richie has them, and I've seen them at swell hotels. Most people don't eat in an office," he ended, with a curl of his handsome lip.
It was while he was fussing about, whistling or singing, altering the angle of a spoon here or the position of a wine-glass there, that his mother came in. She had put on her Sunday black silk, and she had even added a lace collar and a shell cameo pin; she was knitting busily, the ball of pink worsted tucked under one arm. There was a sort of grim amusement, tempered by patience, in her face. To have supper at seven o'clock, and call it "dinner"; to load the table with more food than anybody could eat, and much of it stuff that didn't give the stomach any honest work to do—"like that truck," she said, pointing an amused knitting-needle at the olives—was nonsense. But Blair was young; he would get over his foolishness when he got into business. Meantime, let him be foolish! "I suppose he thinks he's the grand high cockalorum!" she told herself, chuckling. Aloud she said, with rough jocosity:
"What in the world is the good of all those flowers? A supper table is a place for food, not fiddle-faddle!"
Blair reddened sharply. "There are people," he began, in that voice of restrained irritation which is veiled by sarcastic politeness—"there are people, my dear mother, who think of something else than filling their stomachs." Mrs. Maitland's eye had left the dinner table, and was raking her son from head to foot. He was very handsome, this sixteen-year-old boy, standing tall and graceful in his new clothes, which, indeed, he wore easily, in spite of his excitement at their newness.
"Well!" she said, sweeping him with a glance. Her face glowed; "I wish his father could have lived to see him," she thought; she put out her hand and touched his shoulder. "Turn round here till I look at you! Well, well! I suppose you're enjoying those togs you've got on?" Her voice was suddenly raucous with pride; if she had known how, she would have kissed him. Instead she said, with loud cheerfulness: "Well, my son, which is the head of the table? Where am I to sit?"
"Mother!" Blair said. He turned quite white. He went over to the improvised serving-table, and picked up a fork with a trembling hand; put it down again, and turned to look at her. Yes; she was all dressed up! He groaned under his breath. The tears actually stood in his eyes. "I thought," he said, and stopped to clear his voice, "I didn't know—"
"What's the matter with you?" Mrs. Maitland asked, looking at him over her spectacles.
"I didn't suppose you would be willing to come," Blair said, miserably.
"Oh, I don't mind," she said, kindly; "I'll stick it out for an hour."
Blair ground his teeth. Harris, pulling on a very large pair of white cotton gloves—thus did he live up to the standards of the policemen's ball—came shuffling across the hall, and his aghast expression when he caught sight of Mrs. Maitland was a faint consolation to the despairing boy.
"Here! Harris! have you got places enough?" Mrs. Maitland said. "Blair, have you counted noses? Mrs. Richie's coming, and Mr. Ferguson."
"Mrs. Richie!" In spite of his despair, Blair had an elated moment. He was devoted to David's mother, and there was some consolation in the fact that she would see that he knew how to do things decently! Then his anger burst out. "I didn't ask Mrs. Richie," he said, his voice trembling.
"What time is supper?" his mother interrupted, "I'm getting hungry!" She took her place at the head of the table, sitting a little sidewise, with one foot round the leg of her chair; she looked about impatiently, striking the table softly with her open hand—a hand always beautiful, and to-night clean. "What nonsense to have it so late!"
"It isn't supper," Blair said; "it's dinner; and—" But at that moment the door-bell saved the situation. Harris, stumbling with agitation, had retreated to his pantry, so Mrs. Maitland motioned to Blair. "Run and open the door for your friends," she said, kindly.
Blair did not "run," but he went; and if he could have killed those first-comers with a glance, he would have done so. As for Mrs. Maitland, still glowing with this new experience of taking part in her son's pleasure, she tramped into the front room to say how do you do and shake hands with two very shy young men, who were plainly awed by her presence. As the others came in, it was she who received them, standing on the hearth-rug, her back to the empty fireplace which Blair had filled with roses, all ready to welcome the timid youngsters, who in reply to her loud greetings stammered the commonplaces of the occasion.
"How are you, Elizabeth? What! a long dress? Well, well, youaregetting to be a big girl! How are you, David? And so you have a swallowtail, too? Glad to see you, Mrs. Richie. Who's this? Harry Knight? Well, Harry, you are quite a big boy. I knew your stepmother when she was Molly Wharton, and not half your age."
Harry, who had a sense of humor, was able to laugh, but David was red with wrath, and Elizabeth tossed her head. As for Blair, he grew paler and paler.
Yet the dreadful dinner went off fairly smoothly. Mrs. Maitland sat down before anybody else. "Come, good people, come!" she said, and began her rapid "Bless, O Lord," while the rest of the company were still drawing up their chairs. "Amen, soup, Mrs. Richie?" she said, heartily. The ladling out of the soup was an outlet for her energy; and as Harris's ideals put all the dishes on the table at once, she was kept busy carving or helping, or, with the hospitable insistence of her generation, urging her guests to eat. Blair sat at the other end of the table in black silence. Once he looked at Mrs. Richie with an agonized gratitude in his beautiful eyes, like the gratitude of a hurt puppy lapping a friendly and helping hand; for Mrs. Richie, with the gentlest tact, tried to help him by ignoring him and talking to the young people about her. Elizabeth, too, endeavored to do her part by assuming (with furtive glances at David) a languid, young-lady-like manner, which would have made Blair chuckle at any less terrible moment. Even Mr. Ferguson, although still a little dazed by that encounter with his niece, came to the rescue—for the situation was, of course, patent—and talked to Mrs. Maitland; which, poor Blair thought, "at least shut her up"!
Mrs. Maitland was, of course perfectly unconscious that any one could wish to shut her up; she did not feel anything unusual in the atmosphere, and she was astonishingly patient with all the stuff and nonsense. Once she did strike the call-bell, which she had bidden Harris to bring from the office table, and say, loudly: "Make haste, Harris! Make haste! What is all this delay?" The delay was Harris's agitated endeavor to refresh his memory about "them basins."
"Is itnow?" he whispered to Blair, furtively rubbing his thumb on the shiny seam of his trousers. Blair, looking a little sick, whispered back:
"Oh, throw 'em out of the window."
"Aw', now, Mr. Blair," poor Harris protested, "I clean forgot; is it with these here tomatoes, or with the dessert?"
"Go to the devil!" Blair said, under his breath. And the finger-bowls appeared with the salad.
"What's this nonsense?" Mrs. Maitland demanded; then, realizing Blair's effort, she picked up a finger-bowl and looked at it, cocking an amused eyebrow. "Well, Blair," she said, with loud good nature, "we are putting on airs!"
Blair pretended not to hear. For the whole of that appalling experience he had nothing to say—even to Elizabeth, sitting beside him in the new white dress, the spun silk of her brown hair shimmering in the amazing glitter of the great cut-glass chandelier. The other young people, glancing with alarmed eyes now at Blair, and now at his mother, followed their host's example of silence. Mrs. Maitland, however, did her duty as she saw it; she asked condescending questions as to "how you children amuse yourselves," and she made her crude jokes at everybody's expense, with side remarks to Robert Ferguson about their families: "That Knight boy is Molly Wharton's stepson; he looks like his father. Old Knight is an elder in The First Church; he hands round the hat for other people to put their money in—never gives anything himself. I always call his wife 'goose Molly.' … Is that young Clayton, Tom Clayton's son? He looks as if he had some gumption; Tom was always Mr. Doestick's friend. … I suppose you know that that West boy's grandmother wasn't sure who his grandfather was? … Mrs. Richie's a pretty woman, Friend Ferguson; where are your eyes!" …
When it was over, that terrible thirty minutes—for Mrs. Maitland droveHarris at full speed through all Blair's elaborations—it was Mrs.Richie who came to the rescue.
"Mrs. Maitland," she said, "sha'n't you and I and Mr. Ferguson go and talk in your room, and leave the young people to amuse themselves?" And Mrs. Maitland's quick agreement showed how relieved she was to get through with all the "nonsense."
When their elders had left them, the "young people" drew a long breath and looked at one another. Nannie, almost in tears, tried to make some whispered explanation to Blair, but he turned his back on her. David, with a carefully blase air, said, "Bully dinner, old man." Blair gave him a look, and David subsided. When the guests began a chatter of relief, Blair still stood apart in burning silence. He wished he need never see or speak to any of them again. He hated them all; he hated—But he did not finish this, even in his thoughts.
When the others had recovered their spirits, and Nannie had begun to play on the piano, and somebody had suggested that they should all sing—"And then let's dance!" cried Elizabeth—Blair disappeared. Out in the hall, standing with clenched hands in the dim light, he said to himself he wished they would all clear out! "I am sick of the whole darned business; I wish they'd clear out!"
It was there that Elizabeth found him. She had forgotten her displeasure at David, and was wildly happy; but she had missed Blair, and had come, in a dancing whirl of excitement, to find him. "What are you doing? Come right back to the parlor!"
Blair, turning, saw the smooth cheek, pink as the curve of a shell, the soft hair's bronze sheen, the amber darkness of the happy eyes. "Oh, Elizabeth!" he said, and actually sobbed.
"Blair! Whatisthe matter?"
"It was disgusting, the whole thing."
"What was disgusting?"
"That awful dinner—"
"Awful? You are perfectly crazy! It was lovely! What are you talking about?" In her dismayed defense of her first social function, she put her hands on his arm and shook it. "Why! It is the first dinner I ever went to in all my life; and look: six-button gloves! What do you think of that? Uncle told Cherry-pie I could have whatever was proper, and I got these lovely gloves. They are awfully fashionable!" She pulled one glove up, not only to get its utmost length, but also to cover that scar which her fierce little teeth had made so long ago. "Oh, Blair, it really was a perfectlybeautifuldinner," she said, earnestly.
She was so close to him that it seemed as if the color on her cheek burned against his, and he could smell the rose in her brown hair. "Oh, Elizabeth," he said, panting, "you are an angel!"
"It was simply lovely!" she declared. In her excitement she did not notice that new word. Blair trembled; he could not speak. "Come right straight back!" Elizabeth said; "please! Everybody will have a perfectly splendid time, if you'll just come back. We want you to sing. Please!" The long, sweet corners of her eyes implored him.
"Elizabeth," Blair whispered, "I—I love you."
Elizabeth caught her breath; then the exquisite color streamed over her face. "Oh!" she said faintly, and swerved away from him. Blair came a step nearer. They were both silent. Elizabeth put her hand over her lips, and stared at him with half-frightened eyes. Then Blair:
"Do you care, a little, Elizabeth?"
"We must go back to the parlor," she said, breathing quickly.
"Elizabeth,doyou?"
"Oh—Blair!"
"Please, Elizabeth," Blair said; and putting his arms round her very gently, he kissed her cheek.
Elizabeth looked at him speechlessly; then, with a lovely movement, came nestling against him. A minute later they drew apart; the girl's face was quivering with light and mystery, the young man's face was amazed. Then amazement changed to triumph, and triumph to power, and power to something else, something that made Elizabeth shrink and utter a little cry. In an instant he caught her violently to him and kissed her—kissed the scar on her upraised, fending arm, then her neck, her eyes, her mouth, holding her so that she cried out and struggled; and as he let her go, she burst out crying. "Oh—oh—oh—" she said; and darting from him, ran up-stairs, stumbling on the unaccustomed length of her skirt and catching at the banisters to keep from falling. But at the head of the stairs she paused; the tears had burned off in flashing excitement. She hesitated; it seemed as if she would turn and come back to him. But when he made a motion to bound up after her, she smiled and fled, and he heard the door of Nannie's room bang and the key turn in the lock.
Blair Maitland stood looking after her; in that one hot instant boyishness had been swept out of his face.
"They have all suddenly grown up!" Mrs. Richie said, disconsolately. She had left the "party" early, without waiting for her carriage, because Mrs. Maitland's impatient glances at her desk had been an unmistakable dismissal.
"I will walk home with you," Robert Ferguson said.
"Aren't you going to wait for Elizabeth?"
"David will bring her home."
"He'll be only too glad of the chance; how pretty she was to-night! You must have been very proud of her."
"Not in the least. Beauty isn't a thing to be proud of. Quite the contrary."
Mrs. Richie laughed: "You are hopeless, Mr. Ferguson! What is a girl for, if not to be sweet and pretty and charming? And Elizabeth is all three."
"I would rather have her good."
"But prettiness doesn't interfere with goodness! And Elizabeth is a dear, good child."
"I hope she is," he said
"Youknowshe is," she declared.
"Well, she has her good points," he admitted; and put his hand up to his lean cheek as if he still felt the flower-like touch of Elizabeth's lips.
"But they have all grown up," Mrs. Richie said. "Mr. Ferguson, David wants to smoke! What shall I do?"
"Good heavens! hasn't he smoked by this time?" said Robert Ferguson, horrified. "You'll ruin that boy yet!"
"Oh, when he was a little boy, there was one awful day, when—" Mrs. Richie shuddered at the remembrance; "but now he wants to really smoke, you know."
"He's seventeen," Mr. Ferguson said, severely. "I should think you might cut the apron-strings by this time."
"You seem very anxious about apron-strings for David," she retorted with some spirit. "I notice you never show any anxiety about Blair."
At which her landlord laughed loudly: "I should say not! He's been brought up by a man—practically." Then he added with some generosity, "But I'm not sure that an apron-string or two might not have been a good thing for Blair."
Mrs. Richie accepted the amend good-naturedly. "My tall David is very nice, even if he does want to smoke. But I've lost my boy."
"He'll be a boy," Robert Ferguson said, "until he makes an ass of himself by falling in love. Then, in one minute, he'll turn into a man. I—" he paused, and laughed: "I was twenty, just out of college, when I made an ass of myself over a girl who was as vain as a peacock. Well, she was beautiful; I admit that."
"You were very young," Mrs. Richie said gravely; the emotion behind his careless words was obvious. They walked along in silence for several minutes. Then he said, contemptuously:
"She threw me over. Good riddance, of course."
"If she was capable of treating you badly, of course it was well to have her do so—in time," she agreed; "but I suppose those things cut deep with a boy," she added gently. She had a maternal instinct to put out a comforting hand, and say "never mind." Poor man! because, when he was twenty a girl had jilted him, he was still, at over forty, defending a sensitive heart by an armor of surliness. "Won't you come in?" she said, when they reached her door; she smiled at him, with her pleasant leaf-brown eyes,—eyes which were less sad, he thought, than when she first came to Mercer. ("Getting over her husband's death, I suppose," he said to himself. "Well, she has looked mournful longer than most widows!")
He followed her into the house silently, and, sitting down on her little sofa, took a cigar out of his pocket. He began to bite off the end absently, then remembered to say, "May I smoke?"
The room was cool and full of the fragrance of white lilies. Mr. Ferguson had planted a whole row of lilies against the southern wall of Mrs. Richie's garden. "Such things are attractive to tenants; I find it improves my property," he had explained to her, when she found him grubbing, unasked, in her back yard. He looked now, approvingly at the jug of lilies that had replaced the grate in the fireplace; but Mrs. Richie looked at the clock. She was tired, and sometimes her good neighbor stayed very late.
"Poor Blair!" she said. "I'm afraid his dinner was rather a disappointment. What charming manners he has," she added, meditatively; "I think it is very remarkable, considering—"
Mr. Ferguson knocked off his glasses. "Mrs. Maitland's manners may not be as—as fine-ladyish as some people's, I grant you," he said, "but I can tell you, she has more brains in her little finger than—"
"Than I have in my whole body?" Mrs. Richie interrupted gaily; "I know just what you were going to say."
"No, I wasn't," he defended himself; but he laughed and stopped barking.
"It is what you thought," she said; "but let me tell you, I admire Mrs.Maitland just as much as you do."
"No, you don't, because you can't," he said crossly; but he smiled. He could not help forgiving Mrs. Richie, even when she did not seem to appreciate Mrs. Maitland—the one subject on which the two neighbors fell out. But after the smile he sighed, and apparently forgot Mrs. Maitland. He scratched a match, held it absently until it scorched his fingers; blew it out, and tossed it into the lilies; Mrs. Richie winced, but Mr. Ferguson did not notice her; he leaned forward, his hands between his knees, the unlighted cigar in his fingers: "Yes; she threw me over."
For a wild moment Mrs. Richie thought he meant Mrs. Maitland; then she remembered. "It was very hard for you," she said vaguely.
"And Elizabeth's mother," he went on, "my brother Arthur's wife, left him. He never got over the despair of it. He—killed himself."
Mrs. Richie's vagueness was all gone. "Mr. Ferguson!"
"She was bad—all through."
"Oh,no!" Helena Richie said faintly.
"She left him, for another man. Just as the girl I believed in left me. I would have doubted my God, Mrs. Richie, before I could have doubted that girl. And when she jilted me, I suppose I did doubt Him for a while. At any rate, I doubted everybody else. I do still, more or less."
Mrs. Richie was silent.
"We two brothers—the same thing happened to both of us! It was worse for him than for me; I escaped, as you might say, and I learned a valuable lesson; I have never built on anybody. Life doesn't play the same trick on me twice. But Arthur was different. He was of softer stuff. You'd have liked my brother Arthur. Yes; he was too good to her—that was the trouble. If he had beaten her once or twice, I don't believe she would have behaved as she did. Imagine leaving a good husband, a devoted husband—"
"What I can't imagine," Helena Richie said, in a low voice, "is leaving a living child.Thatseems to me impossible."
"The man married her after Arthur—died," he went on; "I guess she paid the piper in her life with him! I hope she did. Oh, well; she's dead now; I mustn't talk about her. But Elizabeth has her blood in her; and she is pretty, just as she was. She looks like her, sometimes. There—now you know. Now you understand why I worry so about her. I used to wish she would die before she grew up. I tried to do my duty to her, but I hoped she would die. Yet she seems to be a good little thing. Yes, I'm pretty sure she is a good little thing. To-night, before we went to the dinner, she—she behaved very prettily. But if I saw her mother in her, I would—God knows what I would do! But except for this fussing about clothes, she seems all right. You know she wanted a locket once? But you think that is only natural to a girl? Not a vanity that I need to be anxious about? Her mother was vain—a shallow, selfish theatrical creature!" He looked at her with worried eyes. "I am dreadfully anxious, sometimes," he said simply.
"There's nothing to be anxious about," she said, in a smothered voice, "nothing at all."
"Of course I'm fond of her," he confessed, "but I am never sure of her."
"You ought to be sure of her," Mrs. Richie said; "her little vanities—why, it is just natural for a girl to want pretty dresses! But to think—Poor little Elizabeth!" She hid her face in her hands; "and poor bad mother," she said, in a whisper.
"Don't pityher! She was not the one to pity. It was Arthur who—" He left the sentence unfinished; his face quivered.
"Oh," she cried, "you are all wrong. She is the one to pity, I don't care how selfish and shallow she was! As for your brother, he just died. What was dying, compared to living? Oh, you don't understand. Poor bad women! You might at least be sorry for them. How can you be so hard?"
"I suppose I am hard," he said, half wonderingly, but very meekly; "when a good woman can pity Dora—that was her name; who am I to judge her? I'll try not to be so hard," he promised.
He had risen. Mrs. Richie tried to speak, but stopped and caught her breath at the bang of the front door.
"It's David!" she said, in a terrified voice. Her face was very pale, so pale that David, coming abruptly into the room, stood still in his tracks, aghast.
"Why, Materna! What's up? Mother, something is the matter!"
"It's my fault, David," Robert Ferguson said, abashed. "I was telling your mother a—a sad story. Mrs. Richie, I didn't realize it would pain you. Your mother is a very kind woman, David; she's been sympathizing with other people's troubles."
David, looking at him resentfully, came and stood beside her, with an aggressively protecting manner. "I don't see why she need bother about other people's troubles. Say, Materna, I—I wouldn't feel badly. Mr. Ferguson, I—you—" he blustered; he was very much perturbed.
The fact was David was not in an amiable humor; Elizabeth had been very queer all the way home. "High and mighty!" David said to himself; treating him as if he were a little boy, and she a young lady! "And I'm seventeen—the idea of her putting on such airs!" And now here was her uncle making his mother low-spirited. "Materna, I wouldn't bother," he comforted her.
Mrs. Richie put a soothing hand on his arm. "Never mind," she said; she was still pale, "Yes, it was a sad story. But I thank you for telling me, Mr. Ferguson."
He tried awkwardly to apologize for having distressed her, and then took himself off. When he opened his own door, even before he closed it again, he called out, "Miss White!"
"Yes, sir?" said the little governess, peering rabbit-like from the parlor.
"Miss White, I've been thinking; I'm going to buy Elizabeth a piece of jewelry; a locket, I think. You can tell her so. Mrs. Richie says she's quite sure she isn't really vain in wanting such things."
"I have been at my post, sir, since Elizabeth was three years old," Miss White said with spirit, "and I have frequently told you that she was not vain. I'll go and tell her what you say, immejetly!"
But when Cherry-pie went to carry the great news she found Elizabeth's door locked.
"What? Uncle is going to give me a locket?" Elizabeth called out in answer to her knock. "Oh, joy! Splendid!"
"Let me in, and I'll tell you what he said," Miss White called back.
"No! I can't!" cried the joyous young voice. "I'm busy!"
She was busy; she was holding a lamp above her head, and looking at herself in the mirror over the mantelpiece. Her hair was down, tumbling in a shining mass over her shoulders, her eyes were like stars, her cheeks rose-red. She was turning her white neck from side to side, throwing her head backward, looking at herself through half-shut eyes; her mouth was scarlet. "Blair is in love with me!" she said to herself. She felt his last kiss still on her mouth; she felt it until it seemed as if her lip bled.
"David Richie needn't talk about 'little girls' any more.I'm engaged!" She put the lamp down on the mantelpiece, shook her mane of hair back over her bare shoulders, and then, her hands on her hips, her short petticoat ruffling about her knees, she began to dance. "Somebody is in love with me!
"'Oh, isn't it joyful, joyful, joyful—'"
[Illustration: "BLAIR IS IN LOVE WITH ME!"]