When, on drunken and then on leaden feet, there came to Elizabeth the ruthless to-morrow of her act, her first clear thought was to kill herself ….
After the marriage in the mayor's office—where they paused long enough to write the two notes that were received the next day—Blair had fled with her up into the mountains to a little hotel, where they would not, he felt certain, encounter any acquaintances.
Elizabeth neither assented nor objected. From the moment she had struck her hand into his, there in the tawdry "saloon" of the toll-house, and cried out, "Come!" she let him do as he chose. So he had carried her away to the city hall, where, like any other unclassed or unchurched lovers, they were married by a hurried city official. She had had one more crisis of rage, when in the mayor's office, as she stood at a high wall desk and wrote with an ink-encrusted pen that brief note to her uncle, she said to herself that, as to David Richie, he could hear the news from her uncle—or never hear it; she didn't care which. Then for an instant her eyes glittered again; but except for that one moment, she seemed stunned, mind and body. To Blair, her silent acquiescences had been signs that he had won something more than her consent to revenge herself upon David,—and he wanted more! In all his life he had never deeply cared for anybody but himself; but now, under the terrible selfishness of his act, under the primitive instinct that he called love, there was, trembling in the depths of his nature,Love. It had been born only a little while ago, this new, naked baby of Love. It had had no power and no knowledge; unaided by that silent god of his, it had not been strong enough to save him from himself, or save Elizabeth from him. But he did love her, in spite of his treason to her soul, for he was tender with her, and almost humble; yet his purpose was inflexible. It seemed to him it must find response in her. Such purpose might strike fire from the most unbending steel—why not from this yielding, silent thing, Elizabeth's heart? But numb and flaccid, perfectly apathetic, stunned by that paroxysm of fury, she no more responded to him than down would have responded to the blow of flint …
It was their second day in the mountains. Blair, going down-stairs very early in the morning, stopped in the office of the hotel to write a brief but intensely polite note to his mother, telling her of his marriage. "Nannie will have broken it to her—poor, dear old Nannie!" he said to himself, pounding a stamp down on the envelope, "but of course it's proper to announce it myself." Then he dropped the "announcement" into the post-bag, and went out for a tramp in the woods. It was a still, furtive morning of low clouds, with an expectancy of snow in the air. But it was not cold, and when, leaving the road and pushing aside the frosted ferns and underbrush, he found himself in the silence of the woods, he sat down on a fallen tree trunk to think…. The moment had come when the only god he knew would no longer be denied.
"I might as well face it," he said; and slowly lit a cigar. But instead of "facing it," he began to watch the first sparse and fitful beginnings of snow—hesitant flakes that sauntered down to rest for a crystal moment on his coat sleeve. Suddenly he caught his thoughts together with a jerk: "I'vegotto think it out!" he said. Curiously enough, when he said this his thought did not turn with any especial distinctness to David Richie.
Instead, in the next hour of reasonings and excuses, there was always, back in his mind, one face—scornful, contemptuous even; a face he had known only as gentle, and sometimes tender; the face of David's mother. Once he swore at himself, to drive that face out of his mind. "What a fool I am! Elizabeth had broken her engagement with him. I had the right to speak before the thing was smoothed over again. Anybody would say so, even—even Mrs. Richie if she could really understand how things were. But of course she will only seehisside." All his excuses for his conduct were in relation to David Richie; he did not think of Elizabeth. He honestly did not know that he had wronged her. He loved her so crazily that he could not realize his cruelty.
It was snowing steadily now; he could hear the faint patter of small, hard flakes on the dry oak leaves over his head. Suddenly some bleached and withered ferns in front of him rustled, and he saw wise, bright eyes looking at him. "I wish I had some nuts for you, bunny," he said—and the bright eyes vanished with a furry whirl through the ferns. He picked up the empty half of a hickory-nut, and turning it over in his fingers, looked at the white grooves left by small sharp teeth. "You little beggars must get pretty hungry in the winter, bunny," he said; "I'll bring a bag of nuts out here for you some day." But while he was talking to the squirrel, he was wrestling with his god. It was characteristic of him that never once in that struggle to justify himself did he use the excuse of Elizabeth's consent. His code, which had allowed him to injure a woman, would not permit him to blame her—even if she deserved it. Instead, over and over he heaped up his own poor defense: "If I had waited, he might have patched it up with her." Over and over the defense crumbled before his eyes: "it was contemptible not to give him the chance to patch it up." Then would come his angry retort: "That's nonsense! Besides it is better, infinitely better, for her to marry me than a poor man like him. I can give her everything,—and love her! God, how I love her. Apart from any selfish consideration, it is a thousand times better for her." For an instant his marrying her seemed actually chivalrous; and at that his god laughed. Blair reddened sharply; to recognize his hypocrisy was the "touch on the hollow of the thigh; and the hollow of the thigh was out of joint"! He pitched the nut away with a vicious fling, and knew, inarticulately, that there was no use lying to himself any longer.
With blank eyes he watched the snow piling up on a withered stalk of goldenrod. "I wish it hadn't happened in just the way it did," he conceded;—his god was beginning to prevail!—"but if I had waited, I might have lost her." Then a thought stabbed him: suppose that he should lose her anyhow? Suppose that when she came to herself—the phrase was a confession! suppose she should want to leave him? It was an intolerable idea. "Well, she can't," he told himself, grimly, "she can't, now." His face was dusky with shame, yet when he said that, his lip loosened in a furtively exultant smile. Blair would have been less, or more, than a man if, at that moment, in spite of his shame, he had not exulted. "She's my wife!" he said, through those shamed and smiling lips. Then his eyes narrowed: "And she doesn't care a damn for me."
So it was that as he sat there in the snow, watching the puff of white deepen on the stalk of goldenrod, his god prevailed yet a little more, for, so far as Elizabeth was concerned, he did not try to fool himself: "she doesn't care a damn." But when he said that, he saw the task of his life before him—to make her care! It was like the touch of a spur; he leaped to his feet, and flung up his arms in a sort of challenge. Yes; hehad"done the thing a man can't do." Yes; he ought not to have taken advantage of her anger. Yes; his honor was smirched, grant it all! grant it all! "I was mad," he said, stung by this intolerable self-knowledge; "I was a cur. I ought to have waited; I know it. I admit it. But what's the use of talking about it now? It's done; and by God, she shall love me yet!"
So it was that his god blessed him, as the best that is in us, always blesses us when it conquers us: the blessing was the revelation of his own dishonor. It is a divine moment, this of the consciousness of having been faithless to one's own ideals. And Blair Maitland, a false friend, a selfish and cruel lover, was not entirely contemptible, for his eyes, beautiful and evasive, confessed the shock of a heavenly vision.
As he walked home, he laid his plans very carefully: he must show her the most delicate consideration; he must avoid every possible annoyance; he must do this, he must not do that. "And I'll buy her a pearl necklace," he told himself, too absorbed in the gravity of the situation to see in such an impulse the assertion that he was indeed his mother's son! But the foundation of all his plans for making Elizabeth content, was the determination not to admit for a single instant, to anybody but himself, that he had done anything to be ashamed of. Which showed that his god was not yet God.
When he got back to the hotel, he found that Elizabeth had not left her room; and rushing up-stairs two steps at a time, he knocked at her door. . . . She was sitting on the edge of her bed, her lips parted, her eyes staring blindly out of the window at the snow. The flakes were so thick now that the meadow on the other side of the road and the mountain beyond were blurred and almost blotted out; there was a gray pallor on her face as if the shadow of the storm had fallen on it. Instantly Blair knew that she "had come to herself." As he stood looking at her, something tightened in his throat; he broke out into the very last thing he had meant to say: "Elizabeth?-forgive me!"
"I ought to die, you know," she said, without turning her eyes from the window and the falling snow.
He came and knelt down beside her, and kissed her hand. "Elizabeth, dearest! When I love you so?"
He kissed her shoulder. She shivered.
"My darling," he said, passionately.
She looked at him dully; "I wish you would go away."
"Elizabeth, let me tell you how I love you."
"Love me?" she said; "me?"
"Elizabeth!" he protested; "you are an angel, and I love you—no man ever loved a woman as I love you."
In her abasement she never thought of reproaching him, of saying "if you loved me, why did you betray me?" She had not gone as far as that yet. Her fall had been so tremendous that if she had any feeling about him, it was nothing more than the consciousness that he too, had gone over the precipice. "Please go away," she said.
"Dearest, listen; you are my wife. If—if I hurried you too much, you will forgive me because I loved you so? I didn't dare to wait, for fear—" he stumbled on the confession which his god had wrung from him, but which must not be made to her. Elizabeth's heavy eyes were suddenly keen.
"Fear of what?"
"Oh, don't look at me that way! I love you so that it kills me to have you angry at me!"
"I am not angry with you," she said, faintly surprised; "why should I be angry withyou? Only, you see, Blair, I—I can't live. I simply can't live."
"You have got to live!—or I'll die," he said. "I love you, I tell you I love you!" His outstretched, trembling hands entreated hers, but she would not yield them to his touch; her shrinking movement away from him, her hands gripped together at her throat, filled him with absolute terror: "Elizabeth!don't—" She glanced at him with stony eyes. Blair was suffering. Why shouldhesuffer? But his suffering did not interest her. "Please go away," she said, heavily.
He went. He dared not stay. He left her, going miserably down-stairs to make a pretense of eating some breakfast. But all the while he was arranging entreaties and arguments in his own mind. He went to the door of their room a dozen times that morning, but it was locked. No, she did not want any breakfast. Wouldn't she come out and walk? No, no, no. Please let her alone. And then in the afternoon; "Elizabeth, Imustcome in! You must have some food."
She let him enter; but she was indifferent alike to the food and to the fact that by this time there was, of course, a giggling consciousness in the hotel that the "bride and groom had had a rumpus." … "A nice beginning for a honeymoon," said the chambermaid, "locking that pretty young man out of her room!—and me with my work to do in there. Well, I'm sorry for him; I bet you she's a case."
Blair, too, was indifferent to anything ridiculous in his position; the moment was too critical for such self-consciousness. When at last he took a little tray of food to his wife, and knelt beside her, begging her to eat, he was appalled at the ruin in her face. She drank some tea to please him; then she said, pitifully:
"What shall we do, Blair?" That she should say "we" showed that these hours which had plowed her face had also sowed some seed of unselfishness in her broken soul.
"Darling," he said, tenderly, "have you forgiven me?"
At this she meditated for a minute, staring with big, anguished eyes straight ahead of her at nothing; "IthinkI have, Blair. I have tried to. Of course I know I was more wicked than you. It was more my doing than yours. Yes. I ought to ask you if you would forgive me."
"Elizabeth! Forgive you? When you made me so happy! Am I to forgive you for making me happy?"
"Blair," she said—she put the palms of her hands together, like a child; "Blair, please let me go." She looked at him with speechless entreaty. The old dominant Elizabeth was gone; here was nothing but the weak thing, the scared thing, pleading, crouching, begging for mercy. "Please, Blair,please—"
But the very tragedy of such humbleness was that it made an appeal to passion rather than to mercy. It made him love her more, not pity her more. "I can't let you go, Elizabeth," he said, hoarsely; "I can't; I love you—I will never let you go! I will die before I will let you go!"
With that cry of complete egotism from him, the storm which her egotism had let loose upon their little world broke over her own head. As the sense of the hopelessness of her position and the futility of her struggle dawned upon her, she grew frightened to the point of violence. She was outrageous in what she said to him—beating against the walls of this prison-house of marriage which she herself had reared about them, and crying wildly for freedom. Yet strangely enough, her fury was never the fury of temper; it was the fury of fear. In her voice there was a new note, a note of entreaty; she demanded, but not with the old invincible determination of the free Elizabeth. She was now only the woman pleading with the man; the wife, begging the husband.
Through it all, her jailer, insulted, commanded, threatened, never lost a gentleness that had sprung up in him side by side with love. It was, of course, the gentleness of power, although he did not realize that, for he was abjectly frightened; he never stopped to reassure himself by remembering that, after all, rave as she might, she was his! He was incredibly soft with her—up to a certain point: "I will never let you go!" If his god spoke, the whisper was drowned in that gale of selfishness. Elizabeth, now, was the flint, striking that she might kindle in Blair some fire of anger which would burn up the whole edifice of her despair. But he opposed to her fiercest blows of terror and entreaty nothing but this softness of frightened love and unconscious power. He cowered at the thought of losing her; he entreated her pity, her mercy; he wept before her. The whole scene in that room in the inn, with the silent whirl of snow outside the windows, was one of dreadful abasement and brutality on both sides.
"I am a bad woman. I will not stay with you. I will kill myself first.I am going away. I am going away to-night."
"Then you will kill me. Elizabeth! Think how I love you; think! And—hewouldn't want you, since you threw him over. You couldn't go back to him."
"Go back to David? now? How can you say such a thing! I am dead, so far as he is concerned. Oh—oh—oh,—why am I not dead? Why do I go on living? I will kill myself rather than stay with you!" It seemed to Elizabeth that she had forgotten David; she had forgotten that she had meant to write him a terrible letter. She had forgotten everything but the blasting realization of what had happened to her. "Do not dare to speak his name!" she said, frantically. "I cannot bear it! I cannot bear it! I am dead to him. He despises me, as I despise myself. Blair, I can't—I can't live; I can't go on—"
In the end he conquered. There were two days and nights of struggle; and then she yielded. Blair's reiterated appeal was to her sense of justice. Curiously, but most characteristically, through all the clamor of her despair at this incredible thing that she had done, justice was the one word which penetrated to her consciousness. Was it fair, she debated, numbly, in one of their long, aching silences, was it just, that because she had ruined herself, she should ruin him?
She had locked herself in her room, and was sitting with her head on her arms that were stretched before her on a little table. Blair had gone out for one of his long, wretched walks through the snow; sometimes he took the landlord's dog along for company, and on this particular morning, a morning of brilliant sunshine and cold, insolent wind, he had stopped to buy a bag of nuts for the hungry squirrels in the woods. As he walked he was planning, planning, planning, how he could make his misery touch Elizabeth's heart; he was all unconscious that her misery had not yet touched his heart. But Elizabeth, locked in her room, was beginning to think of his misery. Dully at first, then with dreary concentration, she went over in her mind his arguments and pleadings: he was satisfied to love her even if she didn't love him; he had known what stakes he played for, and he was willing to abide by them; she ought to do the same; she had done this thing—she had married him, was it fair, now, to destroy him, soul and body, just because she had acted on a moment's impulse? In a crisis of terror, his primitive instinct of self-preservation had swept away the acquired instinct of chivalry, and like a brutal boy, he had reminded her that she was to blame as well as he. "You did it, too," he told her. sullenly. She remembered that he had said he had not fully understood that it was only impulse on her part; "I thought you cared for me a little, or else you wouldn't have married me." In the panic of the moment he really had not known that he lied, and in her absorption in her own misery she did not contradict him. She ought, he said, to make the best of the situation; or else he would kill himself. "Do you want me to kill myself?" he had threatened. If she would make the best of it, he would help her. He would do whatever she wished; he would be her friend, her servant,—until she should come to love him.
"I shall never love you," she told him. "I will always love you! But I will not make you unhappy. Let me be your servant; that's all I ask."
"I love David. I will always love him."
He had been silent at that; then broke again into a cry for mercy. "I don't care if you do love him! Don't destroy me, Elizabeth."
He had had still one other weapon:they were married. There was no getting round that. The thing was done; except by Time and the outrageous scandal of publicity, it could not be undone. But this weapon he had not used, knowing perfectly well that the idea of public shame would be, just then, a matter of indifference to Elizabeth?-perhaps even a satisfaction to her, as the sting of the penitential whip is a satisfaction to the sinner. All he said was summed up in three words: "Don't destroy me."
There was no reply. She had fallen into a silence which frightened him more than her words. It was then that he went out for that walk on the creaking snow, in the sunshine and fierce wind, taking the bag of nuts along for the squirrels. Elizabeth, alone, her head on her arms on the table, went over and over his threats and entreaties, until it seemed as if her very mind was sore. After a while, for sheer weariness, she left the tangle of motives and facts and obligations, and began to think of David. It was then that she moaned a little under her breath.
Twice she had tried to write to him to tell him what had happened. But each time she cringed away from her pen and paper. After all, what could she write? The fact said all there was to say, and he knew the fact by this time. When she said that, her mind, drawn by some horrible curiosity, would begin to speculate as to how he had heard the fact? Who told him? What did he say? How did he—? and here she would groan aloud in an effortnotto know "how" he took it! To save herself from this speculation which seemed to dig into a grave, and touch and handle the decaying body of love, she would plan what she should say to him when, after a while, "to-morrow," perhaps, she should be able to take up her pen: "David,—I was out of my head. Think of me as if I were dead." . . . "David,—I don't want you to forgive me. I want you to hate me as I hate myself." . . . "David,—I was not in my right mind—forgive me. I love you just the same. But it is as if I were dead." Again and again she had thought out long, crying, frightened letters to him; but she had not written them. And now she was beginning to feel, vaguely, that she would never write them. "What is the use? I am dead." The idea of calling upon him to come and save her, never occurred to her. "I am dead," she said, as she sat there, her face hidden in her arms; "there is nothing to be done."
After a while she stopped thinking of David and the letter she had not been able to write; it seemed as if, when she tried to make it clear to herself why she did not write to him, something stopped in her mind—a cog did not catch; the thought eluded her. When this happened—as it had happened again and again in these last days; she would fall to thinking, with vague amazement, that this irremediable catastrophe was out of all proportion to its cause. It was monstrous that a crazy minute should ruin a whole life—two whole lives, hers and David's. It was as if a pebble should deflect a river from its course, and make it turn and overflow a landscape! It was incredible that so temporary a thing as an outbreak of temper should have eternal consequences. She gasped, with her face buried in her arms, at the realization—which comes to most of us poor human creatures sooner or later—that sins may be forgiven, but their results remain. As for sin—but surely that meaningless madness was not sin? "It was insanity," she said, shivering at the memory of that hour in the toll-house—that little mad hour, that brought eternity with it! She had had other crazy hours, with no such weight of consequence. Her mind went back over her engagement: her love, her happiness—and her tempers. Well, nothing had come of them. David always understood. And still further back: her careless, fiery girlhood—when the knowledge of her mother's recreancy, undermining her sense of responsibility by the condoning suggestion of heredity, had made her quick to excuse her lack of self-control. Her girlhood had been full of those outbreaks of passion, which she "couldn't help"; they were all meaningless, and all harmless, too; at any rate they were all without results of pain to her.
Suddenly it seemed to her, as she looked across the roaring gulf that separated her from the past, that all her life had been just a sunny slope down to the edge of the gulf. All those "harmless" tempers which had had no results, had pushed her to this result!
Her poor, bright, shamed head lay so long and so still on her folded arms that one looking in upon her might have thought her dead. Perhaps, in a way, Elizabeth did die then, when her heart seemed to break with the knowledge that it is impossible to escape from yesterday. "Oh," she said, brokenly, "why didn't somebody tell me? Why didn't they stop me?" But she did not dwell upon the responsibility of other people. She forgot the easy excuse of 'heredity.' This new knowledge brought with it a vision of her own responsibility that filled her appalled mind to the exclusion of everything else. It is not the pebble that turns the current—it is the easy slope that invites it. All her life Elizabeth had been inviting this moment; and the moment, when it came, was her Day of Judgment. What she had thought of as an incredible injustice of fate in letting a mad instant turn the scales for a whole life, was merely an inevitable result of all that had preceded it. When this fierce and saving knowledge came to her, she thought of Blair. "I have spoiled my own life and David's life. I needn't spoil Blair's. He said if I left him, it would destroy him…. Perhaps if I stay, it will be my punishment. I can never be punished enough."
When Blair came home, she was standing with her forehead against the window, her dry eyes watching the dazzling white world.
Coming up behind her, he took her hand and kissed it humbly. She turned and looked at him with somber eyes.
"Poor Blair," she said.
And Blair, under his breath, said, "Thank God!"
The coming back to Mercer some six weeks later was to Blair a miserable and skulking experience. To Elizabeth it was almost a matter of indifference; there is a shame which goes too deep for embarrassment. The night they arrived at the River House, Nannie and Miss White were waiting for them, tearful and disapproving, of course, but distinctly excited and romantic. After all, Elizabeth was a "bride!" and Cherry-pie and Nannie couldn't help being fluttered. Blair listened with open amusement to their half-scared gossip of what people thought, and what the newspapers had said, and how "very displeased" his mother had been; but Elizabeth hardly heard them. At the end of the call, while Blair was bidding Nannie tell his mother he was coming to see her in the morning. Miss White, kissing her "lamb" good night, tried to whisper something in her ear: "Hesaid to tell you—" "No—no—no,—I can't hear it; I can't bear it yet!" Elizabeth broke in; she put her hands over her eyes, shivering so that Cherry-pie forgot David and his message, and even her child's bad behavior.
"Elizabeth! you've taken cold?"
Elizabeth drew away, smiling faintly. "No; not at all. I'm tired.Please don't stay." And with the message still unspoken, Miss White andNannie went off together, as fluttering and frightened as when theycame.
The newspaper excitement which had followed the announcement of the elopement of Sarah Maitland's son, had subsided, so there was only a brief notice the morning after their arrival in town, to the effect that "the bride and groom had returned to their native city for a short stay before sailing for Europe." Still, even though the papers were inclined to let them alone, it would be pleasanter, Blair told his wife, to go abroad.
"Well," she said, dully. Elizabeth was always dull now. She had lifted herself up to the altar, but there was no exaltation of sacrifice; possibly because she considered her sacrifice a punishment for her sin, but also because she was still physically and morally stunned.
"Of course there is nobody in Mercer for whose opinion I care a copper," Blair said. They were sitting in their parlor at the hotel; Elizabeth staring out of the window at the river, Blair leaning forward in his chair, touching once in a while, with timid fingers, a fold of her skirt that brushed his knee. "Of course I don't care for a lot of gossiping old hens; but it will be pleasanter for you not to be meeting people, perhaps?" he said gently.
There was only one person whom he himself shrank from meeting—his mother. And this shrinking was not because of the peculiar shame which the thought of Mrs. Richie had awakened in him that morning in the woods, when the vision of her delicate scorn had been so unbearable; his feeling about his mother was sheer disgust at the prospect of an interview which was sure to be esthetically distressing. While he was still absent on what the papers called his "wedding tour," Nannie had written to him warning him what he might expect from Mrs. Maitland:
"Mamma is terribly displeased, I am afraid, though she hasn't said a word since the night I told her. Then she said very severe things—and oh, Blair, dear, whydidyou do it the way you did? I think Elizabeth was perfectly—" The unfinished sentence was scratched out. "Youmustbe nice to Mamma when you come home," she ended.
"She'll kick," Blair said, sighing; "she'll row like a puddler!" In his own mind, he added that, after all, no amount of kicking would alter the fact. And again the little exultant smile came about his lips. "As for being 'nice,' Nannie might as well talk about being 'nice' to a circular saw," he said, gaily. His efforts to be gay, to amuse or interest Elizabeth, were almost pathetic in their intensity. "Well! the sooner I'll go, the sooner I'll get it over!" he said, and reached for his hat; Elizabeth was silent. "You might wish me luck!" he said. She did not answer, and he sighed and left her.
As he loitered down to Shantytown, lying in the muddy drizzle of a midwinter thaw, he planned how soon he could get away from the detestable place. "Everything is so perfectly hideous," he said to himself, "no wonder she is low-spirited. When I get her over in Europe she'll forget Mercer, and—everything disagreeable." His mind shied away from even the name of the man he had robbed.
At his mother's house, he had a hurried word with Nannie in the parlor: "Is she upset still? She mustn't blame Elizabeth! It was all my doing. I sort of swept Elizabeth off her feet, you know. Well—it's another case of getting your tooth pulled quickly. Here goes!" When he opened the dining-room door, his mother called to him from her bedroom: "Come in here," she said; and there was something in her voice that made him brace himself. "I'm in for it," he said, under his breath.
For years Sarah Maitland's son had not seen her room; the sight of it now was a curious shock that seemed to push him back into his youth, and into that old embarrassment which he had always felt in her presence. The room was as it had been then, very bare and almost squalid; there was no carpet on the floor, and no hint of feminine comfort in a lounge or even a soft chair. That morning the inside shutters on the lower half of the uncurtained windows were still closed, and the upper light, striking cold and bleak across the dingy ceiling, glimmered on the glass doors of the bookcases behind which, in his childhood, had lurked such mysterious terrors. The narrow iron bed had not yet been made up, and the bedclothes were in confusion on the back of a chair; the painted pine bureau was thick with dust; on it was the still unopened cologne bottle, its kid cover cracked and yellow under its faded ribbons, and three small photographs: Blair, a baby in a white dress; a little boy with long trousers and a visored cap; a big boy of twelve with a wooden gun. They were brown with time, and the figures were almost undistinguishable, but Blair recognized them,—and again his armor of courage was penetrated.
"Well, Mother," he said, with great directness and with at least an effort at heartiness, "I am afraid you are rather disgusted with me."
"Are you?" she said; she was sitting sidewise on a wooden chair—what is called a "kitchen chair"; she had rested her arm along its back, and as Blair entered, her large, beautiful hand, drooping limply from its wrist, closed slowly into an iron fist.
"No, I won't sit down, thank you," he said, and stood, lounging a little, with an elbow on the mantelpiece. "Yes; I was afraid you would be displeased," he went on, good-humoredly; "but I hope you won't mind so much when I tell you about it. I couldn't really go into it in my letter. By the way, I hope my absence hasn't inconvenienced you in the office?"
"Well, not seriously," she said dryly. And he felt the color rise in his face. That he was frightfully ill at ease was obvious in the elaborate carelessness with which he began to inquire about the Works. But her only answer to his meaningless questions was silence. Blair was conscious that he was breathing quickly, and that made him angry. "WhyamI such an ass?" he asked himself; then said, with studied lightness, that he was afraid he would have to absent himself from business for still a little longer, as he was going abroad. Fortunately—here the old sarcastic politeness broke into his really serious purpose to be respectful; fortunately he was so unimportant that his absence didn't really matter. "Youarethe Works, you know, Mother."
"You are certainly unimportant," she agreed. He noticed she had not taken up her knitting, though a ball of pink worsted and a half-finished baby sock lay on the bureau near her; this unwonted quiet of her hands, together with the extraordinary solemnity of her face, gave him a sense of uneasy astonishment. He would almost have welcomed one of those brutal outbursts which set his teeth on edge by their very ugliness. He did not know how to treat this new dignity.
"I would like to tell you just what happened," he began, with a seriousness that matched her own. "Elizabeth had made up her mind not to marry David Richie. They had had some falling out, I believe. I never asked what; of course that wasn't my business. Well, I had been in love with her for months; but I didn't suppose I had a ghost of a chance; of course I wouldn't have dreamed of trying to—to take her from him. But when she broke with him, why, I felt that I had a—a right, you know."
His mother was silent, but she struck the back of her chair softly with her closed fist: her eyebrow began to lift ominously.
"Well; we thought—I mean I thought; that the easiest way all round was to get married at once. Not discuss it, you know, with people; but just—well, in point of fact, I persuaded her to run off with me!" He tried to laugh, but his mother's face was rigid. She was looking at him closely, but she said nothing. By this time her continued silence had made him so nervous that he went through his explanation again from beginning to end. Still she did not speak. "You see, Mother," he said, reddening with the discomfort of the moment, "you see it was best to do it quickly? Elizabeth's engagement being broken, there was no reason to wait. But I do regret that I could not have told you first. I fear you felt—annoyed."
"Annoyed?" For a moment she smiled. "Well, I should hardly call it 'annoyed.'" Suddenly she made a gesture with her hand, as if to say, stop all this nonsense! "Blair," she said, "I'm not going to go into this business of your marriage at all. It's done." Blair drew a breath of astonished relief. "You've not only done a wicked thing, which is bad; you've done a fool thing, which is worse. I have some sort of patience with a knave, but a fool—'annoys' me, as you express it. You've married a girl who loves another man. You may or may not repent your wickedness—you and I have different ideas on such subjects; but you'll certainly repent your foolishness. When you are eaten up with jealousy of David, you'll wish you had behaved decently. I know what I'm talking about"—she paused, looking down at her fingers picking nervously at the back of the chair; "I've been jealous," she said in a low voice. Then, with a quick breath: "However, wicked or foolish, or both, it'sdone, and I'm not going to waste my time talking about it."
"You're very kind," he said; he was so bewildered by this unexpected mildness that he could not think what to say next. "I very much appreciate your overlooking my not telling you about it before I did it. The—the fact was," he began to stammer; her face was not reassuring; "the fact was, it was all so hurried, I—"
But she was not listening. "You say you mean to go to Europe; how?"
"How?" he repeated. "I don't know just what you mean. Of course I shall be sorry to leave the Works, but under the circumstances—"
"It costs money to go to Europe. Have you got any?"
"My salary—"
"How can you have a salary when you don't do any work?"
Blair was silent; then he said, frowning, something about his mother's always having been so kind—
"Kind?" she broke in, "you call it kind? Well, Blair, I am going to be kind now—another way. So far as I'm concerned, you'll not have one dollar that you don't earn."
He looked perfectly uncomprehending.
"I've done being 'kind,' in the way that's ruined you, and made you a useless fool. I'm going to try another sort of kindness. You can work, my son, or you can starve." Her face quivered as she spoke.
"What do you mean?" Blair said, quietly; his embarrassment fell from him like a slipping cloak; he was suddenly and ruthlessly a man.
She told him what she meant. "This business of your marrying Elizabeth isn't the important thing; that's just a symptom of your disease. It's the fact of your being the sort of man you are, that's important." Blair was silent. Then Sarah Maitland began her statement of the situation as she saw it; she told him just what sort of a man he was: indolent, useless, helpless, selfish. "Until now I've always said that at any rate you were harmless. I can't say even that now!" She tried to explain that when a man lives on money he has not earned, he incurs, by merely living, a debt of honor;—that God will collect. But she did not know how to say it. Instead, she told him he was a parasite;—which loathsome truth was like oil on the flames of his slowly gathering rage. He was a man, she said, whose business in life was to enjoy himself. She tried to make clear to him that after youth,—perhaps even after childhood,—enjoyment, as the purpose of effort, was dwarfing. "You are sort of a dwarf, Blair," she said, with curiously impersonal brutality. Any enjoyment, she insisted, that was worthy of a man, was only a by-product, as you might call it, of effort for some other purpose than enjoyment. "One of our puddlers enjoys doing a good job, I guess;—but that isn't why he does it," she said, shrewdly. Any man whose sole effort was to get pleasure is, considering what kind of a world we live in, a poor creature. "That's the best that can be said for him," she said; "as for the worst, we won't go into that. You know it even better than I do." Then she told him that his best, which had been harmlessness, and his worst, which they "would not go into"—were both more her fault than his. It was her fault that he was such a poor creature; "a pithless creature; I've made you so!" she said. She stopped, her face moving with emotion. "I've robbed you of incentive; I see that now. Any man who has the need of work taken away from him, is robbed. I guess enjoyment is all that is left for him. I ask your pardon." Her humility was pitiful, but her words were outrageous. "You are young yet," she said; "Ithinkwhat I am going to do will cure you. If it doesn't, God knows what will become of you!" It was the cure of the surgeon's knife, ruthless, radical; it was, in fact, kill or cure; she knew that. "Of course it's a gamble," she admitted, and paused, nibbling at her finger; "a gamble. But I've got to take it." She spoke of it as she might of some speculative business decision. She looked at him as if imploring comprehension, but she had to speak as she thought, with sledgehammer directness. "It takes brains to make money—I know because I've made it; but any fool can inherit it, just as any fool can accept it. I'm going to give you a chance to develop some brains. You can work or you can starve. Or," she added simply, "you can beg. You have begged practically all your life, thanks to me."
If only she could have said it all differently! But alas! yearning over him with agonized consciousness of her own wrong-doing, and with singular justice in regard to his, she approached his selfish heart as if it were one of her own "blooms," and she a great engine which could mold and squeeze it into something of value to the world. She flung her iron facts at him, regardless of the bruises they must leave upon that most precious thing, his self-respect. Well; she was going to stop her work of destruction, she said. Then she told him how she proposed to do it: he had had everything—and he was nothing. Now he should have nothing, so that he might become something.
There was a day, many years ago, when this mother and son, standing together, had looked at the fierce beauty of molten iron; then she had told him of high things hidden in the seething and shimmering metal—of dreams to be realized, of splendid toils, of vast ambitions. And as she spoke, a spark of vivid understanding had leaped from his mind to hers. Now, her iron will, melted by the fires of love, was seething and glowing, dazzlingly bright in the white heat of complete self-renunciation; it was ready to be poured into a torturing mold to make a tool with which he might save his soul! But no spark of understanding came into his angry eyes. She did not pause for that; his agreement was a secondary matter. The habit of success made her believe that she could achieve the impossible—namely, save a man's soul in spite of himself; "make," as she had told Robert Ferguson, "a man of her son." She would have been glad to have his agreement, but she would not wait for it.
Blair listened in absolute silence. "Do I understand," he said when she had finished, "that you mean to disinherit me?"
"I mean to give you the finest inheritance a young man can have:the necessity for work!—and work for the necessity. For, of course, your job is open to you in the office. But it will be at an honest salary after this; the salary any other unskilled man would get."
"Please make yourself clear," he said laconically; "you propose to leave me no money when you die?"
"Exactly."
"May I ask how you expect me to live?"
"The way most decent men live—by work. You can work; or else, as I said, you can starve. There's a verse in the Bible—you don't know your Bible very well; perhaps that's one reason you have turned out as you have; but there's a verse in the Bible that says if a man won't work, he sha'n't eat. That's the best political economy I know. But I never thought of it before," she said simply; "I never realized that the worst handicap a young man can have in starting out in life is a rich father—or mother. Ferguson used to tell me so, but somehow I never took it in."
"So," he said—he was holding his cane in both hands, and as he spoke he struck it across his knees, breaking it with a splintering snap; "so, you'll disinherit me because I married the girl I love?"
"No!" she said, eager to make herself clear; "no, not at all! Don't you understand? (My God! how can I make him understand?) I disinherit you to make a man of you, so that your father won't be ashamed of you—as I am. Yes, I owe it to your father to make a man of you; if it can be done."
She rose, with a deep breath, and stood for an instant silent, her big hands on her hips, her head bent. Then, solemnly: "That is all; you may go, my son."
Blair got on to his feet with a loud laugh—a laugh singularly like her own. "Well," he said, "Iwillgo! And I'll never come back. This lets me out! You've thrown me over: I'll throw you over. I think the law will have something to say to this disinheritance idea of yours; but until then—take a job in your Works? I'll starve first! So help me God, I'll forget that you are my mother; it will be easy enough, for the only womanly thing about you is your dress"—she winced, and flung her hand across her face as if he had struck her. "If I can forget that I am your son, starvation will be a cheap price. We've always hated each other, and it's a relief to come out into the open and say so. No more gush for either of us!" He actually looked like her, as he hurled his insults at her. He picked up his coat and left the room; he was trembling all over.
She, too, began to tremble; she looked after him as he slammed the door, half rose, bent over and lifted the splintered pieces of his cane; then sat down, as if suddenly weak. She put her hands over her face; there was a broken sound from behind them.
That night she came into Nannie's parlor and told her, briefly, that she meant to disinherit Blair. She even tried to explain why, according to her judgment, she must do so. But Nannie, appalled and crying, was incapable of understanding.
"Oh, Mamma, don't—don't say such things! Tell Blair you take it back. You don't mean it; I know you don't! Disinherit Blair? Oh, it isn't fair! Mamma, please forgive him, please—please—"
"My dear," said Sarah Maitland patiently, "it isn't a question of forgiving Blair; I'm too busy trying to forgive myself." Nannie looked at her in bewilderment. "Well, well, we won't go into that," said Mrs. Maitland; "you wouldn't understand. What I came over to say, especially, was that if things can go back into the old ways I shall be glad. I reckon Blair won't want to see me for a while, but if Elizabeth will come to the house as she used to, I sha'n't rake up unpleasant subjects. She is your brother's wife, and shall be treated with respect in my house. Tell her so. 'Night."
But Nannie, with a soft rush across the room, darted in front of her and stood with her back against the door, panting. "Mamma! Wait. You must listen to me!" Her stepmother paused, looking at her with mild astonishment. She was like another creature, a little wild creature standing at bay to protect its young. "You have no right," Nannie said sternly, "you have no right, Mother, to treat Blair so. Listen to me: it was not—not nice in him to run away with Elizabeth; I know that, though I think it was more her fault than his. But it wasn't wicked! He loved her."
"My dear, I haven't said it was wicked," Blair's mother tried to explain; "in fact, I don't think it was; it wasn't big enough to be wicked. No, it was only a dirty, contemptible trick." Nannie cringed back, her hand gripping the knob behind her. "If Blair had been a hard-working man, knocking up against other hard-working men, trying to get food for his belly and clothes for his nakedness, he'd have been ashamed to play such a trick—he'd have been a man. If I had loved him more I'd have made a man of him; I'd have made work real to him, not make-believe, as I did. And I wouldn't have been ashamed of him, as I am now."
"I think," said Nannie, with one of those flashes of astuteness so characteristic of the simple mind, "that a man would fall in love just as much if he were poor as if he were rich; and—and you ought to forgive him, Mamma."
Mrs. Maitland half smiled: "I guess there's no making you understand, Nannie; you are like your own mother. Come! Open this door! I've got to go to work."
But Nannie still stood with her hand gripping the knob. "I must tell you," she said in a low voice: "I must not be untruthful to you, Mamma: I will give Blair all I have myself. The money my father left me shall be his; and—and everything I may ever have shall be his." Then she seemed to melt away before her stepmother, and the door banged softly between them.
"Poor little soul!" Sarah Maitland said to herself, smiling, as she sat down at her desk in the dining-room. "Exactly like her mother! I must give her a present."
The next day she sent for her general manager and told him what course she had taken with her son. He was silent for a moment; then he said, with an effort, "I have no reason to plead Blair's cause, but you're not fair, you know."
"So Nannie has informed me," she said dryly. Then she leaned back in her chair and tapped her desk with one big finger. "Go on; say what you like. It won't move me one hair."
Robert Ferguson said a good deal. He pointed out that she had no right, having crippled Blair, to tell him to run a race. "You've made him what he is. Well, it's done; it can't be undone. But you are rushing to the other extreme; you needn't leave him millions, of course; but leave him a reasonable fortune."
She meditated. "Perhaps a very small allowance, in fact, to make my will sound I may have to. I must find out about that. But while I'm alive, not one cent. I never expected to be glad his father died before he was born, and so didn't leave him anything, but I am. No, sir; my son can earn what he wants or he can go without. I've got to do my best to make up to him for all the harm I've done him, and this is the way to do it. Now, the next thing is to make my willsound. He says he'll contest it"—she gave her grunt of amusement. "Pity I can't see him do it! I'd like the fun of it. It will be cast-iron. If there was any doubt about it, I would realize on every security I own to-morrow and give it all away in one lump, now, while I'm alive—if I had to go hungry myself afterward! Will you ask Howe and Marston to send their Mr. Marston up here to draw up a new will for me? I want to go to work on it to-night. I've thought it out pretty clearly, but it's a big job, a big job! I don't know myself exactly how much I'm worth—how much I'd clean up to, at any rate. But I've got a list of charities on my desk as long as your arm. Nannie will be the residuary legatee; she has some money from her father, too, though not very much. The Works didn't amount to much when my husband was alive; he divided his share between Nannie and me; he—"; she paused, reddening faintly with that strange delicacy that lay hidden under the iron exterior; "he didn't know Blair was coming along. Well, I suppose Nannie will give Blair something. In fact, she as good as warned me. Think of Nannie givingmenotice! But as I say, she won't have any too much herself. And, Mr. Ferguson, I want to tell you something: I'm going to give David some money now. I mean in a year or two. A lot."
Robert Ferguson's face darkened. "David doesn't take money very easily."
Mrs. Maitland did not ask him to explain. She was absorbed in the most tremendous venture of her life—the saving of her son, and her plan for David was comparatively unimportant. She put through the business of her will with extraordinary despatch and precision, and with a ruthlessness toward Blair that took her lawyer's breath away; but she would not hear one word of protest.
"Your business, sir, is to see that this instrument is unbreakable," she said, "not to tell me how to leave my money."
The day after the will was executed she went to Philadelphia. "I am going to see David," she told her general superintendent; "I want to get this affair off my mind so I can settle down to my work, but I've got to square things up first with him. You'll have to run the shop while I'm off!"
She had written to David briefly, without preface or apology:
"DEAR DAVID,—Come and see me at the Girard House Tuesday morning at 7.45 o'clock."
Nearly two months had passed since that dreadful day when David Richie had gone to his mother to be comforted. In his journey back across the mountains his mind and body were tense with anticipation of the letter which he was confident was awaiting him in Philadelphia. He was too restless to lie down in his berth. Once he went into the day coach and wandered up and down the aisle between the rows of huddled and uncomfortable humanity. Sometimes a sleepy passenger, hunched up on a plush seat, would swear at him for jostling a protruding foot, and once a drearily crying baby, propped against a fat and sleeping mother, clutched with dirty fingers at his coat. At that little feeble pull he stopped and looked down at the small, wabbling head, then bent over and lifted the child, straightening its rumpled clothes and cuddling it against his shoulder. The baby gurgled softly in his ear—and instantly he remembered the baby he had seen on the raft the night that he first knew he was in love with Elizabeth. When he went back to the smoking-compartment and sat down, his hands deep in his pockets, his head sunk between his shoulders, his hat pulled down over his eyes, he thought of that raft baby and wondered if it were alive. But such thoughts were only in the moments when his bruised mind could not steady itself on what had happened to him. Most of the time he was saying, over and over, just what he was going to do the next morning: he would get into the station; take a cab; drive to the hospital—a dozen times that night his thumb and finger sought his waistcoat pocket for a bill to hasten the driver of that cab! leap out, run up the stairs to the mail-rack beside the receiving clerk's desk, seize Elizabeth's letter—here the pause would come, the moment when his body relaxed, and something seemed to melt within him: suppose the letter was not there? Very well: back to the cab! another tip; hurry! hurry! hurry! His mother's house, the steps, his key in the lock—again and again his fingers closed on the key-ring in his pocket! letters on the hall table awaiting him—herletter. Then again the relaxing shock: suppose it was not there? The thought turned him sick; after the almost physical recoil from it, came brief moments of longing for his mother's tender arms, or the remembrance of that baby on the raft. But almost immediately his mind would return to the treadmill of expectation; get into the station—take a cab—rush—So it went, on and on, until, toward dawn, through sheer exhaustion he slept.
That next day was never very clear in David's memory. Only one fact stood out distinctly in the mists: there was no letter. Afterward, when he tried to recall that time of discovering that she had not written, he was confused by the vision of his mother smiling down at him from the head of the stairs and calling to an unseen maid, "Bring the doctor a cup of coffee, Mary!" He could remember that he stood sorting out the letters on the hall table, running them over swiftly, then going through them slowly, one by one, scanning each address, each post-mark; then, with shaking hands, shuffling and sorting them like a pack of cards, and going through them again.She had not written. He could remember that he heard the blood beating in his ears, and at the same time his mother's voice: "Bring the doctor a cup of coffee." . . . She had not written.
For months afterward, when he tried to recall that morning, the weak feeling in his knees, the way the letters that were not from her shook in his hand, the sound of his mother's joyous voice—these things would come into his mind together. They were all he could remember of the whole day; the day when the grave closed over his youth.
After that came hours of expectation, of telegrams back and forth: "Have you heard where they are?" And: "No news." Weeks of letters between Robert Ferguson and his mother: "It is what I have always said, she is her mother's daughter." And: "Oh, don't be so hard on her—and on her poor, bad mother. Find out where she is, and go and see her." And: "I will never see her. I'm done with her." But among all the letters, never any letter from Elizabeth to David.
In those first days he seemed to live only when the mail arrived; but his passion of expectation was speechless. Indeed his inarticulateness was a bad factor when it came to recovery from the blow that had been dealt him. At the moment when the wound was new, he had talked to his mother; but almost immediately he retreated into silence. And in silence the worst things in his nature began to grow. Once he tried to write to Elizabeth; the letter commenced with frantic directions to come to his mother "at once!" Then his pen faltered: perhaps she did not care to come? Perhaps she did not wish to leave "him"?—and the unfinished letter was flung into the fire. With suspicion of Elizabeth came a contemptuous distrust of human nature in general, and a shrinking self-consciousness, both entirely foreign to him. He was not only crushed by loss, but he was stinging with the organic mortification of the man who has not been able to keep his woman. It was then that Helena Richie first noticed a harshness in him that frightened her, and a cynical individualism that began to create its own code of morals, or at any rate of responsibilities. But before he shut himself into all this misery, not only of loss, but of suspicion and humiliation, he did say one thing:
"I'm not going to howl; you needn't be afraid. I shall do my work. You won't hear me howl." There were times when she wished he would! She wished it especially when Robert Ferguson wrote that Elizabeth and Blair were going to return to Mercer, that they would live at the River House, and that it was evident that the "annulment," to which at first David's mind had turned so incessantly, was not being thought of. "I understand from Miss White (of course I haven't heard from or written to Mrs. Blair Maitland) that she does not wish to take any steps for a separation," Elizabeth's uncle wrote.
"Hemustsee her when she gets back," Helena Richie said, softly; but David said nothing at all. At that moment his suspicion became a certainty; yes, she had loved the fellow! It had been something else than one of her fits of fury! It had beenlove. … No wonder, with this poison working in him, that he shut even his mother out of his heart. At times the pitying tenderness of her eyes was intolerable to him; he thought he saw the same pity in everybody's eyes; he felt sure that every casual acquaintance was thinking of what had happened to him: he said to himself he wished to God people would mind their business, and let him mind his! "I'm not howling," he told himself. He was like a man whose skin has been taken off; he winced at everything, but all the same, he did his work in the hospital with exhausting thoroughness; to be sure he gave his patients nothing but technical care. Whether they lived or died was nothing to David; whether he himself lived or died was still less to him—except, perhaps, that in his own case he had a preference. But work is the only real sedative for grief, and the suffering man worked himself callous, so he had dull moments of forgetfulness, or at any rate of comparative indifference, Yet when he received that note from Mrs. Maitland summoning him to her hotel he flinched under the callousness. However, at a little before eight o'clock on Tuesday morning, he knocked at her bedroom door.
The Girard House knew Sarah Maitland's eccentricities as well as her credit; she always asked for a cheap room, and was always put up under the roof. She had never learned to use her money for her own comfort, so it never occurred to her to have a parlor for herself; her infrequent callers were always shown up here to the top of the house.
On this especial morning she had come directly from the train, and when David arrived she was pacing up and down the narrow room, haggard and disheveled from a night in the sleeping-car; she had not even taken off her bonnet. She turned at his step and stopped short in her tracks—he was so thin, so grim, so old! "Well, David," she said; then hesitated, for there was just an instant's recoil in David. He had not realized the fury that would leap up and scorch him like a flame at the sight of Blair's mother.
"David, you'll—you'll shake hands with me, won't you?" she said timidly. At the sound of her voice his anger died out; only the cold ashes of misery were left.
"Why, Mrs. Maitland!" he protested, and took her big, beautiful, unsteady hand in both of his.
For a moment neither of them spoke. It was a dark, cold morning; far below them stretched the cheerless expanse of snow-covered roofs; from countless chimneys smoke was rising heavily to the lowering sky, and soot was sifting down; the snow on the window-sill was speckled with black. Below, in the courtyard of the hotel, ice-carts rumbled in and out, and milk-cans were banged down on the cobblestones; a dull day, an empty sky, a futile interview, up here in this wretched little room under the eaves. David wondered how soon he could get away.
"David," Mrs. Maitland said, "I know I can't make it up to you in any way. But I'd like to."
"You are very kind," he said coldly, "but we won't go into that, if you please, Mrs. Maitland."
"No, we won't talk about it," she said, with evident relief; "but David, I came to Philadelphia to say that I want you to let me be of help to you in some way."
"Help to me?" he repeated, surprised. "I really don't see—"
"Why," she explained, "you want to begin to practise; you don't want to drudge along at a hospital under some big man's thumb. I want to set you up!"
David smiled involuntarily, "But the hospital is my greatest chance, Mrs. Maitland. I'm lucky to have these three years there. But it's kind in you to think of giving me a hand."
"Nonsense!" she said, quite missing the force of what he said. "You ought to put out your own shingle. David, you can have all the money you need; it's yours to take."
David started as if she had struck him: "yours to take." Oh, that had been said to him before! "No, I can't, I couldn't take money! You don't understand. I couldn't take money from—anybody!" he said with a gasp.
She looked at him helplessly, then stretched out her empty hands. "David," she said pitifully, "money is all I've got. Won't you take it?" The tears were on her cheeks and the big, empty hands shook. "I haven't got anything but money, David," she entreated.
His face quivered; he said some broken, protesting word; then suddenly he put his arms round her and kissed her. Her gray head, in the battered old bonnet, rested a moment on his shoulder, and he felt her sob. "Oh, David," she said, "what shall I do? He—he hates me. He said the only womanly thing about me was … Oh, can I make a man of him, do you think?" She entirely forgot David's wrongs in her cry for comfort, a cry that somehow penetrated to his benumbed heart, for in his effort to comfort her he was himself vaguely comforted, For a minute he held her tightly in his arms until he was sure he could command himself. When he let her go, she put her hand up in a bewildered way and touched her cheek; the boy had kissed her! But by that time she was able to go back to the purpose that had brought her here; she told him to sit down and then began, dogmatically, to insist upon her plan.
David smiled a little as he explained that, quite apart from any question of income, the hospital experience was valuable to him. "I wouldn't give it up, Mrs. Maitland, if I had a million dollars!" he said, with a convincing exaggeration that was like the old David. "But it's mighty kind in you. Please believe I do appreciate your kindness."
"No kindness about it," she said impatiently; "my family is in your debt, David." At which he hardened instantly.
"Well," she said; and was silent for awhile, biting her finger and looking down at her boots. Suddenly, with a grunt of satisfaction, she began to hit the arm of her chair softly with her closed fist. "I've got it!" she said. "I suppose you wouldn't refuse the trusteeship of a fund, one of these days, to build a hospital? Near my Works, maybe? I'm all the time having accidents. I remember once getting a filing in my eye, and—and somebody suggested a doctor to take it out. A doctor for a filing! I guessyou'dhave been equal to that job—young as you are? Still, it wouldn't be bad to have a doctor round, even if he was young, if anything serious happened. Yes, a hospital near the Works—first for my men and then for outsiders. It is a good idea! I suppose you wouldn't refuse to run such a hospital, and draw your wages, like a man?"
"Well, no, I wouldn't refuse that," he said, smiling. It was many weeks since David had smiled so frankly. A strange thing had happened in that moment when he had forgotten himself in trying to comfort Blair's mother—his corroding suspicion of Elizabeth seemed to melt away! In its place was to come, a little later, the dreadful but far more bearable pain of enduring remorse for his own responsibility for Elizabeth's act. But just then, when he tried to comfort that poor mother, there was only a breaking of the ice about his own heart in a warm gush of pity for her…. "I don't see that there's much chance of funds for hospitals coming my way," he said, smiling.
"You never can tell," said Mrs. Maitland.