The morning Blair heard his sentence from his mother, Elizabeth spent in her parlor in the hotel, looking idly out of the window at the tawny current of the river covered with its slipping sheen of oil. Steamboats were pushing up and down or nosing into the sand to unload their cargoes; she could hear the creak of hawsers, the bang of gangplanks thrown across to the shore, the cries and songs of stevedores sweating and toiling on the wharf that was piled with bales of cotton, endless blue barrels of oil, and black avalanches of coal. She did not think of Blair's ordeal; she was not interested in it. She was not interested in anything. Sometimes she thought vaguely of the letter which had never been and would never be written to David, and sometimes of that message from him which she had not yet been able to hear from Miss White's lips; but for the most part she did not think of anything. She was tired of thinking. She sat huddled in a chair, staring dully out of the window; she was like a captive bird, moping on its perch, its poor bright head sinking down into its tarnished feathers. She was so absorbed in the noise and confusion of traffic that she did not hear a knock. When it was repeated, she rose listlessly to answer it, but before she reached the door it opened, and her uncle entered. Elizabeth backed away silently. He followed her, but for a moment he was silent, too—it seemed to Robert Ferguson as if youth had been wiped out of her face. Under the shock of the change in her, he found for a moment nothing to say. When he spoke his voice trembled—with anger, she thought. "Mrs. Richie wrote me that I must come and see you. I told her I would have nothing to do with you."
Elizabeth sat down without speaking.
"I don't see what good it does to come," he said, staring at the tragic face. "Of course you know my opinion of you." She nodded. "So why should I come?"
"I don't know."
"Well, I—I'm here. And you may come home sometimes, if you want to.Miss White is willing to see you, I believe."
"Thank you, Uncle Robert."
As she spoke the door of the elevator in the hall clanged shut, and the next moment Blair entered. He carried a loose twist of white paper in his arms, and when, at the sight of Robert Ferguson, he tossed it down on the table it fell open, and the fragrance of roses overflowed into the room. Raging from the lash of his mother's tongue, he had rushed back to the hotel to tell Elizabeth what had happened, but in spite of his haste he stopped on the way to get her some flowers. He did not think of them now, nor even of his own wrongs, for here was Robert Ferguson attacking her! "Mr. Ferguson," he said, quietly, but reddening to his temples, "of course you know that in the matter of Elizabeth's hasty marriage I am the only one to blame. But though you blame me, I hope you will believe that I will do my best to make her happy."
[Illustration: "OF COURSE YOU KNOW MY OPINION OF YOU"]
"I believe," said Elizabeth's uncle, "that you are a damned scoundrel." He took up his hat and began to smooth the nap on his arm; then he turned to Elizabeth—and in his heart he damned Blair Maitland more vigorously than before: the lovely color had all been washed away by tears, the amber eyes were dull, even the brightness of her hair seemed dimmed. It was as if something had breathed upon the sparkle and clearness; it was like seeing her through a mist. So, barking fiercely to keep his lip from shaking, he said: "And I hope you understand, Elizabeth, I have no respect for you, either."
She looked up with faint surprise. "Why, of course not."
"I insist," Blair said, peremptorily, "that you address my wife with respect or leave her presence."
Mr. Ferguson put his hat down on the table, not noticing that the roses spotted it with their wet petals, and stared at him. "Well, upon my word!" he said. "Do you think I needyouto instruct me in my duty to my niece?" Then, with sudden, cruel insight, he added, "David Richie's mother has done that." As he spoke he bent over and kissed Elizabeth. Instantly, with a smothered cry, she clung to him. There was just a moment when, her head on his breast, he felt her soft hair against his cheek—and a minute later, she felt something wet on her cheek. They had both forgotten Blair. He slunk away and left them alone.
Robert Ferguson straightened up with a jerk. "Where—where—where's my hat!" he said, angrily; "she said I was hard. She doesn't know everything!" But Elizabeth caught his hand and held it to her lips.
When Blair came back she was quite gentle to him; yes, the roses were very pretty; yes, very sweet. "Thank you, Blair," she said; but she did not ask him about his interview with his mother; she had forgotten it. He took the stab of her indifference without wincing; but suddenly he was comforted, for when he began to tell her what his mother was going to do, she was sharply aroused. She lifted her head—that spirited head which in the old days had never drooped; and looked at him in absolute dismay. Blair was being punished for a crime that was more hers than his!
"Oh," she said, "it isn't fair! I'm the one to blame; it isn't fair!"
The indignation in her voice made his heart leap. "Of course it isn't fair. But Elizabeth, I would pay any price to know that you were my wife." He tried to take her hand, but she pushed him aside and began to pace about the room.
"It isn't right!" she said; "she sha'n't treat you so!" She was almost like the old, furious Elizabeth in that gust of distress at her own responsibility for an injustice to him. But Blair dared to believe that her anger was for his sake, and to have her care that he should lose money made the loss almost welcome. He felt, through his rage at his mother, a thrill of purpose, a desire to amount to something, for Elizabeth's sake—which, if she could have known it, might have comforted Sarah Maitland, sitting in her dreary bedroom, her face hidden in her hands.
"Dearest, what do I care for her or her money?" he cried out; "I have you!"
Elizabeth was not listening to him; she was thinking what she could do to save him from his mother's displeasure. "I'll go and see her, and tell her it was my fault," she said to herself. She had a vague feeling that if she could soften Mrs. Maitland she and Blair would be quits.
She did not tell him of her purpose, but the mere having a purpose made her face alert, and it seemed to him that she identified herself with him and his interests. His eager denial of her self-accusation that she had injured him, his ardent impulse to protect her from any remorse, to take all the blame of a possible "mistake" on his own shoulders, brought an astonishing unselfishness into his face. But Elizabeth would not let him blame himself.
"It was all my fault," she insisted. "I was out of my head!"
At that he frowned sharply—"when you are eaten up with jealousy," his mother had said. Oh, he did not need his mother to tell him what jealousy meant: Elizabeth would not have married him if she had not been 'out of her head'! "She still thinks of him," he said to himself, as he had said many, many times in these two months of marriage—months of alternate ecstasies and angers, of hopes and despairs. As for her indignation at the way he had been treated, it meant nothing personal, after all. In his disappointment he went out of the room in hurt silence and left her to her thoughts of "him." This was the way most of their talks ended.
But Elizabeth's indignation did not end. In the next two days, while Mrs. Maitland was in Philadelphia making her naive offer to David, she brooded over the situation. "I won't have Blair punished for my sins," she said to herself; "I won't have it!" Her revolt at an injustice was a faint echo of her old violence. She had no one to talk to about it; Nannie was too shy to come to see her, and Miss White too tearful to be consulted. But she did not need advice; she knew what she must do. The afternoon following Mrs. Maitland's return from Philadelphia she went to see her. . . . She found Nannie in the parlor, sitting forlornly at her drawing-board. Nannie had heard, of course, from Blair, the details of that interview with his mother, and in her scared anger she planned many ways of "making Mamma nice to Blair," but she had not thought of Elizabeth's assistance. She took it for granted that Elizabeth would not have the courage to "face Mamma."
"I have come to see Mrs. Maitland," Elizabeth said. "Is she in the dining-room?"
Nannie quailed. "Oh, Elizabeth! How do you dare? But do go; and make her forgive him. She wouldn't listen to me. And after all, Elizabeth, you know thatyou—"
"Yes, I'm the one," Elizabeth said, briefly; and went swiftly across the hall. She stood for a moment by Sarah Maitland's desk unnoticed. "Mrs. Maitland!" Elizabeth's voice was peremptory. Blair's mother put her pen down and looked up over her spectacles. "Oh—Elizabeth?"
"Mrs. Maitland, I came to tell you that you must not be angry at Blair.It was all my fault."
"I guess, as I told your uncle, it was the pot and the kettle,Elizabeth."
"No, no! I was angry, and I was—willing."
"Do you think it excuses Blair if you did throw yourself at his head?"
Elizabeth, who had thought that no lesser wound than the one she had dealt herself could hurt her, flinched. But she did not defend herself. "I think it does excuse him to some extent, and that is why I have come to ask you to forgive him."
"Oh," said Mrs. Maitland, and paused; then with most disconcerting suddenness, sneezed violently and blew her nose; "bless you, I've forgiven him."
"Then," said Elizabeth, with a gasp of relief, "you won't disinherit him!"
"Disinherit him? What's that got to do with forgiving him? Of course I will disinherit him,—or rather, I have. My will is made; signed, sealed. I've left him an income of a thousand dollars a year. That will keep you from starvation. If Blair is worth more he'll earn more. If he isn't, he can live on a thousand dollars—as better men than he have done. Or he can go to the workhouse;—your uncle can take care of you. I reckon I've paid taxes in this county long enough to entitle my son to go to the workhouse if he wants to."
"But Mrs. Maitland," Elizabeth protested, hotly, "it isn't fair, just because I—I let him marry me, to punish him—"
Mrs. Maitland struck her fist on the arm of her chair. "You don't know what you are talking about! I am not 'punishing' him; that's the last thing I was thinking of. If there's any 'punishing' going on, I'm the one that's getting it. Listen, Elizabeth, and I'll try to explain—you look as if you had some sense, so maybe you can understand. Nannie couldn't; she has no brains. And Blair wouldn't—I guess he has no heart. But this is how it is: Blair has always been a loafer—that's why he behaved as he did to you. Satan finds some mischief still, you know! So I'm cutting off his allowance, now, and leaving him practically penniless in my will, to stop his loafing. To make him work! He'll have to work, to keep from starving; and work will make a man of him. As for you, you've done an abominable thing, Elizabeth; but it'sdone! Now, turn to, and pay for your whistle: do your duty! Use your influence to induce Blair to work. That's the best way to make up for the injury you've done him. As for the injury he's done you, I hope the Lord will send you some children to make up for that. Now, my—my dear, clear out! clear out! I've got my work to do."
Elizabeth went back to Nannie's parlor, stinging under her mother-in-law's candor. That she was able to feel it showed that her apathy was wearing off. At any rate, the thought of the "injury" she had done Blair, which she took to be the loss of fortune, strengthened her sometimes wavering resolution to stay with him. She did not tell him of this interview, or of its effect upon her, but she told her uncle—part of it. She went to him that night, and sitting down on a hassock at his feet, her head against his knee, she told him how Blair was to be punished for her crime—she called it a crime. Then, in a low voice, she told him, as well as she could, just how the crime had been committed.
"I guessed how it was," he said. And they were silent for a while. Then he broke out, huskily: "I don't care a hang about Blair or his mother's will. He deserves all he gets—or won't get, rather! But, Elizabeth, if—if you want to be free—"
"Uncle Robert, what I want isn't of any importance any more."
"I talked it over as a supposititious case with Howe the other day, and he said that if Blair would agree, possibly—mind you, onlypossibly;—a divorce could be arranged."
She sunk her head in her hands; then answered in a whisper: "Uncle, I did it. I've got to see it through."
After a minute's silence he put his hand on her soft hair. "Bully for you, Elizabeth," he said, brokenly. Then, to escape from the emotional demand of the moment, he began to bark: "You are outrageously careless about money. How on earth a girl, who has been brought up by a man, and so might be expected to have some sense in such matters, can be so careless, I don't understand! You've never asked me about that legacy. I've put the money in the bank. Your bank-book is there on my table."
Elizabeth was silent. That money! Oh, how could she ever touch it? But in view of Mrs. Maitland's decision it was perfectly obvious that ultimately she would have to touch it. "Blair can live on it." she thought—it was a relief to her to stab herself with words;—"Blair'can live on it for two years.'"
Of course, after a while, as time passed, all the people who had been caught in the storm the two reckless creatures had let loose, shook down again into their grooves, and the routine of living went on. There are few experiences more bewildering to the unhappy human heart than this of discovering that things do go on. Innumerable details of the unimportant flood in and fill up the cracks and breaches that grief has made in the structure of life; we continue to live, and even to find life desirable!
Miss White had been the first to realize this; her love for Elizabeth, being really (poor old maid!) maternal, was independent of respect, so almost the next day she had been able to settle down with complete happiness into the old habit of loving. Blair's mother was the next to get into the comfortable track of routine; the very day after she came back from that trip to Philadelphia she plunged into business. She did, however, pause long enough to tell her superintendent how she was going to "even things up with David."
"I am going to give him a lot of money for a hospital," she said. "I'm not going to leave it to him; I'm only sixty-two, and I don't propose to die yet awhile. When I do Blair will probably contest the will. He can't break it. It's cast-iron. But I don't want David to wait until I'm dead and gone, and Blair has given up trying to break my will, and the estate is settled. I'm going to give it to him before I die. In a year or two, maybe. I'm realizing on securities now—why don't I give him the securities? My dear sir, what does a doctor know about securities? Doctors have no more financial sense than parsons—at least, not much more," she added, with relenting justice. "No; David is to have his money, snug in the bank—that new bank, on Federal Street. I told the president I was rolling up a nest-egg for somebody—I could see he thought it was for Blair! I didn't enlighten him, because I don't want the thing talked about. When I get the amount I want, I'll hand Master David a bank certificate of deposit, and with all his airs about accepting money, he won't be able to help himself! He'll have to build his hospital, and draw his wages. It will make him independent of his outside customers, you see. Yes, I guess I can whip the devil round the stump as well as the next person!" she said, bridling with satisfaction. So, with an interest and a hope, Sarah Maitland, like Miss White, found life worth living.
With David's mother the occupation of trying to help David made living desirable. It also made her a little more remote from other people's interests. Poor Robert Ferguson discovered this to his cost: it had occurred to him that now, when they were all so miserable, she might perhaps "be willing." But she was not. When, a day or two after he had gone to see Elizabeth, he went to Philadelphia, Mrs. Richie was tremulously glad to see him, so that she might pour out her fears about David and ask advice on this point and that. "Being a man, you understand better than I do," she acknowledged meekly; then broke down and cried for her boy's pain. And when the kind, barking old friend, himself blinking behind misty spectacles, said, "Oh, now, my dear, don't cry," she was so comforted that she cried some more, and for a single minute found her head most unexpectedly on his shoulder. But all the same, she was not "willing."
"Don't ask me, dear Mr. Ferguson," she said, wiping her eyes. "We are such good friends, and I'm so fond of you, don't let's spoil it all."
"I believe you are fond of me," he said, "and that is why it's so unreasonable in you not to marry me. I don't ask—impossibilities. But you do like me; and I love you, you dear, good, foolish woman;—so good that you couldn't see badness when it lived next door to you!"
"Don't be so hard on people who do wrong," she pleaded; "you make me afraid of you when you are so hard."
"I'm not hard; Elizabeth is her mother's daughter; that's all." "Oh!" she cried, with sudden passion, "that poor mother! Can't you forgive her?"
"No," he said; "I can't."
"You ought to forgive Elizabeth, at any rate," she insisted, faintly; "and you ought to go and see her."
"Have you forgiven her?" he parried.
She hesitated. "I think I have. I've tried to; but I don't understand her. I can understand doing something—wicked, for love; but not for hate."
He gave his meager laugh. "If forgiveness was a question of understanding, I'm afraid you'd be as hard on her mother as I am."
"On the contrary," she said, vehemently, "if I forgive Elizabeth, it is for her mother's sake." Then she broke out, almost with tears: "Oh, how can you be so unkind as not to go and see the child? The time we need our friends most is when we have done wrong!"
He was silent.
"Sometimes," she said, "sometimes I wish you would do something wrong yourself, just to learn to be pitiful!"
"You wish I would do wrong? I'malwaysdoing wrong! I did wrong when I growled so. But—" he paused; "I believe Ihaveseen Elizabeth," he said sheepishly; "I believe we kissed and made up." At which even poor, sad Helena laughed.
But these two old friends discovered, just as Miss White and Blair's mother had discovered, that life was not over for them, because the habit of friendship persisted. And by and by, nearly a year later, David—even David! began to find a reason for living, in his profession. The old, ardent interest which used to make his eyes dim with pity, or his heart leap with joy at giving help, was gone; he no longer cared to cuddle the babies he might help to bring into the world; and a death-bed was an irritating failure rather than any more human emotion. So far as other people's hopes and fears went, he was bitter or else callous, but he began to forget his humiliation, and he lost his self-consciousness in the serious purpose of success. He did not talk to his mother of the catastrophe of his life; but he did talk of other things, and with the old friendly intimacy. She was his only intimate friend.
Thus, gradually, the little world that loved Elizabeth and Blair fell back, after the storm of pain and mortification, into the merciful commonplace of habit and of duty to be done.
But for Elizabeth and Blair there was no going back; they had indeed fired the Ephesian dome! The past now, to Elizabeth, meant David's message,—to which, finally, she had been able to listen: "Tell her I understand; ask her to forgive me." In Blair's past there was nothing real to which he could return; for him the reality of life had begun with Love; and notwithstanding the bite of shame, the battle with his sense of chivalry, that revolted (now and then) at the thought of holding an unwilling woman as his wife, and the constant dull ache of jealousy, he had madly happy moments that first year of his marriage. Elizabeth was his! That was enough for him. His circumstances, which would have caused most men a good deal of anxiety, were, thanks to his irresponsibility, very little in his thought. There was still a balance at his bank which made it possible, without encroaching on Elizabeth's capital—which he swore he would not do—to live at the old River House "fairly decently." He was, however, troubled because he could not propitiate Elizabeth with expensive gifts; and almost immediately after that interview with his mother, he began to think about an occupation, merely that he might have more money to spend on his wife. "If I could only buy her some jewels!" he used to say to himself, with a worried look. "I want to get you everything you want, my darling," he told her once.
She made no answer; and he burst out in sudden angry pain: "You don't care what I do!" Still she did not speak. "You—you are thinking of him still," he said between set teeth. This constant corroding thought did not often break through his studied purpose to win her by his passionately considerate tenderness; when it did, it always ended in bitterness for him.
"Of course I am thinking of him," she would say, dully; "I never stop thinking of him."
"I believe you would go back to him now!" he flung at her
"Go back to him? I would go back to him on my hands and knees if he would take me."
Words like that left him speechless with misery; and yet he was happy—she was his wife!
When his bank account began to dwindle, he found it easy to borrow; the fact that he was the son of his mother (and consequently his bills had always been paid) was sufficient collateral. That he borrowed at a ruinous interest was a matter of indifference to a man who, having never earned a dollar, had not the slightest idea of the value of a dollar. At the end of the first year of his marriage, jewels for Elizabeth seemed less important to him than her bread and butter; and it was then that with real anxiety he tried to find something to do. Again "Sarah Maitland's son" found doors open to him which the ordinary man, inexperienced and notoriously idle, would have found closed; but none of them offered what he thought a sufficient salary; and by and by he realized that very soon he would be obliged, as he expressed it, "to sponge on Elizabeth"; for, reckless as he was, he knew that his borrowing capacity must come to an end. When the "sponging" finally began, he was acutely uncomfortable, which was certainly to his credit. At any rate, it proved that he was enough of a man to be miserable under such conditions. When a husband who is young and vigorous lives idly on his wife's money one of two things happens: he is miserable, or he degenerates into contentment. Blair was not degenerating—consequently he was honestly wretched.
His attempts to find something to do were not without humor to his mother, who kept herself informed, of course, of all his "business" ventures. "What! he wants the Dalzells to take him on? What for? Errand-boy? That's all he's good for. But I'm afraid two dollars and a half a week won't buy him many china beetles!" When Blair essayed a broker's office she even made an ancient joke to her superintendent: "If Blair could buy himself for what he is worth to Haines, and sell himself for what he thinks he's worth, he might make a fair profit,—and pick up some more old masters."
But she was impatient for him to get through with all this nonsense of dilly-dallying at making a living by doing things he knew nothing about! How soon would he get down to hard-pan and knock at her door at the Works and ask for a job, man-fashion? "That's what I want to know!" she used to tell Mr. Ferguson, who was silent. He did not want to know anything about Blair; all he cared for was to help his girl bear the burden of her folly. He called it "folly" now, and Miss White used to nod her old head in melancholy agreement. It was only to Robert Ferguson that Mrs. Maitland betrayed her constant anxiety about her son; and it was that anxiety which made her keenly sensitive to Elizabeth's deepening depression. For as the excitement of sacrifice and punishment wore off, and the strain of every-day living began to tell, Elizabeth's depression was very marked. She was never angry now—she had not the energy for anger; and she was never unkind to Blair; perhaps her own pain made her pitiful of his. But she was always, as Cherry-pie expressed it, "under a cloud." Mrs. Maitland, watching her, wondered if she was moody because funds were getting low. How intensely she hoped that was the reason! "I reckon that money of hers is coming to an end," she used to think, triumphantly—for she had known, through Nannie, just when Blair had reached the point at which he had been obliged to use his wife's capital. Whenever she saw Elizabeth—who for want of anything better to do came constantly to see Nannie: she would drop a word or two which she thought might go back to her son: "We need an extra hand in the office." Or: "How would Blair like to travel for the Works? We can always take on a traveling man."
She never had the chance to drop her hints to Blair himself. In vain Nannie urged upon her brother her old plea: "Be nice to Mamma. Do come and see her. Everything will be all right again if you will only come and see her!" Nothing moved him. If his mother could be firm, so could he; he was never more distinctly her son than in his obstinacy.
"If she alters her will," he said, briefly, "I will alter my behavior.She's not my mother so long as she casts off her son."
Mrs. Maitland seemed to age very much that second year. Her business was still a furious interest; she stormed her way through every trade obstacle, occasionally bargaining with her conscience by increasing her donations to foreign missions; but there was this change of suddenly apparent age. Instead of the old, clear-eyed, ruthless joy in work, there was a look of furtive waiting; an anxiety of hope deferred, that grooved itself into her face. And somewhere in the spring of the third year, the hoped-for moment approached—necessity began to offer its beneficent opportunity to her son. In spite of experiments in prudence in borrowing and in earning, the end of Elizabeth's money was in sight. When the end was reached, there would be nothing for Blair Maitland but surrender.
"Shall I cave in now?" he vacillated; he was wandering off alone across the bridge, fairly aching with indecision, and brooding miserably, not only over the situation, but over his helplessness to buy his way into Elizabeth's affections. "She ought to have a carriage; it is preposterous for my wife to be going round in streetcars. If I could give her a carriage and a pair of horses!" But of course it was ridiculous to think of things like that. He could not buy a carriage for Elizabeth out of her own money—besides, her money was shrinking alarmingly. It was this passionate desire to propitiate her, as well as the recognition of approaching necessities, that brought him to the point where he saw capitulation ahead of him. "I wish I could make up my mind," he thought, wearily. "Well, if I don't get something to do pretty soon, it will be made up for me,—I'llhaveto eat crow! I'll have to go to the Works and ask for a job. But I swear I won't speak to—her!It is damnable to have to cave in; I'd starve before I'd do it, if it wasn't for Elizabeth."
But before the time for eating crow arrived, something happened.
Mrs. Maitland and Nannie were having their supper at the big, cluttered office table in the shabby dining-room—shabbier now by twenty years than when Blair first expressed his opinion of it. In the midst of the silent meal Sarah Maitland's eye fell on her stepdaughter, and hardened into attention. Nannie looked pale, she thought; and frowned slightly. It occurred to her that the girl might be lonely in the long evenings over there in the parlor, with nothing to do but read foolish little stories, or draw foolish little pictures, or embroider foolish little tidies and things. "What a life!" she said to herself; it was a shame Blair did not come in and cheer his sister up. Yes; Nannie was certainly very solitary. What a pity David Richie had no sense! "Now that he can't get Elizabeth, nothing could be more sensible," she said to herself; then sighed. Young men were never very sensible in regard to matrimony. "I suppose I ought to do something myself to cheer her up," she thought—a little impatiently, for really it was rather absurd to expect a person of her quality to cheer Nannie! Still, she might talk to her. Of course they had only one topic in common:
"Seen your brother lately?"
"No, Mamma. He went East day before yesterday."
"Has he found anything to do?" This was the usual weary question;Nannie gave the usual scared answer:
"Ithinknot; not yet. He is going to look up something in New York,Elizabeth says."
"Tell Elizabeth I will take him on at the Works, whenever he is ready to come. His belly will bring him to it yet!" she ended, with the old, hopeful belief that has comforted parents ever since the fatted calf proved the correctness of the expectation. Nannie sighed. Mrs. Maitland realized that she was not "cheering" her very much. "You ought to amuse yourself," she said, severely; "how do you amuse yourself?"
"I—draw," Nannie managed to say; she really could not think of any other amusement.
Then her stepmother had an inspiration: "Would you like to come over to the furnace and see the night cast? It's quite a sight, people say."
Nannie was dumfounded at the attention. Mamma offering to take her to the Works! To be sure, it was the last thing on earth she would choose to do, but if her stepmother asked her, of course she could not say no. She said "yes," reluctantly enough, but Mrs. Maitland did not detect the reluctance; she was too pleased with herself at having thought of some way of entertaining the girl.
"Get your bonnet on, get your bonnet on!" she commanded, in high good humor. And Nannie, quailing at the thought of the Works at night—"it's dreadful enough in the daytime," she said to herself—put on her hat, in trembling obedience. "Yes," Mrs. Maitland said, as she tramped down the cinder path toward the mills, Nannie almost running at her heels—"yes, the cast is a pretty sight, people say. Your brother once said that it ought to be painted. Well, I suppose there are people who care for pictures," she said, incredulously. "I know I'm $5,000 out of pocket on account of a picture," she ended, with a grim chuckle.
As they were crossing the Yards, the cavernous glooms of the Works, under the vast stretch of their sheet-iron roofs, were lighted for dazzling moments by the glow of molten metal and the sputtering roar of flames from the stacks; a network of narrow-gauge tracks spread about them, and the noises from the mills were deafening. Nannie clutched nervously at Mrs. Maitland's arm, and her stepmother grunted with amusement. "Hold on to me," she shouted—she had to shout to make herself heard; "there's nothing to hurt you. Why, I could walk around here with my eyes shut!"
Nannie clung to her frantically; if she protested, the soft flutter of her voice did not reach Mrs. Maitland's ears. A few steps farther brought them into the comparative silence of the cast-house of the furnace, and here they paused while Sarah Maitland spoke to one of the keepers. Only the furnace itself was roofed; beyond it the stretch of molded sand was arched by the serene and starlit night.
"That's the pig bed out there," Mrs. Maitland explained, kindly; "see, Nannie? Those cross-trenches in the sand they call sows; the little hollows on the side are the pigs. When they tap the furnace, the melted iron will flow down into 'em; understand?"
"Mamma, I'd—I'd like to go home," poor Nannie managed to say; "it scares me!"
Mrs. Maitland looked at her in astonishment. "Scares you? What scares you?"
"It's so—dreadful," Nannie gasped.
"You don't suppose I'd bring you anywhere where you could get hurt?" her stepmother said, incredulously. She was astonished to the point of being pained. How could Herbert's girl be such a fool? She remembered that Blair used to call his sister the "'fraid-cat." "Good name," she thought, contemptuously. She made no allowance for the effect of this scene of night and fire, of stupendous shadows and crashing noises, upon a little bleached personality, which for all these years, had lived in the shadow of a nature so dominant and aggressive that, quite unconsciously, it sucked the color and the character out of any temperament feebler than itself. Sarah Maitland frowned, and said roughly, "Oh, you can go home, if you want to; Mr. Parks!" she called to the foreman; "just walk back to the house, if you please, with my daughter;" then she turned on her heel and went up to the furnace.
Nannie, clutching Parks's hand, stumbled out into the darkness. "It's perfectly awful!" she confided to the good-natured man, when he left her at her back door.
"Oh, you get used to it," he said, kindly. "You'd 'a knowed," he told one of his workmen afterward, "that there wasn't hide nor hair of her that belonged to the Old One. A slip of a thing, and scared to death of the noise."
The "Old One," after Nannie had gone, poked about for a moment or two,—"she noses into things, to save two cents," her men used to say, with reluctant admiration of the ruthless shrewdness that was instant to detect their shortcomings; then she went down the slight incline from the furnace hearth to the open stretch of molding-sand; there was a pile of rusty scrap at one side, and here, in the soft April darkness under the stars, she seated herself, looking absently at the furnace and the black, gnome-like figures of the helpers. She was thinking just what Parks had thought, that Nannie had none of her blood in her. "Afraid!" said Sarah Maitland. Well, Blair had never been afraid, she would say that for him; he was a fool, and pig-headed, and a loafer; but he wasn't a coward. He had even thought it fine, that scene of power, where civilization made itself before his very eyes! When would he think it fine enough to come in and go to work? Come in, and take his part in making civilization? Then she noticed the bending figure of the keeper opening the notch of the furnace; instantly there was a roar of sparks, and a blinding white gush of molten iron flowing like water down into the sand runner. The sudden, fierce illumination drowned the stars overhead, and brought into clear relief her own figure, sitting there on the pile of scrap watching the flowing iron. Tiny blue flames of escaping gas danced and shimmered on its ineffable rippling brightness, that cooled from dazzling snow to rose, then to crimson, and out in the sand, to glowing gray. Blair had called it "beautiful." Well, it was a pretty sight! She wished she had told him that she herself thought it pretty; but the fact was, it had never struck her before. "I suppose I don't notice pretty things very much," she thought, in some surprise. "Well, I've never had time for foolishness. Too busy making money for Blair." She sighed; after all, he wasn't going to have the money. She had been heaping up riches, and had not known who should gather them. She had been too busy to see pretty things. And why? That orphan asylums and reformatories—and David Richie's hospital—should have a few extra thousands! A month ago the fund she was making for David had reached the limit she had set for it, and only to-day she had brought the bank certificate of deposit home with her. She had felt a little glow of satisfaction when she locked it into the safe in her desk; she liked the consciousness of a good job finished. She was going to summon the youngster to Mercer, and tell him how he was to administer the fund; and if he put on any of his airs and graces about accepting money, she would shut him up mighty quick! "I'll write him to-morrow, if I've time," she had said. At the moment, the sense of achievement had exhilarated her; yet now, as she sat there on the heap of scrap, bending a pliant boring between her fingers, her pillar of fire roaring overhead from the chimneys of the furnaces, the achievement seemed flat enough. Why should she, to build a hospital for another woman's son, have worked so hard that she had never had time to notice the things her own son called "pretty"? Not his china beetles, of course, or truck like that; but the shimmering flow of her iron,—or even that picture, for which she was out of pocket $5,000. "I can see you might call it pretty, if it hadn't cost so much," she admitted. Yes, she had worked, she told herself, "as hard as a man," to earn money for Blair!—only to make him idle and to have him say that thing about her clothes which Goose Molly had said before he was born. "Wonder if I've been a fool?" she ruminated.
It was at that moment that she noticed, at one side of the furnace, between two bricks of the hearth, a little puff of white vapor; instantly she leaped, shouting, to her feet. But it was too late. The molten iron, seeping down through some crack in the furnace, creeping, creeping, beneath the bricks of the pavement, had reached some moisture…The explosion, the clouds of scalding steam, the terror of the flowing, scattering fire, drowned her voice and hid her frantic gestures of warning….
"Killed?" she said, furiously, as some one helped her up from the scrap-heap against which she had been hurled; "of course not! I don't get killed." Then suddenly the appalling confusion was dominated by her voice:
"Look after those men."
She stood there in the center of the horror, reeling a little once or twice, holding her skirt up over her left arm, and shouting her quick orders. "Hurt?" she said again to a questioning helper. "I don't know. I haven't time to find out. That man there is alive! Get a doctor!" She did not leave the Works until two badly burned men had been carried away, and two dead bodies lifted out of the reek of steam and the spatter of half-chilled metal. Then, still holding her skirt over her arm, she went alone, in the darkness, up the path to her back door.
"No! I don't want anybody to go home with me," she said, angrily; "look after things here. Notify Mr. Ferguson. I'll come back." When she banged open her own door, she had only one question: "Is—Nannie—all—right?" Harris, gaping with dismay, and stammering, "My goodness! yes'm; yes'm!" followed her to the dining-room, where she crashed down like a felled tree, and lay unconscious on the floor.
When she began to come to herself, a doctor, for whom Harris had fled, was binding up her torn arm, which, covered with blood, and black with grit and rust, was an ugly sight. "Where's Blair?" she said, thickly; then came entirely to her senses, and demanded, sharply, "Nannie all right?" Reassured again on this point, she looked frowningly at the doctor. "Come, hurry! I want to get back to the Works."
"Back to the Works! To-night? Impossible! You mustn't think of such a thing," the young man protested. Mrs. Maitland looked at him, and he shifted from one foot to the other. "It—it won't do, really," he said, weakly; "that was a pretty bad knock you got on the back of your head, and your arm—"
"Young man," she said, "you patch this up,quick. I've got to see to my men. That's my business. You 'tend to yours."
"But my business is to keep you here," he told her, essaying to be humorous. His humor went out like a little candle in the wind: "Your business is to put on bandages. That's all I pay you for."
And the doctor put on bandages with expedition. In the front hall he spoke to Nannie. "Your mother has a very bad arm, Miss Maitland; and that violent blow on her head may have done damage. I can't tell yet. You must make her keep still."
"Make!—Mamma?" said Nannie.
"She says she's going over to the Works," said the doctor, shrugging his shoulders; "when she comes home, get her to bed as quickly as you can. I'll come in and see her in the morning, if she wants me. But if she won't do what I say about keeping quiet, I'd rather you called in other advice." When Nannie tried to "make Mamma" keep still, the only reply she received was: "You showed your sense in going home, my dear!" And off she went, Harris, at Nannie's instigation, lurking along behind her. "If Herbert's girl had been hurt!" she said, aloud, staggering a little as she walked, "my God, what would I have done?"
Afterward, they said it was astounding that she had been able to go back to the Works that night. She must have been in very intense pain. When she came home, the pain conquered to the extent of sending her, at midnight, up to her stepdaughter's room; she was red with fever, and her eyes were glassy. "Got any laudanum, or stuff of that kind?" she demanded. And yet the next day, when the bandages had been changed and there was some slight relief, she persisted in going to the Works again. But the third day she gave up, and attended to her business in the dining-room.
"If only Blair would come home," Nannie said, "I think, perhaps, she would be nice to him. Haven't you any idea where he is, Elizabeth?"
"Not the slightest," Elizabeth said, indifferently. She herself came every day, and performed what small personal services Mrs. Maitland would permit. Nannie did not amount to much as a nurse, but she was really helpful in writing letters, signing them so exactly in Sarah Maitland's hand that her stepmother was greatly diverted at her proficiency. "I shall have to look after my check-book," she said, with a chuckle.
It was not until a week later that they began to be alarmed. It was Harris who first discovered the seriousness of her condition; when he did, the knowledge came like a blow to her household and her office. It was late in the afternoon. Earlier in the day she had had a violent chill, during which she sat crouching and cowering over the dining-room fire, refusing to go to bed, and in a temper that scared Nannie and Harris almost to death. When the chill ceased, she went, flushed with fever, to her own room, saying she was "all right," and banging the door behind her. At about six, when Harris knocked to say that supper was ready, she came out, holding the old German cologne bottle in her hand. "Hegave me that," she said, and fondled the bottle against her cheek; then, suddenly she pushed it into Harris's face. "Kiss it!" she commanded, and giggled shrilly.
Harris jumped back with a screech."Gor!"he said; and his knees hit together. The slender green bottle fell smashing to the floor. Mrs. Maitland started, and caught her breath; her mind cleared instantly.
"Clean up that mess. The smell of the cologne takes my breath away.I—I didn't know I had it in my hand."
That night Elizabeth sent a peremptory letter into space, telling Blair that his mother was seriously ill, and he really ought to be at home. But he had left the hotel to which she sent it, without giving any address, so it lay in a dusty pigeonhole awaiting his return a week later.
The delirium came again the next day; then Sarah Maitland cried, because, she said, Nannie had hidden the Noah's ark; "and Blair and I want to play with it," she whined. But a moment afterward she looked at her stepdaughter with kind eyes, and said, as she had said a dozen times in the last ten days, "Lucky you went home that night, my dear."
Of course by this time the alarm was general. The young doctor was supported, at Robert Ferguson's insistence, by an old doctor, who, if he was awed by his patient, at least did not show it. He was even courageous enough to bring a nurse along with him.
"Miss Baker will spare your daughter," he said, soothingly, when Sarah Maitland, seeing the strange figure in her bedroom, had declared she wouldn't have a fussing woman about. "Miss Nannie needs help," the doctor said. Mrs. Maitland frowned, and yielded.
But the nurse did not have a good time. In her stiffly starched skirt, with her little cap perched on her head, she went fluttering prettily about, watched all the while by the somber, half-shut eyes. She moved the furniture, she dusted the bureau, she arranged the little row of photographs; and then she essayed to smooth Mrs. Maitland's hair—it was the last straw. The big, gray head began to lift slowly; a trembling finger pointed at the girl; there was only one word:
"Stop."
The startled nurse stopped,—so abruptly that she almost lost her balance.
"Clear out. You can sit in the hall. When I want you, I'll let you know."
Miss Baker fled, and Mrs. Maitland apparently forgot her. When the doctor came, however, she roused herself to say: "I won't have that fool girl buzzing round. I don't like all this highfalootin' business of nurses, anyhow. They are nothing but foolish expense." Perhaps that last word stirred some memory, for she added abruptly: "Nannie, bring me that—that picture you have in the parlor. The Virgin Mary, you know. Rags of popery, but I want to look at it. No; I can't pay $5,000 for 14 X 18 inches of old master, and hire nurses to curl my hair, too!" But nobody smiled at her joke.
When Nannie brought the picture, she bade her put it on a chair by the bedside, and sometimes the two girls saw her look at it intently. "I think she likes the child," Elizabeth said, in a low voice; but Nannie sighed, and said, "No; she is provoked because Blair was extravagant." After Miss Baker's banishment, Elizabeth did most of the waiting on her, for Nannie's anxious timidity made her awkward to the point of being, as Mrs. Maitland expressed it, wearily, "more bother than she was worth." Once she asked where Blair was, and Elizabeth said that nobody knew. "He heard of some business opening, Mrs. Maitland, and went East to see about it."
"Went East? What did he go East for? He's got a business opening at home, right under his nose," she said, thickly.
After that she did not ask for him. But from her bed in her own room she could see the dining-room door, and she lay there watching it, with expectation smoldering in her half-shut eyes. Once, furtively, when no one was looking, she lifted the hem of the sheet with her fumbling right hand and wiped her eyes. For the next few days she gained, and lost, and gained again. There were recurrent periods of lucidity, followed by the terrible childishness that had been the first indication of her condition. At the end of the next week she suddenly said, in a loud voice, "I won't stay in bed!" And despite Nannie's pleadings, and Miss Baker's agitated flutterings, she got up, and shuffled into the dining-room; she stood there, clutching with her uninjured hand a gray blanket that was huddled around her shoulders. Her hair was hanging in limp, disordered locks about her face, which had fallen away to the point of emaciation. She was leaning against the table, her knees shaking with weakness. But it was evident that her mind was quite clear. "Bed is a place to die in," she said; "I'm well. Let me alone. I shall stay here." She managed to get over to her desk, and sank into the revolving chair with a sigh of relief. "Ah!" she said, "I'm getting out of the woods. Harris! Bring me something to eat." But when the food was put before her, she could not touch it.
Robert Ferguson, who almost lived at the Maitland house that week, told her, soothingly, that she really ought to go back to bed, at which she laughed with rough goodnature. "Don't talk baby-talk. I'm getting well. But I've been sick; I've had a scare; so I'm going to write a letter, in case—Or here, you write it for me."
"To Blair?" he said, as he took his pen out of his pocket.
"Blair? No! To David Richie about that money. Don't you remember I told you I was going to give him a lot of money for a hospital? That I was going to get a certificate of deposit"—her voice wavered and she seemed to doze. A moment later, when her mind cleared again, her superintendent said, with some effort: "Aren't you going to do something for Blair? You will get well, I'm sure, but—in case—Your will isn't fair to the boy; you ought to do something for him."
Instantly she was alert: "I have. I've done the best thing in the world for him; I've thrown him on his own legs! As for getting well, of course I'm going to get well. But if I didn't, everything is closed up; my will's made; Blair is sure of poverty. Well; I guess I won't have you write to David to-day; I'm tired. When I'm out again, I'll tell Howe to draw up a paper telling him just what the duties of a trustee are…. Why don't you … why don't you marry his mother, and be done with it? I hate to see a man and woman shilly-shally."
"She won't have me," he said, good-naturedly; in his anxiety he was willing to let her talk of anything, merely to amuse her.
"Well, she's a nice woman," Sarah Maitland said; "and a good woman; I was afraidyouwere doing the shilly-shallying. And any man who would hesitate to take her, isn't fit to black her boots. Friend Ferguson, I have a contempt for a man who is more particular than his Creator." Robert Ferguson wondered what she was driving at, but he would not bother her by a question.
"What was that I used to say about her?" the sick woman ruminated, with closed eyes; "'fair and—What was it? Forty? No, that wasn't it."
"Fifty," he suggested, smiling.
She shook her head peevishly. "No, that wasn't it. 'Fair, and, and'—what was it? It puts me out of patience to forget things! 'Fair and—frail!' That was it; frail! 'Fair and frail.'" She did not pause for her superintendent's gasp of protest. "Yes; first time I saw her, I thought there was a nigger in the woodpile. She won't marry you, friend Ferguson, because she has something on her conscience. Tell her I say not to be a fool. The best man going is none too good for her!"
Robert Ferguson's heart gave a violent plunge in his breast, but before his angry denial could reach her brain, her thought had wandered. "No! no! no! I won't go to bed. Bed is where people die." She got up from her chair, to walk about and show how well she was; but when she reached the center of the room she seemed to crumple up, sinking and sliding down on to the floor, her back against one of the carved legs of the table. Once there, she would not get up. She became so violently angry when they urged her to let them help her to her feet, that they were obliged to yield. "We will do more harm by irritating her," the doctor said, "than any good we could accomplish by putting her back to bed forcibly." So they put cushions behind her, and there she sat, staring with dim, expectant eyes at the dining room door; sometimes speaking with stoical endurance, intelligently enough; sometimes, when delirious, whimpering with the pain of that terrible arm, swollen now to a monstrous mass of agony.
Late in the afternoon she said she wanted to see '"that picture"; and Elizabeth knelt beside her, holding the little dark canvas so that she could look at it; she sat staring into it for a long time. "Mary didn't try to keep her baby from the cross," she said, suddenly; "well, I've done better than that; I brought the cross to my baby." Her face fell into wonderfully peaceful lines. Just at dusk she tried to sing.
"'Drink to me only with thine eyes'"
she quavered; "my boy sings that beautifully. I must give him a present. A check. I must give him a check."
But when Nannie said, eagerly, "Blair has written Elizabeth that he will be at home to-morrow; I'll tell him you want to see him; and oh, Mamma, won't you please be nice to him?"—she looked perfectly blank. Toward morning she sat silently for a whole hour sucking her thumb. When, abruptly, she came to herself and realized what she had been doing, the shamed color rose in her face. Nannie, kneeling at her side, caught at the flicker of intelligence to say, "Mamma, would you like to see the Rev. Mr. Gore? He is here; waiting in the parlor. Sha'n't I bring him in?"
Mrs. Maitland frowned. "What does he come for now? I'm sick. I can't see people. Besides, I sent him a check for Foreign Missions last month."
"Oh, Mamma!" Nannie said, brokenly, "he hasn't come for money; I—I sent for him."
Sarah Maitland's eyes suddenly opened; her mind cleared instantly. "Oh," she said; and then, slowly: "Um-m; I see." She seemed to meditate a moment; then she said, gravely: "No, my dear, no; I won't see little Gore. He's a good little man; a very good little man for missions and that sort of thing. But when it comes tothis—" she paused; "I haven't time to see to him," she said, soberly. A minute later, noticing Nannie's tears, she tried to cheer her: "Come, come! don't be troubled," she said, smiling kindly, "I can paddle my own canoe, my dear." After that she was herself for nearly half an hour. Once she said. "My house is in order, friend Ferguson." Then she lost herself again. To those who watched her, huddled on the heap of cushions, mumbling and whimpering, or with a jerk righting her mind into stony endurance, she seemed like a great tower falling and crumbling in upon itself. At that last dreadful touch of decay, when she put her thumb in her mouth like a baby, her stepdaughter nearly fainted.
All that night the mists gathered, and thinned, and gathered again. In the morning, still lying on the floor, propped against all the pillows and cushions of the house, she suddenly looked with clear eyes at Nannie.
"Why!" she said, in her own voice, and frowning sharply, "that certificate of deposit! I got it from the Bank the day of the accident, but I haven't indorsed it! Lucky I've got it here in the house. Bring it to me. It's in the safe in my desk. Take my keys."
Nannie, who for the moment was alone with her, found the key, and opening the little iron door in the desk, brought the certificate and a pen dipped in ink; but even in those few moments of preparation, the mist had begun to settle again: "I told the cashier it was a present I was going to make," she chuckled to herself; "saidhe'dlike to get a present like that. I reckon he would. Reckon anybody would." Her voice lapsed into incoherent murmurings, and Nannie had to speak to her twice before her eyes were intelligent again; then she took the pen and wrote, her lips faintly mumbling: "Pay to the order of—what's the date?" she said, dully, her eyes almost shut. "Never mind; I don't have to date it. But I was thinking: Blair gave me a calendar when he was a little boy. Blair—Blair—" And as she spoke his name, she wrote it: "Blair Maitland." But just as she did so, her mind cleared, and she saw what she had written. "Blair Maitland?" she said, and smiled and shook her head. "Oh, I've written that name too many times. Too many times. Got the habit." She lifted her pen heavily, perhaps to draw it through the name, but her hand sagged.
"Aren't you going to sign it, Mamma?" Nannie asked, breathlessly; and her stepmother turned faintly surprised eyes upon her. Nannie, kneeling beside her, urged again: "Mamma, you want to give it to Blair! Try, do try—" But she did not hear her.
At noon that day, through the fogged and clogging senses, there was another outburst of the soul. They had been trying to give her some medicine, and each time she had refused it, moving her head back and side-wise, and clenching her teeth against the spoon. Over and over the stimulant was urged and forced upon her; when suddenly her eyes flashed open and she looked at them with the old power that had made people obey her all her life. The mind had been insulted by its body beyond endurance; she lifted her big right hand and struck the spoon from the doctor's fingers: "I have the right to die."
Then the flame fluttered down again into the ashes.
When Blair reached the house that afternoon, she was unconscious. Once, at a stab of pain, she burst out crying with fretful wildness; and once she put her thumb into her mouth.
At six o'clock that night she died.
When the doctor came to tell Nannie that Sarah Maitland was dead, he found her in the parlor, shivering up against her brother. Blair had come to his mother's house early that afternoon; a note from Elizabeth, awaiting him at the River House, had told him of the gravity of Mrs. Maitland's condition, and bidden him "come instantly." As he read it, his face grew tense. "Of course I must go," he said; but there was no softening in his eyes. In all these months, in which his mother's determination had shown no weakening, his anger had deepened into the bitterest animosity. Yet curiously enough, though he hated her more, he disliked her less. Perhaps because he thought of her as a Force rather than as a mother; a power he was fighting—force against force! And the mere sense of the grapple gave him a feeling of equality with her which he had never had. Or it may have been merely that his eyes and ears did not suffer constant offense from her peculiarities. He had not forgotten the squalor of the peculiarities, but they did not strike him daily in the face, so hate was not made poignant by disgust. But neither was it lessened by the possibility of her death.
"I wonder if she has changed her will?" he said to himself, with fierce curiosity. But whether she had done so or not, propriety demanded his presence in her house if she were dying. As for anything more than propriety,—well, if by destroying her iniquitous will she had showed proper maternal affection, he would show proper filial solicitude. It struck him, as he stepped into a carriage to drive down to Shanty town, that such an attitude of mind on his part was pathetic for them both. "She never cared for me," he thought; and he knew he had never cared for her. Yes, it was pathetic; if he could have had for a mother such a woman as—he frowned; he would not name David Richie's mother even in his thoughts. But if he could have had a gentle and gracious woman for a mother, how he would have loved her! He had always been motherless, he thought; it was not today which would make him so. Still, it was strangely shaking, this idea of her death. When Nannie came into the parlor to greet him, he was silent while she told him, shivering and crying, the story of the last two weeks.
"She hasn't been conscious since noon," she ended, "but she may call for you; and oh, if she does. Blair, you will be lovely to her, won't you?"
His grave silence seemed an assent.
"Will you go in and see her?" she said, weeping. But Blair, with the picture she had given him of that awful figure lying on the floor, shook his head.
"I will wait here.—I could not bear to see it," he added, shuddering.
"Elizabeth is with her," Nannie said, "so I'll stay a little while with you. I don't believe it will be before morning."
Now and then they spoke in whispers; but for the most part they were silent, listening to certain sinister sounds that came from the room across the hall.
It was a warm May twilight; above the gaunt outline of the foundry, the dim sickle of a young moon hung in a daffodil sky; the river, running black between banks of slag and cinders, caught the sheen of gold and was transfigured into glass mingled with fire. Through the open windows, the odor of white lilacs and the acrid sweetness of the blossoming plum-tree, floated into the room. The gas was not lighted; sometimes the pulsating flames, roaring out sidewise from under the half-shut dampers of the great chimneys, lighted the dusk with a red glare, and showed Blair's face set in new lines. He had never been so near the great Reality before; never been in a house where, on the threshold, Death was standing; his personal affairs, angers or anxieties, dropped out of his mind. So sitting and listening and not speaking, the doctor found them.
"She has gone," he said, solemnly. Nannie began to cry; Blair stood up, then walked to the window and looked out at the Yards.Dead?For a moment the word had no meaning. Then, abruptly, the old, elemental meaning struck him like a blow; that meaning which the animal in us knows, before we know the acquired meanings which grief and faith have put into the word: his mother "was not." It was incredible! He gasped as he stood at the window, looking out over the blossoming lilacs at the Works, black against a fading saffron sky. Ten minutes ago his mother was in the other room, owning those Works; now—? The sheer impossibility of imagining the cessation of such a personality filled him with an extraordinary dismay. He was conscious of a bewildered inability to believe what had been said to him.
Mr. Ferguson, who had been with Sarah Maitland when the end came, followed the doctor into the parlor; but neither he nor Blair remembered personalities. They stood together now, listening to what the doctor was saying; Blair, still dazed and unbelieving, put his arm round Nannie and said, "Don't cry, dear; Mr. Ferguson, tell her not to cry!" And the older man said, "Make her sit down, Blair; she looks a little white." Both of them had forgotten individual resentments or embarrassments.
When some people die, it is as if a candle flame were gently blown out; but when, on the other side of the hall, this big woman lay dead on the floor, it seemed to the people who stood by as if the whole machinery of life had stopped. It was so absorbing in its astonishment that everything else became simple. Even when Elizabeth entered, and came to put her arms around Nannie, Blair hardly noticed her. As the doctor and Robert Ferguson spoke together in low tones, of terrible things they called "arrangements," Sarah Maitland's son listened, and tried to make himself understand that they were talking of—his mother!
"I shall stay until everything has been done," Mr. Ferguson said, after the doctor left them. "Blair, you and Elizabeth will be here, of course, to-night? Or else I'll stay. Nannie mustn't be alone."
Blair nodded. "Of course," he said. At which Nannie, who had been crying softly to herself, suddenly looked up.
"I would rather be by myself. I don't want any one here. Please go home with Elizabeth, Blair. Please!"
"But Nannie dear, I want to stay," Blair began, gently; she interrupted him, almost hysterically:
"No!Please!It troubles me. I would rather you didn't. I—I want to be alone."
"Well," Blair said, vaguely; he was too dazed to protest.
Robert Ferguson yielded too, though with a little surprise at her vehemence. Then he turned to Blair; "I'll give you some telegrams that must be sent," he said, in the old friendly voice. It was only when he wrote a despatch to David's mother that the world was suddenly adjusted to its old levels of anger and contempt. "I'll send this myself," he said, coldly. Blair, with instant intuition, replied as coldly, "Oh, very well."
He and Elizabeth went back to the hotel in silence, each deeply shaken by the mere physical fact of death. When they reached the gloomy granite columns of the old River House, Blair left his wife, saying briefly something about "walking for a while." He wanted to be alone. This was not because he felt any lack of sympathy in Elizabeth; on the contrary, he was nearer to her than at any time since their marriage; but it was a moment that demanded solitude. So he wandered about Mercer's streets by himself until after midnight—down to the old covered bridge, past Mrs. Todd's ice-cream saloon, out into the country, where the wind was rising, and the tree-tops had begun to sway against the sky.
There is a bond, it appears, between mother and child which endures as long as they do. It is independent of love; reason cannot weaken it; hate cannot destroy it. When a man's mother dies, something in the man dies, too. Blair Maitland, walking aimlessly about in the windy May midnight, standing on the bridge watching the slipping twinkle of a star in the inky ripples below him, was vaguely conscious of this. He thought, with a reluctance that was almost repulsion, of her will. He did not want to think of it, it was not fitting! Yet he knew, back in his mind, that within a few days, as soon as decency permitted, he would take the necessary steps to contest it. Nor did he think definitely of her; certainly not of all the unbeautiful things about her, those acute, incessant trivialities of ugliness which had been a veil between them all his life. Now, the veil was rent, and behind it was a holy of holies,—the inviolable relation of the child and the mother. It was of this that he thought, inarticulately, as he stood on the bridge, listening to the rush of the wind; this, and the bare and unbelievable fact that she "was not." As he struggled to realize her death, he was aware of a curious uneasiness that was almost fright.
When he came to Nannie the next morning, he was still deeply absorbed; and when she put something into his hands and said it was from his mother, he suddenly wept.
* * * * *
They had respected Nannie's desire to be alone that night, but it was nearly twelve before she was really left to herself, and the house was silent. Robert Ferguson had made her go up-stairs to bed, and bidden the worn-out nurse sleep in the room next to her so that she would not be so entirely solitary. He himself did not go home until those soft and alien footsteps that cross our thresholds, and dare as business the offices that Love may not essay, had at last died away. Nannie, in her bedroom, sat wide-eyed, listening for those footsteps. Once she said to herself: "Whentheyhave gone—" and her heart pounded in her throat. At last "they" went; she heard the front door close; then, out in the street, another door banged softly; after that there was the sound of wheels.
"Now!" she said to herself. But still she did not move…. Was the nurse asleep? Was Harris up in his room in the garret? Was there any one downstairs—except Death? Death in Mrs. Maitland's bedroom. "For God's sake,lock her door!" Harris had said. And they locked it. We generally lock it. Heaven knows why! Why do we turn the key on that poor, broken, peaceful thing, as if it might storm out in the night, and carry us back with it into its own silence?
It was almost dawn—the high spring dawn that in May flushes even Mercer's skies at three o'clock in the morning, when, lamp in hand, Nannie Maitland opened her bedroom door and peered into the upper hall. Outside, the wind, which had begun to blow at sunset, was roaring around the old house; it rumbled in the chimneys, and a sudden gust tore at a loose shutter, and sent it banging back against the bricks. But in the house everything was still. The window over the front door was an arch of glimmering gray barred by the lines of the casement; but toward the well of the staircase there was nothing but darkness. Nannie put a hesitating foot across her own threshold, paused, then came gliding out into the hall; at the head of the stairs she looked down into a gulf of still blackness; the close, warm air of the house seemed to press against her face. She listened intently: no sound, except the muttering indifference of the wind about the house. Slowly, step by step, shivering and shrinking, she began to creep down-stairs. At the closed door of the dining-room—next to that other room which Harris had bidden them lock up; she stood for a long time, her fingers trembling on the knob; her lamp, shaking in her hand, cast a nimbus of light around her small gray figure. It seemed to her as if she could not turn that knob. Then, with gasp of effort, it was done, and she entered. Her first look was at that place on the floor, where for the last two days the pillows had been piled. The pillows were not there now; the room was in new, bleak order. Instantly, after that shrinking glance at the floor, she looked toward Mrs. Maitland's room, and her hand went to her throat as if she could not breathe. A moment afterward she began to creep across the floor, one terrified step dragging after another; she walked sidewise, always keeping her head turned toward that silent room. Just as she reached the big desk, the wind, sucking under the locked door, shook it with sly insinuation;—instantly she wheeled about, and stood, swaying with fright, her back against the desk. She stood there, panting, for a full minute. The terror of that furtively shaken door was agonizing. Then, very slowly, with a sidewise motion so that she could look toward the room, she put her lamp down on the top of the desk, and began, with constant bird-like glances over her shoulder, to search…. Yes; there it was! just where she herself had put it, slipped between the pages of a memorandum-book, so that if, in another gleam of consciousness, Blair's mother should ask for it, there need be no delay in getting it. When her fingers closed on it, she turned, swiftly, so that the room might not be behind her. Always watching the locked door, she groped for pen and ink and some sheets of paper, which she carried over to the table. Then she drew up a chair, folded back the sleeves of her wrapper, propped the memorandum-book—which had on the inside page the flowing signature of its owner—open before her. Then, slowly and steadily, she began to do the thing she had come to do. Instantly she was calmer. When a great gust of wind rumbled suddenly in the chimney, and a wraith of ashes blew out of the fireplace, she did not even raise her eyes; but once she looked over toward the room, and smiled, as if to say "It is all right. I am making it all right!"
It took her a long time, this business that would make it "all right," this business that brought her, a creature who all her life had been afraid of her own shadow, creeping down to the dining-room, creeping past the room into which Death had been locked, creeping over to the desk, to that unsigned indorsement which had been meant for Blair! It took a long time. Sheet after sheet of paper was scrawled over, held up beside the name in the notebook, then tossed into the empty grate. At last she did it:
Sarah Maitland
When she had finished, her relief, in having done what she could to carry out the purpose of the dying hand, was so great that she was able, without once looking over her shoulder, to put the pen and ink back into the desk and set a match to the papers in the fireplace. Indeed, as she took up her lamp to creep up-stairs again, she even stopped and touched the knob of the locked door with a sort of caress.