But when, with a last breathless rush across the upper hall, she regained her own room, she bolted her door with furious panic-stricken hands, then sank, almost fainting, upon her bed.
[Illustration: SHE WHEELED ABOUT AND STOOD, SWAYING WITH FRIGHT]
The Maitland Works were still. High in the dusty gloom of the foundry, a finger of sunshine pointing down from a grimy window touched the cold lip of a cupola and traveled noiselessly over rows of empty molds upon the blackened floor. The cast-house was silent. The Yards were deserted. The pillar of fire was out; the pillar of smoke had faded away.
In the darkened parlor of her great house, Sarah Maitland was still, too. Lines of sunshine fell between the bowed shutters, and across them wavering motes swam noiselessly from gloom to gloom. The marble serenities of death were without sound; the beautiful, powerless hands were empty, even of the soft futility of flowers; some one had placed lilies-of-the-valley in them, but her son, with new, inarticulate appreciation, lifted them and took them away. The only sound that broke the dusky stillness of the room was the subdued brush of black garments, or an occasional sigh, or the rustle of a furtively turned page of a hymn-book. Except when, standing shoulder to shoulder in the hall, her business associates, with hats held decorously before whispering lips, spoke to each other of her power and her money,—who now had neither money nor power,—the house was profoundly still. Then, suddenly, from the head of the stairs, a Voice fell into the quietness:
"Lord, let me know mine end and the number of my days, that I may be certified how long I have to live. When thou with rebukes dost chasten man for sin, thou makest his beauty to consume away, like as it were a moth fretting a garment: every man, therefore, is vanity. For man walketh in a vain show, and disquieteth—"the engine of a passing freight coughed, and a cloud of smoke billowed against the windows; the strips of sunshine falling between the shutters were blotted out; came again—went again. Over and over the raucous running jolt of backing cars, the rattling bump of sudden breaks, swallowed up the voice, declaring the eternal silence: ". . .glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is . . . of the sun, and another glory of the moon, for one star differeth from . . . Dust to dust, ashes to ashes. . ."
Out in the street the shadow of her house fell across the meager dooryard, where, on its blackened stems, the pyrus japonica showed some scattered blood-red blossoms; it fell over Shantytown, that packed the sidewalk and stared from dingy doors and windows; it fell on her men, standing in unrebuked idleness, their lowered voices a mutter of energy held, for this waiting moment, in leash. A boy who had climbed up the lamp-post announced shrilly that "It" was coming. Some girls, pressing against the rusted iron spears of the fence, and sagging under the weight of babies almost as big as themselves, called across the street to their mothers, "Here she is!"
And so she came. No squalor of her surroundings could mar the pomp of her approach. The rumble of her men's voices ceased before it; Shantytown fell silent. Out from between the marble columns of her doorway, out from under the twisted garland of wistaria murmurous with bees, down the curving steps, along the path to the crowded, curious sidewalk, she came. Out of the turmoil and the hurry of her life, out of her triumphs and arrogances and ambitions, out of her careless generosities and her extraordinary successes, she came. And following her, with uncovered head, came the sign and symbol of her failure—her only son.
Up-stairs, in the front hall, standing a little back from the wide arched window, Nannie,—forbidden by the doctor, because of her fatigue, to go to the grave; and Elizabeth and Miss White, who would not leave her alone,—looked down on the slowly moving crowd. When Sarah Maitland's men closed in behind her, nearly a thousand strong, and the people in twos and threes began to file out of the house, Nannie noiselessly turned a slat of the Venetian blind. Why! there were those Maitlands from the North End. "I didn't suppose they remembered our existence," she said, her breath still catching in a sob; "and there are the Knights," she whispered to Elizabeth. "Do you see old Mrs. Knight? I don't believe she's been to call on Mamma for ten years. I never supposed she'd come."
Miss White, wiping her eyes as she peered furtively through the blinds, said in a whisper that there was So-and-so, and that such and such a person was evidently going out to the cemetery. "Mrs. Knight is dreadfully lame, isn't she?" Nannie said. "Poor Mamma always called her Goose Molly. It was nice in her to come, wasn't it?"
"Nannie," some one said, softly. And turning, she saw Mrs. Richie. "I came on last night, Nannie dear. She was a good, kind friend to me. And David is here, too. He hopes you will feel like seeing him. He was very fond of her." Then she looked at Elizabeth: "How do you do? How is Blair?" she said, calmly.
The moment was tense, yet of the four women, Elizabeth felt it least.David was in the house! She could not feel anything else.
"Oh, Mrs. Richie—poor Mamma!" Nannie said; and with Mrs. Richie's kind arm about her, she retreated to her own room.
Miss White went hurrying down-stairs—Elizabeth knew why! As for her, she stood there in the empty hall, quite alone. She heard the carriage doors closing out in the street, the sound of horses' feet, the drag of wheels—even the subdued murmur of Shantytown looking on at the show…. David was in the house.
She went to the end of the hall and stood leaning over the banisters; she could hear Miss White's flurried voice; then, suddenly, he spoke. It was only some grave word,—she did not catch the sense of it, but the sound—the sound of his voice! It turned her dizzy. Before she knew it she sank down on the top step of the stairs, her head against the banisters. She sat there, her face haggard with unshed tears, until Mrs. Richie came out of Nannie's room and found her. It was then that David's mother, who thought she had done her best in the courteous commonplace of how-do-you-do—suddenly did better; she stooped down and kissed Elizabeth's cheek.
"You poor child!" she said; "oh, youpoorchild!" The pity of the slender, crouching figure touched even Helena Richie's heart,—that heart of passionate and resentful maternity; so she was able to kiss her, and say, with wet eyes, "poor child!"
Elizabeth could not speak. Later, when the mother and son had left the house, Miss White came upstairs and found her still sitting dumb and tearless, on the top step. She clutched at Cherry-pie's skirt with shaking hands: "Did he say—anything?"
"Oh, my poor lamb," old Miss White said, nibbling and crying, "how could he,here?"
David, coming with his mother over the mountains to be present at Mrs. Maitland's funeral, thought to himself how strange it was that it had taken death to bring him to Mercer. In all those long months of bewildered effort to adjust himself to the altered conditions of life, there had been an undercurrent of purpose:he would see Elizabeth.He would know from her own lips just how things were with her. It seemed to David that if he could do that, if he could know beyond doubt—or hope—that she was happy, he would himself be cured of the incessant, dull ache of remorse, which quickened sometimes into the stabbing suspicion that she had never really loved him. … If she was happy, then he need no longer blame himself for injuring her. The injury he had done himself, he must bear, as men before him had borne, and as men after him would bear, the results of their own sins and follies. He had, of course, long since lost the wincing self-consciousness of the jilted man, just as he had lost the expectation that she would send for him, summon him to storm her prison and carry her away to freedom! That was a boy's thought, anyhow. It was when that hope had completely faded, that he began to say he must see for himself that she was happy and that she did not wish to leave the man who had, at any rate, been man enough to take her, and whom now, very likely, she loved. It was the uncertainty about her happiness that was so intolerable to him. Far more intolerable, he thought, than would be the knowledge that she was content, for that he would deserve, and to the honest mind there is a certain satisfaction in receiving its deserts. But his hatred of Blair deepened a little at the mere suggestion of her contentment. Those evil moments of suspecting her loyalty to him at the time of her marriage were very rare now; though the evil moments of speculating as to how God—or he himself, would finally punish Blair Maitland, were as frequent as ever. During the last six months the desire to know how things were with Elizabeth had been at times almost overwhelming. Once he went so far as to buy his railroad ticket; but though his feet carried him to the train, his mind drove him away from it, and the ticket was not used. But when the news came of Sarah Maitland's death, he went immediately to the station and engaged his berth. Then he went home and asked his mother if she were going to the funeral; "I am," he said. He spoke with affection of Mrs. Maitland, but so far as his going to Mercer went, her funeral was entirely incidental. Her death had ended his uncertainty: he would see Elizabeth!
"And when I see her," he said to himself, "the moment I see her,—I will know." He debated with himself whether he should speak of the catastrophe of their lives, or wait for her to do so. As he thought of putting it into words, he was aware of singular shyness, which showed him with startling distinctness how far apart he and she were. Just how and when he would see her he had not decided; probably it could not be on the day Mrs. Maitland was buried; but the next day? "How shall I manage it?" he asked himself—then found that it had been managed for him.
When they came back from the cemetery, Mrs. Richie went to Robert Ferguson's. "You are to come home and have supper with me," he had told her; "David can call for you when he gets through his gallivanting about the town." (David had excused himself, on the ground of seeing Knight and one or two of the fellows; he had said nothing of his need to walk alone over the old bridge, out into the country, and, in the darkness, round and round the River House.) So, in the May twilight of Robert Ferguson's garden, the two old neighbors paced up and down, and talked of Sarah Maitland.
"I've got to break to David that apparently he isn't going to get the fund for his hospital," Mr. Ferguson said. "There is no mention of it in her will. She told me once, about two years ago, that she was putting money by for him, and when she got the amount she wanted she was going to give it to him. But she left no memorandum of it. I'm afraid she changed her mind." His voice, rather than his words, caught her attention; he was not speaking naturally. He seemed to talk for the sake of talking, which was so unlike him that Mrs. Richie looked at him with mild curiosity. "Mrs. Maitland had a perfect right to change her mind," she said; "and really David never counted very much on the hospital. She spoke of it to him, I know, but I think he had almost forgotten it—though I hadn't," she confessed, a little ruefully. She smiled, and Robert Ferguson, fiercely twitching off his glasses, tried to smile back; but his troubled eyes lingered questioningly on her serene face. It was almost a beautiful face in its peace. What was it Mrs. Maitland had said about her looks? "Fair and—" He was so angry at remembering the word that he swore softly at himself under his breath, and Helena Richie gave him a surprised look. He had sworn at himself several times in these five days since Sarah Maitland, half delirious, wholly shrewd, had said those impossible things about David's mother. Under his concern and grief, under his solemn preoccupations, Robert Ferguson had felt again and again the shock of the incredible suggestion:"something on her conscience."Each time the words thrust themselves up through his absorbed realization of Mrs. Maitland's death, he pushed them down savagely: "It is impossible!" But each time they rose again to the surface of his mind. When they did, they brought with them, as if dredged out of the depths of his memory, some sly indorsement of their truth. . . . She never says anything about her husband. "Why on earth should she? He was probably a bad egg; that friend of hers, that Old Chester doctor, hinted that he was a bad egg. Naturally he is not a pleasant subject of conversation for his wife." . . . Her only friends, except in his own little circle, were two old men (one of them dead now), in Old Chester. "Well, Heaven knows a parson and a doctor are about as good friends as a woman can have." . . . But nowomenfriends belonging to her past. "Thank the Lord! If she had a lot of cackling females coming to see her,Iwouldn't want to!" . . . She is always so ready to defend Elizabeth's wicked mother.
"She has a tender heart; she's not hard like the rest of her sex."
No, Life had not played another trick on him! Mrs. Maitland was out of her head, that was all. As for him, somebody ought to boot him for even remembering what the poor soul had said. And so, disposing of the intolerable suspicion, he would draw a breath of relief—until the whisper came again:"something on her conscience?"
He was so goaded by this fancy of a dying woman, and at the same time so shaken by her death, that, as his guest was quick to see, he was entirely unreal; almost—if one can say such a thing of Robert Ferguson, artificial. He was artificial when he spoke of David and the money he was not to have; the fact was, he did not at that moment care, he said to himself, a hang about David, or his money either!
"You see," he said, as they came to the green door in the brick wall, and went into the other garden, "you see, your house is still empty?"
"Dear old house!" she said, smiling up at the shuttered windows.
He looked into her face, and its entire candor made him suddenly and sharply angry at Sarah Maitland. It was the old friendly anger, just as if she were not dead; and he found it curiously comforting. ("She ought to be ashamed of herself to have such an idea of Mrs. Richie. I'll tell her so—oh, Lord! what am I saying? Well, well; she was dying; she didn't know what she was talking about.") . . . "We could pull down some partitions and make the two houses into one," he said, wistfully.
But she only laughed and shook her head. "I want to see if my white peony is going to blossom; come over to the stone seat."
"You always shut me up," he said, sulkily; and in his sulkiness he was more like himself than he had been for days. Sitting by her side on the bench under the hawthorn, he let her talk about her peony or anything else that seemed to her a safe subject; for himself, all he wanted was the comfort of looking into her comforting eyes, and telling himself that he insulted her when he even denied those poor, foolish, dying words. When a sudden soft shower drove them indoors to his library he came back with a sigh to Mrs. Maitland; but this time he was quite natural: "The queer part of it is, she hadn't changed her mind about David's money up to within two days of her death. She meant him to have it when she spoke to me of writing to him; and her mind was perfectly clear then; at least"—he frowned; "she did wander for a minute. She had a crazy idea—"
"What?" said Mrs. Richie, sympathetically.
"Nothing; she was wandering. But it was only for a minute, and except for that she was clear. When I urged her to make some provision for Blair, she was perfectly clear. Practically told me to mind my own business! Just like her," he said, sighing.
"It would have been a great deal of money," Mrs. Richie said; "probably David is better off without it." But he knew she was disappointed; and indeed, after supper, in his library, she admitted the disappointment frankly enough. "He has changed very much; his youth is all gone. He is more silent than ever. I had thought that perhaps the building of this hospital would bring him out of himself. You see, he blames himself for the whole thing."
"He is still bitter?"
"Oh, I'm afraid so. He very rarely speaks of it. But I can see that he blames himself always. I wish he would talk freely."
"He will one of these days. He'll blurt it out and then he'll begin to get over it. Don't stop him, and don't get excited, no matter what absurd things he says. He'll be better when he has emptied his heart. I was, you know, after I talked to you and told you that I'd been—jilted."
"I'm afraid it's gone too deep for that with David," she said, sadly.
"It couldn't go deeper than it did with me, and yet you—you taught me to forgive her. Yes, and to be glad, too; for if she hadn't thrown me over, I wouldn't have known you."
"Nowstop!" Mrs. Richie said, with soft impatience.
"For a meek and mild looking person," said Robert Ferguson, twitching off his glasses, "you have the most infernally strong will. I hate obstinacy."
"Mr. Ferguson, be sensible. Don't talk—that way. Listen: David must see Elizabeth while he is here. This situation has got to become commonplace. I meant to go home to-morrow morning, but if you will ask us all to luncheon—"
"'Dinner'! We don't have your Philadelphia airs in Mercer."
"Well, 'dinner,'" she said, smiling; "we'll stay over and take the evening train.
"I won't ask Blair!"
"I hate obstinacy," Mrs. Richie told him, drolly. "Well, I am not so very anxious to see Blair myself. But I do want Elizabeth and David to meet. You see, David means to practise in Mercer—"
"What! Then you will come here to live? When will you come?"
"Next spring, I hope. And it is like coming home again. The promise of the hospital was a factor in his decision, but, even without it, I think he will want to settle in Mercer"; she paused and sighed.
Her old landlord did not notice the sigh. "I'll get the house in order for you right off!" he said, beaming. "I suppose you'll ask for all sorts of new-fangled things! A tenant is never satisfied." He was so happy that he barked and chuckled at the same time.
"I hope it's wise for him to come," Mrs. Richie said, anxiously; "I confess I don't feel quite easy about it, because—Elizabeth will be here; and though, of course, nobody is going to think of how things might have been, still, it will be painful for them both just at first. That's why I want you to invite us to dinner,—the sooner they meet, the sooner things will be commonplace."
"When a man has once been in love with a woman," Robert Ferguson said, putting on his glasses carefully, "he can hate her, but she can never be commonplace to him."
And before she knew it she said, impulsively, "Please don't ever hate me."
He laid a quick hand on hers that was resting in her lap. "I'll never hate you and you'll never be commonplace. Dear woman—can't you?"
She shook her head; the tears stood suddenly in her leaf-brown eyes.
"Helena!" he said, and there was a half-frightened violence in his voice; "whatis it? Tell me, for Heaven's sake; what is it? Do you hate me?"
"No—no—no!"
"If you dislike me, say so! I think I could bear it better to believe you disliked me."
"Robert, how absurd you are! You know I could never dislike you. But our—our age, and David, and—"
He put an abrupt hand on her shoulder and looked hard into her eyes; then for a single minute he covered his own. "Don't talk about age, and all that nonsense. Don't talk about little things, Helena, for God's sake! Oh, my dear—" he said, brokenly. He got up and went across the room to a bookcase; he stood there a moment or two with his back to her. Helena Richie, bewildered, her eyes full of tears, looked after him in dismay. But when he took his chair again, he was "commonplace" enough, and when, later, David came in, he was able to talk in the most matter-of-fact way. He told the young man that evidently Mrs. Maitland had changed her mind about a hospital. "Of course some papers may turn up that will entitle you to your fund, but I confess I'm doubtful about it. I'm afraid she changed her mind."
"Probably she did," David said, laconically; "well, I am glad she thought of it,—even if she didn't do it. She was a big person, Mr. Ferguson; I didn't half know how big a person she was!" For a moment his face softened until his own preoccupations faded out of it.
"Nobody knew how big she was—except me," Robert Ferguson said. Then he began to talk about her. . . . It was nearly midnight when he ended; when he did, it was with an outburst of pain and grief: "Nobody understood her. They thought because she ran an iron-works, that she wasn't—a woman. I tell you she was! I tell you her heart was a woman's heart. She didn't care about fuss and feathers, and every other kind of tomfoolery, like all the rest of you, but she was as—as modest as a girl, and as sensitive. You needn't laugh—"
"Laugh?" said Helena Richie; "I am ready to cry when I think how her body misrepresented her soul!"
He nodded; his chin shook. "Big, generous, incapable of meanness, incapable of littleness!—and now she's dead. I believe her disappointment about Blair really killed her. It cut some spring. She has never been the same woman since he—" He stopped short, and looked at David; no one spoke.
Then Mrs. Richie asked some casual question about the Works, and they began to talk of other things. When his guests said good-night, Robert Ferguson, standing on his door-step, called after them: "Oh, hold on: David, won't you and your mother come in to dinner to-morrow? Luncheon, your mother calls it. She wants us to be fashionable in Mercer! Nobody here but Miss White and Elizabeth."
"Yes, thank you; we'll come with pleasure," Mrs. Richie called back, and felt the young man's arm grow rigid under her hand.
The mother and son walked on in silence. It had stopped raining, but the upper sky was full of fleecy clouds laid edge to edge like a celestial pavement; from between them sometimes a serene moon looked down.
"David, you don't mind staying over for a day?"
"Oh no, not at all. I meant to."
"And you don't mind—seeing Elizabeth?"
"I want to see her. Will he be there?"
"Blair? No! Certainly not. It wouldn't be pleasant for—for—"
"For him?" David said, dryly. "I should think not. Still, I am sorry. I have rather a curiosity to see Blair."
"Oh, David!" she protested, sadly.
"My dear mother, don't be alarmed. I have no intention of calling him out. I am merely interested to know how a sneak-thief looks when he meets—" he laughed; "the man he has robbed. However, it might not be pleasant for the rest of you."
His mother was silent; her plan of making things "commonplace" was not as simple as she thought.
Robert Ferguson, on his door-step, looked after them, his face falling abruptly into stern lines. When he went back to his library he stood perfectly still, his hands in his pockets, staring straight ahead of him. Once or twice his whole face quivered. Suddenly he struck his clenched fist hard on the table: "Well!" he said, aloud, violently, "what difference does it make?" He lit a cigar and sat down, his legs stretched out in front of him, his feet crossed. He sat there for an hour, biting on his extinguished cigar. Then he said in an unsteady voice, "She is a heavenly creature." The vigil in his library, which lasted until the dawn was white above Mercer's smoke, left Robert Ferguson shaken to the point of humility. He no longer combated Mrs. Maitland's wandering words; they did not matter. What mattered was the divine discovery that they did not matter! Or rather, that they opened his eyes to the glory of the human soul. To a man of his narrow and obstinate council of perfection, the realization, not only that it was possible to enter into holiness through the door of sin—that low door that bows the head that should be upright—but that his own possibilities of tenderness were wider than he knew,—such a realization was conversion. It was the recognition that in the matter of forgiveness he and his Father were one. Helena might or might not "have something on her conscience." If she had, then it proved that she in her humility was a better woman than, with nothing on his conscience, he in his arrogance was a man; and when he said that, he began to understand, with shame, that in regard to other people's wrong-doing he had always been, as Sarah Maitland expressed it, "more particular than his Creator." He thought of her words now, and his lean face reddened. "She hit me when she said that. I've always set up my own Ebenezer. What a fool I must have seemed to a woman like Helena. . . . She's a heavenly creature!" he ended, brokenly; "what difference does it make how she became so? But ifthat'sthe only reason she keeps on refusing me—"
When Elizabeth and David met in Mr. Ferguson's library at noon the next day, everybody was, of course, elaborately unconscious.
Elizabeth came in last. As she entered, Miss White, nibbling speechlessly, was fussing with the fire-irons of a grate filled with white lilacs. Mrs. Richie, turning her back upon her son, began to talk entirely at random to Robert Ferguson, who was rapidly pulling out books from the bookcase at the farther end of the room. David was the only one who made no pretense. When he heard the front door close and knew that she was in the house, he stood staring at the library door. Elizabeth, entering, walked straight up to him, and put out her hand.
"How are you, David?" she said.
David, taking the small, cold hand in his, said, calmly, "How're you, Elizabeth?" Then their eyes met. Hers held steadfast; it was his which fell.
"Have you seen Nannie?" she said.
And he: "Yes; poor Nannie!"
"Hullo, Elizabeth," her uncle called out, carelessly; and Mrs. Richie came over and kissed her.
So that first terrible moment was lived through. During luncheon, they hardly spoke to each other. Elizabeth, with obvious effort, talked to Mrs. Richie of Nannie and Mrs. Maitland; David talked easily and (for him) a great deal, to Robert Ferguson; he talked politics, and disgusted his iron-manufacturing host by denouncing the tariff; he talked municipal affairs, and said that Mercer had a lot of private virtue, but no public morals. "Look at your streets!" said the squirt. In those days, the young man who criticized the existing order was a squirt; now he is a cad; but in the nostrils of middle age, he is as rankly unpleasant by one name as by the other. Elizabeth's uncle was so annoyed that he forgot the embarrassment of the occasion, and said, satirically, to Mrs. Richie: "Well, well! 'See how we apples swim'!" which made her laugh, but did not disturb David in the least. The moment luncheon was over, Elizabeth rose.
"I must go and see Nannie," she said; and David, opening the door for her, said, "I'll go along with you." At which their elders exchanged a startled look.
Out in the street they walked side by side—these two between whom there was a great gulf fixed. By that time the strain of the occasion had begun to show in Elizabeth's face; she was pale, and the tension of her set lips drew the old dimple into a livid line. David was apparently entirely at ease, speaking lightly of this or that; Elizabeth answered in monosyllables. Once, at a crossing, he laid an involuntary hand on her arm—but instantly lifted it as if the touch had burnt him! "Lookout!" he said, and for the first time his voice betrayed him. But before the clattering dray had passed, his taciturn self-control had returned: "you can hardly hear yourself think, in Mercer," he said. Elizabeth was silent; she had come to the end of effort.
It was not until they reached the iron gate of Mrs. Maitland's house that he dragged his quivering reality out of the inarticulate depths, but his brief words were flat and meaningless to the strained creature beside him.
"I was glad to see you to-day," he said.
And she, looking at him with hard eyes, said that it was very kind in him and in his mother to come on to Mrs. Maitland's funeral. "Nannie was so touched by it," she said. She could not say another word; not even good-by. She opened the gate and fled up the steps to the front door.
David, so abruptly deserted, stood for a full minute looking at the dark old house, where the wistaria looping above the pillared doorway was blossoming in wreaths of lavender and faint green.
Then he laughed aloud. "What a fool I am," he said.
When Nannie Maitland, trembling very much, pressed into her brother's hand that certificate for what was, in those days, a very considerable fortune, Blair had been deeply moved. It came after a night, not of grief, to be sure, but of what might be called cosmic emotion,—the child's realization of the parent's death. When he saw the certificate, and knew that at the last moment his mother's ruthless purpose had flagged, her iron will had bent, a wave of something like tenderness rose above his hate as the tide rises above wrecking rocks. For a moment he thought that even if she had carried out her threat of disinheriting him he would be able to forgive her. But as inevitably the wave of feeling ebbed, and he saw again those black rocks of hate below the moving brightness of the tide, he reminded himself that this gift of hers was only a small part of what belonged to him. In a way it was even a confession that she had wronged him. She had written his name, Nannie told him with a curious tremor in her hands and face, "just at the last. It was that last morning," Nannie said, huskily, trying to keep her voice steady; "she hadn't time to change her will, but this shows she was sorry she made it."
"I don't know that that follows," Blair said, gravely. It was not until the next day that he referred to it again: "After all, Nannie, if her will is what she said it would be, it is—outrageous, you know. This money doesn't alter that."
Yet somehow, in those days before the funeral, whenever he thought of breaking the will, that relenting gift seemed to stay his hand. The idea of using her money to thwart her purpose, of taking what she had given him, from affection and a tardy sense of justice, to insult her memory, made him uncomfortable to the point of irritability. It was esthetically offensive. Once he sounded Elizabeth on the subject, and her agreeing outcry of disgust drove him into defending himself: "Of course we don't know yet what her will is; but if she has done what she threatened, it is abominable; and I'll break it—"
"With the money she gave you?" she said.
And he said, boldly, "Yes!"
But he was not really bold; he was perplexed and unhappy, for his hope that his mother had not disinherited him was based on something a little finer than his wish to come into his own; it was a real reluctance to do violence to a relationship of which he had first become conscious the night she died. But with that reluctance, was also the instinct of self-defense: "I have a right to her money!"
The day after the funeral he went to Mrs. Maitland's lawyers with a request to see the will.
"Certainly," the senior member of the firm said; "as you are a legatee a copy has already been prepared for you. I regret, Blair, that your mother took the course she did. I cannot help saying to you that we ventured to advise against it.
"I was aware of my mother's purpose," Blair said, briefly; and added, to himself, "she has done it! … I shall probably contest the will," he said aloud.
Sarah Maitland's old friend and adviser looked at him sympathetically."No use, my boy; it's cast-iron. That was her own phrase, 'cast-iron.'"Then, really sorry for him, he left him in the inner office so that hemight read that ruthless document alone.
Mrs. Maitland had said it was a pity she could not live to see Blair fight her will; she "would like the fun of it." She would not have found any food for mirth if she could have seen her son in that law-office reading with set teeth, her opinion of himself, her realization of her responsibility in making him what he was, and her reason for leaving him merely a small income from a trust fund. Had it not been for the certificate—in itself a denial of her cruel words—lying at that moment in his breast pocket, he would have been unable to control his fury. As it was, underneath his anger was the consciousness that she had made what reparation she could.
When he folded the copy of the will and thrust it into his pocket his face was very pale, but he could not resist saying to old Mr. Howe as he passed him in the outer office, "I hope you will be pleased, sir, in view of your protest about this will, to know that my mother regretted her course toward me, and left a message to that effect with my sister."
"I am glad to hear it," the astonished lawyer said, "but—"
Blair did not wait to hear the end of his sentence. He said to himself that even before he made up his mind what to do about the will he must get possession of his money—"or the first thing I know some of their confounded legal quibbles will make trouble for me," he said.
Certainly there was no trouble for him as yet; the process of securing his mother's gift involved nothing more than the depositing of the certificate in his own bank. The cashier, who knew Sarah Maitland's name very well indeed on checks payable to her son, ventured to offer his condolences: "Your late mother was a very wonderful woman, Mr. Maitland. There was no better business man this side of the Alleghanies than your mother, sir."
Blair bowed; he was too absorbed to make any conventional reply. The will: should he or should he not contest it? His habit of indecision made the mere question—apart from its gravity—acutely painful; not even the probabilities of the result of such a contest helped him to decide what to do. The probabilities were grimly clear. Blair had, perhaps, a little less legal knowledge than the average layman, but even he could not fail to realize that Sarah Maitland's will was, as Mr. Howe had said, "iron." Even if it could be broken, it might take years of litigation to do it. "And a 'bird in the hand'!" Blair reminded himself cynically. "But," he told Nannie, a week or two later when she was repeating nervously, for the twentieth time, just how his mother had softened toward him,—"but those confounded orphan asylums make me mad! If she wanted orphans, what about you and me? Charity begins at home. I swear I'll contest the will!"
Nannie did not smile; she very rarely smiled now. Miss White thought she was grieving over her stepmother's death; and Elizabeth said, pityingly, "I didn't realize she was so fond of her." Perhaps Nannie did not realize it herself until she began to miss her stepmother's roughness, her arrogant generosity, her temper,—to miss, even, the mere violence of her presence; then she began to grieve softly to herself. "Oh, Mamma, I wish you hadn't died," she used to say, over and over, as she lay awake in the darkness. She lay awake a great deal in those first weeks.
All her life Nannie had been like a little leaf whirled along by a great gale of thundering power and purpose which she never attempted to understand, much less contend with; now, abruptly, the gale had dropped, and all her world was still. No wonder she lay awake at night to listen to such stillness! Apart from grief the mere shock of sudden quietness might account for her nervousness, Robert Ferguson said; but he was perplexed at her lack of interest in her own affairs. She seemed utterly unaware of the change in her circumstances. That she was a rich woman now was a matter of indifference to her. And she seemed equally unconscious of her freedom. Apparently it never occurred to her that she could alter her mode of life. Except that, at Blair's insistence, she had a maid, and that Harris had cleared the office paraphernalia from the dining-room table, life in the stately, dirty, melancholy old house still ran in those iron grooves which Mrs. Maitland had laid down for herself nearly thirty years before. Nannie knew nothing better than the grooves, and seemed to desire nothing better. She was indifferent to her surroundings, and what was more remarkable, indifferent to Blair's perplexities; at any rate, she was of no assistance to him in making up his mind about the will. His vacillations hardly seemed to interest her. Once he said, suppose instead of contesting it, he should go to work? But she only said, vaguely, "That would be very nice."
Curiously enough, in the midst of his uncertainties, a little certainty had sprung up: it was the realization that work, merely as work, might be amusing. In these months of tormenting jealousy, of continually crushed hope that Elizabeth would begin to care for him, of occasional shamed consciousness of having taken advantage of a woman—Blair Maitland had had very little to amuse him. So, in those hesitating weeks that followed his mother's death, work, which her will necessitated, began to interest him. Perhaps the interest, if not the amusement, was enhanced by one or two legal opinions as to the possibility of breaking the will. Harry Knight read it, and grinned:
"Well, old man, as you wouldn't give me the case anyhow, I can afford to be perfectly disinterested and tell you the truth. In my opinion, it would put a lot of cash into some lawyer's pocket to contest this will; but I bet it would take a lot out of yours! You'd come out the small end of the horn, my boy."
But Knight was young, Blair reflected, and perhaps his opinion wasn't worth anything. "He's 'Goose Molly's' son," he said to himself, with a half-laugh; it was strange how easily he fell into his mother's speech sometimes! With a distrust of Harry Knight's youth as keen as her own might have been, Blair stated his case to a lawyer in another city.
"Before reading the will," said this gentleman, "let me inquire, sir, whether there is any doubt in your mind of your mother's mental capacity at the time the instrument was drawn?"
"My mother was Sarah Maitland, of the Maitland Works," said Blair, briefly; and the lawyer's involuntary exclamation of chagrin would have been laughable, if it had not been so significant. "But we should, of course, be glad to represent you, Mr. Maitland," he said. Blair, remembering Harry Knight's disinterested remark about pockets, said, dryly, "Thanks, very much," and took his departure. "He must think I'm Mr. Doestick's friend," he told himself. The old joke was his mother's way of avoiding an emphatic adjective when she especially felt the need of it; but he had forgotten that she had ever used it.
As he walked from the lawyer's office to his hotel, he was absorbed to the point of fatigue in his effort to make up his mind, but it was characteristic of him that even in his absorption he winced at the sight of a caged robin, sitting, moping on its perch, in front of a tobacconist's. He had passed the poor wild thing and walked a block, before he turned impulsively on his heel, and came back to interview the shopkeeper. "How much will you sell him for?" he said, with that charming manner that always made people eager to oblige him. The robin, looking at him with lack-luster eyes, sunk his poor little head down into his dulled feathers; there was something so familiar in the movement, that Blair cringed.
"I want to buy the little beggar," he said, so eagerly that the owner mentioned a preposterous price. Blair took the money out of his pocket, and the bird out of the cage. For a minute the captive hesitated, clinging with terrified claws to his rescuer's friendly finger. "Off with you, old fellow!" Blair said, tossing the bird up into the air; and the unused wings were spread! For a minute the eyes of the two men followed the joyous flight over the housetops; then the tobacconist grinned rather sheepishly: "Guess you've struck oil, ain't you?—or somebody's left you a fortune."
Blair chuckled. "Think so?" he said. But as he walked on down the street, he sighed; how dull the robin's eyes had been. Elizabeth's eyes looked like that sometimes. "What a donkey I am," he said to himself; "ten dollars! Well, I'llhaveto contest the will and get that fortune, or I can't keep up the liberator role!" Then he fell to thinking how he must invest what fortune he had—anything to get that confounded robin out of his head! "I'm not going to keep all my money in a stocking in the bank," he told himself. The idea of investment pleased him; and when he got back to Mercer he devoted himself to consultations with brokers. After some three months of it, he found the 'work,' as he called it, distinctly amusing. "It's mighty interesting," he told his wife once; "I really like it."
Elizabeth said, languidly, that she hoped he would go into business because it would have pleased his mother. Since Mrs. Maitland's death, Elizabeth had not seemed well; no one connected her languor with that speechless walk with David to Nannie's door, or her look into his eyes when she bade farewell to a hope that she had not known she was cherishing. But the experience had been a profound shock to her. His entire ease, his interest in other matters than the one matter of her life, and most of all his casual "glad to see you," meant that he had forgiven her, and so no longer loved her,—for of course, if he loved her he would not forgive her! In these two years she had told herself with perfect sincerity, a thousand times, that he had ceased to love her; but now it seemed to her that, for the first time, she really knew it. "He doesn't even hate me," she thought, bleakly. For sheer understanding of suffering she grew a little gentler to Blair; but her sympathy, although it gave him moments of hope, did not reach the point of helping him to decide what to do about the will. So, veering between the sobering reflection that litigation was probably useless, and the esthetically repulsive idea of using his mother's confession of regret to fight her, he reached no decision. Meantime, "investment" slipped easily into speculation,—speculation which, by that strange tempering of the wind that sometimes comes before the lamb is shorn, was remarkably successful.
It was gossip about this speculation that made Robert Ferguson prick up his ears: "Where in thunder does he get the money to monkey with the stock-market?" he said to himself; "he hasn't any securities to put up, and he can't borrow on his expectations any more,—everybody knows she cut him off with a shilling!" He was concerned as well as puzzled. "I'll have him on my hands yet," he thought, morosely. "Confound it! It's hard on me that she disinherited him. He'll be a millstone round my neck as long as he lives." Robert Ferguson had long ago made up his mind—with tenderness—that he must support Elizabeth, "but I won't supply that boy with money to gamble with! And if he goes on in this way, of course he'll come down on me for the butcher's bill." That was how he happened to ask Elizabeth about Blair's concerns. When he did, the whole matter came out. It was Sunday morning. Elizabeth, starting for church, had asked Blair, perfunctorily, if he were going. "Church?" he said—he was sitting at his writing-table, idly spinning a penny; "not I! I'm going to devote the Sabbath day to deciding about the will." She had made no comment, and his lip hardened. "She doesn't care what I do," he said to himself, gloomily; yet he believed she would be pleased if he refused to fight. "Heads or tails," he said, listening to her retreating step; "suppose I say 'heads, bird in the hand;—work. Tails, bird in the bush;—fight.' Might as well decide it this way if she won't help me."
She had never thought of helping him; instead she stopped at her uncle's and went out into the garden with him to watch him feed his pigeons. When that was over, they came back together to the library, and it was while she was standing at his big table buttoning her gloves that he asked her if Blair was speculating.
Yes; she believed he was. No; not with her money; that had been just about used up, anyhow; although he had paid it all back to her when he got his money. "Will you invest it for me, Uncle Robert?" she said.
"Of course; but mind," he barked, with the old, comfortable crossness, "you won't get any crazy ten per cent out of my investments! You'll have to go to Blair Maitland's wildcats for that. But if he isn't using your money, how on earth can he speculate? What do you mean by 'his' money?"
"Why," she explained, surprised, "he has all that money Mrs. Maitland gave him the day she died."
"What!"
"Didn't you know about the check?" she said; she had not mentioned it to him herself, partly because of their tacit avoidance of Blair's name, but also because she had taken it for granted that he was aware of what Mrs. Maitland had done. She told him of it now, adding, in a smothered voice, "She forgave him for marrying me, you see, at the end."
He was silent for a few moments, and Elizabeth, glancing at the clock, was turning to go, but he stopped her. "Hold on a minute. I don't understand this business. Tell me all about it, Elizabeth."
She told him what little she knew, rather vaguely: Mrs. Maitland had drawn a check—no: she believed it was called a bank certificate of deposit. It was for a great deal of money. When she told him how much, Robert Ferguson struck his fist on the arm of his chair. "That's it!" he said. "That is where David's money went!"
"David'smoney?" Elizabeth said, breathlessly.
"I see it now," he went on, angrily; "she had the money on hand; that's why she tried to write that letter. How Fate does get ahead of David every time!"
"Uncle! What do you mean?"
He told her, briefly, of Mrs. Maitland's plan. "She said two years ago that she was going to give David a lump sum. I didn't know she had got it salted down—she was pretty close-mouthed about some things; but I guess she had. Well, probably, at the last minute, she thought she had been hard on Blair, and decided to hand it over to him, instead of giving it to David. She had a right to, a perfect right to. But I don't understand it! The very day she spoke of writing to David, she told me she wouldn't leave Blair a cent. It isn't like her to whirl about that way—unless it was during one of those times when she wasn't herself. Well," he ended, sighing, "there is nothing to be done about it, of course; but I'll see Nannie, and get at the bottom of it, just for my own satisfaction."
Elizabeth's color came and went; she reminded herself that she must be fair to Blair; his mother had a right to show her forgiveness by leaving the money to him instead of David. Yes; she must remember that; she must be just to him. But even as she said so she ground her teeth together.
"Blair did not try to influence his mother, Uncle Robert," she said, "if that's what you are thinking of. He didn't see her while she was sick. He has never seen her since—since—" "There are other ways of influencing people than by seeing them. He wrote to Nannie, didn't he?"
"If I thought," Elizabeth said in a low voice, "that Blair had induced Nannie to influence Mrs. Maitland, I would—" But she did not finish her sentence. "Good-by, Uncle Robert. I'm going to see Nannie."
As she hurried down toward Shantytown through the Sunday emptiness of the hot streets, she said to herself that if Nannie had made her stepmother give the money to Blair, she, Elizabeth, would do something about it! "I won't have it!" she said, passionately.
It had been a long time since Elizabeth's face had been so vivid. The old sheet-lightning of anger began to flash faintly across it. She did not know what she would do to Nannie if Nannie had induced Mrs. Maitland to rob David, but she would do something! Yet when she reached the house, her purpose waited for a minute; Nannie's tremor of loneliness and perplexity was so pitifully in evidence that she could not burst into her own perplexity.
She had been trying, poor Nannie! to make up her mind about many small, crowding affairs incident to the situation. In these weeks since Mrs. Maitland's death, Nannie, for the first time in her life, found herself obliged to answer questions. Harris asked them: "You ain't a-goin' to be livin' here, Miss Nannie; 'tain't no use to fill the coal-cellar, is it?" Miss White asked them: "Your Mamma's clothes ought to be put in camphor, dear child, or else given away; which do you mean to do?" Blair asked them: "When will you move out of this terrible house, Nancy dear?" A dozen times a day she was asked to make up her mind, she whose mind had always been made up for her!
That hot Sunday morning when Elizabeth was hurrying down to Shantytown with the lightning flickering in her clouded eyes, Nannie, owing to Miss White's persistence about camphor, had gone into Mrs. Maitland's room to look over her things.
Oh, these "things"! These pitiful possessions that the helpless dead must needs leave to the shrinking disposal of those who are left! How well every mourner knows them, knows the ache of perplexity and dismay that comes with the very touch of them. It is not the valuables that make grief shrink,—they settle themselves; such-and-such books or jewels or pieces of silver belong obviously to this or that side of the family. But what about the dear, valueless, personal things that neither side of the family wants? Things treasured by the silent dead because of some association unknown, perhaps, to those who mourn. What about these precious, worthless things? Mrs. Maitland had no personal possessions of intrinsic value, but she had her treasures. There was a little calendar on her bureau; it was so old that Nannie could not remember when it had not been there hanging from the slender neck of a bottle of German cologne. She took it up now, and looked at the faded red crescents of the new moon; how long ago that moon had waxed and waned! "She loved it," Nannie said to herself, "because Blair gave it to her." Standing on the bureau was the row of his photographs; on each one his mother had written his age and the date when the picture had been taken. In the disorder of the top drawer, tumbled about among her coarse handkerchiefs, her collars, her Sunday black kid gloves, were relics of her son's babyhood: a little green morocco slipper, with a white china button on the ankle-band; a rubber rattle, cracked and crumbling…. What is one to do with things like these? Burn them, of course. There is nothing else that can be done. Yet the mourner shivers when the flame touches them, as though the cool fingers of the dead might feel the scorch! Poor, frightened Nannie was the last person who could light such a holy fire; she took them up—the slipper or the calendar, and put them down again. "Poor Mamma!" she said over and over. Then she saw a bunch of splinters tied together with one of Blair's old neckties; she held it in her hand for a minute before she realized that it was part of a broken cane. She did not know when or why it had been broken, but she knew it was Blair's, and her eyes smarted with tears. "Oh, how she loved him!" she thought, and drew a breath of satisfaction remembering how she had helped that speechless, dying love to express itself.
She was standing there before the open drawer, lifting things up, then putting them back again, unable to decide what to do with any of them, when Elizabeth suddenly burst in:
"Nannie!"
"Oh, I am so glad you've come!" Nannie said. She made a helpless gesture. "Elizabeth, whatshallI do with everything?"
Elizabeth shook her head; the question which she had hurried down here to ask paused before such forlorn preoccupation.
"Of course her dresses Harris will give away—"
"Oh no!" Elizabeth interrupted, shrinking. "Don't give them to a servant."
"But," poor Nannie protested, "they are so dreadful, Elizabeth. Nobody can possibly wear them, except people like some of Harris's friends. But things like these—what would you do with these?" She held out a discolored pasteboard box broken at the corners and with no lid; a pair of onyx earrings lay in the faded blue cotton. "I never saw her wear them but once, and they aresougly," Nannie mourned.
"Nannie," Elizabeth said, "I want to ask you something. That certificate Mrs. Maitland gave Blair: what made her give it to him?"
Nannie put the pasteboard box back in the drawer and turned sharply to face her sister-in-law, who was sitting on the edge of Mrs. Maitland's narrow iron bed; the scared attention of her eyes banished their vagueness. "What made her give it to him? Why, love, of course! Don't you suppose Mamma loved Blair better than anybody in the world, even if he did—displease her?"
"Uncle thinks you may have influenced her to give it to him."
"I did not!"
"Did you suggest it to her, Nannie?"
"I asked her once, while she was ill, wouldn't she please be nice toBlair,—if you call that suggesting! As for the certificate, that lastmorning she sort of woke up, and told me to bring it to her to sign.And I did."
She turned back to the bureau, and put an unsteady hand down into the drawer. The color was rising in her face, and a muscle in her cheek twitched painfully.
"But Nannie," Elizabeth said, and paused; the dining-room door had opened, and Robert Ferguson was standing on the threshold of Mrs. Maitland's room looking in at the two girls. The astonishment he had felt in his talk with his niece had deepened into perplexity. "I guess I'll thresh this thing out now," he said to himself, and picked up his hat. He was hardly ten minutes behind Elizabeth in her walk down to the Maitland house.
"Nannie," he said, kindly,—he never barked at Nannie; "can you spare time, my dear, to tell me one or two things I want to know?" He had come in, and found a dusty wooden chair. "Go ahead with your sorting things out. You can answer my question in a minute; it's about that certificate your mother gave Blair."
Nannie had turned, and was standing with her hands behind her gripping the edge of the bureau; she gasped once or twice, and glanced first at one inquisitor and then at the other; her face whitened slowly. She was like some frightened creature at bay; indeed her agitation was so marked that Robert Ferguson's perplexity hardened into something like suspicion. "Can there be anything wrong?" he asked himself in consternation. "You see, Nannie," he explained, gently, "I happen to know that your mother meant it for David Richie, not Blair."
"If she did," said Nannie, "she changed her mind." "When did she change her mind?"
"I don't know. She just told me to bring the check to her to sign, that—that last morning."
"Was she perfectly clear mentally?"
"Yes. Yes. Of course she was! Perfectly clear."
"Did she say why she had changed her mind?"
"No," Nannie said, and suddenly fright and anger together made her fluent; "but why shouldn't she change her mind, Mr. Ferguson? Isn't Blair her son? Her only son! What was David to Mamma? Would you have her give all that money to an outsider, and leave her only son penniless? Perhaps she changed her mind that morning. I don't know anything about it. I don't see what difference it makes when she changed it, so long as she changed it. All I can tell you is that she told me to bring her the check, or certificate, or whatever you call it, out of the little safe. And I did, and she made it out to Blair. I didn't ask her to. I didn't even know she had it; but I am thankful she did it!"
Her eyes were dilating; she put her shaking hand up to her throat, as if she were struggling for breath. Her statement was perfectly reasonable and probable, yet it left no doubt in Robert Ferguson's mind that there was something wrong,—very wrong! Even Elizabeth could see it. They both had the same thought: Blair had in some way influenced, perhaps even coerced his mother. How, they could not imagine, but Nannie evidently knew. They looked at each other in dismay. Then Elizabeth sprang up and put her arms around her sister-in-law. "Oh, Uncle," she said, "don't ask her anything more now!" She felt the quiver through all the terrified little figure.
"Mamma wanted Blair to have the money; it's his! No one can take it from him!"
"Nobody wants to, Nannie, if it is his honestly," Robert Ferguson said, gravely.
"Honestly?" Nannie whispered, with dry lips.
"Nannie dear, tell us the truth," Elizabeth implored her; "Uncle won't be hard on Blair, if—if he has done wrong. I know he won't."
"Wrong?" said Nannie; "Blair done wrong?" She pushed Elizabeth's arms away; "Blair has never done wrong in his life!" She stood there, with her back against the bureau, and dared them. "I won't have you suspect my brother! Elizabeth! How can you let Mr. Ferguson suspect Blair?"
"Nannie," said Robert Ferguson, "was Blair with his mother when she signed that certificate?"
"No."
"Were you alone with her?"
Silence.
"Answer me, Nannie."
She looked at him with wild eyes, but she said nothing. Mr. Ferguson put his hand on her shoulder. "Nannie," he said, quietly, "Blair signed it; Blair wrote his mother's name."
"No! No! No! He did not! He did not." There was something in her voice—a sort of relief, a sort of triumph, even, that the other two could not understand, but which made them know that she was speaking the truth. "He did not," Nannie said, in a whisper; "if you accuse him of that, I'll have to tell you; though very likely you won't understand. I did it. For Mamma."
"Didwhat?" Robert Ferguson gasped; "not—? You don't mean—? Nannie! you don't mean that you—" he stopped; his lips formed a word which he would not utter.
"Mamma wanted him to have the money. The day before she died she told me she was going to give him a present. That day, that last day, she told me to get the check. And she wrote his name on it. No one asked her to. Not Blair. Not I. I never thought of such a thing! I didn't even know there was a check. She wanted to do it. She wrote his name. And then—she got weak; she couldn't go on. She couldn't sign it. So I signed it for her…later. It was not wrong. It was right. It carried out her wish. I am glad I did it."
"Nannie," her old friend said, in despair, "don't you know what the law calls it, when one person imitates another person's handwriting for such a purpose."
"You can call it anything you want to," she said, passionately. "Icall it carrying out Mamma's wishes. And I would do it over again this minute."
Robert Ferguson was speechless with dismay. To find rigidity in this meek mind, was as if, through layers of velvet, through fold on fold of yielding dullness that gave at the slightest touch, he had suddenly, at some deeper pressure, felt, under the velvet, granite!
"It was right," Nannie said, fiercely, trembling all over, "it was right, because it was necessary. Oh, what do your laws amount to, when it comes to dying? When it comes to a time like that! She wasdying—you don't seem to understand—Mamma was dying! And she wanted Blair to have that money; and just because she hadn't the strength to write her name, you would let her wish fail. Of course I wrote it for her! Yes; I know what you call it. But what do I care what it is called, if I carried out her wish and gave Blair the money she wanted him to have? Now he has got it, and nobody can take it away from him."
"My dear child, if he kept it, it would be stealing."
"You can't steal from your mother," Nannie said; "Mamma would be the first one to say so!"
Mr. Ferguson looked over at his niece and shook his head; how were they to make her understand? "He can't keep it, Nannie. When he understands that it isn't his, he will simply give it back to the estate, and then it will come to you."
"To me?" she said, astounded. And he explained that she was her stepmother's residuary legatee. She looked blank, and he told her the meaning of the term.
"The estate is going to meet the bequests with a fair balance; and as that balance will come to you, this money you gave to Blair will be yours, too."
She had been standing, with Elizabeth's pitying arms about her; but at the shock of his explanation she seemed to collapse. She sank down in a chair, panting. "It wasn't necessary! I could have just given it to him."
Later, when Robert Ferguson was walking home with his niece, he, too, said, grimly: "No; it 'wasn't necessary,' as she says, poor child! She could have given it to him; just as she will give it to him, now. Well, well, to think of that mouse, Nannie, upsetting the lion's plans!"
Elizabeth was silent.
"What I can't understand," he ruminated, "is how that signature could pass at the bank; a girl like Nannie able to copy a signature so that a bank wouldn't detect it!"
"She has always copied Mrs. Maitland's writing," Elizabeth said; "that last week Mrs. Maitland said she could not tell the difference herself."
Robert Ferguson looked perfectly incredulous. "It's astounding!" he said; "and it would be impossible,—if it hadn't happened. Well, come along home with me, Elizabeth. I think I'd better tell you just how the matter stands, so that you can explain it to Blair. I don't care to see him myself—if I can help it. But in the matter of transferring the money to the estate, we must keep Nannie's name out of it, and I want you to tell him how he and I must patch it up."
"When he returns it, I suppose the executors will give it at once toDavid?" she said.
"Of course not. It will belong to the estate. Women have no financial moral sense!"
"Oh!" Elizabeth said; and pondered.
Just as he was pulling out his latch-key to open his front door, she spoke again: "If Nannie gives it back to him, Blair will have to send it to David, won't he?"
"I can't go into Mr. Blair Maitland's ideals of honor," her uncle said, dryly. "Legally, if Nannie chooses to make him a gift, he has a right to keep it."
She made no reply. She sat down at the library table opposite him, and listened without comment to the information which he desired her to convey to Blair. But long before she got back to the hotel, Blair had had the information.
Nannie, left to herself after that distressing interview, sat in the dusty desolation of Mrs. Maitland's room, her face hidden in her hands.She needn't have done it. That was her first clear thought. The strain of that dreadful hour alone in the dining-room, with Death behind the locked door, had been unnecessary! As she realized how unnecessary, she felt a resentment that was almost anger at such a waste of pain. Then into the resentment crept a little fright. Mr. Ferguson's words about wrong-doing began to have meaning. "Of course it was against the law," she told herself, "but it was not wrong,—there is a difference." It was incredible to her that Mr. Ferguson did not see the difference. "Mamma wouldn't have let him speak so to me, if she'd been here," she thought, and her lip trembled; "oh, I wish she hadn't died," she said; and cried softly for a minute or two. Then it occurred to her that she had better go to the River House and tell her brother the whole story. "If Mr. Ferguson is angry about it perhaps Blair had better pay the money back right off; of course I'll give it to him the minute it comes to me; but he will know what to do now."
She ran up-stairs to her own room, and began to dress to go out, but she was so nervous that her fingers were all thumbs; "I don't want Elizabeth to tell him," she said to herself; and tried to hurry, dropping her hat-pin and mislaying her gloves; "oh, where is my veil!" she said, frantically.
She was just leaving her room when she heard Blair's voice in the lower hall: "Nancy! Where are you?"
"I'm coming," she called back; and came running down-stairs. "Oh, Blair dear," she said, "I want to see you so much!" By that time she was on the verge of tears, and the flush of worry in her cheeks made her so pretty that her brother looked at her appreciatively.
"Black is mighty becoming to you, Nancy. Nannie dear, I have something to tell you. Come into the parlor!" His voice, as he put his arm around her and drew her into the room, had a ring in it which, in spite of her preoccupation, caught her attention. "Sit down!" he commanded; and then, standing in front of her, his handsome face alert, he told her that he was not going to contest his mother's will. "I pitched up a penny," he said, gaily; "I was sick and tired of the uncertainty. 'Heads, I fight; tails, I cave.' It came down tails," he said, with a half-sheepish laugh. "Well, it will please Elizabeth if I don't fight. I'll go into business. I can get a partnership in Haines's office. He is a stockbroker, you know."
Nannie's attention flagged; in the nature of things she could not understand how important this decision was, so she was not disturbed that it should have been made by the flip of a penny. Blair was apt to rely upon chance to make up his mind for him, and in regard to the will, heads or tails was as good a chance as any. In her own preoccupation, she had not realized that he had reached the reluctant conviction that in any effort to break the will, the legal odds would be against him. But if she had realized it she would have known that the probable hopelessness of litigation would not have helped him much in reaching a decision, so the penny judgment would not have surprised her. Blair, as he told her about it, was in great spirits. He had been entirely sincere in his reluctance to take any step which might indicate contempt for his mother's late (if adequate) repentance; so now, though a little rueful about the money, he was distinctly relieved that his taste was not going to be sentimentally offended. He meant to live on what his mother had given him until he made a fortune for himself. For he was going to make a fortune! He was going to stand on his own legs. He was going to buy Elizabeth's interest in him and his affairs, buy even her admiration by making this sacrifice of not fighting for his rights! He was full of the fervor of it all as he stood there telling his sister of his decision. When he had finished, he waited for her outburst of approval.
But she only nodded nervously; "Blair, Mr. Ferguson says you've got to give back that money; Mamma's check, you know?"
"What?" Blair said; he was standing by the piano, and as he spoke he struck a crashing octave; "what on earth do you mean?"
"Well, he—I—" It had not occurred to Nannie that it would be difficult to tell Blair, but suddenly it seemed impossible. "You see, Mamma didn't exactly—sign the check."
"What are you talking about?" Blair said, suddenly attentive.
"She wanted you to have the money," Nannie began, faintly.
"Of course she did; but what do you mean about not signing the check 'exactly'?" In his bewilderment, which was not yet alarm, he put his arm around her, laughing: "Nancy, what is all this stuff?"
"I did for her," Nannie said.
"Did what?"
"Signed it."
"Nannie, I don't understand you; do you mean that mother made you indorse that certificate? Nancy, do try to be clear!" He was uneasy now; perhaps some ridiculous legal complication had arisen. "Some of their everlasting red tape! Fortunately, I've got the money all right," he said to himself, dryly.
"She wrote the first part of it," Nannie began, stammering with the difficulty of explaining what had seemed so simple; "but she hadn't the strength to sign her name, so I—did it for her."
Her brother looked at her aghast. "Did she tell you to?"
"No; she . . . was dead."
"Good God!" he said. The shock of it made him feel faint. He sat down, too dumfounded for speech.
"I had to, you see," Nannie explained, breathlessly; she was very much frightened, far more frightened than when she had told Mr. Ferguson. "I had to, because—because Mamma couldn't. She was … not alive."
Blair suddenly put his hands over his face. "You forged mother's name!"His consternation was like a blow; she cringed away from it: "No;I—just wrote it."