Book: The Iron Woman

M >> Margaret Deland >> The Iron Woman




Nannie looked at the closed door of the library, then at Miss
White, lying there, crying and moaning to herself with her poor
old head on the stairs; once she tried to speak, but Miss White
did not hear her; it was intolerable to see such pain. Blair's
sister, ashamed with his shame, stammered something, she did not
know what, then opening the front door, slipped out into the
dusk. The situation was so incredible she could not take it in.
Blair and Elizabeth--_married?_ She kept saying it over and
over. But it was impossible! Elizabeth was to marry David on her
birthday. "I feel as if I were going out of my mind!" Nannie told
herself, hurrying down into Mercer's black, noisy heart. When she
reached the squalor of Maitland's shantytown and saw the great
old house on the farther side of the street, looming up on its
graded embankment, black against a smoldering red sunset, she was
almost sobbing aloud, and when Harris answered her ring, she was
in such tension that she burst out at him: "Harris! where is Mr.
Blair? Do you know? Have you heard--anything?" She seized the old
man's arm and held on to it. "Where is Mr. Blair, Harris?"

"My laws, Miss Nannie! how do I know? Ain't he at the hotel?
There's a letter come for you; it come just after you went out.
Looks like it was from him. There, now, child! Don't you take on
like that! I guess if Mr. Blair can write letters, there ain't
much wrong with him."

When he brought her the letter, she made him wait there in the
dimly lighted hall until she opened it, she had a feeling that
she could not read it by herself, "Oh, Harris!" she said, and
began to tremble; "it's true! He did.... They are--oh, Harris!"
And while the old man drew her into the parlor, and scuffled
about to light the gas and bring her a glass of water, she told
him, brokenly--she had to tell somebody--what had happened.
Harris's ejaculations were of sheer amazement, untouched by
disapproval: "Mr. Blair? Married to Miss Elizabeth? My land!
There! He always did git in ahead!" His astounded chuckle was as
confusing as all the rest of it. Nannie, standing under the
single flaring jet of gas, read the letter again. It was, at any
rate, more enlightening than Elizabeth's to her uncle:

"Dear Nannie: Don't have a fit when I tell you Elizabeth and I
are married. She had a row with David, and broke her engagement
with him. We were married this afternoon. I'm afraid mother won't
like it, because, I admit, it's rather sudden. But really it is
the easiest way all round, especially for--other people. It's on
the principle of having your tooth pulled _quick_!--if you
have to have it pulled, instead of by degrees. I'll amount to
something, now, and that will please mother. You tell her that I
will amount to something now! I want you to tell her about it
before I write to her myself--which, of course, I shall do to-
morrow--because it will be easier for her to have it come from
you. Tell her marrying Elizabeth will make a business man of me.
You must tell her as soon as you get this, because probably it
will be in the newspapers. I feel like a cur, asking you to break
it to her, because, of course, it's sort of difficult. She won't
like it, just at first; she never likes anything I do. But it
will be easier for her to hear it first from you. Oh, you dear
old Nancy!--I am nearly out of my head, I'm so happy. . . .

"P.S. We are going off for a month or so. I'll let you know where
to address us when I know myself."

Nannie dropped down into a chair, and tried to get her wits
together. If Elizabeth had broken with David, why, then, of
course, she could marry Blair; but why should she marry him right
away? "It isn't--decent!" said Nannie. And when did she break
with David? Only day before yesterday she was expecting to marry
him. "It is horrible!" said Nannie; and her recoil of disgust for
a moment included Blair. But the habit of love made her instant
with excuses: "It's worse in Elizabeth than in him. Mamma will
say so, too." Then she felt a shock of terror: "Mamma!" She
smoothed out the letter, crumpled in her shaking hand, and read
it again: "'I want you to tell her--' Oh, I _can't!_" Nannie
said; "'it will be easier for her to have it come from you--'
And what about me?" she thought, with sudden, unwonted
bitterness; "it won't be 'easy' for me."

She began to take off her things; then realized that she was
shivering. The few minutes of stirring the fire which was
smoldering under a great lump of coal between the brass jambs of
the grate, gave her the momentary relief of occupation; but when
she sat down in the shifting firelight, and held her trembling
hands toward the blaze, the shame and fright came back again.
"Poor David!" she said; but even as she said it she defended her
brother; "if Elizabeth had broken with him, of course Blair had a
right to marry her. But how _could_ Elizabeth! I can never
forgive her!" Nannie thought, wincing with disgust. "To be
engaged to David one day, and marry Blair the next!--Oh, Blair
ought not to have done it," she said, involuntarily; and hid her
face in her hands. But it was so intolerable to her to blame him,
that she drove her mind back to Elizabeth's vulgarity; she could
bear what had happened if she thought of Blair as a victim and
not as an offender.

"I can never feel the same to Elizabeth again," she said. Then
she remembered what her brother had bidden her do, and quailed.
For a moment she was actually sick with panic. Then she, too,
knew the impulse to get the tooth pulled "quick." She got up and
went swiftly across the hall to the dining-room. It was empty,
except for Harris, who was moving some papers from the table to
set it for supper.

"Oh, Harris," she said, with a gasp of relief, "she isn't here!
Harris, I have got to tell her. You don't think she'll mind much,
do you?"

But by this time Harris's chuckling appreciation of Mr. Blair's
cleverness in getting in ahead had evaporated. "My, my, my, Miss
Nannie!" he said, his weak blue eyes blinking with fright,
"_I_ wouldn't tell her, not if you'd gimme the Works!"

"Harris, if you were in my place, would you try to, at supper?"

"Now, Miss, how can I tell? She'll be wild; my, my; wild!"

"I don't see why. Mr. Blair had a right to get married."

"He'd ought to have let on to her about it," Harris said.

For a few minutes Nannie was stricken dumb. Then she sought
encouragement again: "Perhaps if you had something nice for
supper, she'd be--pleased, you know, and take it better?"

"There's to be cabbage. Maybe that will soften her up. She likes
it; gor, how she likes cabbage!" said Harris, almost weeping.

"Harris, how do you think she'll take it?"

"She won't take it well," the old man said. "Miss Elizabeth was
Mr. David's girl. When I come to think it over, I don't take it
well myself, Miss Nannie. Nor you don't, neither. No, she won't
take it well."

"But Miss Elizabeth had broken with Mr. David," Nannie defended
her brother; "Mr. Blair had a right--" then she shivered. "But
_I've_ got to tell her! Oh, Harris, I think she wouldn't
mind so much, if he told her himself?"

Harris considered. "Yes, Miss, she would. Mr. Blair don't put
things right to his ma. He'd say something she wouldn't like.
He'd say something about some of his pretty truck. Them things
always make her mad. That picture he bought--the lady nursin' the
baby, in your parlor; she ain't got over that yet. Oh, no, she'll
take it better from you. You be pretty with her, Miss Nannie. She
likes it when you're pretty with her. I once seen a chippy
sittin' on a cowcatcher; well, it made me think o' you and her.
You be pretty to her, and then tell her, kind of--of easy,"
Harris ended weakly.

Easy! It was all very well to say "_easy_"; Harris might as
well say knock her down "easy." At that moment the back door
banged.

Mrs. Maitland burst into the room in intense preoccupation; the
day had been one of absorbing interest, culminating in success,
and she was alert with satisfaction. "Harris, supper! Nannie,
take my bonnet! Is your brother to be here to-night? I've
something to tell him! Where's the evening paper?"

Nannie, breathless, took the forlorn old bonnet, and said, "I--I
think he isn't coming, Mamma." Harris came running with the
newspaper; they exchanged a frightened glance, although the
mistress of the house, with one hand on the carving-knife, was
already saying, "Bless, O Lord--"

At supper Mrs. Maitland, eating--as the grocer said so long ago,
"like a day-laborer"--read her paper. Nannie watching her, ate
nothing at all and said nothing at all.

When the coarse, hurried meal was at an end, and Harris, blinking
with horrified sympathy, had shut himself into his pantry, Nannie
said, faintly, "Mamma, I have something to tell you."

"I guess it will keep, my dear, I guess it will keep! I'm too
busy just now to talk to you." She crumpled up her newspaper,
flung it on the floor, and plunged over to her desk.

Nannie looked helplessly at the back of her head, then went off
to her parlor. She sat there in the firelit darkness, too
distracted and frightened to light the gas, planning how the news
must be told. At eight o'clock there was a fluttering, uncertain
ring at the front door, and Cherry-pie came quivering in: had
Nannie heard anything more? Did she know where _they_ were?
"I asked her uncle to come down here and see if Mrs. Maitland had
heard anything, but--he was dreadful, Nannie, dreadful! He said
he would see the whole family in--I can't repeat where he said he
would see them!" She broke down and cried; then, crouching at
Nannie's side, she read Blair's letter by the uncertain light of
the fire. After that, except for occasional whispered
ejaculations of terror and pain, they were silent, sitting close
together like two frightened birds; sometimes a lump of coal
split apart, or a hissing jet of gas bubbled and flamed between
the bars of the grate, and then their two shadows flickered
gigantic on the wall behind them; but except for that the room
was very still. When the older woman rose to go, Nannie clung to
her:

"Oh, won't you tell her? Please--please!" Poor old Miss White
could only shake her head:

"I can't, my dear, I _can't!_ It would not be fitting. Do it
now, my dear; do it immejetly, and get it over."

When Cherry-pie had wavered back into the night, Nannie gathered
up her courage to "get it over." She went stealthily across the
hall; but at the dining-room door she stood still, her hand on
the knob, not daring to enter. Strangely enough, in the midst of
the absorbing distress of the moment, some trick of memory made
her think of the little 'fraid-cat, standing outside that door,
trying to find the courage to open it and get for Blair--for
whose sake she stood there now--the money for his journey all
around the world! In spite of her terror, she smiled faintly;
then she opened the door and looked in. Mrs. Maitland was still
at work, and she retreated noiselessly. At eleven she tried
again.

Except for the single gas-jet under a green shade that hung above
the big desk, the room was dark. Mrs. Maitland was in her chair,
writing rapidly; she did not hear Nannie's hesitating footstep,
or know that she was in the room, until the girl put her hand on
the arm of her chair.

"Mamma."

"Yes?"

"Mamma, I have something to--to tell you."

Mrs. Maitland signed her name, put her pen behind her ear, flung
a blotter down on the heavily written page, and rubbed her fist
over it. "Well?" she said cheerfully; and glanced up at her
stepdaughter over her steel-rimmed spectacles, with kind eyes;
"what are you awake for, at this hour?" Then she drew out a fresh
sheet of paper, and began to write: "My dear Sir:--Yours
received, and con--"

"Mamma . . . Blair is married."

The pen made a quick, very slight upward movement; there was a
spatter of ink; then the powerful, beautiful hand went on evenly
"--tents noted." She rubbed the blotter over this line, put the
pen in a cup of shot, and turned around. "What did you say?"

"I said . . . Blair is married."

Silence.

"He asked me to tell you."

Silence.

"He hopes you will not be angry. He says he is going to be a--a
tremendous business man, now, because he is so happy."

Silence. Then, in a loud voice: "How long has this been going
on?"

"Oh, Mamma, not any time at all, truly! I am perfectly sure it--
it was on the spur of the moment."

"Married, 'on the spur of the moment'? Good God!"

"I only mean he hasn't been planning it. He--"

"And what kind of woman has married him, 'on the spur of the
moment'?"

"Oh,--Mamma . . ."

Her voice was so terrified that Mrs. Maitland suddenly looked at
her. "Don't be frightened, Nannie," she said kindly. "What is it?
You have something more to tell me, I can see that. Come, out
with it! Is she bad?"

"Oh, _Mamma!_ don't! don't! It is--she is--Elizabeth--"

Then she fled.

That night, at about two o'clock, Mrs. Maitland entered her
stepdaughter's room. Nannie was dozing, but started up in her
bed, her heart in her throat at the sight of the gaunt figure
standing beside her. Blair's mother had a candle in one hand, and
the other was curved about it to protect the bending flame from
the draught of the open door; the light flickered up on her face,
and Nannie was conscious of how deep the wrinkles were on her
forehead and about her mouth.

"Nannie, tell me everything."

She put the candle on the table at the head of the bed, and sat
down, leaning forward a little, as if a weight were resting on
her shoulders. Her clasped hands, hanging loosely between her
knees, seemed, in the faint light of the small, pointed flame,
curiously shrunken and withered. "Tell me," she said heavily.

Nannie told her all she knew. It was little enough.

"How do you know that Elizabeth had broken with David Richie?"
her stepmother said. Nannie silently handed her Blair's letter.
Mrs. Maitland took up her candle, and holding it close to the
flimsy sheet, read her son's statement. Then she handed it back.
"I see; some sort of a squabble; and Blair--" She stopped, almost
with a groan. "His _friend,_" she said, and her chin shook;
"your father's son!" she said brokenly.

"Mamma!" Nannie protested--she was sitting up in bed, her hair in
its two braids falling over her white night-dress, her eyes, so
girlish, so frightened, fixed on that quivering iron face;
"Mamma! remember, he was in love with Elizabeth long ago, before
David ever thought--"

"In love with Elizabeth? He was never in love with anybody but
himself."

"Oh, Mamma, please forgive him! It's done now, and it can't be
undone."

"What has my forgiveness got to do with it? It's done, as you
say. It can't be undone. Nothing can be undone. Nothing; nothing.
All the years that remain cannot undo the years that I have been
building this up."

Nannie stared at her blankly. And suddenly the hard face
softened. "Lie down. Go to sleep." She put her big roughened hand
gently on the girl's head. "Go to sleep, my child." She took up
her candle, and a moment later Nannie heard the stairs creak
under her heavy tread.

Sarah Maitland did not sleep that night; but after the first
outburst, when Nannie had panted out, "It is--Elizabeth," and
then fled, there had been no anger. When the door closed behind
her stepdaughter, Blair's mother put her hand over her eyes and
sat perfectly still at her desk. _Blair was married._ And he
had not told her,--that was the first thought. Then, into the
pitiful, personal dismay of mortification and wounded love, came
the sword-thrust of a second thought: he had stolen his friend's
wife.

It was not a moment for nice discriminations; the fact that
Elizabeth had not been married to David seemed immaterial. This
was because, to Sarah Maitland's generation, the word, in this
matter of getting married, was so nearly as good as the bond,
that a broken engagement was always a solemn, and generally a
disgraceful thing. So, when she said that Blair had "stolen
David's wife," she cringed with shame. What would his father say
to such conduct! In what had she been wanting that Herbert's son
could disgrace his father's name--and hate his mother? For of
course he must hate her to shut her out of his life, and not tell
her he was going to get married! Her mind seemed to oscillate
between the abstraction of his dishonor and a more intimate and
primitive pain,--the sense of personal slight. "Oh, my son, my
son, my son," she said. She was bending over, her elbows on her
knees, her furrowed forehead resting on her clenched hands; her
whole big body quivered. He had shut her out.... He hated her....
He had never loved her.... "My son! my son!" Then a sharp return
of memory to the shame of his conduct whipped her to her feet and
set her walking about the room. It was long after midnight before
she said to herself that the first thing to do was to learn
exactly what had happened. Nannie must tell her. It was then that
she went up to her stepdaughter's room.

When Nannie had told her, or rather when Blair's letter had made
the thing shamefully clear, she went down-stairs and faced the
situation. Who was responsible for it? Who was to blame--before
she could add, in her mind, "Elizabeth or Blair?" some trick of
memory finished her question: who was to blame--"_this man or
his parents?_" The suggestion of personal responsibility was
like a blow in the face. She flinched under it, and sat down
abruptly, breathing hard. How could it be possible that she was
to blame? What had she left undone that other mothers did? She
had loved him; no mother could have loved him more than she did!--
and he had never cared for her love. In what had she been
lacking? He had had a religious bringing up; she had begun to
take him to church when he was four years old. He had had every
educational opportunity. All that he wanted he had had. She had
never stinted him in anything. Could any mother have done more?
Could Herbert himself have done more? No; she could not reproach
herself for lack of love. She had loved him, so that she had
spared him everything--even desire! All that he could want was
his before he could ask for it.

In the midst of this angry justifying of herself, tramping up and
down the long room, she stopped suddenly and looked about her;
where was her knitting? Her thoughts were in such a distracted
tangle that the accustomed automatic movement of her fingers was
imperative. She tucked the grimy pink ball of zephyr under her
arm, and tightening her fingers on the bent and yellowing old
needles, began again her fierce pacing up and down, up and down.
But the room seemed to cramp her, and by and by she went across
the hall into Nannie's parlor, where the fire had sprung into
cheerful flames; here she paused for a while, standing with one
foot on the fender, knitting rapidly, her unseeing eyes fixed on
the needles. Yes; Blair had had no cares, no responsibilities,--
and as for money! With a wave of resentment, she thought that she
would find out in the morning from her bookkeeper just how much
money she had given him since he was twenty-one. It was then that
a bleak consciousness, like the dull light of a winter dawn,
slowly began to take possession of her: _money_. She had
given him money; but what else had she given him? Not
companionship; she had never had the time for that; besides, he
would not have wanted it; she knew, inarticulately, that he and
she had never spoken the same language. Not sympathy in his
endless futilities; what intelligent person could sympathize with
a man who found serious occupation in buying--well, china
beetles? Or pictures! She glanced angrily over at that piece of
blackened canvas by the door, its gold frame glimmering faintly
in the firelight. He had spent five thousand dollars on a picture
that you could cover with your two hands! Yes; she had given him
money; but that was all she had given him. Money was apparently
the only thing they had in common.

Then came another surge of resentment,--that pitiful resentment
of the wounded heart; Blair had never cared how hard she worked
to make money for him! It occurred to her, perhaps for the first
time in her life, that she worked very hard; she said to herself
that sometimes she was tired. Yes, she had never thought of it
before, but she was sometimes very tired. But what did Blair care
for that? What did he care how hard she worked? Even as she said
it, with that anger which is a confession of something deeper
than anger, her mind retorted that if he had never cared how hard
she worked for their money, she had never cared how easily he
spent it. She had been irritated by his way of spending it, and
she had been contemptuous; but she had never really cared. So it
appeared that they did not have even money in common. The earning
had been all hers; the spending had been all his. If she had
liked to buy gimcracks, they would have had that in common, and
perhaps he would have been fond of her? "But I never knew how to
be a fool," she thought, simply. Yes; she didn't know how to
spend, she only knew how to earn. Of course, if he had had to
earn what he spent, they would have had work as a bond of
sympathy. Work! Blair had never understood that work was the
finest thing in the world. She wondered why he had not understood
it, when she herself had worked so hard--worked, in fact, so that
he might be beyond the need of working. As she said that, her
fingers were suddenly rigid on her needles; it seemed as if her
soul had felt a jolt of dismay; why didn't her son understand the
joy of work? Because she had spared him all necessity for it!--
for the work she had given him to do was not real, and they both
knew it. Spared him? Robbed him! "_Who hath sinned, this man or
his parents?_" "This man," her selfish, indolent, dishonorable
son, or she herself, whose hurry to possess the one thing she
wanted, that finest thing in the world, Work!--had pushed him
into the road of pleasant, shameful idleness, the road that
always leads to dishonor? Good God! what a fool she had been not
to make him work.

Sarah Maitland, tramping back and forth, the ball of pink worsted
dragging behind her in a grimy tangle, thought these things with
a sledge-hammer directness that spared herself nothing. She
wanted the truth, no matter how it made her cringe to find it!
She would hammer out her very heart to find the truth. And the
truth she found was that she had never allowed Blair to meet the
negations of life--to meet those _No's_, which teach the
eternal affirmations of character. He had had everything; he had
done nothing. The result was as inevitable as the action of a law
of nature! In the illuminating misery of this terrible night, she
saw that she had given her son, as Robert Ferguson had said to
her once, "fullness of bread and abundance of idleness." And now
she was learning what bread and idleness together must always
make of a man.

Walking up and down the dimly lighted room, she had a vision of
her sin that made her groan. _She_ had made Blair what he
was: because it had been easy for her to make things easy for
him, she had given him his heart's desire, and brought leanness
withal to his soul. In satisfying her own hunger for work, she
had forgotten to give it to him, and he had starved for it! She
had left, by this time, far behind her the personal affront to
her of his reserves; she took meekly the knowledge that he did
not love her: she even thought of his marriage as unimportant, or
as important only because it was a symptom of a condition for
which she was responsible. And having once realized and accepted
this fact, there was only one solemn question in her mind:

"What am I going to do about it?"

For she believed, as other parents have believed before her--and
probably will go on believing as long as there are parents and
sons--she believed that she could, in some way or other, by the
very strength of her agonizing love, force into her son's soul
from the outside that Kingdom of God which must be within. "Oh,
what am I going to do?" she said to herself.

She stood still and covered her face with her hands. "God," she
said, "don't punish him! It's my fault; punish me."

Perhaps she had never really prayed before.




CHAPTER XX

Robert Ferguson, in his library, and poor Miss White in the hall,
listened with tense nerves for the wheels of the carriage that
was to bring David Richie "to breakfast."

"Send him in to me," Mr. Ferguson had said; and then had shut
himself into his library.

Miss White was quivering with terror when at last she heard the
carriage door bang. David came leaping up the steps, his face
rosy as a girl's in the raw morning air--it was a lowering Mercer
morning, with the street lamps burning at eight o'clock in a murk
of smoke and fog. He raked the windows with a smiling glance, and
then stood, laughing for sheer happiness, waiting for _her_
to open the door to him.

David had had a change of spirit, if not of mind, since he wrote
his eminently sensible letter to Elizabeth. He had been able to
scrape up enough money of his own to pay at least one of his
bills, and things had gone better with him at the hospital, so he
no longer felt the unreasonable humiliation which Elizabeth's
proposal had accentuated in him. The reproach which his mood had
read into her letter had vanished after a good night's sleep and
a good day's work; now, it seemed to him only an exquisite
expression of most lovely love, which brought the color into his
face, and made his lips burn at the thought of her lips! Of
course her idea of marrying on her little money was not to be
thought of--he and Mr. Ferguson would laugh over it together; but
what an angel she was to think of it! All that night, in the
journey over the mountains, he had lain in his berth and looked
out at the stars, cursing himself joyously for a dumb fool who
had had no words to tell her how he loved her for that sweet,
divinely foolish proposal, which was "not to be thought of"! "But
when I see her, I'll make her understand; when I hold her in my
arms--" he told himself, with all the passion of twenty-six years
which had no easy outlet of speech.

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