Book: The Iron Woman

M >> Margaret Deland >> The Iron Woman




When Robert Ferguson's door opened, his heart was on his lips.
"Eliz--" he began, and stopped short. "Oh, Miss White. Good
morning, Miss White!" And before poor Cherry-pie knew it, he had
given her a great hug; "Where is Elizabeth? Not out of bed yet?
Oh, the lazybones!" He was so eager that, until he was fairly in
the hall, with the front door shut, and his overcoat almost off,
he did not notice her silence. Then he gave her a startled look.
"Miss White! is anything the matter? Is Elizabeth ill?"

"No; oh, no," she said breathlessly; "but--Mr. Ferguson will tell
you. No, she is not sick. Go, he will tell you. In the library."

The color dropped out of his face as a flag drops to half-mast.
"She is dead," he said, with absolute finality in his voice.
"When did she die?" He stood staring straight ahead of him at the
wall, ghastly with fright.

"No! no! She is not dead; she is well. Quite well; oh, very well.
Go, David, my dear boy--oh, my _dear_ boy! Go to Mr.
Ferguson. He will tell you. But it is--terrible, David."

He went, dazed, and saying, "Why, but what is it? If she is not--
not--"

Robert Ferguson met him on the threshold of the library, drew him
in, closed the door, and looked him full in the face. "No, she
isn't dead," he said; "I wish to God she were." Then he struck
him hard on the shoulder. "David," he said harshly, "be a man;
they've played a damned dirty trick on you. Yesterday she married
Blair Maitland.... Take it like a man, and be thankful you are
rid of her." He wheeled about and stood with his back to his
niece's lover. He had guided the inevitable sword, but he could
not witness the agony of the wound. There was complete stillness
in the room; the ticking of the clock suddenly hammered in Robert
Ferguson's ears; a cinder fell softly from the grate. Then he
heard a long-drawn breath:

"Tell me, if you please, exactly what has happened."

Elizabeth's uncle, still with his back turned, told him what
little he knew. "I don't know where they are," he ended; "I don't
want to know. The scoundrel wrote to Nannie, but he gave no
address. Elizabeth's letter to me is on my table; read it."

He heard David move over to the library table; he heard the
rustle of the sheet of paper as it was drawn out of the envelope.
Then silence again, and the clamor of the clock. He turned round,
in time to see David stagger slightly and drop into a chair;
perspiration had burst out on his forehead. He was so white
around his lips that Robert Ferguson knew that for a moment his
body shared the awful astonishment of his soul. "There's some
whiskey over there," he said, nodding toward a side table. David
shook his head. Then, still shuddering with that dreadful
sickness, he spoke.

"She ... has married--Blair? _Blair_?" he repeated,
uncomprehendingly. He put his hand up to his head with that
strange, cosmic gesture which horrified humanity has made ever
since it was capable of feeling horror.

"Yes," Mr. Ferguson said grimly; "yes, Blair--your friend! Well,
you are not the first man who has had a sweetheart--and a
'friend.' A wife, even--and a 'friend.' And then discovered that
he had neither wife nor friend. Damn him."

"Damn him?" said David, and burst into a scream of laughter. He
was on his feet now, but he rocked a little on his shaking legs.
"Damnation is too good for him; may God--" In the outburst of
fury that followed, even Robert Ferguson quailed and put up a
protesting hand.

"David--David," he stammered, actually recoiling before that
storm of words. "David, he will get what he deserves. She was
worthless!" David stopped short. At the mention of Elizabeth, his
hurricane of rage dropped suddenly into the flat calm of absolute
bewilderment. "Do not speak of Elizabeth in that way, in my
presence," he said, panting.

"She is her mother's daughter! She is bad, through and through.
She--"

"Stop!" David cried, violently; "what in hell do you keep on
saying that for? I will not listen--I will not hear." . . . He
was beside himself; he did not know what he said.

But Robert Ferguson was silenced. When David spoke again, it was
in gasps, and his words came thickly as if his tongue were numb:
"What--what are we to do?"

"Do? There is nothing to do, that I can see."

"She must be taken away from him!"

"Nobody knows where they are. But if I did know, I wouldn't lift
my hand to get her away. She has made her bed--she can lie in it,
so far as I am concerned."

"But she didn't!" David groaned; "you don't understand. I am the
one to curse, not Elizabeth."

"What are you talking about?"

"I did it."

The older man looked at him with almost contemptuous incredulity.
"My dear fellow, what is the use of denying facts? You can't make
black white, can you? Day before yesterday you loved this--this,"
he seemed to search for some epithet; glanced at David, and said,
almost meekly: "girl. Day before yesterday she expected to marry
you. To-day she is the wife of another man. Have you committed
any crime in the last three days which justifies that?"

"Yes," David said, in a smothered voice, "I have." Then he handed
back to the shamed and angry man the poor, pitiful little letter.
"Don't you see? She says, 'David didn't want'"--he broke off,
unable to speak. A moment later he added, "'E. _F_.' She
isn't used to the--the other, yet," he said, again with that
bewildered look.

But Elizabeth's uncle was too absorbed in his own humiliation to
see confession in that tragic initial. "What is that nonsense
about your not wanting her?"

"She thought so. She had reason to think so."

"You had better explain yourself, David."

"She wrote to me," David said, after a pause; "she told me she
would have that money of hers on her birthday. She said we could
be married then." He reddened to his temples. "She asked me to
marry her that day; _asked_ me, you understand." He turned
on his heel and went over to the window; he stood there for some
minutes with his back to Robert Ferguson. The green door in the
wall between the two gardens was swinging back and forth on
sagging hinges; David watched it with unseeing eyes; suddenly a
sooty pigeon came circling down and lit just inside the old
arbor, which was choked with snow shovelled from the flagstones
of the path. Who can say why, watching the pigeon's teetering
walk on the soot-specked snow, David should smell the fragrance
of heliotrope hot in the sunshine, and see Elizabeth drawing
Blair's ring from her soft young bosom? He turned back to her
uncle, with a rigid face: "Well, _I--I_ said--'no' to her
letter. Do you understand? I told her 'no.' '_No_,' to a
girl like Elizabeth! Because, in my--my filthy pride--" he
paused, picked up a book, turned it over and over, and then put
it straight edge to edge with the table. His hand was trembling
violently. When he could speak again it was in a whisper. "My
cursed pride. I didn't want to marry until I could do everything.
I wasn't willing to be under obligations; I told her so. I said--
'no.' It made her angry. It would make any girl angry,--but
Elizabeth! Why, she used to bite herself when she was angry. When
she is angry, she will do--anything. _She has done it._ My
God!"

Robert Ferguson could not look at him. He made a pretense of
taking up some papers from his desk, and somehow or other got
himself out of the room. He found Miss White in the hall,
clasping and unclasping her little thin old hands.

"How did he--?" she tried to say, but her poor nibbling lip could
not finish the question.

"How does a man usually take a stab in the back?" he flung at
her. "Don't be a--" He stopped short. "I beg your pardon, Miss
White." But she was too heartbroken to resent the rudeness of his
suffering.

After that they stood there waiting, without speaking to each
other. Once Mr. Ferguson made as if he would go back to the
library, but stopped with his hand on the door-knob; once Miss
White said brokenly, "The boy _must_ have some breakfast";
but still they left him to himself.

After a while, Cherry-pie sat down on the stairs and cried
softly. Robert Ferguson walked about; now out to the front door,
with a feint of looking at the thermometer in the vestibule; now
the length of the hall, into which the fog had crept until the
gas burned in a hazy ring; now into the parlor--from which he
instantly fled as if a serpent had stung him: her little basket
of embroidery, overflowing with its pretty foolishness, stood on
the table.

When David Richie opened the library door and came into the hall
he was outwardly far steadier than they. "I think I'll go to the
depot now, sir. No, thank you, Miss White; I'll get something to
eat there,"

"Oh, but my dear boy," she said, trying to swallow her tears,
"now do--now don't--I can have your breakfast ready immejetly,
and--"

"Let him alone," Mr. Ferguson said; "he'll eat when he feels like
it. David, must you go back this morning? I wish you'd stay."

"I have to go back, thank you, sir."

"You may find a letter from her at home; she didn't know you were
to be here to-day."

"I may," David said; and some dull note in his voice told Robert
Ferguson that the young man's youth was over.

"My boy," he said, "forget her! You are well rid of--" he stopped
short, with an apprehensive glance; but David made no protest;
apparently he was not listening.

"I shall take the express," he said; "I must see my mother,
before I go to the hospital to-night. She must be told. She will
be--sorry."

"Your mother!" said Robert Ferguson. "Well, David, thank God you
have loved one woman who is good!"

"I have loved _two_ women who are good," David said. He
turned and took Miss White's poor old, shaking hands in his.
"When she comes back--"

"Comes back?" the older man cried out, furiously; "she shall
never come back to this house!"

David did not notice him: "Miss White, listen. When you see her,
tell her I understand. Just tell her, 'David says, "I
understand."' And Miss White, say: 'He says, try to forgive
him.'"

She sobbed so, that instinctively, but without tenderness, he put
his arm about her; his face was dull to the point of
indifference. "Don't cry, Miss White. And be good to her; but I
know you will be good to her!" He picked up his hat, put his coat
over his arm, and stretched out his hand to Robert Ferguson with
a steady smile. "Good-by, sir." Then the smile dropped and left
the amazed and naked face quivering before their eyes. Through
the wave of merciful numbness which had given him his hard
composure, agony stabbed him. "For God's sake, don't be hard on
her. She has enough to bear! And blame me--_me_. I did it--"

He turned and fled out of the house, and the two unhappy people
who loved Elizabeth looked at each other speechlessly.




CHAPTER XXI

Except in his gust of primitive fury when he first knew that he
had been robbed, and in that last breaking down in the hall,
David knew what had happened to him only, if one may say so, with
the outside of his mind. Even while he was talking with
comparative calmness to Mr. Ferguson, his thoughts were whirling,
and veering, in dizzying circles--bewildered rage, pity, fright,
revolt,--and then back again to half-dazed fury. But each time he
tried to realize exactly what had happened, something in him
seemed to swerve, like a shying horse; he could not get near
enough to the fact, to understand it. In a numb way he must have
recognized this, because in those moments by himself in the
library he deliberately shut a door upon the blasting truth.
Later, of course, he would have to open it and look in upon the
ruin of his life. Somewhere back in his thoughts he was aware
that this moment of opening the Door would come, and come soon.
But while he talked to Robert Ferguson, and tried, dully, to
comfort Miss White, and even as he went down the steps up which
he had bounded not an hour before, he was holding that moment
off. His one clear feeling was a desire to be by himself. Then,
he promised himself, when he was alone, he would open the Door,
and face the Thing that lay behind it. But as he walked along the
street, the Door was closed, bolted, locked, and his back was
against it. "Elizabeth has married Blair," he said to himself,
softly. The words seemed to have no meaning. "Elizabeth has
married Blair," he insisted again; but was only cognizant that
the blur of fog around a street-lamp showed rainbow lines in a
wonderful pattern. "They are all at right angles," he said;
"that's interesting," and looked ahead to see if the next light
repeated the phenomenon. Then automatically he took out his
watch: "Nine-thirty. Elizabeth has married Blair. The train
leaves at ten. I had better be going to the depot. _Elizabeth
has married Blair_." And he walked on, looking at the lamps
burning in the fog. Then suddenly, as if the closed Door showed a
crack of light, he decided that he would not go back on the
express; an inarticulate impulse pierced him to the quick,--the
impulse to resist, to fight, to save himself and her! But almost
with the rending pang, the Door slammed to again and the impulse
blurred--like the street-lamps. Still, the impetus of it was
sufficient to keep him from turning toward the railroad station.

"Hello!" some one said; Harry Knight was standing, grinning,
directly in front of him; "you needn't run down a friend of your
youth, even if you don't condescend to live in Mercer any more!"

"Oh, hello," David heard himself say.

"When did you come to town? I'd ask you to lunch with me, but I
suppose your lady-love would object. Wait till you get to be an
old married man like me; then she'll be glad to get rid of you!"
David knew that he gave the expected laugh, and that he said it
was a foggy day, and Philadelphia had a better climate than
Mercer; ("he hasn't heard it yet," he was saying to himself)
"yes, dark old hole; I'm going back to-night. Yes; awfully sorry
I can't--good-by--good-by. (He'll know by to-night.") He did not
notice when Knight seemed to melt into the mist; nor was he
conscious that he had begun to walk again--on, and on, and on.
Suddenly he paused before the entrance of a saloon, which bore,
above "XXX Pale Ale," in gilt letters on the window, the sign
"Landis' Hotel."

He was aware of overpowering fatigue. Why not go in here and sit
down? He would not meet any one he knew in such a place. "Better
take a room for an hour or two," he thought. He knew that he must
be alone to open that Door, but he did not say so; instead his
mind, repeating, parrot-like, "Elizabeth has married Blair," made
its arrangements for privacy, as steadily as a surgeon might make
arrangements for a mortal operation.

As he entered the hotel, a woman on her hands and knees, slopping
a wet cloth over the black and white marble floor of the office,
looked up at him, and moved her bucket of dirty water to let him
pass. "Huh! He's got a head on him this morning," she thought
knowingly. But the clerk at the desk gave him an uneasy glance.
Men with tragic faces and bewildered eyes are not welcomed by
hotel clerks.

"Say," he said, pleasantly enough, as he handed out a key, "don't
you want a pick-me-up? You're kind o' white round the gills."

David nodded. "Where's the bar?" he said thickly. He found his
way to it, and while he waited for his whisky he lifted a
corkscrew from the counter and looked at it closely. "That's
something new, isn't it?" he said to the man who was rinsing out
a glass for him; "I never saw a corkscrew (Elizabeth has married
Blair) with that hook thing on the side." He took his two fingers
of whisky, and followed the bell-boy to a room.

"I don't like that young feller's looks," the clerk told the
scrub-woman; "we don't want any more free reading notices in the
papers of this hotel being a roadhouse on the way to heaven." And
when the bell-boy who had shown the unwelcome guest to his room
came back to his bench in the office, he interrogated him, with a
grin that was not altogether facetious: "Any revolvers lyin'
round up in No. 20, or any of those knobby blue bottles?"

"Naw," said the bell-boy, disgustedly, "ner no dimes, neither."

David, in the small, unfriendly hotel bedroom that looked out
upon squalid back yards and smelled as if its one window had not
been opened for a year, was at last alone. Down in the alley, a
hand-organ was shrilling monotonously: Kafoozleum--Kafoozleum.

He looked about him for a minute, then tried to open the window,
but the sash stuck; he shook it violently, then shoved it up with
such force that a cracked pane of glass clattered out; a gust of
raw air came into the stagnant mustiness of the narrow room.
After that he sat down and drew a long breath. Then he opened the
Door....

Down-stairs the clerk was sharing his uneasiness with the
barkeeper. "He came in looking like death. Wild-eyed he was. Mrs.
Maloney there will tell you. She came up to me and remarked on
it. No, sir, men, like that ain't healthy for this hotel."

"That's so," the barkeeper agreed. "Why didn't you tell him you
were full up?"

"Well, he seemed the gentleman," the clerk said. "I didn't just
see my way--"

"Huh!" the other flung back at him resentfully. "'Tain't only a
poor man that puts his hand in the till, and then hires a room in
a hotel"--he made a significant gesture and rolled up his eyes.

"He didn't register," the clerk said. "Only wanted the room for a
couple of hours."

"A couple of hours is long enough to--" said the barkeeper.

"Good idea to send a boy up to ask if he rung?"

"_I'd_ have sent him ten minutes ago," the barkeeper said
scornfully.

So it was that David, staring in at his ruin, was interrupted
more than once that morning: "No, I didn't ring. Clear out." And
again: "No; I'm not waiting for anybody. Shut that door." But the
third time he was frantic: "Damn it, if you knock on my door
again I'll kick you down-stairs! Do you understand?" And at that
the office subsided.

"They don't do it when they're swearing mad," the barkeeper said.
"I guess his girl has given him the mitten. You ladies are always
making trouble for us, Mrs. Maloney. You drive us to suicide for
love of you!" Mrs. Maloney simperingly admitted her baleful
influence. "As for you," he jeered at the clerk, "you're fresh, I
guess. That little affair in 18 got on your nerves."

"Well, if you'd found him as I did, I guess it would 'a' got on
your nerves," the clerk said, affrontedly; he added under his
breath that they could kill themselves all over the house, and he
wouldn't lift a finger to stop 'em. "You don't get no thanks," he
told himself gloomily. But after that, No. 20 was not disturbed.

At first, when David opened his closed Door and looked in, there
had been the shock again. He was stunned with incredulous
astonishment. Then his mind cleared. With the clearing came once
more that organic anger of the robbed man; an anger that has in
it the uncontrollable impulse to regain his property. It could
not be--this thing that had happened. It should not be!

He would see her; he would take her. As for _him_--David's
sinewy fingers closed as talons might close into the living flesh
of a man's neck. He knew the lust of murder, and he exulted in
it. Yet even as he exulted, the baseness of what Blair had done
was so astounding, that, sitting there in the dreary room, his
hands clenched in his pockets, his legs stretched out in front of
him, David Richie actually felt a sort of impersonal amazement
that had nothing to do with anger. For one instant the
unbelievableness of Blair's dishonor threw him back into that
clamoring confusion from which he had escaped since he opened the
Door. Blair must have been in love with her! Had Elizabeth
suspected it? She certainly had never hinted it to him; why not?
Some girlish delicacy? But Blair--Blair, a dishonorable man? In
the confounding turmoil of this uprooting of old admirations, he
was conscious of the hand-organ down in the alley, pounding out
its imbecile refrain. He even found himself repeating the
meaningless words:

"In ancient days there lived a Turk,
A horrid beast within the East, ......
Oh, Kafoozleum, Kafoozleum"--

His mind righted itself; he came back to facts, and to the simple
incisive question: what must he do? It was not until the
afternoon that, by one tortuous and torturing line of reasoning
after another, he came to know that, as her uncle had said, for
the present he could do nothing.

"Nothing?" At first, David had laughed savagely; he would turn
the world upside down before he would leave her in her misery!
For that she was in misery he never doubted; nor did he stop to
ask himself whether she had repented her madness, he only
groaned. He saw, or thought he saw, the whole thing. There was
not one doubt, not one poisonous suspicion of Elizabeth herself.
That she was disloyal to him never entered his head. To David she
was only in a terrible trap, from which, at any cost, she must be
rescued. That her own mad temper had brought her to such a pass
was neither here nor there; it had nothing to do with the matter
in hand, namely her rescue--and then the killing of the man who
had trapped her! It came into David's head--like a lamp moving
toward him through a mist--that perhaps she had written to him?
He had not really grasped the idea when Robert Ferguson suggested
it; but now he was suddenly certain that a letter must be
awaiting him in Philadelphia! Perhaps in it she called on him to
come and help her? The thought was like a whip. He forgot his
desire to kill Blair; he leaped to his feet, fumbling in his
pocket for a time-table; then realized that there was no train
across the mountains until night. Should he telegraph his mother
to open any letter from Elizabeth, and wire him where she was?
No; even in the whirl of his perplexity, he knew he could not let
any other eyes than his own see what, in her abasement, Elizabeth
must have written. He began to pace frantically up and down; then
stood and looked out of the window, beating his mind back to
calmness,--for he must be calm. He must think what could be done.
He would get the letter as soon as he reached home; until he got
it and learned where she was, the only thing to do was to decide
how she should be saved.

And so it was that, not allowing himself to dip down into that
elemental rage of the wronged man, not even daring to think of
his own incredible blunder which had kindled her crazy anger,
still less venturing to let his thought rest on the suffering
that had come to her, he kept his mind steadily on that one
imperative question: _what was to be done?_ At first the
situation seemed almost simple: she must leave Blair instantly.
"To-day!" he said to himself, striking the rickety table before
him with his fist; "to-day!" Next, the marriage must be annulled.
That was all; annulled! These were the premises from which he
started. All that long, dark morning, well into the afternoon, he
followed blind alleys of thought, ending always in the same
_impasse_--there was nothing he could do. He did not even
know where she was, until the letter in Philadelphia should tell
him,--at that thought he looked at his watch again. Oh, how many
endless hours before he could go and get that letter! And after
all, she was Blair Maitland's wife. Suppose she did leave him,
would the swine give her her freedom? Not without long, involved
processes of law; he knew his man well enough to know that. Yes,
there would have to be dreadful publicity, heart-breaking
humiliation for his poor, mad darling. She would have to face
those things. Oh, if he only knew where she was, so that he could
go that moment and help her to take that first step of flight.
She must go at once to his mother. Yes, his mother would shelter
her from the beast. If he could only get word to her, to go,
_instantly_, to his mother. But he did not know where she
was! He cursed himself for not having taken the ten o'clock
express! He could have been at home that night, had her letter,
and started out again to go to her. As it was, nothing could be
done until to-morrow morning. Then he would know what to do,
because then he would know where she was. But meantime--
meantime...

There is no doubt that when the frantic man realized his
befogging ignorance, and found himself involved in this dreadful
delay, the hotel clerk's apprehensions were, at least for wild
moments, justified. But only for moments--Elizabeth was to be
rescued! David could not consider escape from his own misery
until that task had been accomplished. Yet consider: his girl,
his woman--another man's; and he helpless! And suppose he did
rescue her; suppose he did drag her from the arms of the thief
who had been his friend--could it ever be the same? Never. Never.
Never. His Elizabeth was dead. The woman whom he meant to have
yet--somehow, sometime, somewhere; the woman whom Blair Maitland
had filched from him, was not his Elizabeth. The rose, trampled
in the mire, may be lifted, it may be revived, it may be
fragrant--but it has known the mire!

There were, in the early darkening afternoon, crazy moments for
David Richie. Moments of murderous hate of Blair, moments of
unbearable consciousness of his own responsibility, moments of
almost repulsion for the tragic, marred creature he loved; and at
this last appalling revelation to himself of his own
possibilities--moments of absolute despair. And when one of those
despairing moments came, he put his head down on the table, on
his folded arms, and cried for his mother. He cried hard, like a
child: "Materna!"

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