Book: The Iron Woman

M >> Margaret Deland >> The Iron Woman




And so it was that he arose and went to his mother.




CHAPTER XXII

When, after his interview with David, Robert Ferguson went into
Mrs. Maitland's office at the Works, he looked older by twenty
years than when he had left it the night before. Sarah Maitland,
sitting at her desk, heard his step, and wheeled round to greet
him.

"Better shut that door," she said briefly; and he gave the door
in the glass partition a shove with his foot. Then they looked at
each other. "Well," she said; and stretched out her hand. "We're
in the same box. I guess we'd better shake hands." She grinned
with pain, but she forced her grunt of a laugh. "What's your
story? Mine is only his explanation to Nannie."

"Mine isn't even that. She merely wrote me she had married him;
that was all. Miss White told me what he wrote to Nannie. What do
you know about it?"

"That's all I know," she said, and gave him Blair's note.

He read it, and handed it back in silence.

"Well, what are you going to do?" she asked.

"Do? There's nothing to do. I'm done with her!"

"He's my son," Sarah Maitland said. "I have got to do something."

"But there's nothing to be done," he pointed out; it was not like
this ruthless woman to waste time crying over spilt milk. "They
are both of age, and they are married; that's all there is to it.
I went into the mayor's office and found the registry. The
marriage is all right so far as that goes. As for David--men
don't go out with a gun or a horsewhip in these fine times. He
won't do anything. For that matter, he is well rid of her. I told
him so. I might have added that the best thing a jilted man can
do is to go down on his knees and thank God that he's been
jilted; I know what I'm talking about! As for your son--" he
stopped.

"Yes," she said, "_my son?_" And even in his fury, Robert
Ferguson felt a pang at the sight of her torn and ravaged face
that quivered so that he turned his eyes away out of sheer
decency. "I must do something for my son. And I think I know what
it will be." She bit her forefinger, frowning with thought. "I
think I know ... I have not done right by Blair."

"No, you haven't," he said dryly. "Have you just discovered that?
But I don't see what you or I or God Almighty can do _now_!
They're married."

"Oh, I can't do anything about this marriage," she said, with a
gesture of indifference; "but that's not the important thing."

"Not important? What do you mean?"

"I mean that the important thing is to know what made Blair
behave in this way; and then cure him."

"Cure him! There's no cure for rottenness." He was so beside
himself with pain that he forgot that she was a woman, and
Blair's mother.

"I blame myself for Blair's conduct," she said.

"Oh, Elizabeth is as bad as he is!" But he waited for her
contradiction.

It did not come. "Probably worse." Involuntarily he raised a
protesting hand.

"But I mean to forgive her," said Sarah Maitland, with cold
determination.

"Forgive Elizabeth?" he said, angrily, and his anger was the very
small end of the wedge of his own forgiveness; "forgive
_her_? It strikes me the boot is on the other leg, Mrs.
Maitland."

"Oh, well," she said, "what difference does it make? I guess it's
a case of the pot and the kettle. I'm not blaming your girl
overmuch; although a bad woman is always worse than a bad man. In
this case, Elizabeth acted from hate, and Blair from love; the
result is the same, of course, but one motive is worse than the
other. But never mind that--Blair has got her, and he will be
faithful to her; for a while, anyhow. And Elizabeth will get used
to him--that's Nature, and Nature is bigger than a girl's first
fancy. So if David doesn't interfere--you think he won't? you
don't know human nature, Friend Ferguson! David isn't a saint--at
least I hope he isn't; I don't care much about twenty-seven-year-
old male saints. David may not be able to interfere, but he'll
try to, somehow. You wait! As for Blair, as I say, if David
doesn't put his finger in the pie, Blair isn't hopeless."

"I'm glad you think so."

"I _do_ think so. Blair is young yet; and if she costs him
something, he may value her--and I think I can manage to make her
cost him something! A man doesn't value what comes cheap; and all
his life everything has come cheap to Blair."

"I don't see what you're driving at."

"Just this," she explained; "Blair has had everything he wanted,--
oh, yes, yes; it's my fault!" she struck an impatient fist upon
the arm of her chair. "I told you it was my fault. Don't take
precious time to argue over that. It is _all_ my fault.
There! will that satisfy you? I've given him everything. So he
thought he could have everything. He doesn't know the meaning of
'no.' He has got to learn. I shall teach him. I have thought it
all out. I'm going to make a man of him."

"How?" said Robert Ferguson.

"I haven't got the details clear in my mind yet, but this is the
gist of it: _NO money but what he earns_."

"No money?"

"After this, it will be 'root, hog, or die.'"

"But Blair can't root," her superintendent said, fair in spite of
himself. And at that her face lighted with a sort of awful
purpose.

"Then he must die! Ferguson, don't you see--_he has begun to
die already?_" Again her face quivered. "Look at this business
of taking David's wife--oh, I know, they weren't married yet, but
the principle is the same; what do you call that but dying? Look
at his whole life: what has he done? Received--received! Given
nothing. Ferguson, you can't fool God: you've got to give
something! A privilege means an obligation--the obligation of
sweat! Sweat of your body or your brains. Blair has never
sweated. He's always had something for nothing. That is the one
immorality that damns. It has damned Blair. Of course, I ought to
have realized it before, but I--I suppose I was too busy. Yes; I
tell you, if Blair had had to work for what he's got, as you and
I have worked for what we've got, he wouldn't be where he is to-
day. You know that! He'd have had something else to think of than
satisfying his eyes, or his stomach, or his lust. He'd have been
decent."

"He might have been," Robert Ferguson said drearily, "but I doubt
it. Anyway, you can't, by making him earn or go without, or
anything else, give David's girl back to him."

"No," she said heavily, and for a moment her passion of hope
flagged; "no, I can't do that. But I shall try to make it up to
David in some way, of course. Where is he?" she broke off.

He told her briefly of David's arrival and departure. "He's gone
back to his mother," he ended; "she'll comfort him." Then, with a
bark of anger, he added, "Mrs. Richie was always saying that
Elizabeth would turn out well. I wonder what she will say now? I
knew better; her mother, my brother Arthur's wife, was--no good.
Yet I let Mrs. Richie bamboozle me into building on her. I always
said Life shouldn't play the same trick on me twice--but it has
done it! It has done it. My heart was set on Elizabeth. Yes, Mrs.
Maitland, I've been fooled again--but so have you."

"Nothing of the kind! I never was fooled before," Sarah Maitland
said; "and I sha'n't be again. I am going to make a man of my
son! As for your girl, forgive her, Ferguson. Don't be a fool;
you take it out of yourself when you refuse forgiveness."

"I'll never forgive her," said Robert Ferguson; "she's hurt the
woman I--I have a regard for; she's made David's mother suffer.
I'm done with her!"




CHAPTER XXIII

When, on drunken and then on leaden feet, there came to Elizabeth
the ruthless to-morrow of her act, her first clear thought was to
kill herself ....

After the marriage in the mayor's office--where they paused long
enough to write the two notes that were received the next day--
Blair had fled with her up into the mountains to a little hotel,
where they would not, he felt certain, encounter any
acquaintances.

Elizabeth neither assented nor objected. From the moment she had
struck her hand into his, there in the tawdry "saloon" of the
toll-house, and cried out, "_Come!_" she let him do as he
chose. So he had carried her away to the city hall, where, like
any other unclassed or unchurched lovers, they were married by a
hurried city official. She had had one more crisis of rage, when
in the mayor's office, as she stood at a high wall desk and wrote
with an ink-encrusted pen that brief note to her uncle, she said
to herself that, as to David Richie, he could hear the news from
her uncle--or never hear it; she didn't care which. Then for an
instant her eyes glittered again; but except for that one moment,
she seemed stunned, mind and body. To Blair, her silent
acquiescences had been signs that he had won something more than
her consent to revenge herself upon David,--and he wanted more!
In all his life he had never deeply cared for anybody but
himself; but now, under the terrible selfishness of his act,
under the primitive instinct that he called love, there was,
trembling in the depths of his nature, _Love_. It had been
born only a little while ago, this new, naked baby of Love. It
had had no power and no knowledge; unaided by that silent god of
his, it had not been strong enough to save him from himself, or
save Elizabeth from him. But he did love her, in spite of his
treason to her soul, for he was tender with her, and almost
humble; yet his purpose was inflexible. It seemed to him it must
find response in her. Such purpose might strike fire from the
most unbending steel--why not from this yielding, silent thing,
Elizabeth's heart? But numb and flaccid, perfectly apathetic,
stunned by that paroxysm of fury, she no more responded to him
than down would have responded to the blow of flint ...

It was their second day in the mountains. Blair, going down-
stairs very early in the morning, stopped in the office of the
hotel to write a brief but intensely polite note to his mother,
telling her of his marriage. "Nannie will have broken it to her--
poor, dear old Nannie!" he said to himself, pounding a stamp down
on the envelope, "but of course it's proper to announce it
myself." Then he dropped the "announcement" into the post-bag,
and went out for a tramp in the woods. It was a still, furtive
morning of low clouds, with an expectancy of snow in the air. But
it was not cold, and when, leaving the road and pushing aside the
frosted ferns and underbrush, he found himself in the silence of
the woods, he sat down on a fallen tree trunk to think.... The
moment had come when the only god he knew would no longer be
denied.

"I might as well face it," he said; and slowly lit a cigar. But
instead of "facing it," he began to watch the first sparse and
fitful beginnings of snow--hesitant flakes that sauntered down to
rest for a crystal moment on his coat sleeve. Suddenly he caught
his thoughts together with a jerk: "I've _got_ to think it
out!" he said. Curiously enough, when he said this his thought
did not turn with any especial distinctness to David Richie.

Instead, in the next hour of reasonings and excuses, there was
always, back in his mind, one face--scornful, contemptuous even;
a face he had known only as gentle, and sometimes tender; the
face of David's mother. Once he swore at himself, to drive that
face out of his mind. "What a fool I am! Elizabeth had broken her
engagement with him. I had the right to speak before the thing
was smoothed over again. Anybody would say so, even--even Mrs.
Richie if she could really understand how things were. But of
course she will only see _his_ side." All his excuses for
his conduct were in relation to David Richie; he did not think of
Elizabeth. He honestly did not know that he had wronged her. He
loved her so crazily that he could not realize his cruelty.

It was snowing steadily now; he could hear the faint patter of
small, hard flakes on the dry oak leaves over his head. Suddenly
some bleached and withered ferns in front of him rustled, and he
saw wise, bright eyes looking at him. "I wish I had some nuts for
you, bunny," he said--and the bright eyes vanished with a furry
whirl through the ferns. He picked up the empty half of a
hickory-nut, and turning it over in his fingers, looked at the
white grooves left by small sharp teeth. "You little beggars must
get pretty hungry in the winter, bunny," he said; "I'll bring a
bag of nuts out here for you some day." But while he was talking
to the squirrel, he was wrestling with his god. It was
characteristic of him that never once in that struggle to justify
himself did he use the excuse of Elizabeth's consent. His code,
which had allowed him to injure a woman, would not permit him to
blame her--even if she deserved it. Instead, over and over he
heaped up his own poor defense: "If I had waited, he might have
patched it up with her." Over and over the defense crumbled
before his eyes: "it was contemptible not to give him the chance
to patch it up." Then would come his angry retort: "That's
nonsense! Besides it is better, infinitely better, for her to
marry me than a poor man like him. I can give her everything,--
and love her! God, how I love her. Apart from any selfish
consideration, it is a thousand times better for her." For an
instant his marrying her seemed actually chivalrous; and at that
his god laughed. Blair reddened sharply; to recognize his
hypocrisy was the "touch on the hollow of the thigh; and the
hollow of the thigh was out of joint"! He pitched the nut away
with a vicious fling, and knew, inarticulately, that there was no
use lying to himself any longer.

With blank eyes he watched the snow piling up on a withered stalk
of goldenrod. "I wish it hadn't happened in just the way it did,"
he conceded;--his god was beginning to prevail!--"but if I had
waited, I might have lost her." Then a thought stabbed him:
suppose that he should lose her anyhow? Suppose that when she
came to herself--the phrase was a confession! suppose she should
want to leave him? It was an intolerable idea. "Well, she can't,"
he told himself, grimly, "she can't, now." His face was dusky
with shame, yet when he said that, his lip loosened in a
furtively exultant smile. Blair would have been less, or more,
than a man if, at that moment, in spite of his shame, he had not
exulted. "She's my wife!" he said, through those shamed and
smiling lips. Then his eyes narrowed: "And she doesn't care a
damn for me."

So it was that as he sat there in the snow, watching the puff of
white deepen on the stalk of goldenrod, his god prevailed yet a
little more, for, so far as Elizabeth was concerned, he did not
try to fool himself: "she doesn't care a damn." But when he said
that, he saw the task of his life before him--to make her care!
It was like the touch of a spur; he leaped to his feet, and flung
up his arms in a sort of challenge. Yes; he _had_ "done the
thing a man can't do." Yes; he ought not to have taken advantage
of her anger. Yes; his honor was smirched, grant it all! grant it
all! "I was mad," he said, stung by this intolerable self-
knowledge; "I was a cur. I ought to have waited; I know it. I
admit it. But what's the use of talking about it now? It's done;
and by God, she shall love me yet!"

So it was that his god blessed him, as the best that is in us,
always blesses us when it conquers us: the blessing was the
revelation of his own dishonor. It is a divine moment, this of
the consciousness of having been faithless to one's own ideals.
And Blair Maitland, a false friend, a selfish and cruel lover,
was not entirely contemptible, for his eyes, beautiful and
evasive, confessed the shock of a heavenly vision.

As he walked home, he laid his plans very carefully: he must show
her the most delicate consideration; he must avoid every possible
annoyance; he must do this, he must not do that. "And I'll buy
her a pearl necklace," he told himself, too absorbed in the
gravity of the situation to see in such an impulse the assertion
that he was indeed his mother's son! But the foundation of all
his plans for making Elizabeth content, was the determination not
to admit for a single instant, to anybody but himself, that he
had done anything to be ashamed of. Which showed that his god was
not yet God.

When he got back to the hotel, he found that Elizabeth had not
left her room; and rushing up-stairs two steps at a time, he
knocked at her door. . . . She was sitting on the edge of her
bed, her lips parted, her eyes staring blindly out of the window
at the snow. The flakes were so thick now that the meadow on the
other side of the road and the mountain beyond were blurred and
almost blotted out; there was a gray pallor on her face as if the
shadow of the storm had fallen on it. Instantly Blair knew that
she "had come to herself." As he stood looking at her, something
tightened in his throat; he broke out into the very last thing he
had meant to say: "Elizabeth?-forgive me!"

"I ought to die, you know," she said, without turning her eyes
from the window and the falling snow.

He came and knelt down beside her, and kissed her hand.
"Elizabeth, dearest! When I love you so?"

He kissed her shoulder. She shivered.

"My darling," he said, passionately.

She looked at him dully; "I wish you would go away."

"Elizabeth, let me tell you how I love you."

"Love me?" she said; "_me?_"

"Elizabeth!" he protested; "you are an angel, and I love you--no
man ever loved a woman as I love you."

In her abasement she never thought of reproaching him, of saying
"if you loved me, why did you betray me?" She had not gone as far
as that yet. Her fall had been so tremendous that if she had any
feeling about him, it was nothing more than the consciousness
that he too, had gone over the precipice. "Please go away," she
said.

"Dearest, listen; you are my wife. If--if I hurried you too much,
you will forgive me because I loved you so? I didn't dare to
wait, for fear--" he stumbled on the confession which his god had
wrung from him, but which must not be made to her. Elizabeth's
heavy eyes were suddenly keen.

"Fear of what?"

"Oh, don't look at me that way! I love you so that it kills me to
have you angry at me!"

"I am not angry with you," she said, faintly surprised; "why
should I be angry with _you_? Only, you see, Blair, I--I
can't live. I simply can't live."

"You have got to live!--or I'll die," he said. "I love you, I
tell you I love you!" His outstretched, trembling hands entreated
hers, but she would not yield them to his touch; her shrinking
movement away from him, her hands gripped together at her throat,
filled him with absolute terror: "Elizabeth! _don't_--" She
glanced at him with stony eyes. Blair was suffering. Why should
_he_ suffer? But his suffering did not interest her. "Please
go away," she said, heavily.

He went. He dared not stay. He left her, going miserably down-
stairs to make a pretense of eating some breakfast. But all the
while he was arranging entreaties and arguments in his own mind.
He went to the door of their room a dozen times that morning, but
it was locked. No, she did not want any breakfast. Wouldn't she
come out and walk? No, no, no. Please let her alone. And then in
the afternoon; "Elizabeth, I _must_ come in! You must have
some food."

She let him enter; but she was indifferent alike to the food and
to the fact that by this time there was, of course, a giggling
consciousness in the hotel that the "bride and groom had had a
rumpus." ... "A nice beginning for a honeymoon," said the
chambermaid, "locking that pretty young man out of her room!--and
me with my work to do in there. Well, I'm sorry for him; I bet
you she's a case."

Blair, too, was indifferent to anything ridiculous in his
position; the moment was too critical for such self-
consciousness. When at last he took a little tray of food to his
wife, and knelt beside her, begging her to eat, he was appalled
at the ruin in her face. She drank some tea to please him; then
she said, pitifully:

"What shall we do, Blair?" That she should say "we" showed that
these hours which had plowed her face had also sowed some seed of
unselfishness in her broken soul.

"Darling," he said, tenderly, "have you forgiven me?"

At this she meditated for a minute, staring with big, anguished
eyes straight ahead of her at nothing; "I _think_ I have,
Blair. I have tried to. Of course I know I was more wicked than
you. It was more my doing than yours. Yes. I ought to ask you if
you would forgive me."

"Elizabeth! Forgive you? When you made me so happy! Am I to
forgive you for making me happy?"

"Blair," she said--she put the palms of her hands together, like
a child; "Blair, please let me go." She looked at him with
speechless entreaty. The old dominant Elizabeth was gone; here
was nothing but the weak thing, the scared thing, pleading,
crouching, begging for mercy. "Please, Blair, _please_--"

But the very tragedy of such humbleness was that it made an
appeal to passion rather than to mercy. It made him love her
more, not pity her more. "I can't let you go, Elizabeth," he
said, hoarsely; "I can't; I love you--I will never let you go! I
will die before I will let you go!"

With that cry of complete egotism from him, the storm which her
egotism had let loose upon their little world broke over her own
head. As the sense of the hopelessness of her position and the
futility of her struggle dawned upon her, she grew frightened to
the point of violence. She was outrageous in what she said to
him--beating against the walls of this prison-house of marriage
which she herself had reared about them, and crying wildly for
freedom. Yet strangely enough, her fury was never the fury of
temper; it was the fury of fear. In her voice there was a new
note, a note of entreaty; she demanded, but not with the old
invincible determination of the free Elizabeth. She was now only
the woman pleading with the man; the wife, begging the husband.

Through it all, her jailer, insulted, commanded, threatened,
never lost a gentleness that had sprung up in him side by side
with love. It was, of course, the gentleness of power, although
he did not realize that, for he was abjectly frightened; he never
stopped to reassure himself by remembering that, after all, rave
as she might, she was his! He was incredibly soft with her--up to
a certain point: "I will never let you go!" If his god spoke, the
whisper was drowned in that gale of selfishness. Elizabeth, now,
was the flint, striking that she might kindle in Blair some fire
of anger which would burn up the whole edifice of her despair.
But he opposed to her fiercest blows of terror and entreaty
nothing but this softness of frightened love and unconscious
power. He cowered at the thought of losing her; he entreated her
pity, her mercy; he wept before her. The whole scene in that room
in the inn, with the silent whirl of snow outside the windows,
was one of dreadful abasement and brutality on both sides.

"I am a bad woman. I will not stay with you. I will kill myself
first. I am going away. I am going away to-night."


"Then you will kill me. Elizabeth! Think how I love you; think!
And--_he_ wouldn't want you, since you threw him over. You
couldn't go back to him."

"Go back to David? now? How can you say such a thing! I am dead,
so far as he is concerned. Oh--oh--oh,--why am I not dead? Why do
I go on living? I will kill myself rather than stay with you!" It
seemed to Elizabeth that she had forgotten David; she had
forgotten that she had meant to write him a terrible letter. She
had forgotten everything but the blasting realization of what had
happened to her. "Do not dare to speak his name!" she said,
frantically. "I cannot bear it! I cannot bear it! I am dead to
him. He despises me, as I despise myself. Blair, I can't--I can't
live; I can't go on--"

In the end he conquered. There were two days and nights of
struggle; and then she yielded. Blair's reiterated appeal was to
her sense of justice. Curiously, but most characteristically,
through all the clamor of her despair at this incredible thing
that she had done, justice was the one word which penetrated to
her consciousness. Was it fair, she debated, numbly, in one of
their long, aching silences, was it just, that because she had
ruined herself, she should ruin him?

She had locked herself in her room, and was sitting with her head
on her arms that were stretched before her on a little table.
Blair had gone out for one of his long, wretched walks through
the snow; sometimes he took the landlord's dog along for company,
and on this particular morning, a morning of brilliant sunshine
and cold, insolent wind, he had stopped to buy a bag of nuts for
the hungry squirrels in the woods. As he walked he was planning,
planning, planning, how he could make his misery touch
Elizabeth's heart; he was all unconscious that her misery had not
yet touched his heart. But Elizabeth, locked in her room, was
beginning to think of his misery. Dully at first, then with
dreary concentration, she went over in her mind his arguments and
pleadings: he was satisfied to love her even if she didn't love
him; he had known what stakes he played for, and he was willing
to abide by them; she ought to do the same; she had done this
thing--she had married him, was it fair, now, to destroy him,
soul and body, just because she had acted on a moment's impulse?
In a crisis of terror, his primitive instinct of self-
preservation had swept away the acquired instinct of chivalry,
and like a brutal boy, he had reminded her that she was to blame
as well as he. "You did it, too," he told her. sullenly. She
remembered that he had said he had not fully understood that it
was only impulse on her part; "I thought you cared for me a
little, or else you wouldn't have married me." In the panic of
the moment he really had not known that he lied, and in her
absorption in her own misery she did not contradict him. She
ought, he said, to make the best of the situation; or else he
would kill himself. "Do you want me to kill myself?" he had
threatened. If she would make the best of it, he would help her.
He would do whatever she wished; he would be her friend, her
servant,--until she should come to love him.

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