Book: The Iron Woman

M >> Margaret Deland >> The Iron Woman




Nannie was dumfounded at the attention. Mamma offering to take
her to the Works! To be sure, it was the last thing on earth she
would choose to do, but if her stepmother asked her, of course
she could not say no. She said "yes," reluctantly enough, but
Mrs. Maitland did not detect the reluctance; she was too pleased
with herself at having thought of some way of entertaining the
girl.

"Get your bonnet on, get your bonnet on!" she commanded, in high
good humor. And Nannie, quailing at the thought of the Works at
night--"it's dreadful enough in the daytime," she said to
herself--put on her hat, in trembling obedience. "Yes," Mrs.
Maitland said, as she tramped down the cinder path toward the
mills, Nannie almost running at her heels--"yes, the cast is a
pretty sight, people say. Your brother once said that it ought to
be painted. Well, I suppose there are people who care for
pictures," she said, incredulously. "I know I'm $5,000 out of
pocket on account of a picture," she ended, with a grim chuckle.

As they were crossing the Yards, the cavernous glooms of the
Works, under the vast stretch of their sheet-iron roofs, were
lighted for dazzling moments by the glow of molten metal and the
sputtering roar of flames from the stacks; a network of narrow-
gauge tracks spread about them, and the noises from the mills
were deafening. Nannie clutched nervously at Mrs. Maitland's arm,
and her stepmother grunted with amusement. "Hold on to me," she
shouted--she had to shout to make herself heard; "there's nothing
to hurt you. Why, I could walk around here with my eyes shut!"

Nannie clung to her frantically; if she protested, the soft
flutter of her voice did not reach Mrs. Maitland's ears. A few
steps farther brought them into the comparative silence of the
cast-house of the furnace, and here they paused while Sarah
Maitland spoke to one of the keepers. Only the furnace itself was
roofed; beyond it the stretch of molded sand was arched by the
serene and starlit night.

"That's the pig bed out there," Mrs. Maitland explained, kindly;
"see, Nannie? Those cross-trenches in the sand they call sows;
the little hollows on the side are the pigs. When they tap the
furnace, the melted iron will flow down into 'em; understand?"

"Mamma, I'd--I'd like to go home," poor Nannie managed to say;
"it scares me!"

Mrs. Maitland looked at her in astonishment. "Scares you? What
scares you?"

"It's so--dreadful," Nannie gasped.

"You don't suppose I'd bring you anywhere where you could get
hurt?" her stepmother said, incredulously. She was astonished to
the point of being pained. How could Herbert's girl be such a
fool? She remembered that Blair used to call his sister the
"'fraid-cat." "Good name," she thought, contemptuously. She made
no allowance for the effect of this scene of night and fire, of
stupendous shadows and crashing noises, upon a little bleached
personality, which for all these years, had lived in the shadow
of a nature so dominant and aggressive that, quite unconsciously,
it sucked the color and the character out of any temperament
feebler than itself. Sarah Maitland frowned, and said roughly,
"Oh, you can go home, if you want to; Mr. Parks!" she called to
the foreman; "just walk back to the house, if you please, with my
daughter;" then she turned on her heel and went up to the
furnace.

Nannie, clutching Parks's hand, stumbled out into the darkness.
"It's perfectly awful!" she confided to the good-natured man,
when he left her at her back door.

"Oh, you get used to it," he said, kindly. "You'd 'a knowed," he
told one of his workmen afterward, "that there wasn't hide nor
hair of her that belonged to the Old One. A slip of a thing, and
scared to death of the noise."

The "Old One," after Nannie had gone, poked about for a moment or
two,--"she noses into things, to save two cents," her men used to
say, with reluctant admiration of the ruthless shrewdness that
was instant to detect their shortcomings; then she went down the
slight incline from the furnace hearth to the open stretch of
molding-sand; there was a pile of rusty scrap at one side, and
here, in the soft April darkness under the stars, she seated
herself, looking absently at the furnace and the black, gnome-
like figures of the helpers. She was thinking just what Parks had
thought, that Nannie had none of her blood in her. "Afraid!" said
Sarah Maitland. Well, Blair had never been afraid, she would say
that for him; he was a fool, and pig-headed, and a loafer; but he
wasn't a coward. He had even thought it fine, that scene of
power, where civilization made itself before his very eyes! When
would he think it fine enough to come in and go to work? Come in,
and take his part in making civilization? Then she noticed the
bending figure of the keeper opening the notch of the furnace;
instantly there was a roar of sparks, and a blinding white gush
of molten iron flowing like water down into the sand runner. The
sudden, fierce illumination drowned the stars overhead, and
brought into clear relief her own figure, sitting there on the
pile of scrap watching the flowing iron. Tiny blue flames of
escaping gas danced and shimmered on its ineffable rippling
brightness, that cooled from dazzling snow to rose, then to
crimson, and out in the sand, to glowing gray. Blair had called
it "beautiful." Well, it was a pretty sight! She wished she had
told him that she herself thought it pretty; but the fact was, it
had never struck her before. "I suppose I don't notice pretty
things very much," she thought, in some surprise. "Well, I've
never had time for foolishness. Too busy making money for Blair."
She sighed; after all, he wasn't going to have the money. She had
been heaping up riches, and had not known who should gather them.
She had been too busy to see pretty things. And why? That orphan
asylums and reformatories--and David Richie's hospital--should
have a few extra thousands! A month ago the fund she was making
for David had reached the limit she had set for it, and only to-
day she had brought the bank certificate of deposit home with
her. She had felt a little glow of satisfaction when she locked
it into the safe in her desk; she liked the consciousness of a
good job finished. She was going to summon the youngster to
Mercer, and tell him how he was to administer the fund; and if he
put on any of his airs and graces about accepting money, she
would shut him up mighty quick! "I'll write him to-morrow, if
I've time," she had said. At the moment, the sense of achievement
had exhilarated her; yet now, as she sat there on the heap of
scrap, bending a pliant boring between her fingers, her pillar of
fire roaring overhead from the chimneys of the furnaces, the
achievement seemed flat enough. Why should she, to build a
hospital for another woman's son, have worked so hard that she
had never had time to notice the things her own son called
"pretty"? Not his china beetles, of course, or truck like that;
but the shimmering flow of her iron,--or even that picture, for
which she was out of pocket $5,000. "I can see you might call it
pretty, if it hadn't cost so much," she admitted. Yes, she had
worked, she told herself, "as hard as a man," to earn money for
Blair!--only to make him idle and to have him say that thing
about her clothes which Goose Molly had said before he was born.
"Wonder if I've been a fool?" she ruminated.

It was at that moment that she noticed, at one side of the
furnace, between two bricks of the hearth, a little puff of white
vapor; instantly she leaped, shouting, to her feet. But it was
too late. The molten iron, seeping down through some crack in the
furnace, creeping, creeping, beneath the bricks of the pavement,
had reached some moisture...The explosion, the clouds of scalding
steam, the terror of the flowing, scattering fire, drowned her
voice and hid her frantic gestures of warning....

"Killed?" she said, furiously, as some one helped her up from the
scrap-heap against which she had been hurled; "of course not! I
don't get killed." Then suddenly the appalling confusion was
dominated by her voice:

"_Look after those men._"

She stood there in the center of the horror, reeling a little
once or twice, holding her skirt up over her left arm, and
shouting her quick orders. "Hurt?" she said again to a
questioning helper. "I don't know. I haven't time to find out.
That man there is alive! Get a doctor!" She did not leave the
Works until two badly burned men had been carried away, and two
dead bodies lifted out of the reek of steam and the spatter of
half-chilled metal. Then, still holding her skirt over her arm,
she went alone, in the darkness, up the path to her back door.

"No! I don't want anybody to go home with me," she said, angrily;
"look after things here. Notify Mr. Ferguson. I'll come back."
When she banged open her own door, she had only one question:
"Is--Nannie--all--right?" Harris, gaping with dismay, and
stammering, "My goodness! yes'm; yes'm!" followed her to the
dining-room, where she crashed down like a felled tree, and lay
unconscious on the floor.

When she began to come to herself, a doctor, for whom Harris had
fled, was binding up her torn arm, which, covered with blood, and
black with grit and rust, was an ugly sight. "Where's Blair?" she
said, thickly; then came entirely to her senses, and demanded,
sharply, "Nannie all right?" Reassured again on this point, she
looked frowningly at the doctor. "Come, hurry! I want to get back
to the Works."

"Back to the Works! To-night? Impossible! You mustn't think of
such a thing," the young man protested. Mrs. Maitland looked at
him, and he shifted from one foot to the other. "It--it won't do,
really," he said, weakly; "that was a pretty bad knock you got on
the back of your head, and your arm--"

"Young man," she said, "you patch this up, _quick_. I've got
to see to my men. That's my business. You 'tend to yours."

"But my business is to keep you here," he told her, essaying to
be humorous. His humor went out like a little candle in the wind:
"Your business is to put on bandages. That's all I pay you for."

And the doctor put on bandages with expedition. In the front hall
he spoke to Nannie. "Your mother has a very bad arm, Miss
Maitland; and that violent blow on her head may have done damage.
I can't tell yet. You must make her keep still."

"_Make!_--Mamma?" said Nannie.

"She says she's going over to the Works," said the doctor,
shrugging his shoulders; "when she comes home, get her to bed as
quickly as you can. I'll come in and see her in the morning, if
she wants me. But if she won't do what I say about keeping quiet,
I'd rather you called in other advice." When Nannie tried to
"make Mamma" keep still, the only reply she received was: "You
showed your sense in going home, my dear!" And off she went,
Harris, at Nannie's instigation, lurking along behind her. "If
Herbert's girl had been hurt!" she said, aloud, staggering a
little as she walked, "my God, what would I have done?"

Afterward, they said it was astounding that she had been able to
go back to the Works that night. She must have been in very
intense pain. When she came home, the pain conquered to the
extent of sending her, at midnight, up to her stepdaughter's
room; she was red with fever, and her eyes were glassy. "Got any
laudanum, or stuff of that kind?" she demanded. And yet the next
day, when the bandages had been changed and there was some slight
relief, she persisted in going to the Works again. But the third
day she gave up, and attended to her business in the dining-room.

"If only Blair would come home," Nannie said, "I think, perhaps,
she would be nice to him. Haven't you any idea where he is,
Elizabeth?"

"Not the slightest," Elizabeth said, indifferently. She herself
came every day, and performed what small personal services Mrs.
Maitland would permit. Nannie did not amount to much as a nurse,
but she was really helpful in writing letters, signing them so
exactly in Sarah Maitland's hand that her stepmother was greatly
diverted at her proficiency. "I shall have to look after my
check-book," she said, with a chuckle.

It was not until a week later that they began to be alarmed. It
was Harris who first discovered the seriousness of her condition;
when he did, the knowledge came like a blow to her household and
her office. It was late in the afternoon. Earlier in the day she
had had a violent chill, during which she sat crouching and
cowering over the dining-room fire, refusing to go to bed, and in
a temper that scared Nannie and Harris almost to death. When the
chill ceased, she went, flushed with fever, to her own room,
saying she was "all right," and banging the door behind her. At
about six, when Harris knocked to say that supper was ready, she
came out, holding the old German cologne bottle in her hand.
"_He_ gave me that," she said, and fondled the bottle
against her cheek; then, suddenly she pushed it into Harris's
face. "Kiss it!" she commanded, and giggled shrilly.

Harris jumped back with a screech. _"Gor!"_ he said; and his
knees hit together. The slender green bottle fell smashing to the
floor. Mrs. Maitland started, and caught her breath; her mind
cleared instantly.

"Clean up that mess. The smell of the cologne takes my breath
away. I--I didn't know I had it in my hand."

That night Elizabeth sent a peremptory letter into space, telling
Blair that his mother was seriously ill, and he really ought to
be at home. But he had left the hotel to which she sent it,
without giving any address, so it lay in a dusty pigeonhole
awaiting his return a week later.

The delirium came again the next day; then Sarah Maitland cried,
because, she said, Nannie had hidden the Noah's ark; "and Blair
and I want to play with it," she whined. But a moment afterward
she looked at her stepdaughter with kind eyes, and said, as she
had said a dozen times in the last ten days, "Lucky you went home
that night, my dear."

Of course by this time the alarm was general. The young doctor
was supported, at Robert Ferguson's insistence, by an old doctor,
who, if he was awed by his patient, at least did not show it. He
was even courageous enough to bring a nurse along with him.

"Miss Baker will spare your daughter," he said, soothingly, when
Sarah Maitland, seeing the strange figure in her bedroom, had
declared she wouldn't have a fussing woman about. "Miss Nannie
needs help," the doctor said. Mrs. Maitland frowned, and yielded.

But the nurse did not have a good time. In her stiffly starched
skirt, with her little cap perched on her head, she went
fluttering prettily about, watched all the while by the somber,
half-shut eyes. She moved the furniture, she dusted the bureau,
she arranged the little row of photographs; and then she essayed
to smooth Mrs. Maitland's hair--it was the last straw. The big,
gray head began to lift slowly; a trembling finger pointed at the
girl; there was only one word:

"_Stop_."

The startled nurse stopped,--so abruptly that she almost lost her
balance.

"Clear out. You can sit in the hall. When I want you, I'll let
you know."

Miss Baker fled, and Mrs. Maitland apparently forgot her. When
the doctor came, however, she roused herself to say: "I won't
have that fool girl buzzing round. I don't like all this
highfalootin' business of nurses, anyhow. They are nothing but
foolish expense." Perhaps that last word stirred some memory, for
she added abruptly: "Nannie, bring me that--that picture you have
in the parlor. The Virgin Mary, you know. Rags of popery, but I
want to look at it. No; I can't pay $5,000 for 14 X 18 inches of
old master, and hire nurses to curl my hair, too!" But nobody
smiled at her joke.

When Nannie brought the picture, she bade her put it on a chair
by the bedside, and sometimes the two girls saw her look at it
intently. "I think she likes the child," Elizabeth said, in a low
voice; but Nannie sighed, and said, "No; she is provoked because
Blair was extravagant." After Miss Baker's banishment, Elizabeth
did most of the waiting on her, for Nannie's anxious timidity
made her awkward to the point of being, as Mrs. Maitland
expressed it, wearily, "more bother than she was worth." Once she
asked where Blair was, and Elizabeth said that nobody knew. "He
heard of some business opening, Mrs. Maitland, and went East to
see about it."

"Went East? What did he go East for? He's got a business opening
at home, right under his nose," she said, thickly.

After that she did not ask for him. But from her bed in her own
room she could see the dining-room door, and she lay there
watching it, with expectation smoldering in her half-shut eyes.
Once, furtively, when no one was looking, she lifted the hem of
the sheet with her fumbling right hand and wiped her eyes. For
the next few days she gained, and lost, and gained again. There
were recurrent periods of lucidity, followed by the terrible
childishness that had been the first indication of her condition.
At the end of the next week she suddenly said, in a loud voice,
"I won't stay in bed!" And despite Nannie's pleadings, and Miss
Baker's agitated flutterings, she got up, and shuffled into the
dining-room; she stood there, clutching with her uninjured hand a
gray blanket that was huddled around her shoulders. Her hair was
hanging in limp, disordered locks about her face, which had
fallen away to the point of emaciation. She was leaning against
the table, her knees shaking with weakness. But it was evident
that her mind was quite clear. "Bed is a place to die in," she
said; "I'm well. Let me alone. I shall stay here." She managed to
get over to her desk, and sank into the revolving chair with a
sigh of relief. "Ah!" she said, "I'm getting out of the woods.
Harris! Bring me something to eat." But when the food was put
before her, she could not touch it.

Robert Ferguson, who almost lived at the Maitland house that
week, told her, soothingly, that she really ought to go back to
bed, at which she laughed with rough goodnature. "Don't talk
baby-talk. I'm getting well. But I've been sick; I've had a
scare; so I'm going to write a letter, in case--Or here, you
write it for me."

"To Blair?" he said, as he took his pen out of his pocket.

"Blair? No! To David Richie about that money. Don't you remember
I told you I was going to give him a lot of money for a hospital?
That I was going to get a certificate of deposit"--her voice
wavered and she seemed to doze. A moment later, when her mind
cleared again, her superintendent said, with some effort: "Aren't
you going to do something for Blair? You will get well, I'm sure,
but--in case--Your will isn't fair to the boy; you ought to do
something for him."

Instantly she was alert: "I have. I've done the best thing in the
world for him; I've thrown him on his own legs! As for getting
well, of course I'm going to get well. But if I didn't,
everything is closed up; my will's made; Blair is sure of
poverty. Well; I guess I won't have you write to David to-day;
I'm tired. When I'm out again, I'll tell Howe to draw up a paper
telling him just what the duties of a trustee are.... Why don't
you ... why don't you marry his mother, and be done with it? I
hate to see a man and woman shilly-shally."

"She won't have me," he said, good-naturedly; in his anxiety he
was willing to let her talk of anything, merely to amuse her.

"Well, she's a nice woman," Sarah Maitland said; "and a good
woman; I was afraid _you_ were doing the shilly-shallying.
And any man who would hesitate to take her, isn't fit to black
her boots. Friend Ferguson, I have a contempt for a man who is
more particular than his Creator." Robert Ferguson wondered what
she was driving at, but he would not bother her by a question.

"What was that I used to say about her?" the sick woman
ruminated, with closed eyes; "'fair and--What was it? Forty? No,
that wasn't it."

"Fifty," he suggested, smiling.

She shook her head peevishly. "No, that wasn't it. 'Fair, and,
and'--what was it? It puts me out of patience to forget things!
'Fair and--_frail_!' That was it; frail! 'Fair and frail.'"
She did not pause for her superintendent's gasp of protest. "Yes;
first time I saw her, I thought there was a nigger in the
woodpile. She won't marry you, friend Ferguson, because she has
something on her conscience. Tell her I say not to be a fool. The
best man going is none too good for her!"

Robert Ferguson's heart gave a violent plunge in his breast, but
before his angry denial could reach her brain, her thought had
wandered. "No! no! no! I won't go to bed. Bed is where people
die." She got up from her chair, to walk about and show how well
she was; but when she reached the center of the room she seemed
to crumple up, sinking and sliding down on to the floor, her back
against one of the carved legs of the table. Once there, she
would not get up. She became so violently angry when they urged
her to let them help her to her feet, that they were obliged to
yield. "We will do more harm by irritating her," the doctor said,
"than any good we could accomplish by putting her back to bed
forcibly." So they put cushions behind her, and there she sat,
staring with dim, expectant eyes at the dining room door;
sometimes speaking with stoical endurance, intelligently enough;
sometimes, when delirious, whimpering with the pain of that
terrible arm, swollen now to a monstrous mass of agony.

Late in the afternoon she said she wanted to see '"that
picture"; and Elizabeth knelt beside her, holding the little dark
canvas so that she could look at it; she sat staring into it for
a long time. "Mary didn't try to keep her baby from the cross,"
she said, suddenly; "well, I've done better than that; I brought
the cross to my baby." Her face fell into wonderfully peaceful
lines. Just at dusk she tried to sing.

"'Drink to me only with thine eyes'"

she quavered; "my boy sings that beautifully. I must give him a
present. A check. I must give him a check."

But when Nannie said, eagerly, "Blair has written Elizabeth that
he will be at home to-morrow; I'll tell him you want to see him;
and oh, Mamma, won't you please be nice to him?"--she looked
perfectly blank. Toward morning she sat silently for a whole hour
sucking her thumb. When, abruptly, she came to herself and
realized what she had been doing, the shamed color rose in her
face. Nannie, kneeling at her side, caught at the flicker of
intelligence to say, "Mamma, would you like to see the Rev. Mr.
Gore? He is here; waiting in the parlor. Sha'n't I bring him in?"

Mrs. Maitland frowned. "What does he come for now? I'm sick. I
can't see people. Besides, I sent him a check for Foreign
Missions last month."

"Oh, Mamma!" Nannie said, brokenly, "he hasn't come for money; I--
I sent for him."

Sarah Maitland's eyes suddenly opened; her mind cleared
instantly. "Oh," she said; and then, slowly: "Um-m; I see." She
seemed to meditate a moment; then she said, gravely: "No, my
dear, no; I won't see little Gore. He's a good little man; a very
good little man for missions and that sort of thing. But when it
comes to _this_--" she paused; "I haven't time to see to
him," she said, soberly. A minute later, noticing Nannie's tears,
she tried to cheer her: "Come, come! don't be troubled," she
said, smiling kindly, "I can paddle my own canoe, my dear." After
that she was herself for nearly half an hour. Once she said. "My
house is in order, friend Ferguson." Then she lost herself again.
To those who watched her, huddled on the heap of cushions,
mumbling and whimpering, or with a jerk righting her mind into
stony endurance, she seemed like a great tower falling and
crumbling in upon itself. At that last dreadful touch of decay,
when she put her thumb in her mouth like a baby, her stepdaughter
nearly fainted.

All that night the mists gathered, and thinned, and gathered
again. In the morning, still lying on the floor, propped against
all the pillows and cushions of the house, she suddenly looked
with clear eyes at Nannie.

"Why!" she said, in her own voice, and frowning sharply, "that
certificate of deposit! I got it from the Bank the day of the
accident, but I haven't indorsed it! Lucky I've got it here in
the house. Bring it to me. It's in the safe in my desk. Take my
keys."

Nannie, who for the moment was alone with her, found the key, and
opening the little iron door in the desk, brought the certificate
and a pen dipped in ink; but even in those few moments of
preparation, the mist had begun to settle again: "I told the
cashier it was a present I was going to make," she chuckled to
herself; "said _he'd_ like to get a present like that. I
reckon he would. Reckon anybody would." Her voice lapsed into
incoherent murmurings, and Nannie had to speak to her twice
before her eyes were intelligent again; then she took the pen and
wrote, her lips faintly mumbling: "Pay to the order of--what's
the date?" she said, dully, her eyes almost shut. "Never mind; I
don't have to date it. But I was thinking: Blair gave me a
calendar when he was a little boy. Blair--Blair--" And as she
spoke his name, she wrote it: "_Blair Maitland_." But just
as she did so, her mind cleared, and she saw what she had
written. "Blair Maitland?" she said, and smiled and shook her
head. "Oh, I've written that name too many times. Too many times.
Got the habit." She lifted her pen heavily, perhaps to draw it
through the name, but her hand sagged.

Copyright (c) 2007. knowncrafts.net. All rights reserved.