Book: The Iron Woman

M >> Margaret Deland >> The Iron Woman




"And when I see her," he said to himself, "the moment I see her,--
I will know." He debated with himself whether he should speak of
the catastrophe of their lives, or wait for her to do so. As he
thought of putting it into words, he was aware of singular
shyness, which showed him with startling distinctness how far
apart he and she were. Just how and when he would see her he had
not decided; probably it could not be on the day Mrs. Maitland
was buried; but the next day? "How shall I manage it?" he asked
himself--then found that it had been managed for him.

When they came back from the cemetery, Mrs. Richie went to Robert
Ferguson's. "You are to come home and have supper with me," he
had told her; "David can call for you when he gets through his
gallivanting about the town." (David had excused himself, on the
ground of seeing Knight and one or two of the fellows; he had
said nothing of his need to walk alone over the old bridge, out
into the country, and, in the darkness, round and round the River
House.) So, in the May twilight of Robert Ferguson's garden, the
two old neighbors paced up and down, and talked of Sarah
Maitland.

"I've got to break to David that apparently he isn't going to get
the fund for his hospital," Mr. Ferguson said. "There is no
mention of it in her will. She told me once, about two years ago,
that she was putting money by for him, and when she got the
amount she wanted she was going to give it to him. But she left
no memorandum of it. I'm afraid she changed her mind." His voice,
rather than his words, caught her attention; he was not speaking
naturally. He seemed to talk for the sake of talking, which was
so unlike him that Mrs. Richie looked at him with mild curiosity.
"Mrs. Maitland had a perfect right to change her mind," she said;
"and really David never counted very much on the hospital. She
spoke of it to him, I know, but I think he had almost forgotten
it--though I hadn't," she confessed, a little ruefully. She
smiled, and Robert Ferguson, fiercely twitching off his glasses,
tried to smile back; but his troubled eyes lingered questioningly
on her serene face. It was almost a beautiful face in its peace.
What was it Mrs. Maitland had said about her looks? "Fair and--"
He was so angry at remembering the word that he swore softly at
himself under his breath, and Helena Richie gave him a surprised
look. He had sworn at himself several times in these five days
since Sarah Maitland, half delirious, wholly shrewd, had said
those impossible things about David's mother. Under his concern
and grief, under his solemn preoccupations, Robert Ferguson had
felt again and again the shock of the incredible suggestion:
_"something on her conscience."_ Each time the words thrust
themselves up through his absorbed realization of Mrs. Maitland's
death, he pushed them down savagely: "It is impossible!" But each
time they rose again to the surface of his mind. When they did,
they brought with them, as if dredged out of the depths of his
memory, some sly indorsement of their truth. . . . She never says
anything about her husband. "Why on earth should she? He was
probably a bad egg; that friend of hers, that Old Chester doctor,
hinted that he was a bad egg. Naturally he is not a pleasant
subject of conversation for his wife." . . . Her only friends,
except in his own little circle, were two old men (one of them
dead now), in Old Chester. "Well, Heaven knows a parson and a
doctor are about as good friends as a woman can have." . . . But
no _women_ friends belonging to her past. "Thank the Lord!
If she had a lot of cackling females coming to see her, _I_
wouldn't want to!" . . . She is always so ready to defend
Elizabeth's wicked mother.

"She has a tender heart; she's not hard like the rest of her
sex."

No, Life had not played another trick on him! Mrs. Maitland was
out of her head, that was all. As for him, somebody ought to boot
him for even remembering what the poor soul had said. And so,
disposing of the intolerable suspicion, he would draw a breath of
relief--until the whisper came again: _"something on her
conscience?"_

He was so goaded by this fancy of a dying woman, and at the same
time so shaken by her death, that, as his guest was quick to see,
he was entirely unreal; almost--if one can say such a thing of
Robert Ferguson, artificial. He was artificial when he spoke of
David and the money he was not to have; the fact was, he did not
at that moment care, he said to himself, a hang about David, or
his money either!

"You see," he said, as they came to the green door in the brick
wall, and went into the other garden, "you see, your house is
still empty?"

"Dear old house!" she said, smiling up at the shuttered windows.

He looked into her face, and its entire candor made him suddenly
and sharply angry at Sarah Maitland. It was the old friendly
anger, just as if she were not dead; and he found it curiously
comforting. ("She ought to be ashamed of herself to have such an
idea of Mrs. Richie. I'll tell her so--oh, Lord! what am I
saying? Well, well; she was dying; she didn't know what she was
talking about.") . . . "We could pull down some partitions and
make the two houses into one," he said, wistfully.

But she only laughed and shook her head. "I want to see if my
white peony is going to blossom; come over to the stone seat."

"You always shut me up," he said, sulkily; and in his sulkiness
he was more like himself than he had been for days. Sitting by
her side on the bench under the hawthorn, he let her talk about
her peony or anything else that seemed to her a safe subject; for
himself, all he wanted was the comfort of looking into her
comforting eyes, and telling himself that he insulted her when he
even denied those poor, foolish, dying words. When a sudden soft
shower drove them indoors to his library he came back with a sigh
to Mrs. Maitland; but this time he was quite natural: "The queer
part of it is, she hadn't changed her mind about David's money up
to within two days of her death. She meant him to have it when
she spoke to me of writing to him; and her mind was perfectly
clear then; at least"--he frowned; "she did wander for a minute.
She had a crazy idea--"

"What?" said Mrs. Richie, sympathetically.

"Nothing; she was wandering. But it was only for a minute, and
except for that she was clear. When I urged her to make some
provision for Blair, she was perfectly clear. Practically told me
to mind my own business! Just like her," he said, sighing.

"It would have been a great deal of money," Mrs. Richie said;
"probably David is better off without it." But he knew she was
disappointed; and indeed, after supper, in his library, she
admitted the disappointment frankly enough. "He has changed very
much; his youth is all gone. He is more silent than ever. I had
thought that perhaps the building of this hospital would bring
him out of himself. You see, he blames himself for the whole
thing."

"He is still bitter?"

"Oh, I'm afraid so. He very rarely speaks of it. But I can see
that he blames himself always. I wish he would talk freely."

"He will one of these days. He'll blurt it out and then he'll
begin to get over it. Don't stop him, and don't get excited, no
matter what absurd things he says. He'll be better when he has
emptied his heart. I was, you know, after I talked to you and
told you that I'd been--jilted."

"I'm afraid it's gone too deep for that with David," she said,
sadly.

"It couldn't go deeper than it did with me, and yet you--you
taught me to forgive her. Yes, and to be glad, too; for if she
hadn't thrown me over, I wouldn't have known you."

"Now _stop!_" Mrs. Richie said, with soft impatience.

"For a meek and mild looking person," said Robert Ferguson,
twitching off his glasses, "you have the most infernally strong
will. I hate obstinacy."

"Mr. Ferguson, be sensible. Don't talk--that way. Listen: David
must see Elizabeth while he is here. This situation has got to
become commonplace. I meant to go home to-morrow morning, but if
you will ask us all to luncheon--"

"'Dinner'! We don't have your Philadelphia airs in Mercer."

"Well, 'dinner,'" she said, smiling; "we'll stay over and take
the evening train.

"I won't ask Blair!"

"I hate obstinacy," Mrs. Richie told him, drolly. "Well, I am not
so very anxious to see Blair myself. But I do want Elizabeth and
David to meet. You see, David means to practise in Mercer--"

"What! Then you will come here to live? When will you come?"

"Next spring, I hope. And it is like coming home again. The
promise of the hospital was a factor in his decision, but, even
without it, I think he will want to settle in Mercer"; she paused
and sighed.

Her old landlord did not notice the sigh. "I'll get the house in
order for you right off!" he said, beaming. "I suppose you'll ask
for all sorts of new-fangled things! A tenant is never
satisfied." He was so happy that he barked and chuckled at the
same time.

"I hope it's wise for him to come," Mrs. Richie said, anxiously;
"I confess I don't feel quite easy about it, because--Elizabeth
will be here; and though, of course, nobody is going to think of
how things might have been, still, it will be painful for them
both just at first. That's why I want you to invite us to
dinner,--the sooner they meet, the sooner things will be
commonplace."

"When a man has once been in love with a woman," Robert Ferguson
said, putting on his glasses carefully, "he can hate her, but she
can never be commonplace to him."

And before she knew it she said, impulsively, "Please don't ever
hate me."

He laid a quick hand on hers that was resting in her lap. "I'll
never hate you and you'll never be commonplace. Dear woman--can't
you?"

She shook her head; the tears stood suddenly in her leaf-brown
eyes.

"Helena!" he said, and there was a half-frightened violence in
his voice; "_what_ is it? Tell me, for Heaven's sake; what
is it? Do you hate me?"

"No--no--no!"

"If you dislike me, say so! I think I could bear it better to
believe you disliked me."

"Robert, how absurd you are! You know I could never dislike you.
But our--our age, and David, and--"

He put an abrupt hand on her shoulder and looked hard into her
eyes; then for a single minute he covered his own. "Don't talk
about age, and all that nonsense. Don't talk about little things,
Helena, for God's sake! Oh, my dear--" he said, brokenly. He got
up and went across the room to a bookcase; he stood there a
moment or two with his back to her. Helena Richie, bewildered,
her eyes full of tears, looked after him in dismay. But when he
took his chair again, he was "commonplace" enough, and when,
later, David came in, he was able to talk in the most matter-of-
fact way. He told the young man that evidently Mrs. Maitland had
changed her mind about a hospital. "Of course some papers may
turn up that will entitle you to your fund, but I confess I'm
doubtful about it. I'm afraid she changed her mind."

"Probably she did," David said, laconically; "well, I am glad she
thought of it,--even if she didn't do it. She was a big person,
Mr. Ferguson; I didn't half know how big a person she was!" For a
moment his face softened until his own preoccupations faded out
of it.

"Nobody knew how big she was--except me," Robert Ferguson said.
Then he began to talk about her. . . . It was nearly midnight
when he ended; when he did, it was with an outburst of pain and
grief: "Nobody understood her. They thought because she ran an
iron-works, that she wasn't--a woman. I tell you she was! I tell
you her heart was a woman's heart. She didn't care about fuss and
feathers, and every other kind of tomfoolery, like all the rest
of you, but she was as--as modest as a girl, and as sensitive.
You needn't laugh--"

"Laugh?" said Helena Richie; "I am ready to cry when I think how
her body misrepresented her soul!"

He nodded; his chin shook. "Big, generous, incapable of meanness,
incapable of littleness!--and now she's dead. I believe her
disappointment about Blair really killed her. It cut some spring.
She has never been the same woman since he--" He stopped short,
and looked at David; no one spoke.

Then Mrs. Richie asked some casual question about the Works, and
they began to talk of other things. When his guests said good-
night, Robert Ferguson, standing on his door-step, called after
them: "Oh, hold on: David, won't you and your mother come in to
dinner to-morrow? Luncheon, your mother calls it. She wants us to
be fashionable in Mercer! Nobody here but Miss White and
Elizabeth."

"Yes, thank you; we'll come with pleasure," Mrs. Richie called
back, and felt the young man's arm grow rigid under her hand.

The mother and son walked on in silence. It had stopped raining,
but the upper sky was full of fleecy clouds laid edge to edge
like a celestial pavement; from between them sometimes a serene
moon looked down.

"David, you don't mind staying over for a day?"

"Oh no, not at all. I meant to."

"And you don't mind--seeing Elizabeth?"

"I want to see her. Will he be there?"

"Blair? No! Certainly not. It wouldn't be pleasant for--for--"

"For him?" David said, dryly. "I should think not. Still, I am
sorry. I have rather a curiosity to see Blair."

"Oh, David!" she protested, sadly.

"My dear mother, don't be alarmed. I have no intention of calling
him out. I am merely interested to know how a sneak-thief looks
when he meets--" he laughed; "the man he has robbed. However, it
might not be pleasant for the rest of you."

His mother was silent; her plan of making things "commonplace"
was not as simple as she thought.

Robert Ferguson, on his door-step, looked after them, his face
falling abruptly into stern lines. When he went back to his
library he stood perfectly still, his hands in his pockets,
staring straight ahead of him. Once or twice his whole face
quivered. Suddenly he struck his clenched fist hard on the table:
"Well!" he said, aloud, violently, "what difference does it
make?" He lit a cigar and sat down, his legs stretched out in
front of him, his feet crossed. He sat there for an hour, biting
on his extinguished cigar. Then he said in an unsteady voice,
"She is a heavenly creature." The vigil in his library, which
lasted until the dawn was white above Mercer's smoke, left Robert
Ferguson shaken to the point of humility. He no longer combated
Mrs. Maitland's wandering words; they did not matter. What
mattered was the divine discovery that they did not matter! Or
rather, that they opened his eyes to the glory of the human soul.
To a man of his narrow and obstinate council of perfection, the
realization, not only that it was possible to enter into holiness
through the door of sin--that low door that bows the head that
should be upright--but that his own possibilities of tenderness
were wider than he knew,--such a realization was conversion. It
was the recognition that in the matter of forgiveness he and his
Father were one. Helena might or might not "have something on her
conscience." If she had, then it proved that she in her humility
was a better woman than, with nothing on his conscience, he in
his arrogance was a man; and when he said that, he began to
understand, with shame, that in regard to other people's wrong-
doing he had always been, as Sarah Maitland expressed it, "more
particular than his Creator." He thought of her words now, and
his lean face reddened. "She hit me when she said that. I've
always set up my own Ebenezer. What a fool I must have seemed to
a woman like Helena. . . . She's a heavenly creature!" he ended,
brokenly; "what difference does it make how she became so? But if
_that's_ the only reason she keeps on refusing me--"

When Elizabeth and David met in Mr. Ferguson's library at noon
the next day, everybody was, of course, elaborately unconscious.

Elizabeth came in last. As she entered, Miss White, nibbling
speechlessly, was fussing with the fire-irons of a grate filled
with white lilacs. Mrs. Richie, turning her back upon her son,
began to talk entirely at random to Robert Ferguson, who was
rapidly pulling out books from the bookcase at the farther end of
the room. David was the only one who made no pretense. When he
heard the front door close and knew that she was in the house, he
stood staring at the library door. Elizabeth, entering, walked
straight up to him, and put out her hand.

"How are you, David?" she said.

David, taking the small, cold hand in his, said, calmly, "How're
you, Elizabeth?" Then their eyes met. Hers held steadfast; it was
his which fell.

"Have you seen Nannie?" she said.

And he: "Yes; poor Nannie!"

"Hullo, Elizabeth," her uncle called out, carelessly; and Mrs.
Richie came over and kissed her.

So that first terrible moment was lived through. During luncheon,
they hardly spoke to each other. Elizabeth, with obvious effort,
talked to Mrs. Richie of Nannie and Mrs. Maitland; David talked
easily and (for him) a great deal, to Robert Ferguson; he talked
politics, and disgusted his iron-manufacturing host by denouncing
the tariff; he talked municipal affairs, and said that Mercer had
a lot of private virtue, but no public morals. "Look at your
streets!" said the squirt. In those days, the young man who
criticized the existing order was a squirt; now he is a cad; but
in the nostrils of middle age, he is as rankly unpleasant by one
name as by the other. Elizabeth's uncle was so annoyed that he
forgot the embarrassment of the occasion, and said, satirically,
to Mrs. Richie: "Well, well! 'See how we apples swim'!" which
made her laugh, but did not disturb David in the least. The
moment luncheon was over, Elizabeth rose.

"I must go and see Nannie," she said; and David, opening the door
for her, said, "I'll go along with you." At which their elders
exchanged a startled look.

Out in the street they walked side by side--these two between
whom there was a great gulf fixed. By that time the strain of the
occasion had begun to show in Elizabeth's face; she was pale, and
the tension of her set lips drew the old dimple into a livid
line. David was apparently entirely at ease, speaking lightly of
this or that; Elizabeth answered in monosyllables. Once, at a
crossing, he laid an involuntary hand on her arm--but instantly
lifted it as if the touch had burnt him! "Lookout!" he said, and
for the first time his voice betrayed him. But before the
clattering dray had passed, his taciturn self-control had
returned: "you can hardly hear yourself think, in Mercer," he
said. Elizabeth was silent; she had come to the end of effort.

It was not until they reached the iron gate of Mrs. Maitland's
house that he dragged his quivering reality out of the inarticulate
depths, but his brief words were flat and meaningless to the
strained creature beside him.

"I was glad to see you to-day," he said.

And she, looking at him with hard eyes, said that it was very
kind in him and in his mother to come on to Mrs. Maitland's
funeral. "Nannie was so touched by it," she said. She could not
say another word; not even good-by. She opened the gate and fled
up the steps to the front door.

David, so abruptly deserted, stood for a full minute looking at
the dark old house, where the wistaria looping above the pillared
doorway was blossoming in wreaths of lavender and faint green.

Then he laughed aloud. "What a fool I am," he said.




CHAPTER XXXI

When Nannie Maitland, trembling very much, pressed into her
brother's hand that certificate for what was, in those days, a
very considerable fortune, Blair had been deeply moved. It came
after a night, not of grief, to be sure, but of what might be
called cosmic emotion,--the child's realization of the parent's
death. When he saw the certificate, and knew that at the last
moment his mother's ruthless purpose had flagged, her iron will
had bent, a wave of something like tenderness rose above his hate
as the tide rises above wrecking rocks. For a moment he thought
that even if she had carried out her threat of disinheriting him
he would be able to forgive her. But as inevitably the wave of
feeling ebbed, and he saw again those black rocks of hate below
the moving brightness of the tide, he reminded himself that this
gift of hers was only a small part of what belonged to him. In a
way it was even a confession that she had wronged him. She had
written his name, Nannie told him with a curious tremor in her
hands and face, "just at the last. It was that last morning,"
Nannie said, huskily, trying to keep her voice steady; "she
hadn't time to change her will, but this shows she was sorry she
made it."

"I don't know that that follows," Blair said, gravely. It was not
until the next day that he referred to it again: "After all,
Nannie, if her will is what she said it would be, it is--
outrageous, you know. This money doesn't alter that."

Yet somehow, in those days before the funeral, whenever he
thought of breaking the will, that relenting gift seemed to stay
his hand. The idea of using her money to thwart her purpose, of
taking what she had given him, from affection and a tardy sense
of justice, to insult her memory, made him uncomfortable to the
point of irritability. It was esthetically offensive. Once he
sounded Elizabeth on the subject, and her agreeing outcry of
disgust drove him into defending himself: "Of course we don't
know yet what her will is; but if she has done what she
threatened, it is abominable; and I'll break it--"

"With the money she gave you?" she said.

And he said, boldly, "Yes!"

But he was not really bold; he was perplexed and unhappy, for his
hope that his mother had not disinherited him was based on
something a little finer than his wish to come into his own; it
was a real reluctance to do violence to a relationship of which
he had first become conscious the night she died. But with that
reluctance, was also the instinct of self-defense: "I have a
right to her money!"

The day after the funeral he went to Mrs. Maitland's lawyers with
a request to see the will.

"Certainly," the senior member of the firm said; "as you are a
legatee a copy has already been prepared for you. I regret,
Blair, that your mother took the course she did. I cannot help
saying to you. that we ventured to advise against it.

"I was aware of my mother's purpose," Blair said, briefly; and
added, to himself, "she has done it! ... I shall probably contest
the will," he said aloud.

Sarah Maitland's old friend and adviser looked at him
sympathetically. "No use, my boy; it's cast-iron. That was her
own phrase, 'cast-iron.'" Then, really sorry for him, he left him
in the inner office so that he might read that ruthless document
alone.

Mrs. Maitland had said it was a pity she could not live to see
Blair fight her will; she "would like the fun of it." She would
not have found any food for mirth if she could have seen her son
in that law-office reading with set teeth, her opinion of
himself, her realization of her responsibility in making him what
he was, and her reason for leaving him merely a small income from
a trust fund. Had it not been for the certificate--in itself a
denial of her cruel words--lying at that moment in his breast
pocket, he would have been unable to control his fury. As it was,
underneath his anger was the consciousness that she had made what
reparation she could.

When he folded the copy of the will and thrust it into his pocket
his face was very pale, but he could not resist saying to old Mr.
Howe as he passed him in the outer office, "I hope you will be
pleased, sir, in view of your protest about this will, to know
that my mother regretted her course toward me, and left a message
to that effect with my sister."

"I am glad to hear it," the astonished lawyer said, "but--"

Blair did not wait to hear the end of his sentence. He said to
himself that even before he made up his mind what to do about the
will he must get possession of his money--"or the first thing I
know some of their confounded legal quibbles will make trouble
for me," he said.

Certainly there was no trouble for him as yet; the process of
securing his mother's gift involved nothing more than the
depositing of the certificate in his own bank. The cashier, who
knew Sarah Maitland's name very well indeed on checks payable to
her son, ventured to offer his condolences: "Your late mother
was a very wonderful woman, Mr. Maitland. There was no better
business man this side of the Alleghanies than your mother, sir."

Blair bowed; he was too absorbed to make any conventional reply.
The will: should he or should he not contest it? His habit of
indecision made the mere question--apart from its gravity--
acutely painful; not even the probabilities of the result of such
a contest helped him to decide what to do. The probabilities were
grimly clear. Blair had, perhaps, a little less legal knowledge
than the average layman, but even he could not fail to realize
that Sarah Maitland's will was, as Mr. Howe had said, "iron."
Even if it could be broken, it might take years of litigation to
do it. "And a 'bird in the hand'!" Blair reminded himself
cynically. "But," he told Nannie, a week or two later when she
was repeating nervously, for the twentieth time, just how his
mother had softened toward him,--"but those confounded orphan
asylums make me mad! If she wanted orphans, what about you and
me? Charity begins at home. I swear I'll contest the will!"

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