Book: The Iron Woman

M >> Margaret Deland >> The Iron Woman




Nannie did not smile; she very rarely smiled now. Miss White
thought she was grieving over her stepmother's death; and
Elizabeth said, pityingly, "I didn't realize she was so fond of
her." Perhaps Nannie did not realize it herself until she began
to miss her stepmother's roughness, her arrogant generosity, her
temper,--to miss, even, the mere violence of her presence; then
she began to grieve softly to herself. "Oh, Mamma, I wish you
hadn't died," she used to say, over and over, as she lay awake in
the darkness. She lay awake a great deal in those first weeks.

All her life Nannie had been like a little leaf whirled along by
a great gale of thundering power and purpose which she never
attempted to understand, much less contend with; now, abruptly,
the gale had dropped, and all her world was still. No wonder she
lay awake at night to listen to such stillness! Apart from grief
the mere shock of sudden quietness might account for her
nervousness, Robert Ferguson said; but he was perplexed at her
lack of interest in her own affairs. She seemed utterly unaware
of the change in her circumstances. That she was a rich woman now
was a matter of indifference to her. And she seemed equally
unconscious of her freedom. Apparently it never occurred to her
that she could alter her mode of life. Except that, at Blair's
insistence, she had a maid, and that Harris had cleared the
office paraphernalia from the dining-room table, life in the
stately, dirty, melancholy old house still ran in those iron
grooves which Mrs. Maitland had laid down for herself nearly
thirty years before. Nannie knew nothing better than the grooves,
and seemed to desire nothing better. She was indifferent to her
surroundings, and what was more remarkable, indifferent to
Blair's perplexities; at any rate, she was of no assistance to
him in making up his mind about the will. His vacillations hardly
seemed to interest her. Once he said, suppose instead of
contesting it, he should go to work? But she only said, vaguely,
"That would be very nice."

Curiously enough, in the midst of his uncertainties, a little
certainty had sprung up: it was the realization that work, merely
as work, might be amusing. In these months of tormenting
jealousy, of continually crushed hope that Elizabeth would begin
to care for him, of occasional shamed consciousness of having
taken advantage of a woman--Blair Maitland had had very little to
amuse him. So, in those hesitating weeks that followed his
mother's death, work, which her will necessitated, began to
interest him. Perhaps the interest, if not the amusement, was
enhanced by one or two legal opinions as to the possibility of
breaking the will. Harry Knight read it, and grinned:

"Well, old man, as you wouldn't give me the case anyhow, I can
afford to be perfectly disinterested and tell you the truth. In
my opinion, it would put a lot of cash into some lawyer's pocket
to contest this will; but I bet it would take a lot out of yours!
You'd come out the small end of the horn, my boy."

But Knight was young, Blair reflected, and perhaps his opinion
wasn't worth anything. "He's 'Goose Molly's' son," he said to
himself, with a half-laugh; it was strange how easily he fell
into his mother's speech sometimes! With a distrust of Harry
Knight's youth as keen as her own might have been, Blair stated
his case to a lawyer in another city.

"Before reading the will," said this gentleman, "let me inquire,
sir, whether there is any doubt in your mind of your mother's
mental capacity at the time the instrument was drawn?"

"My mother was Sarah Maitland, of the Maitland Works," said
Blair, briefly; and the lawyer's involuntary exclamation of
chagrin would have been laughable, if it had not been so
significant. "But we should, of course, be glad to represent you,
Mr. Maitland," he said. Blair, remembering Harry Knight's
disinterested remark about pockets, said, dryly, "Thanks, very
much," and took his departure. "He must think I'm Mr. Doestick's
friend," he told himself. The old joke was his mother's way of
avoiding an emphatic adjective when she especially felt the need
of it; but he had forgotten that she had ever used it.

As he walked from the lawyer's office to his hotel, he was
absorbed to the point of fatigue in his effort to make up his
mind, but it was characteristic of him that even in his
absorption he winced at the sight of a caged robin, sitting,
moping on its perch, in front of a tobacconist's. He had passed
the poor wild thing and walked a block, before he turned
impulsively on his heel, and came back to interview the
shopkeeper. "How much will you sell him for?" he said, with that
charming manner that always made people eager to oblige him. The
robin, looking at him with lack-luster eyes, sunk his poor little
head down into his dulled feathers; there was something so
familiar in the movement, that Blair cringed.

"I want to buy the little beggar," he said, so eagerly that the
owner mentioned a preposterous price. Blair took the money out of
his pocket, and the bird out of the cage. For a minute the
captive hesitated, clinging with terrified claws to his rescuer's
friendly finger. "Off with you, old fellow!" Blair said, tossing
the bird up into the air; and the unused wings were spread! For a
minute the eyes of the two men followed the joyous flight over
the housetops; then the tobacconist grinned rather sheepishly:
"Guess you've struck oil, ain't you?--or somebody's left you a
fortune."

Blair chuckled. "Think so?" he said. But as he walked on down the
street, he sighed; how dull the robin's eyes had been.
Elizabeth's eyes looked like that sometimes. "What a donkey I
am," he said to himself; "ten dollars! Well, I'll _have_ to
contest the will and get that fortune, or I can't keep up the
liberator role!" Then he fell to thinking how he must invest what
fortune he had--anything to get that confounded robin out of his
head! "I'm not going to keep all my money in a stocking in the
bank," he told himself. The idea of investment pleased him; and
when he got back to Mercer he devoted himself to consultations
with brokers. After some three months of it, he found the 'work,'
as he called it, distinctly amusing. "It's mighty interesting,"
he told his wife once; "I really like it."

Elizabeth said, languidly, that she hoped he would go into
business because it would have pleased his mother. Since Mrs.
Maitland's death, Elizabeth had not seemed well; no one connected
her languor with that speechless walk with David to Nannie's
door, or her look into his eyes when she bade farewell to a hope
that she had not known she was cherishing. But the experience had
been a profound shock to her. His entire ease, his interest in
other matters than the one matter of her life, and most of all
his casual "glad to see you," meant that he had forgiven her, and
so no longer loved her,--for of course, if he loved her he would
not forgive her! In these two years she had told herself with
perfect sincerity, a thousand times, that he had ceased to love
her; but now it seemed to her that, for the first time, she
really knew it. "He doesn't even hate me," she thought, bleakly.
For sheer understanding of suffering she grew a little gentler to
Blair; but her sympathy, although it gave him moments of hope,
did not reach the point of helping him to decide what to do about
the will. So, veering between the sobering reflection that
litigation was probably useless, and the esthetically repulsive
idea of using his mother's confession of regret to fight her, he
reached no decision. Meantime, "investment" slipped easily into
speculation,--speculation which, by that strange tempering of the
wind that sometimes comes before the lamb is shorn, was
remarkably successful.

It was gossip about this speculation that made Robert Ferguson
prick up his ears: "Where in thunder does he get the money to
monkey with the stock-market?" he said to himself; "he hasn't any
securities to put up, and he can't borrow on his expectations any
more,--everybody knows she cut him off with a shilling!" He was
concerned as well as puzzled. "I'll have him on my hands yet," he
thought, morosely. "Confound it! It's hard on me that she
disinherited him. He'll be a millstone round my neck as long as
he lives." Robert Ferguson had long ago made up his mind--with
tenderness--that he must support Elizabeth, "but I won't supply
that boy with money to gamble with! And if he goes on in this
way, of course he'll come down on me for the butcher's bill."
That was how he happened to ask Elizabeth about Blair's concerns.
When he did, the whole matter came out. It was Sunday morning.
Elizabeth, starting for church, had asked Blair, perfunctorily,
if he were going. "Church?" he said--he was sitting at his
writing-table, idly spinning a penny; "not I! I'm going to devote
the Sabbath day to deciding about the will." She had made no
comment, and his lip hardened. "She doesn't care what I do," he
said to himself, gloomily; yet he believed she would be pleased
if he refused to fight. "Heads or tails," he said, listening to
her retreating step; "suppose I say 'heads, bird in the hand;--
work. Tails, bird in the bush;--fight.' Might as well decide it
this way if she won't help me."

She had never thought of helping him; instead she stopped at her
uncle's and went out into the garden with him to watch him feed
his pigeons. When that was over, they came back together to the
library, and it was while she was standing at his big table
buttoning her gloves that he asked her if Blair was speculating.

Yes; she believed he was. No; not with her money; that had been
just about used up, anyhow; although he had paid it all back to
her when he got his money. "Will you invest it for me, Uncle
Robert?" she said.

"Of course; but mind," he barked, with the old, comfortable
crossness, "you won't get any crazy ten per cent out of my
investments! You'll have to go to Blair Maitland's wildcats for
that. But if he isn't using your money, how on earth can he
speculate? What do you mean by 'his' money?"

"Why," she explained, surprised, "he has all that money Mrs.
Maitland gave him the day she died."

"What!"

"Didn't you know about the check?" she said; she had not
mentioned it to him herself, partly because of their tacit
avoidance of Blair's name, but also because she had taken it for
granted that he was aware of what Mrs. Maitland had done. She
told him of it now, adding, in a smothered voice, "She forgave
him for marrying me, you see, at the end."

He was silent for a few moments, and Elizabeth, glancing at the
clock, was turning to go, but he stopped her. "Hold on a minute.
I don't understand this business. Tell me all about it,
Elizabeth."

She told him what little she knew, rather vaguely: Mrs. Maitland
had drawn a check--no: she believed it was called a bank
certificate of deposit. It was for a great deal of money. When
she told him how much, Robert Ferguson struck his fist on the arm
of his chair. "That's it!" he said. "That is where David's money
went!"

"_David's_ money?" Elizabeth said, breathlessly.

"I see it now," he went on, angrily; "she had the money on hand;
that's why she tried to write that letter. How Fate does get
ahead of David every time!"

"Uncle! What do you mean?"

He told her, briefly, of Mrs. Maitland's plan. "She said two
years ago that she was going to give David a lump sum. I didn't
know she had got it salted down--she was pretty close-mouthed
about some things; but I guess she had. Well, probably, at the
last minute, she thought she had been hard on Blair, and decided
to hand it over to him, instead of giving it to David. She had a
right to, a perfect right to. But I don't understand it! The very
day she spoke of writing to David, she told me she wouldn't leave
Blair a cent. It isn't like her to whirl about that way--unless
it was during one of those times when she wasn't herself. Well,"
he ended, sighing, "there is nothing to be done about it, of
course; but I'll see Nannie, and get at the bottom of it, just
for my own satisfaction."

Elizabeth's color came and went; she reminded herself that she
must be fair to Blair; his mother had a right to show her
forgiveness by leaving the money to him instead of David. Yes;
she must remember that; she must be just to him. But even as she
said so she ground her teeth together.

"Blair did not try to influence his mother, Uncle Robert," she
said, "if that's what you are thinking of. He didn't see her
while she was sick. He has never seen her since--since--" "There
are other ways of influencing people than by seeing them. He
wrote to Nannie, didn't he?"

"If I thought," Elizabeth said in a low voice, "that Blair had
induced Nannie to influence Mrs. Maitland, I would--" But she did
not finish her sentence. "Good-by, Uncle Robert. I'm going to see
Nannie."

As she hurried down toward Shantytown through the Sunday
emptiness of the hot streets, she said to herself that if Nannie
had made her stepmother give the money to Blair, she, Elizabeth,
would do something about it! "I won't have it!" she said,
passionately.

It had been a long time since Elizabeth's face had been so vivid.
The old sheet-lightning of anger began to flash faintly across
it. She did not know what she would do to Nannie if Nannie had
induced Mrs. Maitland to rob David, but she would do something!
Yet when she reached the house, her purpose waited for a minute;
Nannie's tremor of loneliness and perplexity was so pitifully in
evidence that she could not burst into her own perplexity.

She had been trying, poor Nannie! to make up her mind about many
small, crowding affairs incident to the situation. In these weeks
since Mrs. Maitland's death, Nannie, for the first time in her
life, found herself obliged to answer questions. Harris asked
them: "You ain't a-goin' to be livin' here, Miss Nannie; 'tain't
no use to fill the coal-cellar, is it?" Miss White asked them:
"Your Mamma's clothes ought to be put in camphor, dear child, or
else given away; which do you mean to do?" Blair asked them:
"When will you move out of this terrible house, Nancy dear?" A
dozen times a day she was asked to make up her mind, she whose
mind had always been made up for her!

That hot Sunday morning when Elizabeth was hurrying down to
Shantytown with the lightning flickering in her clouded eyes,
Nannie, owing to Miss White's persistence about camphor, had gone
into Mrs. Maitland's room to look over her things.

Oh, these "things"! These pitiful possessions that the helpless
dead must needs leave to the shrinking disposal of those who are
left! How well every mourner knows them, knows the ache of
perplexity and dismay that comes with the very touch of them. It
is not the valuables that make grief shrink,--they settle
themselves; such-and-such books or jewels or pieces of silver
belong obviously to this or that side of the family. But what
about the dear, valueless, personal things that neither side of
the family wants? Things treasured by the silent dead because of
some association unknown, perhaps, to those who mourn. What about
these precious, worthless things? Mrs. Maitland had no personal
possessions of intrinsic value, but she had her treasures. There
was a little calendar on her bureau; it was so old that Nannie
could not remember when it had not been there hanging from the
slender neck of a bottle of German cologne. She took it up now,
and looked at the faded red crescents of the new moon; how long
ago that moon had waxed and waned! "She loved it," Nannie said to
herself, "because Blair gave it to her." Standing on the bureau
was the row of his photographs; on each one his mother had
written his age and the date when the picture had been taken. In
the disorder of the top drawer, tumbled about among her coarse
handkerchiefs, her collars, her Sunday black kid gloves, were
relics of her son's babyhood: a little green morocco slipper,
with a white china button on the ankle-band; a rubber rattle,
cracked and crumbling.... What is one to do with things like
these? Burn them, of course. There is nothing else that can be
done. Yet the mourner shivers when the flame touches them, as
though the cool fingers of the dead might feel the scorch! Poor,
frightened Nannie was the last person who could light such a holy
fire; she took them up--the slipper or the calendar, and put them
down again. "Poor Mamma!" she said over and over. Then she saw a
bunch of splinters tied together with one of Blair's old
neckties; she held it in her hand for a minute before she
realized that it was part of a broken cane. She did not know when
or why it had been broken, but she knew it was Blair's, and her
eyes smarted with tears. "Oh, how she loved him!" she thought,
and drew a breath of satisfaction remembering how she had helped
that speechless, dying love to express itself.

She was standing there before the open drawer, lifting things up,
then putting them back again, unable to decide what to do with
any of them, when Elizabeth suddenly burst in:

"Nannie!"

"Oh, I am so glad you've come!" Nannie said. She made a helpless
gesture. "Elizabeth, what _shall_ I do with everything?"

Elizabeth shook her head; the question which she had hurried down
here to ask paused before such forlorn preoccupation.

"Of course her dresses Harris will give away--"

"Oh no!" Elizabeth interrupted, shrinking. "Don't give them to a
servant."

"But," poor Nannie protested, "they are so dreadful, Elizabeth.
Nobody can possibly wear them, except people like some of
Harris's friends. But things like these--what would you do with
these?" She held out a discolored pasteboard box broken at the
corners and with no lid; a pair of onyx earrings lay in the faded
blue cotton. "I never saw her wear them but once, and they are
_so_ ugly," Nannie mourned.

"Nannie," Elizabeth said, "I want to ask you something. That
certificate Mrs. Maitland gave Blair: what made her give it to
him?"

Nannie put the pasteboard box back in the drawer and turned
sharply to face her sister-in-law, who was sitting on the edge of
Mrs. Maitland's narrow iron bed; the scared attention of her eyes
banished their vagueness. "What made her give it to him? Why,
love, of course! Don't you suppose Mamma loved Blair better than
anybody in the world, even if he did--displease her?"

"Uncle thinks you may have influenced her to give it to him."

"I did not!"

"Did you suggest it to her, Nannie?"

"I asked her once, while she was ill, wouldn't she please be nice
to Blair,--if you call that suggesting! As for the certificate,
that last morning she sort of woke up, and told me to bring it to
her to sign. And I did."

She turned back to the bureau, and put an unsteady hand down into
the drawer. The color was rising in her face, and a muscle in her
cheek twitched painfully.

"But Nannie," Elizabeth said, and paused; the dining-room door
had opened, and Robert Ferguson was standing on the threshold of
Mrs. Maitland's room looking in at the two girls. The
astonishment he had felt in his talk with his niece had deepened
into perplexity. "I guess I'll thresh this thing out now," he
said to himself, and picked up his hat. He was hardly ten minutes
behind Elizabeth in her walk down to the Maitland house.

"Nannie," he said, kindly,--he never barked at Nannie; "can you
spare time, my dear, to tell me one or two things I want to
know?" He had come in, and found a dusty wooden chair. "Go ahead
with your sorting things out. You can answer my question in a
minute; it's about that certificate your mother gave Blair."

Nannie had turned, and was standing with her hands behind her
gripping the edge of the bureau; she gasped once or twice, and
glanced first at one inquisitor and then at the other; her face
whitened slowly. She was like some frightened creature at bay;
indeed her agitation was so marked that Robert Ferguson's
perplexity hardened into something like suspicion. "Can there be
anything wrong?" he asked himself in consternation. "You see,
Nannie," he explained, gently, "I happen to know that your mother
meant it for David Richie, not Blair."

"If she did," said Nannie, "she changed her mind." "When did she
change her mind?"

"I don't know. She just told me to bring the check to her to
sign, that--that last morning."

"Was she perfectly clear mentally?"

"Yes. Yes. Of course she was! Perfectly clear."

"Did she say why she had changed her mind?"

"No," Nannie said, and suddenly fright and anger together made
her fluent; "but why shouldn't she change her mind, Mr. Ferguson?
Isn't Blair her son? Her only son! What was David to Mamma? Would
you have her give all that money to an outsider, and leave her
only son penniless? Perhaps she changed her mind that morning. I
don't know anything about it. I don't see what difference it
makes when she changed it, so long as she changed it. All I can
tell you is that she told me to bring her the check, or
certificate, or whatever you call it, out of the little safe. And
I did, and she made it out to Blair. I didn't ask her to. I
didn't even know she had it; but I am thankful she did it!"

Her eyes were dilating; she put her shaking hand up to her
throat, as if she were struggling for breath. Her statement was
perfectly reasonable and probable, yet it left no doubt in Robert
Ferguson's mind that there was something wrong,--very wrong! Even
Elizabeth could see it. They both had the same thought: Blair had
in some way influenced, perhaps even coerced his mother. How,
they could not imagine, but Nannie evidently knew. They looked at
each other in dismay. Then Elizabeth sprang up and put her arms
around her sister-in-law. "Oh, Uncle," she said, "don't ask her
anything more now!" She felt the quiver through all the terrified
little figure.

"Mamma wanted Blair to have the money; it's his! No one can take
it from him!"

"Nobody wants to, Nannie, if it is his honestly," Robert Ferguson
said, gravely.

"_Honestly_?" Nannie whispered, with dry lips.

"Nannie dear, tell us the truth," Elizabeth implored her; "Uncle
won't be hard on Blair, if--if he has done wrong. I know he
won't."

"Wrong?" said Nannie; "Blair done wrong?" She pushed Elizabeth's
arms away; "Blair has never done wrong in his life!" She stood
there, with her back against the bureau, and dared them. "I won't
have you suspect my brother! Elizabeth! How can you let Mr.
Ferguson suspect Blair?"

"Nannie," said Robert Ferguson, "was Blair with his mother when
she signed that certificate?"

"No."

"Were you alone with her?"

Silence.

"Answer me, Nannie."

She looked at him with wild eyes, but she said nothing. Mr.
Ferguson put his hand on her shoulder. "Nannie," he said,
quietly, "Blair signed it; Blair wrote his mother's name."

"No! No! No! He did not! He did not." There was something in her
voice--a sort of relief, a sort of triumph, even, that the other
two could not understand, but which made them know that she was
speaking the truth. "He did not," Nannie said, in a whisper; "if
you accuse him of that, I'll have to tell you; though very likely
you won't understand. I did it. For Mamma."

"Did _what_?" Robert Ferguson gasped; "not--? You don't
mean--? Nannie! you don't mean that you--" he stopped; his lips
formed a word which he would not utter.

"Mamma wanted him to have the money. The day before she died she
told me she was going to give him a present. That day, that last
day, she told me to get the check. And she wrote his name on it.
No one asked her to. Not Blair. Not I. I never thought of such a
thing! I didn't even know there was a check. She wanted to do it.
She wrote his name. And then--she got weak; she couldn't go on.
She couldn't sign it. So I signed it for her...later. It was not
wrong. It was right. It carried out her wish. I am glad I did
it."




CHAPTER XXXII It was not a confession; it was a statement. In the
next distressing hour, during which Robert Ferguson succeeded in
drawing the facts from Blair's sister, there was not the
slightest consciousness of wrong-doing. Over and over, with soft
stubbornness, she asserted her conviction: "It was right to do
it. Mamma wanted to give the money to Blair. But she couldn't
write her name. So I wrote it for her. It was right to do it."

"Nannie," her old friend said, in despair, "don't you know what
the law calls it, when one person imitates another person's
handwriting for such a purpose."

"You can call it anything you want to," she said, passionately.
"_I_ call it carrying out Mamma's wishes. And I would do it
over again this minute."

Robert Ferguson was speechless with dismay. To find rigidity in
this meek mind, was as if, through layers of velvet, through fold
on fold of yielding dullness that gave at the slightest touch, he
had suddenly, at some deeper pressure, felt, under the velvet,
granite!

"It was right," Nannie said, fiercely, trembling all over, "it
was right, because it was necessary. Oh, what do your laws amount
to, when it comes to dying? When it comes to a time like that!
She was _dying_--you don't seem to understand--Mamma was
dying! And she wanted Blair to have that money; and just because
she hadn't the strength to write her name, you would let her wish
fail. Of course I wrote it for her! Yes; I know what you call it.
But what do I care what it is called, if I carried out her wish
and gave Blair the money she wanted him to have? Now he has got
it, and nobody can take it away from him."

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