Book: The Iron Woman

M >> Margaret Deland >> The Iron Woman




Elizabeth gave him a black look. "You like Blair better 'an me,"
she said, the tears hot in her amber eyes. A minute later she
slipped away to hide under the bed in her own room, peering out
from under a lifted valance for a hoped-for pursuer. But no one
came; the other three were so excited that her absence was hardly
noticed.

How they started, the adventurous ones, late that afternoon--
later, in fact, than they planned, because Blair insisted upon
running back to give Harris a parting gift of a dollar; "'Cause,
poor Harris! _he_ can't go traveling"--how they waited in
the big, barn-like, foggy station for what Blair called the "next
train," how they boarded it for "any place"--all seemed very
funny when they were old enough to look back upon it. It even
seemed funny, a day or two afterward, to their alarmed elders.
But at the time it was not amusing to anybody. David was gloomy
at being obliged to marry Nannie; "I pretty near wish I'd stayed
with Elizabeth," he said, crossly. Nannie was frightened,
because, she declared, "Mamma'll be mad;--now I tell you, Blair,
she'll be mad!" And Blair was sulky because he had no wife. Yet,
in spite of these varying emotions, pushed by Blair's resolution,
they really did venture forth to "travel all around the world!"

As for the grown people's feelings about the elopement, they ran
the gamut from panic to amusement.... At a little after five
o'clock, Miss White heard sobbing in Elizabeth's room, and going
in, found the little girl blacking her boots and crying
furiously. "Elizabeth! my lamb! What is the matter?"

"I have a great many sorrows," said Elizabeth, with a hiccup of
despair.

"But what _are_ you doing?"

"I am blacking my red shoes," Elizabeth wailed; and so she was,
the blacking-sponge on its shaky wire dripping all over the
carpet. "My beautiful red shoes; I am blacking them; and now they
are spoiled forever."

"But why do you want to spoil them?" gasped Miss White,
struggling to take the blacking-bottle away from her. "Elizabeth,
tell me immejetly! What has happened?"

"I didn't go on the journey," said Elizabeth; "and David wouldn't
stay at home with me; he liked Blair and Nannie better 'an me. He
hurt my feelings; so pretty soon right away I got mad--mad--mad--
to think he wouldn't stay with me. I always get mad if my
feelings are hurt, and David Richie is always hurting 'em. I
despise him for making me mad! I despise him for treating me so--
_hideous_! And so I took a hate to my shoes." The ensuing
explanation sent Miss White, breathless, to tell Mrs. Richie; but
Mrs. Richie was not at home.

When David did not appear that afternoon after school, Mrs.
Richie was disturbed. By three o'clock she was uneasy; but it was
nearly five before the quiver of apprehension grew into positive
fright; then she put on her things and walked down to the
Maitland house.

"Is David here?" she demanded when Harris answered her ring;
"please go up-stairs and look, Harris; they may be playing in the
nursery. I am worried."

Harris shuffled off, and Mrs. Richie, following him to the foot
of the stairs, stood there gripping the newel-post.

"They ain't here," Harris announced from the top landing.

Mrs. Richie sank down on the lowest step.

"Harris!" some one called peremptorily, and she turned to see
Robert Ferguson coming out of the dining-room: "Oh, you're here,
Mrs. Richie? I suppose you are on David's track. I thought Harris
might have some clue. I came down to tell Mrs. Maitland all we
could wring from Elizabeth."

Before she could ask what he meant, Blair's mother joined them.
"I haven't a doubt they are playing in the orchard," she said.

"No, they're not," her superintendent contradicted; "Elizabeth
says they were going to 'travel'; but that's all we could get out
of her."

"'Travel'! Oh, what does she mean?" Mrs. Richie said; "I'm so
frightened!"

"What's the use of being frightened?" Mrs. Maitland asked,
curiously; "it won't bring them back if they are lost, will it?"

Robert Ferguson knocked his glasses off fiercely. "They couldn't
be lost in Mercer," he reassured David's mother.

"Well, whether they've run away or not, come into my room and
talk about it like a sensible woman," said Mrs. Maitland; "what's
the use of sitting on the stairs? Women have such a way of
sitting on stairs when things go wrong! Suppose they are lost.
What harm's done? They'll turn up. Come!" Mrs. Richie came.
Everybody "came" or went, or stood still, when Mrs. Maitland said
the word! And though not commanded, Mr. Ferguson came too.

In the dining-room Mrs. Maitland took no part in the perplexed
discussion that followed. At her desk, in her revolving chair,
she had instinctively taken up her pen; there was a perceptible
instant in which she got her mind off her own affairs and put it
on this matter of the children. Then she laid the pen down, and
turned around to face the other two; but idleness irritated her,
and she reached for a ball of pink worsted skewered by bone
needles. She asked no questions and made no comments, but
knitting rapidly, listened, until apparently her patience came to
an end; then with a grunt she whirled round to her desk and again
picked up her pen. But as she did so she paused, pen in air;
threw it down, and pounding the flat of her hand on her desk,
laughed loudly:

"I know! I know!" And revolving back again in leisurely relief to
face them, she said, with open amusement: "When I came home this
afternoon, I found this drawer half open and the bills in my
cash-box disturbed. They've"--her voice was suddenly drowned in
the rumble of a train on the spur track; the house shook
slightly, and a gust of black smoke was vomited against the
windows;--"they've helped themselves and gone off to enjoy it!
We'll get on their trail at the railroad station. That's what
Elizabeth meant by 'traveling.'"

Mrs. Richie turned terrified eyes toward Mr. Ferguson.

"Why, of course!" he said, "the monkeys!"

But Mrs. Richie seemed more frightened than ever. "The railroad!--
_Oh_--"

"Nonsense," said Mrs. Maitland; "they're all right. The ticket-
agent will remember them. Mr. Ferguson, telegraph to their
destination, wherever it is, and have them shipped back. No
police help at this end yet, if you please."

Robert Ferguson nodded. "Of course everything is all right," he
said. "I'll let you know the minute I find traces of them, Mrs.
Richie." When he reached the door, he came back. "Now don't you
worry; I could thrash those boys for bothering you!" At which she
tried to smile, but there was a quiver in her chin.

"Harris!" Mrs. Maitland broke in, "supper! Mrs. Richie, you are
going to have something to eat."

"Oh, I can't--"

"What? You are not saying _can't?_ 'Can't' is a 'bad word,'
you know." She got up--a big, heavy woman, in a gray bag of a
dress that only reached to the top of her boots--and stood with
her hands on her hips; her gray hair was twisted into a small,
tight knot at the back of her head, and her face looked like iron
that had once been molten and had cooled into roughened
immobility. It was not an unamiable face; as she stood there
looking down at Mrs. Richie she even smiled the half-amused smile
one might bestow on a puppy, and she put a kindly hand on the
other mother's shoulder. "Don't be so scared, woman! They'll be
found."

"You don't think anything could have happened to him?" Mrs.
Richie said, trembling; "you don't think he could have been run
over, or--or anything?" She clutched at the big hand and clung to
it.

"No," Mrs. Maitland said, dryly; "I don't think anything has
happened to him."

Mrs. Richie had the grace to blush. "Of course I meant Blair and
Nannie, too," she murmured.

"You never thought of 'em!" Mrs. Maitland said, chuckling; "now
you must have some supper."

They were in the midst of it when a note came from Mr. Ferguson
to say that he was on the track of the runaways. He had sent a
despatch that would insure their being returned by the next
train, and he was himself going half-way up the road to meet
them. Then a postscript: "Tell Mrs. Richie not to worry."

"Doesn't seem much disturbed about my worry," said Mrs. Maitland,
jocosely significant; then with loud cheerfulness she tried to
rally her guest: "It's all right; what did I tell you? Where's my
knitting? Come; I'll go over to the parlor with you; we'll sit
there."

Mrs. Maitland's parlor was not calculated to cheer a panic-
stricken mother. It was a vast room, rather chilly on this foggy
November evening, and smelling of soot. On its remote ceiling was
a design in delicate relief of garlands and wreaths, which the
dingy years had not been able to rob of its austere beauty. Two
veined black-marble columns supported an arch that divided the
desert of the large room into two smaller rooms, each of which
had the center-table of the period, its bleak white-marble top
covered with elaborately gilded books that no one ever opened.
Each room had, too, a great cut-glass chandelier, swathed in
brown paper-muslin and looking like a gigantic withered pear.
Each had its fireplace, with a mantelpiece of funereal marble to
match the pillars. Mrs. Maitland had refurnished this parlor when
she came to the old house as a bride; she banished to the lumber-
room, or even to the auctioneer's stand, the heavy, stately
mahogany of the early part of the century, and purchased
according to the fashion of the day, glittering rosewood, carved
and gilded and as costly as could be found. Between the windows
at each end of the long room were mirrors in enormous gilt
frames; the windows themselves, topped with cornices and heavy
lambrequins, were hung with crimson brocade; a grand piano, very
bare and shining, sprawled sidewise between the black columns of
the arch, and on the wall opposite the fireplaces were four large
landscapes in oil, of exactly the same size. "Herbert likes
pictures," the bride said to herself when she purchased them.
"That goose Molly Wharton wouldn't have been able to buy 'em for
him!" The only pleasant thing in the meaningless room was
Nannie's drawing-board, which displayed the little girl's
painstaking and surprisingly exact copy in lead-pencil, of some
chromo--"Evangeline" perhaps, or some popular sentimentality of
the sixties. In the ten years which had elapsed since Mrs.
Maitland had plunged into her debauch of furnishing--her one
extravagance!--of course the parlors had softened; the enormous
roses of the carpets had faded, the glitter of varnish had
dimmed; but the change was not sufficient to blur in Mrs.
Maitland's eyes, all the costly and ugly glory of the room. She
cast a complacent glance about her as she motioned her nervous
and preoccupied guest to a chair. "How do you like Mercer?" she
said, beginning to knit rapidly.

"Oh, very well; it is a little--smoky," Mrs. Richie said,
glancing at the clock.

Mrs. Maitland grunted. "Mercer would be in a bad way without its
smoke. You ought to learn to like it, as I do! I like the smell
of it, I like the taste of it, I like the feel of it!"

"Really?" Mrs. Richie murmured; she was watching the clock.

"That smoke, let me tell you Mrs. Richie is the pillar of cloud,
to this country! (If you read your Bible, you'll know what that
means.) I think of it whenever I look at my stacks."

Mrs. Maitland's resentment at her guest's mild criticism was
obvious; but Mrs. Richie did not notice it. "I think I'll go down
to the station and meet the children," she said, rising.

"I'm afraid you are a very foolish woman," Sarah Maitland said;--
and Mrs. Richie sat down. "Mr. Ferguson will bring 'em here.
Anyway, this clock is half an hour slow. They'll be here before
you could get to the station." She chuckled, slyly. Her sense of
humor was entirely rudimentary, and never got beyond the
practical joke. "I've been watching you look at that clock," she
said; then she looked at it herself and frowned. She was wasting
a good deal of time over this business of the children. But in
spite of herself, glancing at the graceful figure sitting in
tense waiting at the fireside, she smiled. "You are a pretty
creature," she said; and Mrs. Richie started and blushed like a
girl. "If Robert Ferguson had any sense!" she went on, and paused
to pick up a dropped stitch. "Queer fellow, isn't he?" Mrs.
Richie had nothing to say. "Something went wrong with him when he
was young, just after he left college. Some kind of a crash.
Woman scrape, I suppose. Have you ever noticed that women make
all the trouble in the world? Well, he never got over it. He told
me once that Life wouldn't play but one trick on him. 'We're
always going to sit down on a chair--and Life pulls it from under
us,' he said. 'It won't do that to me twice.' He's not given to
being confidential, but that put me on the track. And now he's
got Elizabeth on his hands."

"She's a dear little thing," Mrs. Richie said, smiling; "though I
confess she always fights shy of me; she doesn't like me, I'm
afraid."

Mrs. Maitland lifted an eyebrow. "She's a corked-up volcano.
Robert Ferguson ought to get married, and give her an aunt to
look after her." She glanced at Mrs. Richie again, with
appraising eyes; "pity he hasn't more sense."

"I think I hear a carriage," Mrs. Richie said, coldly. Then she
forgot Mrs. Maitland, and stood waiting and trembling. A minute
later Mr. Ferguson ushered the three sleepy, whimpering children
into the room, and Mrs. Richie caught her grimy, crying little
boy in her arms and cried with him. "Oh, David, oh, David--my
darling! How could you frighten mother so!"

She was on her knees before him, and while her tears and kisses
fell on his tousled thatch of yellow hair, he burrowed his dirty
little face among the laces around her white throat and bawled
louder than ever. Mrs. Maitland, her back to the fireplace, her
hands on her hips, stood looking on; she was very much
interested. Blair, hungry and sleepy and evidently frightened,
was nuzzling up against Mrs. Richie, catching at her hand and
trying to hide behind her skirts; he looked furtively at his
mother, but he would not meet her eye.

"Blair," she said, "go to bed."

"Nannie and me want some supper," said Blair in a whisper.

"You won't get any. Boys that go traveling at supper-time can get
their own suppers or go hungry."

"It's my fault, Mamma," Nannie panted.

"No, it ain't!" Blair said quickly, emerging from behind Mrs.
Richie; "it was me made her do it."

"Well, clear out, clear out! Go to bed, both of you," Mrs.
Maitland said. But when the two children had scuttled out of the
room she struck her knee with her fist and laughed immoderately.

The next morning, when the two children skulked palely into the
dining-room, they were still frightened. Mrs. Maitland, however,
did not notice them. She was absorbed in trying in the murky
light to read the morning paper, propped against the silver urn
in front of her.

"Sit down," she said; "I don't like children who are late for
breakfast. Bless, O Lord, we beseech Thee, these things to our
use, and us to Thy service and glory. Amen!--Harris! Light the
gas."

Mercer's daylight was always more or less wan; but in the autumn
the yellow fogs seemed to press the low-hanging smoke down into
the great bowl of the hills at the bottom of which the town lay,
and the wanness scarcely lightened, even at high noon. On such
days the gas in the dining-room--or office, if one prefers to
call it so--flared from breakfast until dinner time. It flared
now on two scared little faces. Once Blair lifted questioning
eyebrows at Harris, and managed when the man brought his plate of
porridge to whisper, "mad?" At which the sympathetic Harris
rolled his eyes speechlessly, and the two children grew
perceptibly paler. But when, abruptly, Mrs. Maitland crumpled her
newspaper together and threw it on the floor, her absorbed face
showed no displeasure. The fact was, she had forgotten the affair
of the night before; it was the children's obvious alarm which
reminded her that the business of scolding and punishing must be
attended to. She got up from the table and stood behind them,
with her back to the fire; she began to nibble the upper joint of
her forefinger, wondering just how to begin. This silent
inspection of their shoulders made the little creatures quiver.
Nannie crumbled her bread into a heap, and Blair carried an empty
spoon to his mouth with automatic regularity; Harris, in the
pantry, in a paroxysm of sympathy, stretched his lean neck to the
crack of the half-open door.

"Children!"

"Yes, ma'am," Nannie quavered.

"Turn round."

They turned. Nannie began to cry. Blair twisted a button on his
coat with a grip that made his fingers white.

"Come into my room."

The children gasped with dismay. Mrs. Maitland's bedroom was a
nightmare of a place to them both. It was generally dark, for the
lower halves of the inside shutters were apt to be closed; but,
worse than that, the glimmering glass doors of the bookcases that
lined the walls held a suggestion of mystery that was curiously
terrifying. Whenever they entered the room, the brother and
sister always kept a frightened eye on those doors. This dull
winter morning, when they came quaking along behind their mother
into this grim place, it was still in the squalor of morning
confusion. Later, Harris would open the shutters and tidy things
up; he would dust the painted pine bureau and Blair's photographs
and the slender green bottle of German cologne on which the red
ribbons of the calendar were beginning to fade; now everything
was dark and bleak and covered with dust. Mrs. Maitland sat down;
the culprits stood hand in hand in front of her.

"Blair, don't you know it's wrong to take what doesn't belong to
you?"

"I took it," said the 'fraid-cat, faintly; she moved in front of
her brother as though to protect him.

"Blair told you to," his mother said.

"Yes," Blair blurted out, "it was me told her to."

"People that take things that don't belong to them go to hell,"
Mrs. Maitland said; "haven't you learned that in Sunday-school?"

Silence.

"You ought to be punished very severely, Blair--and Nannie, too.
But I am very busy this morning, so I shall only say"--she
hesitated; what on earth should she say! "that--that you shall
lose your allowance for this week, both of you."

One of them muttered, "Yes'm."

Mrs. Maitland looked as uncomfortable as they did. She wondered
what to do next. How much simpler a furnace was than a child!
"Well," she said, "that's all--at present"; it had suddenly
occurred to her that apprehension was a good thing; "_at
present_," she repeated darkly; "and Blair, remember; thieves
go to hell." She watched them with perplexed eyes as they hurried
out of the room; just as they reached the door she called:
"Blair!"

The child stopped short in his tracks and quivered.

"Come here." He came, slowly, his very feet showing his
reluctance. "Blair," she said--in her effort to speak gently her
voice grated; she put out her hand as if to draw him to her, but
the child shivered and moved aside. Mrs. Maitland looked at him
dumbly; then bent toward him, and her hands, hanging between her
knees, opened and closed, and even half stretched out as if in
inarticulate entreaty. Nannie, in the doorway, sobbing under her
breath, watched with frightened, uncomprehending eyes. "My son,"
Sarah Maitland said, with as much mildness as her loud voice
could express, "what did you mean to do when you ran away?" She
smiled, but he would not meet her eyes. "Tell me, my boy, why did
you run away?"

Blair tried to speak, cleared his throat, and blurted out four
husky words: "Don't like it here."

"Don't like what? Your home?"

Blair nodded.

"Why not?" she asked, astonished.

"Ugly," Blair said, faintly.

"Ugly! What is ugly?"

Blair, without looking up, made a little, swift gesture with his
hand. "This," he said; then suddenly he lifted his head, gave her
a sidewise, shrinking look, and dropped his eyes. The color flew
into Mrs. Maitland's face; with an ejaculation of anger, she got
on her feet. "You are a very foolish and very bad little boy,"
she said; "you don't know what you are talking about. I had meant
to increase your allowance, but now I won't do it. Listen to me;
it is no matter whether a house, or a--a person, is what you call
'ugly.' What matters is whether they are useful. Everything in
the world ought to be useful--like our Works. If I ever hear you
saying you don't like a thing because it's ugly, I shall--I shall
not give you any money at all. Money!" she burst out, suddenly
fluent, "money isn't _pretty_! Dirty scraps of paper, bits
of silver that look like lead--perhaps you call money 'ugly,'
too?"

Her vehemence was a sort of self-defense; it was a subtle
confession that she felt in this little repelling personality the
challenge of an equal; but Blair only gaped at her in childish
confusion; and instantly his mother was herself again. "Clear
out, now; and be a good boy." When she was alone, she sat at her
desk in the dining-room for several minutes without taking up her
pen. Her face burned from the slap of the child's words; but
below the scorch of anger and mortification her heart was
bruised. He did not like her to put her arm about him! She drew a
long breath and began to read her letters; but all the while she
was thinking of that scene in the parlor the night before: Blair
crouching against Mrs. Richie, clinging to her white hand;--
voluntarily Sarah Maitland looked at her own hand; "I suppose,"
she said to herself, "he thinks hers is 'pretty'! Where does he
get such notions? I wonder what kind of a woman she is, anyway;
she never says anything about her husband."




CHAPTER III

There came a day when Miss White's little school in the garret
was broken up. Mr. Ferguson declared that David and Blair needed
a boot instead of a petticoat to teach them their Latin--and a
few other things, too! He had found Mrs. Richie in tears because,
under the big hawthorn in her own back yard, David had blacked
Blair's eye, and had himself achieved a bloody nose. Mrs. Richie
was for putting on her things to go and apologize to Mrs.
Maitland, and was hardly restrained by her landlord's snort of
laughter.

"Next time I hope he'll give him two black eyes, and Blair will
loosen one of his front teeth!" said Mr. Ferguson.

David's mother was speechless with horror.

"That's the worst of trusting a boy to a good woman," he barked,
knocking off his glasses angrily; "but I'll do what I can to
thwart you! I'll make sure there isn't any young-eyed cherubin
business about David. He has got to go to boarding-school, and
learn something besides his prayers. If somebody doesn't rescue
him from apron-strings, he'll be a 'very, very good young man'--
and then may the Lord have mercy on his soul!"

"I didn't know anybody could be too good," Mrs. Richie ventured.

"A woman can't be too good, but a man oughtn't to be," her
landlord instructed her.

David's mother was too bewildered by such sentiments to protest--
although, indeed, Mr. Ferguson need not have been quite so
concerned about David's "goodness." This freckled, clear-eyed
youngster, with straight yellow hair and good red cheeks, was
just an honest, growly boy, who dropped his clothes about on the
floor of his room, and whined over his lessons, and blustered
largely when out of his mother's hearing; furthermore, he had
already experienced his first stogie--with a consequent pallor
about the gills that scared Mrs. Richie nearly to death. But
Robert Ferguson's jeering reference to apron-strings resulted in
his being sent to boarding school. Blair went with him, "rescued"
from the goodwoman regime of Cherry-pie's instruction by Mr.
Ferguson's advice to Mrs. Maitland; "although," Robert Ferguson
admitted, candidly, "he doesn't need it as poor David does; his
mother wouldn't know how to make a Miss Nancy of him, even if she
wanted to!" Then, with a sardonic guess at Mrs. Richie's unspoken
thought, he added that Mrs. Maitland would not dream of going to
live in the town where her son was at school. "She has sense
enough to know that Blair, or any other boy worth his salt, would
hate his mother if she tagged on behind," said Mr. Ferguson; "of
course you would never think of doing such a thing, either," he
ended, ironically.

"Of course not," said Mrs. Richie, faintly. So it was that,
assisted by her landlord, David's mother thrust her one chicken
out into the world unprotected by her hovering wing. About the
time Miss White lost her two masculine pupils, the girls began to
go to a day-school in Mercer, Cherry-pie's entire deposition as a
teacher being brought about because, poor lady! she fumbled badly
when it came to a critical moment with Elizabeth. It all grew out
of one of the child's innumerable squabbles with David--she got
along fairly peaceably with Blair. She and Nannie had been
comparing pigtails, and David had asserted that Elizabeth's hair
was "the nicest"; which so gratified her that she first hugged
him violently, and then invited him to take her out rowing.

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