Book: The Iron Woman

M >> Margaret Deland >> The Iron Woman




"But--" she began.

"Oh, Elizabeth, what do we care for what they call right and
wrong? 'Right' is being together!"

She frowned in a puzzled way. She had not been thinking of "right
and wrong"; her mind had been absorbed by the large and simple
necessity of death. But his inevitable reasonableness, ignoring
her organic impulse, was already splitting hairs to justify an
organic impulse of his own.

"God gave you to me," he said, "and by God I'll keep you! That's
what is right; if we parted now it would be wrong."

It seemed as if the gale of passion which had been slowly rising
in him in these hours they had been together blew away the mists
in which her mind had been groping, blew away the soothing fogs
of death which had been closing in about her, and left her,
shrinking, in sudden, confusing light.

"Wrong?" she said, dazed; "I hadn't thought about that. David, I
wouldn't have come to you except--except because it was the end.
Anything else is impossible, you know."

"Why?" he demanded.

"I am married," she said, bewildered.

He laughed under his breath. "Blair Maitland will take his own
medicine, now," he said;--"you are married to _me!_"

The triumph in his voice, while it vaguely alarmed her, struck
some answering chord in her mind, for while mechanically she
contradicted him, some deeper self was saying, "yes; yes."

But aloud she said, "It can't be, David; don't you see it can't
be?"

"But it _is_ already; I will never let you go. I've got you--
at last. Elizabeth, listen to me; while you've been talking,
I've thought it all out: as things are, I don't think you can
possibly get a divorce from Blair and marry me. He's 'kind' to
you, you say; and he's 'decent,' and he doesn't drink--and so
forth and so forth. I know the formula to keep a woman with a man
she hates and call it being respectable. No, you can't get a
divorce from him; but he can get a divorce from you ... if you
give him the excuse to do so."

Elizabeth looked at him with perfectly uncomprehending eyes. The
innocence of them did not touch him. For the second time in her
life she was at the mercy of Love. "Blair is fond of me," she
said; "he never would give me a divorce. He has told me so a
hundred times. Do you suppose I haven't begged him to let me go?
On my knees I begged him. No, David, there is no way out except--
"

"There is a way out if you love me enough to--come to me. Then,"
he said in a whisper, "he will divorce you and we can be married.
Oh, Elizabeth, death is not the way out; it is _life_, dear,
life! Will you live? Will you give me life?" He was breathing as
if he had been running; he held her fingers against his lips
until he bruised them.

She understood. After a minute of silence she said, faintly: "As
for me, nothing matters. Even if it is wicked--"

"It is not wicked!"

"Well, if it were, if you wanted me I would come. I don't seem to
care. Nothing seems to me wrong in the whole world. And nothing
right. Do you understand, David? I am--done. My life is
worthless, anyhow. Use it--and throw it away. But it would ruin
you. No, I won't do it."

"Ruin me? It would make me! I have shriveled, I have starved, I
have frozen without you. Ask my mother if what I tell you isn't
true." She caught her breath and drew away from him. "Your
mother!" she said, faintly. But he did not notice the recoil.

"It would end your career," she said. She was confused by the
mere tumult of his words.

"Career! The only career I want is _you_. Medicine isn't the
only thing in the world, nor Philadelphia the only place to
practise it. And if I can't be a doctor, I can break stones for
my wife. Elizabeth, to love you is the only career I want. But
you--can you? Am I asking more than you can give? Do you care
what people say? We may not be able to be married for a year.
Longer, perhaps; the law takes time. They will call it disgrace,
you know, the people who don't know what love means. Could you
bear that--for me? Do you love me enough for that, Elizabeth?"

His voice was hoarse with passion. He was on his knees beside
her, his face hot against hers, his arms around her. Not only his
bitterly thought-out theories of individualism, but all his years
of decent living, contributed to his overthrow at that moment. He
was a man; and here was his woman, who had been torn from him by
a thief: she had come back to him, she had toiled back through
the storm, she had fought back through cruel and imprisoning ties
that had held her for nearly three years; should he not keep her,
now that she had come? The cave-dweller in him cried out
"_Yes!_" To let her go now, would be to loosen his fingers
just as they gripped the neck of the thief who had robbed him! In
the madness of that moment of hate and love, his face on hers,
his arms around her, David did not know that his tears were wet
on her lips.

"Mine," he said, panting; "_mine_! my own has come back to
me. Say so; tell me so yourself. Say it! I want to hear you say
it."

"Why David, I have always been yours. But I am not worth taking.
I am not--"

[Illustration: "WILL YOU LIVE? WILL YOU GIVE ME LIFE?"]

"Hush! You are mine. They shall never part us again. Elizabeth--
to-morrow we will go away." She sank against him in silence; for
a while he was silent, too. Then, in a low voice, he told her how
they must carry out a plan which had sprung, full-winged, from
his mind; "when he knows you have been here to-night," David
said,--and trembled from head to foot; "he will divorce you."

She listened, assenting, but bewildered. "I was going to die,"
she said, faintly; "I don't know how to live. Oh, I think the
other way would be better."

But he did not stop to discuss it; he had put her back into the
reclining chair--once in a while the physician remembered her
fatigue, though for the most part the lover thought only of
himself; he saw how white she was, and put her in the big chair;
then, drawing up a footstool, he sat down, keeping her hand in
his; sometimes he kissed it, but all the time he talked violently
of right and wrong. Elizabeth was singularly indifferent to his
distinctions; perhaps the deep and primitive experience of
looking into the face of Death made her so. At any rate, her
question was not "Is it right?" it was only "Is it best?" Was it
best for him to do this thing? Would it not injure him? David,
brushing away her objections with an exultant belief in himself,
was far less elemental. Right? What made right and wrong? Law?
Elizabeth knew better! Unless she meant God's law. As far as that
went, she was breaking it if she went on living with Blair. As
for dying, she had no right to die! She was his. Would she rob
him again?

It was all the everlasting, perfectly sincere sophistry of the
man who has been swept past honor and prudence and even pity,
that poured from David's lips; and with it, love! love! love!
Elizabeth, listening to it, carried along by it, had, in the
extraordinary confusion of the moment, nothing to oppose to it
but her own unworth. To this he refused to listen, closing her
lips with his own, and then going on with his quite logical
reasoning. His mind was alert to meet and arrange every
difficulty and every detail; once, half laughing, he stopped to
say, "We'll have to live on your money, Elizabeth. See what I've
come to!" The old scruples seemed, beside this new reality,
merely ridiculous--although there was a certain satisfaction in
throwing overboard that hideous egotism of his, which had made
all the trouble that had come to them. "You see," he explained,
"we shall go away for a while, until you get your divorce. And it
will take time to pick up a practice, especially, in a new place.
So you will probably have to support me," he ended, smiling. But
she was too much at peace in the haven of his clasping arms even
to smile. Once, when he confessed his shame at having doubted
her--"for I did," he said; "I actually thought you cared for
him!" she roused herself: "It was my fault. I won't let you blame
yourself; it was all my fault!" she said; then sank again into
dreaming quiet.

It was midnight; the fire had died down; a stick of drift-wood on
the iron dogs, gnawed through by shimmering blue and copper
flames, broke apart, and a shower of sparks flew up, caught in
the soot, and smoldered in spreading rosettes on the chimney-
back. The night, pressing black against the windows, was full of
the murmurous silence of the rain and the soft advancing crash of
the incoming tide; the man and woman were silent, too. Sometimes
he would kiss the little scar on her wrist; sometimes press his
lips into the soft cup of her palm; there seemed no need of
words. It was in one of these silences that David suddenly raised
his head and frowned.

"Listen!" he said; then a moment later: "wheels! _here?_ at
this time of night!"

Elizabeth crouched back in her chair. "It is Blair. He has
followed me--"

"No, no; it is somebody who has lost his way in the rain. Yes, I
hear him; he is coming in to ask the road."

There were hurried steps on the porch, and Elizabeth grew so
deadly white that David said again, reassuringly: "It's some
passer-by. I'll send him about his business."

Loud, vehement knocking interrupted him, and he said, cheerfully:
"Confound them, making such a noise! Don't be frightened; it is
only some farmer--"

He took up a lamp and, closing the door of the living-room behind
him, went out into the hall; some one, whoever it was, was
fumbling with the knob of the front door as if in terrible haste.
David slipped the bolt and would have opened the door, but it
seemed to burst in, and against it, clinging to the knob, panting
and terrified, stood his mother.

"David! Is she--Am I too late? David! Where is Elizabeth? _Am I
too late?_"




CHAPTER XXXIII

The rainy dawn which Elizabeth had seen glimmering in the steam
and smoke of the railroad station filtered wanly through Mercer's
yellow fog. In Mrs. Maitland's office-dining-room the gas,
burning in an orange halo, threw a livid light on the haggard
faces of four people who had not slept that night.

When Blair had come frantically back from his fruitless quest at
the hotel to say, "Is she here, _now?_" Mrs. Richie had sent
him at once to Mr. Ferguson, who, roused from his bed, instantly
took command.

"Tell me just what has happened, please?" he said.

Blair, almost in collapse, told the story of the afternoon. He
held nothing back. In the terror that consumed him, he spared
himself nothing; he had made Elizabeth angry; frightfully angry.
But she didn't show it; she had even said she was not angry. But
she said--and he repeated that sword-like sentence about "David's
money and David's wife." Then, almost in a whisper, he added her
question about--drowning. "She has--" he said; he did not finish
the sentence.

Robert Ferguson made no comment, but his face quivered. "Have you
a carriage?" he asked, shrugging into his overcoat. Blair nodded,
and they set out.

It was after five when they came back to Mrs. Maitland's dining-
room, where the gaslight struggled ineffectually with the fog.
They had done everything which, at that hour, could be done.

"Oh, when will it ever get light!" Blair said, despairingly. He
pushed aside the food Nannie had placed on the table for them,
and dropped his face on his arms. He had a sudden passionate
longing for his mother; she would have _done_ something! She
would have told these people, these dazed, terrified people! what
to do. She always knew what to do. For the first time in his life
he needed his mother.

Robert Ferguson, standing at the window, was staring out at the
blind, yellow mist. "As soon as it's light enough, we'll get a
boat and go down the river," he said, with heavy significance.

"But it is absurd to jump at such a conclusion," Mrs. Richie
protested.

"You don't know her," Elizabeth's uncle said, briefly.

Blair echoed the words. "No; you don't know her."

"All the same, I don't believe it!" Mrs. Richie said,
emphatically. "For one thing, Blair says that her comb and brush
are not on her bureau. A girl doesn't take her toilet things with
her when she goes out to--"

"Elizabeth might," Mr. Ferguson said.

Blair, looking up, broke out: "Oh, that money! It's that that has
made all the trouble. Why did I say I wouldn't give it up? I'd
throw it into the fire, if it would bring her back to me!"

Mrs. Richie was silent. Her face was tense with anxiety, but it
was not the same anxiety that plowed the other faces. "Did you go
to the depot?" she said. "Perhaps she took the night train. The
ticket-agent might have seen her."

"But why should she take a night train?" Blair said; "where would
she go?"

"Why should she do a great many things she has done?" Mrs. Richie
parried; and added, softly, "I want to speak to you, Blair; come
into the parlor for a minute." When they were alone, she said,--
her eyes avoiding his; "I have an idea that she has gone to
Philadelphia. To see me."

"You? But you are here!"

"Yes; but perhaps she thought I went home yesterday; you thought
so."

Blair grasped at a straw of hope. "I will telegraph--" "No; that
would be of no use. The servants couldn't answer it; and--and
there is no one else there. I will take the morning express, and
telegraph you as soon as I get home."

"But I can't wait all day!" he said; "I will wire--" he paused;
it struck him like a blow that there was only one person to whom
to wire. The blood rushed to his face. "You think that she has
gone to him?"

"I think she has gone to me," she told him, coldly. "What more
natural? I am an old friend, and she was angry with you."

"Yes; she was, but--"

"As for my son," said Mrs. Richie, "he is not at home; but I
assure you,"--she stumbled a little over this; "I assure you that
if he were he would have no desire to see your wife."

Blair was silent. Then he said, in a smothered voice: "If she is
at your house, tell her I won't keep the money. I'll make Nannie
build a hospital with it; or I'll ... tell her, if she will only
just come back to me, I'll--" He could not go on.

"Blair," Robert Ferguson said, from the doorway, "it is light
enough now to get a boat."

Blair nodded. "If she has gone to you, if she is alive," he said,
"tell her I'll give him the money."

Helena Richie lifted her head with involuntary hauteur. "My son
has no interest in your money!"

"Oh," he said, brokenly, "you can't seem to think of anything but
his quarrel with me. Somehow, all that seems so unimportant now!
Why, I'd ask David to help me, if I could reach him." He did not
see her relenting, outstretched hand; for the first time in a
life starved for want of the actualities of pain, Blair was
suffering; he forgot embarrassment, he even forgot hatred; he
touched fundamentals: the need of help and the instinctive
reliance upon friendship. "David would help me!" he said,
passionately; "or my mother would know what to do; but you
people--" He dashed after Mr. Ferguson, and a moment later Mrs.
Richie heard the carriage rattling down the street; the two men
were going to the river to begin their heart-sickening search.

It was then that she started upon a search of her own. She made a
somewhat lame excuse to Nannie--Nannie was the last person to be
intrusted with Helena Richie's fears! Then she took the morning
express across the mountains. She sat all day in fierce
alternations of hope and angry concern: Surely Elizabeth was
alive; but suppose she was alive--with David! David's mother,
remembering what he had said to her that Sunday afternoon on the
beach, knew, in the bottom of her heart, that she would rather
have Elizabeth dead than alive under such conditions. Her old
misgivings began to press upon her: the conditions might have
held no danger for him if he had had a different mother! She
found herself remembering, with anguish, a question that had been
asked her very long ago, when David was a little boy: Can
_you_ make him brave; can _you_ make him honorable; can
_you_--"I've tried, oh, I have tried," she said; "but
perhaps Dr. Lavendar ought not to have given him to me!" It was
an unendurable idea; she drove it out of her mind, and sat
looking at the mist-enfolded mountains, struggling to decide
between a hope that implied a fear and a fear that destroyed a
hope;--but every now and then, under both the hope and the fear,
came a pang of memory that sent the color into her face: Robert
Ferguson's library; his words; his kiss....

As the afternoon darkened into dusk, through sheer fatigue she
relaxed into certainty that both the hope and the fear were
baseless: Elizabeth had not gone to David; she couldn't have done
such an insane thing! David's mother began to be sorry she had
suggested to Blair that his wife might be in Philadelphia. She
began to wish she had stayed in Mercer, and not left them all to
their cruel anxiety. "If she has done what they think, I'll go
back to-morrow. Robert will need me, and David would want me to
go back." It occurred to her, with a lift of joy, that she might
possibly find David at home. Owing to the bad weather, he might
not have gone down to the beach to close the cottage as he had
written her he meant to do. She wondered how he would take this
news about Elizabeth. For a moment she almost hoped he would not
be at home, so that she need not tell him. "Oh," she said to
herself, "when will he get over her cruelty to him?" As she
gathered up her wraps to leave the car, she wondered whether
human creatures ever did quite "get over" the catastrophes of
life. "Have I? And I am fifty,--and it was twenty years ago!"

When with a lurch the cab drew up against the curb, her glance at
the unlighted windows of her parlor made her sigh with relief;
there was nobody there! Yes; she had certainly been foolish to
rush off across the mountains, and leave those poor, distressed
people in Mercer.

"The doctor is at Little Beach, I suppose?" she said to the woman
who answered her ring; "By-the-way, Mary, no one has been here
to-day? No lady to see me?"

"There was a lady to see the doctor; she was just possessed to
see him. I told her he was down at the beach, and she was that
upset," Mary said, smiling, "you'd 'a' thought there wasn't
another doctor in Philadelphia!" Patients were still enough of a
rarity to interest the whole friendly household.

"Who was she? What was she like? Did she give her name?" Mrs.
Richie was breathless; the servant was startled at the change in
her; fear, like a tangible thing, leaped upon her and shook her.

"Who was she?" Mrs. Richie said, fiercely.

The surprised woman, giving the details of that early call, was,
of course, ignorant of the lady's name; but after the first word
or two David's mother knew it. "Bring me a time-table. Never mind
my supper! I must see the lady. I think I know who she was. She
wanted to see me, and I must find her. I know where she has gone.
Hurry! Where is the new time-table?"

"She didn't ask for you, 'm," the bewildered maid assured her.

Mrs. Richie was not listening; she was turning the leaves of the
_Pathfinder_ with trembling fingers; the trains had been
changed on the little branch road, but somehow she must get
there,--_"to-night!"_ she said to herself. To find a train
to Normans was an immense relief, though it involved a fourteen-
mile drive to Little Beach. She could not reach them ("them!" she
was sure of it now), she could not reach them until nearly
twelve, but she would be able to say that Elizabeth had spent the
night with her.

The hour before the train started for Normans seemed endless to
Helena Richie. She sent a despatch to Blair to say:

_"I have found her. Do not come for her yet. This is
imperative. Will telegraph you to-morrow."_

After that she walked about, up and down, sometimes stopping to
look out of the window into the rainswept street, sometimes
pausing to pick up a book but though she turned over the pages,
she did not know what she read. She debated constantly whether
she had done well to telegraph Blair. Suppose, in spite of her
command, he should rush right on to Philadelphia, "then what!"
she said to herself, frantically. If he found that Elizabeth had
followed David down to the cottage, what would he do? There would
be a scandal! And it was not David's fault--she had followed him;
how like her to follow him, careless of everything but her own
whim of the moment! She would have recalled the despatch if she
could have done so. "If Robert were only here to tell me what to
do!" she thought, realizing, even in her cruel alarm, how greatly
she depended on him. Suddenly she must have realized something
else, for a startled look came into her eyes. "No! of course I'm
not," she said; but the color rose in her face. The revelation
was only for an instant; the next moment she was tense with
anxiety and counting the minutes before she could start for the
station.

It was a great relief when she found herself at last on the
little local train, rattling out into the rainy night. When she
reached Normans it was not easy to get a carriage to go to Little
Beach. No depot hack-driver would consider such a drive on such a
night. She found her way through the rainy streets to a livery-
stable, and standing in the doorway of a little office that
smelled of harnesses and horses, she bargained with a reluctant
man, who, though polite enough to take his feet from his desk and
stand up before a lady, told her point-blank that there wasn't no
money, no, nor no woman, that he'd drive twenty-eight miles for--
down to the beach and back; on no such night as this; "but maybe
one of my men might, if you'd make it worth his while," he said,
doubtfully.

"I will make it worth his while," Mrs. Richie said.

"There's a sort of inlet between us and the beach, kind of a
river, like; you'll have to ferry over," the man warned her.

"Please get the carriage at once," she said.

So the long drive began. It was very dark. At times the rain
sheeted down so that little streams of water dripped upon her
from the top of the carryall, and the side curtains flapped so
furiously that she could scarcely hear the driver grumbling that
if he'd 'a' knowed what kind of a night it was he wouldn't have
undertook the job.

"I'll pay you double your price," she said in a lull of the
storm; and after that there was only the sheeting rain and the
tugging splash of mud-loaded fetlocks. At the ferry there was a
long delay. "The ferry-man's asleep, I guess," the driver told
her; certainly there was no light in the little weather-beaten
house on the riverbank. The man clambered out from under the
streaming rubber apron of the carryall, and handing the wet reins
back to her to hold--"that horse takes a notion to run
sometimes," he said, casually; made his way to the ferry-house.
"Come out!" he said, pounding on the door; "tend to your
business! there's a lady wants to cross!"

The ferry-man had his opinion of ladies who wanted to do such
things in such weather; but he came, after what seemed to the
shivering passenger an interminable time, and the carryall was
driven onto the flat-bottomed boat. A minute later the creak of
the cable and the slow rock of the carriage told her they had
started. It was too dark to see anything, but she could hear the
sibilant slap of the water against the side of the scow and the
brush of rain on the river. Once the dripping horse shook
himself, and the harness rattled and the old hack quivered on its
sagging springs. She realized that she was cold; she could hear
the driver and the ferryman talking; there was the blue spurt of
a match, and a whiff of very bad tobacco from a pipe. Then a dash
of rain blew in her face, and the smell of the pipe was washed
out of the air.

It was after twelve when, stumbling up the path to her own house,
she leaned against the door awaiting David's answer to her knock;
when he opened it to the gust of wet wind and her drawn, white
face, he was stunned with astonishment. He never knew what answer
he made to those first broken, frantic words; as for her, she did
not wait to hear his answer. She ran past him and burst into the
fire-lit silence that was still tingling with emotion. She saw
Elizabeth rising, panic-stricken, from her chair. Clutching her
shoulder, she looked hard into the younger woman's face; then,
with a great sigh, she sank down into a chair.

"Thank God!" she said, faintly.

David, following her, stammered out, "How did you get here?" The
full, hot torrent of passion of only a moment before had come to
a crashing standstill. He could hardly breathe with the
suddenness of it. His thoughts galloped. He heard his own voice
as if it had been somebody else's, and he was conscious of his
foolishness in asking his question; what difference did it make
how she got here! Besides, he knew how: she had come over the
mountains that day, taken the evening train for Normans, and
driven down here, fourteen miles--in this storm! "You must be
worn out," he said, involuntarily.

"I am in time; nothing else matters. David, go and pay the man.
Here is my purse."

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