Book: The Iron Woman

M >> Margaret Deland >> The Iron Woman




"She threw me over. Good riddance, of course."

"If she was capable of treating you badly, of course it was well
to have her do so--in time," she agreed; "but I suppose those
things cut deep with a boy," she added gently. She had a maternal
instinct to put out a comforting hand, and say "never mind." Poor
man! because, when he was twenty a girl had jilted him, he was
still, at over forty, defending a sensitive heart by an armor of
surliness. "Won't you come in?" she said, when they reached her
door; she smiled at him, with her pleasant leaf-brown eyes,--eyes
which were less sad, he thought, than when she first came to
Mercer. ("Getting over her husband's death, I suppose," he said
to himself. "Well, she has looked mournful longer than most
widows!")

He followed her into the house silently, and, sitting down on her
little sofa, took a cigar out of his pocket. He began to bite off
the end absently, then remembered to say, "May I smoke?"

The room was cool and full of the fragrance of white lilies. Mr.
Ferguson had planted a whole row of lilies against the southern
wall of Mrs. Richie's garden. "Such things are attractive to
tenants; I find it improves my property," he had explained to
her, when she found him grubbing, unasked, in her back yard. He
looked now, approvingly at the jug of lilies that had replaced
the grate in the fireplace; but Mrs. Richie looked at the clock.
She was tired, and sometimes her good neighbor stayed very late.

"Poor Blair!" she said. "I'm afraid his dinner was rather a
disappointment. What charming manners he has," she added,
meditatively; "I think it is very remarkable, considering--"

Mr. Ferguson knocked off his glasses. "Mrs. Maitland's manners
may not be as--as fine-ladyish as some people's, I grant you," he
said, "but I can tell you, she has more brains in her little
finger than--"

"Than I have in my whole body?" Mrs. Richie interrupted gaily; "I
know just what you were going to say."

"No, I wasn't," he defended himself; but he laughed and stopped
barking.

"It is what you thought," she said; "but let me tell you, I
admire Mrs. Maitland just as much as you do."

"No, you don't, because you can't," he said crossly; but he
smiled. He could not help forgiving Mrs. Richie, even when she
did not seem to appreciate Mrs. Maitland--the one subject on
which the two neighbors fell out. But after the smile he sighed,
and apparently forgot Mrs. Maitland. He scratched a match, held
it absently until it scorched his fingers; blew it out, and
tossed it into the lilies; Mrs. Richie winced, but Mr. Ferguson
did not notice her; he leaned forward, his hands between his
knees, the unlighted cigar in his fingers: "Yes; she threw me
over."

For a wild moment Mrs. Richie thought he meant Mrs. Maitland;
then she remembered. "It was very hard for you," she said
vaguely.

"And Elizabeth's mother," he went on, "my brother Arthur's wife,
left him. He never got over the despair of it. He--killed
himself."

Mrs. Richie's vagueness was all gone. "Mr. Ferguson!"

"She was bad--all through."

"Oh, _no_!" Helena Richie said faintly.

"She left him, for another man. Just as the girl I believed in
left me. I would have doubted my God, Mrs. Richie, before I could
have doubted that girl. And when she jilted me, I suppose I did
doubt Him for a while. At any rate, I doubted everybody else. I
do still, more or less."

Mrs. Richie was silent.

"We two brothers--the same thing happened to both of us! It was
worse for him than for me; I escaped, as you might say, and I
learned a valuable lesson; I have never built on anybody. Life
doesn't play the same trick on me twice. But Arthur was
different. He was of softer stuff. You'd have liked my brother
Arthur. Yes; he was too good to her--that was the trouble. If he
had beaten her once or twice, I don't believe she would have
behaved as she did. Imagine leaving a good husband, a devoted
husband--"

"What I can't imagine," Helena Richie said, in a low voice, "is
leaving a living child. _That_ seems to me impossible."

"The man married her after Arthur--died," he went on; "I guess
she paid the piper in her life with him! I hope she did. Oh,
well; she's dead now; I mustn't talk about her. But Elizabeth has
her blood in her; and she is pretty, just as she was. She looks
like her, sometimes. There--now you know. Now you understand why
I worry so about her. I used to wish she would die before she
grew up. I tried to do my duty to her, but I hoped she would die.
Yet she seems to be a good little thing. Yes, I'm pretty sure she
is a good little thing. To-night, before we went to the dinner,
she--she behaved very prettily. But if I saw her mother in her, I
would--God knows what I would do! But except for this fussing
about clothes, she seems all right. You know she wanted a locket
once? But you think that is only natural to a girl? Not a vanity
that I need to be anxious about? Her mother was vain--a shallow,
selfish theatrical creature!" He looked at her with worried eyes.
"I am dreadfully anxious, sometimes," he said simply.

"There's nothing to be anxious about," she said, in a smothered
voice, "nothing at all."

"Of course I'm fond of her," he confessed, "but I am never sure
of her."

"You ought to be sure of her," Mrs. Richie said; "her little
vanities--why, it is just natural for a girl to want pretty
dresses! But to think--Poor little Elizabeth!" She hid her face
in her hands; "and poor bad mother," she said, in a whisper.

"Don't pity _her_! She was not the one to pity. It was
Arthur who--" He left the sentence unfinished; his face quivered.

"Oh," she cried, "you are all wrong. She is the one to pity, I
don't care how selfish and shallow she was! As for your brother,
he just died. What was dying, compared to living? Oh, you don't
understand. Poor bad women! You might at least be sorry for them.
How can you be so hard?"

"I suppose I am hard," he said, half wonderingly, but very
meekly; "when a good woman can pity Dora--that was her name; who
am I to judge her? I'll try not to be so hard," he promised.

He had risen. Mrs. Richie tried to speak, but stopped and caught
her breath at the bang of the front door.

"It's David!" she said, in a terrified voice. Her face was very
pale, so pale that David, coming abruptly into the room, stood
still in his tracks, aghast.

"Why, Materna! What's up? Mother, something is the matter!"

"It's my fault, David," Robert Ferguson said, abashed. "I was
telling your mother a--a sad story. Mrs. Richie, I didn't realize
it would pain you. Your mother is a very kind woman, David; she's
been sympathizing with other people's troubles."

David, looking at him resentfully, came and stood beside her,
with an aggressively protecting manner. "I don't see why she need
bother about other people's troubles. Say, Materna, I--I wouldn't
feel badly. Mr. Ferguson, I--you--" he blustered; he was very
much perturbed.

The fact was David was not in an amiable humor; Elizabeth had
been very queer all the way home. "High and mighty!" David said
to himself; treating him as if he were a little boy, and she a
young lady! "And I'm seventeen--the idea of her putting on such
airs!" And now here was her uncle making his mother low-spirited.
"Materna, I wouldn't bother," he comforted her.

Mrs. Richie put a soothing hand on his arm. "Never mind," she
said; she was still pale, "Yes, it was a sad story. But I thank
you for telling me, Mr. Ferguson."

He tried awkwardly to apologize for having distressed her, and
then took himself off. When he opened his own door, even before
he closed it again, he called out, "Miss White!"

"Yes, sir?" said the little governess, peering rabbit-like from
the parlor.

"Miss White, I've been thinking; I'm going to buy Elizabeth a
piece of jewelry; a locket, I think. You can tell her so. Mrs.
Richie says she's quite sure she isn't really vain in wanting
such things."

"I have been at my post, sir, since Elizabeth was three years
old," Miss White said with spirit, "and I have frequently told
you that she was not vain. I'll go and tell her what you say,
immejetly!"

But when Cherry-pie went to carry the great news she found
Elizabeth's door locked.

"What? Uncle is going to give me a locket?" Elizabeth called out
in answer to her knock. "Oh, joy! Splendid!"

"Let me in, and I'll tell you what he said," Miss White called
back.

"No! I can't!" cried the joyous young voice. "I'm busy!"

She was busy; she was holding a lamp above her head, and looking
at herself in the mirror over the mantelpiece. Her hair was down,
tumbling in a shining mass over her shoulders, her eyes were like
stars, her cheeks rose-red. She was turning her white neck from
side to side, throwing her head backward, looking at herself
through half-shut eyes; her mouth was scarlet. "Blair is in love
with me!" she said to herself. She felt his last kiss still on
her mouth; she felt it until it seemed as if her lip bled.

"David Richie needn't talk about 'little girls' any more. _I'm
engaged!_" She put the lamp down on the mantelpiece, shook her
mane of hair back over her bare shoulders, and then, her hands on
her hips, her short petticoat ruffling about her knees, she began
to dance. "Somebody is in love with me!

"'Oh, isn't it joyful, joyful, joyful--'"

[Illustration: "BLAIR IS IN LOVE WITH ME!"]




CHAPTER VI

When the company had gone,--"I thought they never _would_
go!" Nannie said--she rushed at her brother. "Blair!"

The boy flung up his head proudly. "She told you, did she?"

"You're engaged!" cried Nannie, ecstatically.

Blair started. "Why!" he said. "So I am! I never thought of it."
And when he got his breath, the radiant darkness of his eyes
sparkled into laughter. "Yes, _I'm engaged!_" He put his
hands into his pockets and strutted the length of the room; a
minute later he stopped beside the piano and struck a triumphant
chord; then he sat down and began to play uproariously, singing
to a crashing accompaniment:

"'... lived a miner, a forty-niner,
With his daughter Clementine!
Oh my darling, oh my _darling_--'"

--the riotous, beautiful voice rang on, the sound overflowing
through the long rooms, across the hall, even into the dining-
room. Harris, wiping dishes in the pantry, stopped, tea-towel in
hand, and listened; Sarah Maitland, at her desk, lifted her head,
and the pen slipped from her fingers. Blair, spinning around on
the piano-stool, caught his sister about her waist in a hug that
made her squeak. Then they both shrieked with laughter.

"But Blair!" Nannie said, getting her breath; "shall you tell
Mamma to-night?"

Blair's face dropped. "I guess I won't tell anybody yet," he
faltered; "oh, that awful dinner!"

As the mortification of an hour ago surged back upon him, he
added to the fear of telling his mother a resentment that would
retaliate by secrecy. "I won't tell her at all," he decided; "and
don't you, either."

"I!" said Nannie. "Well, I should think not. Gracious!"

But though Blair did not tell his mother, he could not keep the
great news to himself; he saw David the next afternoon, and
overflowed.

David took it with a gasp of silence, as if he had been suddenly
hit below the belt; then in a low voice he said, "You--
_kissed_ her. Did she kiss you?"

Blair nodded. He held his head high, balancing it a little from
side to side; his lips were thrust out, his eyes shone. He was
standing with his feet well apart, his hands deep in his pockets;
he laughed, reddening to his forehead, but he was not
embarrassed. For once David's old look of silent, friendly
admiration did not answer him; instead there was half-bewildered
dismay. David wanted to protest that it wasn't--well, it wasn't
_fair_. He did not say it; and in not saying it he ceased to
be a boy.

"I suppose it was when you and she went off after dinner? You
needn't have been so darned quiet about it! What's the good of
being so--mum about everything? Why didn't you come back and
tell? You're not ashamed of it, are you?"

"A man doesn't tell a thing like that," Blair said scornfully.

"Well!" David snorted, "I suppose some time you'll be married?"

Blair nodded again. "Right off."

"Huh!" said David; "your mother won't let you. You are only
sixteen. Don't be an ass."

"I'll be seventeen next May."

"Seventeen! What's seventeen? I'm pretty near eighteen, and I
haven't thought of being married;--at least to anybody in
particular."

"You couldn't," Blair said coldly; "you haven't got the cash."

David chewed this bitter fact in silence; then he said, "I
thought you and Elizabeth were kind of off at dinner. You didn't
talk to each other at all. I thought you were both huffy; and
instead of that--" David paused.

"That damned dinner!" Blair said, dropping his love-affair for
his grievance. Blair's toga virilis, assumed in that hot moment
in the hall, was profanity of sorts. "David, I'm going to clear
out. I can't stand this sort of thing. I'll go and live at a
hotel till I go to college; I'll--"

"Thought you were going to get married?" David interrupted him
viciously.

Blair looked at him, and suddenly understood,--David was jealous!
"Gorry!" he said blankly. He was honestly dismayed. "Look here,"
he began, "I didn't know that _you_--"

"I don't know what you're talking about," David broke in
contemptuously; "if you think _I_ care, one way or the
other, you're mistaken. It's nothing to me. 'By"; and he turned
on his heel.

It was a hot July afternoon; the sun-baked street along which
they had been walking was deep with black dust and full of the
clamor of traffic. Four big gray Flemish horses, straining
against their breastplates, were hauling a dray loaded with
clattering iron rods; the sound, familiar enough to any Mercer
boy, seemed to David at that moment intolerable. "I'll get out of
this cursed noise," he said to himself, and turned down a narrow
street toward the river. It occurred to him that he would go over
the covered bridge, and maybe stop and get a tumbler of ice-cream
at Mrs. Todd's. Then he would strike out into the country and
take a walk; he had nothing else to do. This vacation business
wasn't all it was cracked up to be; a man had better fun at
school; he was sick of Mercer, anyhow.

He had reached Mrs. Todd's saloon by that time, and through the
white palings of the fence he had glimpses of happy couples
sitting at marble-topped tables among the marigolds and
coreopsis, taking slow, delicious spoonfuls of ice-cream, and
gazing at each other with languishing eyes. David felt a qualm of
disgust; for the first time in his life he had no desire for ice-
cream. A boy like Blair might find it pleasant to eat ice-cream
with a lot of fellows and girls out in the garden of a toll-
house, with people looking in through the palings; but he had
outgrown such things. The idea of Blair, at his age, talking
about being in love! Blair didn't know what _love_ meant.
And as for Elizabeth, how could she fall in love with Blair? He
was two months younger than she, to begin with. "No woman ought
to marry a man younger than she is," David said; he himself, he
reflected, was much older than Elizabeth. That was how it ought
to be. The girl should always be younger than the fellow. And
anyway, Blair wasn't the kind of man for a girl like Elizabeth to
marry. "He wouldn't understand her. Elizabeth goes off at half-
cock sometimes, and Blair wouldn't know how to handle her. I
understand her, perfectly. Besides that, he's too selfish. A
woman ought not to marry a selfish man," said David. However, it
made no difference to him whom she married. If Elizabeth liked
that sort of thing, if she found Blair--who was only a baby
anyhow--the kind of man she could love, why then he was
disappointed in Elizabeth. That was all. He was not jealous, or
anything like that; he was just disappointed; he was sorry that
Elizabeth was that kind of girl. "Very, very sorry," David said
to himself; and his eyes stung.... (Ah, well; one may smile; but
the pangs are real enough to the calf! The trouble with us is we
have forgotten our own pangs, so we doubt his.) ... Yes, David
was sorry; but the whole darned business was nothing to him,
because, unlike Blair, he was not a boy, and he could not waste
time over women; he had his future to think of. In fact, he felt
that to make the most of himself he must never marry.

Then suddenly these bitter forecastings ceased. He had come upon
some boys who were throwing stones at the dust-grimed windows of
an unused foundry shed. Along the roof of the big, gaunt
building, dilapidated and deserted, was a vast line of lights
that had long been a target for every boy who could pick up a
pebble. Glass lay in splinters on the slope of sheet-iron below
the sashes, and one could look in through yawning holes at
silent, shadowy spaces that had once roared with light from
swinging ladles and flowing cupolas; but there were a few whole
panes left yet. At the sound of crashing glass, David, being a
human boy, stopped and looked on, at first with his hands in his
pockets; then he picked up a stone himself. A minute later he was
yelling and smashing with the rest of them; but when he had
broken a couple of lights, curiously enough, desire failed; he
felt a sudden distaste for breaking windows,--and for everything
else! It was a sort of spiritual nausea, and life was black and
bitter on his tongue. He was conscious of an actual sinking below
his breast-bone. "I'm probably coming down with brain fever," he
told himself; and he had a happy moment of thinking how wretched
everybody would be when he died. Elizabeth would be _very_
wretched! David felt a wave of comfort, and on the impulse of
expected death, he turned toward home again.... However, if he
should by any chance recover, marriage was not for him. It
occurred to him that this would be a bitter surprise to
Elizabeth, whose engagement would of course be broken as soon as
she heard of his illness; and again he felt happier. No, he would
never marry. He would give his life to his profession--it had
long ago been decided that David was to be a doctor. But it would
be a lonely life. He looked ahead and saw himself a great
physician--no common doctor, like that old Doctor King who came
sometimes to see his mother; but a great man, dying nobly in some
awful epidemic. When Elizabeth heard of his magnificent courage,
she'd feel pretty badly. Rather different from Blair. How much
finer than to be merely looking forward to a lot of money that
somebody else had made! But perhaps that was why Elizabeth liked
Blair; because he was going to have money? And yet, how could she
compare Blair with,--well, _any_ fellow who meant to work
his own way? Here David touched bottom abruptly. "How can a
fellow take money he hasn't earned?" he said to himself. David's
feeling about independence was unusual in a boy of his years, and
it was not altogether admirable; it was, in fact, one of those
qualities that is a virtue, unless it becomes a vice.

When he was half-way across the bridge, he stopped to look down
at the slow, turbid river rolling below him. He stood there a
long time, leaning on the hand-rail. On the dun surface a sheen
of oil gathered, and spread, and gathered again. He could hear
the wash of the current, and in the railing under his hand he
felt the old wooden structure thrill and quiver in the constant
surge of water against the pier below him. The sun, a blood-red
disk, was slipping into the deepening haze, and on either side of
the river the city was darkening into dusk. All along the shore
lights were pricking out of the twilight and sending wavering
shafts down into the water. The coiling smoke from furnace
chimneys lay level and almost motionless in the still air;
sometimes it was shot with sparks, or showed, on its bellying
black curves, red gleams from hidden fires below.

David, staring at the river with absent, angry eyes, stopped his
miserable thoughts to watch a steamboat coming down the current.
Its smoke-stacks were folded back for passing under the bridge,
and its great paddlewheel scarcely moved except to get
steerageway. It was pushing a dozen rafts, all lashed together
into a spreading sheet. The smell of the fresh planks pierced the
acrid odor of soot that was settling down with the night mists.
On one of the rafts was a shanty of newly sawed pine boards; it
had no windows, but it was evidently a home, for a stove-pipe
came through its roof, and there was a woman sitting in its
little doorway, nursing her baby. David, looking down, saw the
downy head, and a little crumpled fist lying on the white, bare
breast. The woman, looking up as they floated below him, caught
his eye, and drew her blue cotton dress across her bosom. David
suddenly put his hand over his lips to hide their quiver. The
abrupt tears were on his cheeks. "Oh--_Elizabeth_!" he said.
The revolt, the anger, the jealousy, were all gone. He sobbed
under his breath. He had forgotten that he had said it made no
difference to him,--"not the slightest difference." It did make a
difference! All the difference in the world.... "Oh,
Elizabeth!"... The barges had slid farther and farther under the
bridge; the woman and the child were out of sight; the steamboat
with its folded smoke-stacks slid after them, leaving a wake of
rocking, yellow foam; the water splashed loudly against the
piers. It was nearly dark there on the footpath, and quite
deserted. David put his head down on his arms on the railing and
stood motionless for a long moment.

When he reached home, he found his mother in the twilight, in the
little garden behind the house. David, standing behind her, said
carelessly, "I have some news for you, Materna."

"Yes?" she said, absorbed in pinching back her lemon verbena.

"Blair is--is spoony over Elizabeth. Here, I'll snip that thing
for you."

Mrs. Richie faced him in amazement. "What! Why, but they are both
children, and--" she stopped, and looked at him. "Oh--
_David!_" she said.

And the boy, forgetting the spying windows of the opposite
houses, dropped his head on her shoulder. "Materna--Materna," he
said, in a stifled voice.




CHAPTER VII

Nobody except David took the childish love-affair very seriously,
not even the principals--especially not Elizabeth. . . .

David did not see her for a day or two, except out of the corner
of his eye when, during the new and still secret rite of shaving--
for David was willing to shed his blood to prove that he was a
man--he looked out of his bedroom window and saw her down in the
garden helping her uncle feed his pigeons. He did not want to see
her. He was younger than his years, this honest-eyed,
inexpressive fellow of seventeen, but for all his youth he was
hard hit. He grew abruptly older that first week; he didn't sleep
well; he even looked a little pale under his freckles, and his
mother worried over his appetite. When she asked him what was the
matter, he said, listlessly, "Nothing." They were very intimate
friends these two, but that moment on the bridge marked the
beginning of the period--known to all mothers of sons--of the
boy's temporary retreat into himself. . . . When a day or two
later David saw Elizabeth, or rather when she, picking a bunch of
heliotrope in her garden, saw him through the open door in the
wall, and called to him to come "right over! as fast as your legs
can carry you!"--he was, she thought, "very queer." He came in
answer to the summons, but he had nothing to say. She, however,
was bubbling over with talk. She took his hand, and, running with
him into the arbor, pulled him down on the seat beside her.

"David! Where on earth have you been all this time? David,
_have you heard?_"

"I suppose you mean--about you and Blair?" he said. He did not
look at her, but he watched a pencil of sunshine, piercing the
leaves overhead, faintly gilding the bunches of green grapes that
had a film of soot on their greenness, and then creeping down to
rest on the heliotrope in her lap.

"Yes!" said Elizabeth. "Isn't it the most exciting thing you ever
heard? David, I want to show you something." She peered out
through the leaves to make sure that they were unobserved. "It's
a terrific secret!" she said, her eyes dancing. Her fingers were
at her throat, fumbling with the fastening of her dress, which
caught, and had to be pulled open with a jerk; then she drew
half-way from her young bosom a ring hanging on a black silk
thread. She bent forward a little, so that he might see it. "I
keep it down in there so Cherry-pie won't know," she whispered.
"_Look!_"

David looked--and looked away.

Elizabeth, with a blissful sigh, dropped the ring back again into
the warm whiteness of that secret place. "Isn't it perfectly
lovely? It's my engagement ring! I'm so excited!"

David was silent.

"Why, David Richie! You don't care a bit!"

"Why, yes, I do," he said. He took a grape from a bunch beside
him, rubbed the soot off on his trousers, and ate it; then
blinked wryly. "Gorry, that's sour."

"You--don't--like--my engagement!" Elizabeth declared slowly.
Reproachful tears stood in her eyes; she fastened her dress with
indignant fingers. "I think you are perfectly horrid not to be
sympathetic. It's very important to a girl to get engaged and
have a ring."

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