The Iron Woman Part 36

"Then he must die! Ferguson, don't you see--_he has begun to die already?_" Again her face quivered. "Look at this business of taking David's wife--oh, I know, they weren't married yet, but the principle is the same; what do you call that but dying? Look at his whole life: what has he done? Received--received! Given nothing. Ferguson, you can't fool G.o.d: you've got to give something! A privilege means an obligation--the obligation of sweat! Sweat of your body or your brains. Blair has never sweated. He's always had something for nothing. That is the one immorality that d.a.m.ns. It has d.a.m.ned Blair. Of course, I ought to have realized it before, but I--I suppose I was too busy. Yes; I tell you, if Blair had had to work for what he's got, as you and I have worked for what we've got, he wouldn't be where he is to- day. You know that! He'd have had something else to think of than satisfying his eyes, or his stomach, or his l.u.s.t. He'd have been decent."

"He might have been," Robert Ferguson said drearily, "but I doubt it. Anyway, you can't, by making him earn or go without, or anything else, give David's girl back to him."

"No," she said heavily, and for a moment her pa.s.sion of hope flagged; "no, I can't do that. But I shall try to make it up to David in some way, of course. Where is he?" she broke off.

He told her briefly of David's arrival and departure. "He's gone back to his mother," he ended; "she'll comfort him." Then, with a bark of anger, he added, "Mrs. Richie was always saying that Elizabeth would turn out well. I wonder what she will say now? I knew better; her mother, my brother Arthur's wife, was--no good.

Yet I let Mrs. Richie bamboozle me into building on her. I always said Life shouldn't play the same trick on me twice--but it has done it! It has done it. My heart was set on Elizabeth. Yes, Mrs.

Maitland, I've been fooled again--but so have you."

"Nothing of the kind! I never was fooled before," Sarah Maitland said; "and I sha'n't be again. I am going to make a man of my son! As for your girl, forgive her, Ferguson. Don't be a fool; you take it out of yourself when you refuse forgiveness."

"I'll never forgive her," said Robert Ferguson; "she's hurt the woman I--I have a regard for; she's made David's mother suffer.

I'm done with her!"

CHAPTER XXIII

When, on drunken and then on leaden feet, there came to Elizabeth the ruthless to-morrow of her act, her first clear thought was to kill herself ....

After the marriage in the mayor's office--where they paused long enough to write the two notes that were received the next day-- Blair had fled with her up into the mountains to a little hotel, where they would not, he felt certain, encounter any acquaintances.

Elizabeth neither a.s.sented nor objected. From the moment she had struck her hand into his, there in the tawdry "saloon" of the toll-house, and cried out, "_Come!_" she let him do as he chose. So he had carried her away to the city hall, where, like any other uncla.s.sed or unchurched lovers, they were married by a hurried city official. She had had one more crisis of rage, when in the mayor's office, as she stood at a high wall desk and wrote with an ink-encrusted pen that brief note to her uncle, she said to herself that, as to David Richie, he could hear the news from her uncle--or never hear it; she didn't care which. Then for an instant her eyes glittered again; but except for that one moment, she seemed stunned, mind and body. To Blair, her silent acquiescences had been signs that he had won something more than her consent to revenge herself upon David,--and he wanted more!

In all his life he had never deeply cared for anybody but himself; but now, under the terrible selfishness of his act, under the primitive instinct that he called love, there was, trembling in the depths of his nature, _Love_. It had been born only a little while ago, this new, naked baby of Love. It had had no power and no knowledge; unaided by that silent G.o.d of his, it had not been strong enough to save him from himself, or save Elizabeth from him. But he did love her, in spite of his treason to her soul, for he was tender with her, and almost humble; yet his purpose was inflexible. It seemed to him it must find response in her. Such purpose might strike fire from the most unbending steel--why not from this yielding, silent thing, Elizabeth's heart? But numb and flaccid, perfectly apathetic, stunned by that paroxysm of fury, she no more responded to him than down would have responded to the blow of flint ...

It was their second day in the mountains. Blair, going down- stairs very early in the morning, stopped in the office of the hotel to write a brief but intensely polite note to his mother, telling her of his marriage. "Nannie will have broken it to her-- poor, dear old Nannie!" he said to himself, pounding a stamp down on the envelope, "but of course it's proper to announce it myself." Then he dropped the "announcement" into the post-bag, and went out for a tramp in the woods. It was a still, furtive morning of low clouds, with an expectancy of snow in the air. But it was not cold, and when, leaving the road and pus.h.i.+ng aside the frosted ferns and underbrush, he found himself in the silence of the woods, he sat down on a fallen tree trunk to think.... The moment had come when the only G.o.d he knew would no longer be denied.

"I might as well face it," he said; and slowly lit a cigar. But instead of "facing it," he began to watch the first spa.r.s.e and fitful beginnings of snow--hesitant flakes that sauntered down to rest for a crystal moment on his coat sleeve. Suddenly he caught his thoughts together with a jerk: "I've _got_ to think it out!" he said. Curiously enough, when he said this his thought did not turn with any especial distinctness to David Richie.

Instead, in the next hour of reasonings and excuses, there was always, back in his mind, one face--scornful, contemptuous even; a face he had known only as gentle, and sometimes tender; the face of David's mother. Once he swore at himself, to drive that face out of his mind. "What a fool I am! Elizabeth had broken her engagement with him. I had the right to speak before the thing was smoothed over again. Anybody would say so, even--even Mrs.

Richie if she could really understand how things were. But of course she will only see _his_ side." All his excuses for his conduct were in relation to David Richie; he did not think of Elizabeth. He honestly did not know that he had wronged her. He loved her so crazily that he could not realize his cruelty.

It was snowing steadily now; he could hear the faint patter of small, hard flakes on the dry oak leaves over his head. Suddenly some bleached and withered ferns in front of him rustled, and he saw wise, bright eyes looking at him. "I wish I had some nuts for you, bunny," he said--and the bright eyes vanished with a furry whirl through the ferns. He picked up the empty half of a hickory-nut, and turning it over in his fingers, looked at the white grooves left by small sharp teeth. "You little beggars must get pretty hungry in the winter, bunny," he said; "I'll bring a bag of nuts out here for you some day." But while he was talking to the squirrel, he was wrestling with his G.o.d. It was characteristic of him that never once in that struggle to justify himself did he use the excuse of Elizabeth's consent. His code, which had allowed him to injure a woman, would not permit him to blame her--even if she deserved it. Instead, over and over he heaped up his own poor defense: "If I had waited, he might have patched it up with her." Over and over the defense crumbled before his eyes: "it was contemptible not to give him the chance to patch it up." Then would come his angry retort: "That's nonsense! Besides it is better, infinitely better, for her to marry me than a poor man like him. I can give her everything,-- and love her! G.o.d, how I love her. Apart from any selfish consideration, it is a thousand times better for her." For an instant his marrying her seemed actually chivalrous; and at that his G.o.d laughed. Blair reddened sharply; to recognize his hypocrisy was the "touch on the hollow of the thigh; and the hollow of the thigh was out of joint"! He pitched the nut away with a vicious fling, and knew, inarticulately, that there was no use lying to himself any longer.

With blank eyes he watched the snow piling up on a withered stalk of goldenrod. "I wish it hadn't happened in just the way it did,"

he conceded;--his G.o.d was beginning to prevail!--"but if I had waited, I might have lost her." Then a thought stabbed him: suppose that he should lose her anyhow? Suppose that when she came to herself--the phrase was a confession! suppose she should want to leave him? It was an intolerable idea. "Well, she can't,"

he told himself, grimly, "she can't, now." His face was dusky with shame, yet when he said that, his lip loosened in a furtively exultant smile. Blair would have been less, or more, than a man if, at that moment, in spite of his shame, he had not exulted. "She's my wife!" he said, through those shamed and smiling lips. Then his eyes narrowed: "And she doesn't care a d.a.m.n for me."

So it was that as he sat there in the snow, watching the puff of white deepen on the stalk of goldenrod, his G.o.d prevailed yet a little more, for, so far as Elizabeth was concerned, he did not try to fool himself: "she doesn't care a d.a.m.n." But when he said that, he saw the task of his life before him--to make her care!

It was like the touch of a spur; he leaped to his feet, and flung up his arms in a sort of challenge. Yes; he _had_ "done the thing a man can't do." Yes; he ought not to have taken advantage of her anger. Yes; his honor was smirched, grant it all! grant it all! "I was mad," he said, stung by this intolerable self- knowledge; "I was a cur. I ought to have waited; I know it. I admit it. But what's the use of talking about it now? It's done; and by G.o.d, she shall love me yet!"

So it was that his G.o.d blessed him, as the best that is in us, always blesses us when it conquers us: the blessing was the revelation of his own dishonor. It is a divine moment, this of the consciousness of having been faithless to one's own ideals.

And Blair Maitland, a false friend, a selfish and cruel lover, was not entirely contemptible, for his eyes, beautiful and evasive, confessed the shock of a heavenly vision.

As he walked home, he laid his plans very carefully: he must show her the most delicate consideration; he must avoid every possible annoyance; he must do this, he must not do that. "And I'll buy her a pearl necklace," he told himself, too absorbed in the gravity of the situation to see in such an impulse the a.s.sertion that he was indeed his mother's son! But the foundation of all his plans for making Elizabeth content, was the determination not to admit for a single instant, to anybody but himself, that he had done anything to be ashamed of. Which showed that his G.o.d was not yet G.o.d.

When he got back to the hotel, he found that Elizabeth had not left her room; and rus.h.i.+ng up-stairs two steps at a time, he knocked at her door... . She was sitting on the edge of her bed, her lips parted, her eyes staring blindly out of the window at the snow. The flakes were so thick now that the meadow on the other side of the road and the mountain beyond were blurred and almost blotted out; there was a gray pallor on her face as if the shadow of the storm had fallen on it. Instantly Blair knew that she "had come to herself." As he stood looking at her, something tightened in his throat; he broke out into the very last thing he had meant to say: "Elizabeth?-forgive me!"

"I ought to die, you know," she said, without turning her eyes from the window and the falling snow.

He came and knelt down beside her, and kissed her hand.

"Elizabeth, dearest! When I love you so?"

He kissed her shoulder. She s.h.i.+vered.

"My darling," he said, pa.s.sionately.

She looked at him dully; "I wish you would go away."

"Elizabeth, let me tell you how I love you."

"Love me?" she said; "_me?_"

"Elizabeth!" he protested; "you are an angel, and I love you--no man ever loved a woman as I love you."

In her abas.e.m.e.nt she never thought of reproaching him, of saying "if you loved me, why did you betray me?" She had not gone as far as that yet. Her fall had been so tremendous that if she had any feeling about him, it was nothing more than the consciousness that he too, had gone over the precipice. "Please go away," she said.

"Dearest, listen; you are my wife. If--if I hurried you too much, you will forgive me because I loved you so? I didn't dare to wait, for fear--" he stumbled on the confession which his G.o.d had wrung from him, but which must not be made to her. Elizabeth's heavy eyes were suddenly keen.

"Fear of what?"

"Oh, don't look at me that way! I love you so that it kills me to have you angry at me!"

"I am not angry with you," she said, faintly surprised; "why should I be angry with _you_? Only, you see, Blair, I--I can't live. I simply can't live."

"You have got to live!--or I'll die," he said. "I love you, I tell you I love you!" His outstretched, trembling hands entreated hers, but she would not yield them to his touch; her shrinking movement away from him, her hands gripped together at her throat, filled him with absolute terror: "Elizabeth! _don't_--" She glanced at him with stony eyes. Blair was suffering. Why should _he_ suffer? But his suffering did not interest her. "Please go away," she said, heavily.

He went. He dared not stay. He left her, going miserably down- stairs to make a pretense of eating some breakfast. But all the while he was arranging entreaties and arguments in his own mind.

He went to the door of their room a dozen times that morning, but it was locked. No, she did not want any breakfast. Wouldn't she come out and walk? No, no, no. Please let her alone. And then in the afternoon; "Elizabeth, I _must_ come in! You must have some food."

She let him enter; but she was indifferent alike to the food and to the fact that by this time there was, of course, a giggling consciousness in the hotel that the "bride and groom had had a rumpus." ... "A nice beginning for a honeymoon," said the chambermaid, "locking that pretty young man out of her room!--and me with my work to do in there. Well, I'm sorry for him; I bet you she's a case."

Blair, too, was indifferent to anything ridiculous in his position; the moment was too critical for such self- consciousness. When at last he took a little tray of food to his wife, and knelt beside her, begging her to eat, he was appalled at the ruin in her face. She drank some tea to please him; then she said, pitifully:

"What shall we do, Blair?" That she should say "we" showed that these hours which had plowed her face had also sowed some seed of unselfishness in her broken soul.

"Darling," he said, tenderly, "have you forgiven me?"

At this she meditated for a minute, staring with big, anguished eyes straight ahead of her at nothing; "I _think_ I have, Blair. I have tried to. Of course I know I was more wicked than you. It was more my doing than yours. Yes. I ought to ask you if you would forgive me."

"Elizabeth! Forgive you? When you made me so happy! Am I to forgive you for making me happy?"

"Blair," she said--she put the palms of her hands together, like a child; "Blair, please let me go." She looked at him with speechless entreaty. The old dominant Elizabeth was gone; here was nothing but the weak thing, the scared thing, pleading, crouching, begging for mercy. "Please, Blair, _please_--"

But the very tragedy of such humbleness was that it made an appeal to pa.s.sion rather than to mercy. It made him love her more, not pity her more. "I can't let you go, Elizabeth," he said, hoa.r.s.ely; "I can't; I love you--I will never let you go! I will die before I will let you go!"

With that cry of complete egotism from him, the storm which her egotism had let loose upon their little world broke over her own head. As the sense of the hopelessness of her position and the futility of her struggle dawned upon her, she grew frightened to the point of violence. She was outrageous in what she said to him--beating against the walls of this prison-house of marriage which she herself had reared about them, and crying wildly for freedom. Yet strangely enough, her fury was never the fury of temper; it was the fury of fear. In her voice there was a new note, a note of entreaty; she demanded, but not with the old invincible determination of the free Elizabeth. She was now only the woman pleading with the man; the wife, begging the husband.