The Iron Woman Part 47

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

"Why," she explained, surprised, "he has all that money Mrs.

Maitland gave him the day she died."

"What!"

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

He was silent for a few moments, and Elizabeth, glancing at the clock, was turning to go, but he stopped her. "Hold on a minute.

I don't understand this business. Tell me all about it, Elizabeth."

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

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

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

"Uncle! What do you mean?"

He told her, briefly, of Mrs. Maitland's plan. "She said two years ago that she was going to give David a lump sum. I didn't know she had got it salted down--she was pretty close-mouthed about some things; but I guess she had. Well, probably, at the last minute, she thought she had been hard on Blair, and decided to hand it over to him, instead of giving it to David. She had a right to, a perfect right to. But I don't understand it! The very day she spoke of writing to David, she told me she wouldn't leave Blair a cent. It isn't like her to whirl about that way--unless it was during one of those times when she wasn't herself. Well,"

he ended, sighing, "there is nothing to be done about it, of course; but I'll see Nannie, and get at the bottom of it, just for my own satisfaction."

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

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

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

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

It had been a long time since Elizabeth's face had been so vivid.

The old sheet-lightning of anger began to flash faintly across it. She did not know what she would do to Nannie if Nannie had induced Mrs. Maitland to rob David, but she would do something!

Yet when she reached the house, her purpose waited for a minute; Nannie's tremor of loneliness and perplexity was so pitifully in evidence that she could not burst into her own perplexity.

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

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

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

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

"Nannie!"

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

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

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

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

"But," poor Nannie protested, "they are so dreadful, Elizabeth.

n.o.body can possibly wear them, except people like some of Harris's friends. But things like these--what would you do with these?" She held out a discolored pasteboard box broken at the corners and with no lid; a pair of onyx earrings lay in the faded blue cotton. "I never saw her wear them but once, and they are _so_ ugly," Nannie mourned.

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

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

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

"I did not!"

"Did you suggest it to her, Nannie?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Was she perfectly clear mentally?"

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

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

"No," Nannie said, and suddenly fright and anger together made her fluent; "but why shouldn't she change her mind, Mr. Ferguson?

Isn't Blair her son? Her only son! What was David to Mamma? Would you have her give all that money to an outsider, and leave her only son penniless? Perhaps she changed her mind that morning. I don't know anything about it. I don't see what difference it makes when she changed it, so long as she changed it. All I can tell you is that she told me to bring her the check, or certificate, or whatever you call it, out of the little safe. And I did, and she made it out to Blair. I didn't ask her to. I didn't even know she had it; but I am thankful she did it!"

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

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

"n.o.body wants to, Nannie, if it is his honestly," Robert Ferguson said, gravely.

"_Honestly_?" Nannie whispered, with dry lips.

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

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