The Iron Woman Part 45

"He is still bitter?"

"Oh, I'm afraid so. He very rarely speaks of it. But I can see that he blames himself always. I wish he would talk freely."

"He will one of these days. He'll blurt it out and then he'll begin to get over it. Don't stop him, and don't get excited, no matter what absurd things he says. He'll be better when he has emptied his heart. I was, you know, after I talked to you and told you that I'd been--jilted."

"I'm afraid it's gone too deep for that with David," she said, sadly.

"It couldn't go deeper than it did with me, and yet you--you taught me to forgive her. Yes, and to be glad, too; for if she hadn't thrown me over, I wouldn't have known you."

"Now _stop!_" Mrs. Richie said, with soft impatience.

"For a meek and mild looking person," said Robert Ferguson, twitching off his gla.s.ses, "you have the most infernally strong will. I hate obstinacy."

"Mr. Ferguson, be sensible. Don't talk--that way. Listen: David must see Elizabeth while he is here. This situation has got to become commonplace. I meant to go home to-morrow morning, but if you will ask us all to luncheon--"

"'Dinner'! We don't have your Philadelphia airs in Mercer."

"Well, 'dinner,'" she said, smiling; "we'll stay over and take the evening train.

"I won't ask Blair!"

"I hate obstinacy," Mrs. Richie told him, drolly. "Well, I am not so very anxious to see Blair myself. But I do want Elizabeth and David to meet. You see, David means to practise in Mercer--"

"What! Then you will come here to live? When will you come?"

"Next spring, I hope. And it is like coming home again. The promise of the hospital was a factor in his decision, but, even without it, I think he will want to settle in Mercer"; she paused and sighed.

Her old landlord did not notice the sigh. "I'll get the house in order for you right off!" he said, beaming. "I suppose you'll ask for all sorts of new-fangled things! A tenant is never satisfied." He was so happy that he barked and chuckled at the same time.

"I hope it's wise for him to come," Mrs. Richie said, anxiously; "I confess I don't feel quite easy about it, because--Elizabeth will be here; and though, of course, n.o.body is going to think of how things might have been, still, it will be painful for them both just at first. That's why I want you to invite us to dinner,--the sooner they meet, the sooner things will be commonplace."

"When a man has once been in love with a woman," Robert Ferguson said, putting on his gla.s.ses carefully, "he can hate her, but she can never be commonplace to him."

And before she knew it she said, impulsively, "Please don't ever hate me."

He laid a quick hand on hers that was resting in her lap. "I'll never hate you and you'll never be commonplace. Dear woman--can't you?"

She shook her head; the tears stood suddenly in her leaf-brown eyes.

"Helena!" he said, and there was a half-frightened violence in his voice; "_what_ is it? Tell me, for Heaven's sake; what is it? Do you hate me?"

"No--no--no!"

"If you dislike me, say so! I think I could bear it better to believe you disliked me."

"Robert, how absurd you are! You know I could never dislike you.

But our--our age, and David, and--"

He put an abrupt hand on her shoulder and looked hard into her eyes; then for a single minute he covered his own. "Don't talk about age, and all that nonsense. Don't talk about little things, Helena, for G.o.d's sake! Oh, my dear--" he said, brokenly. He got up and went across the room to a bookcase; he stood there a moment or two with his back to her. Helena Richie, bewildered, her eyes full of tears, looked after him in dismay. But when he took his chair again, he was "commonplace" enough, and when, later, David came in, he was able to talk in the most matter-of- fact way. He told the young man that evidently Mrs. Maitland had changed her mind about a hospital. "Of course some papers may turn up that will ent.i.tle you to your fund, but I confess I'm doubtful about it. I'm afraid she changed her mind."

"Probably she did," David said, laconically; "well, I am glad she thought of it,--even if she didn't do it. She was a big person, Mr. Ferguson; I didn't half know how big a person she was!" For a moment his face softened until his own preoccupations faded out of it.

"n.o.body knew how big she was--except me," Robert Ferguson said.

Then he began to talk about her... . It was nearly midnight when he ended; when he did, it was with an outburst of pain and grief: "n.o.body understood her. They thought because she ran an iron-works, that she wasn't--a woman. I tell you she was! I tell you her heart was a woman's heart. She didn't care about fuss and feathers, and every other kind of tomfoolery, like all the rest of you, but she was as--as modest as a girl, and as sensitive.

You needn't laugh--"

"Laugh?" said Helena Richie; "I am ready to cry when I think how her body misrepresented her soul!"

He nodded; his chin shook. "Big, generous, incapable of meanness, incapable of littleness!--and now she's dead. I believe her disappointment about Blair really killed her. It cut some spring.

She has never been the same woman since he--" He stopped short, and looked at David; no one spoke.

Then Mrs. Richie asked some casual question about the Works, and they began to talk of other things. When his guests said good- night, Robert Ferguson, standing on his door-step, called after them: "Oh, hold on: David, won't you and your mother come in to dinner to-morrow? Luncheon, your mother calls it. She wants us to be fas.h.i.+onable in Mercer! n.o.body here but Miss White and Elizabeth."

"Yes, thank you; we'll come with pleasure," Mrs. Richie called back, and felt the young man's arm grow rigid under her hand.

The mother and son walked on in silence. It had stopped raining, but the upper sky was full of fleecy clouds laid edge to edge like a celestial pavement; from between them sometimes a serene moon looked down.

"David, you don't mind staying over for a day?"

"Oh no, not at all. I meant to."

"And you don't mind--seeing Elizabeth?"

"I want to see her. Will he be there?"

"Blair? No! Certainly not. It wouldn't be pleasant for--for--"

"For him?" David said, dryly. "I should think not. Still, I am sorry. I have rather a curiosity to see Blair."

"Oh, David!" she protested, sadly.

"My dear mother, don't be alarmed. I have no intention of calling him out. I am merely interested to know how a sneak-thief looks when he meets--" he laughed; "the man he has robbed. However, it might not be pleasant for the rest of you."

His mother was silent; her plan of making things "commonplace"

was not as simple as she thought.

Robert Ferguson, on his door-step, looked after them, his face falling abruptly into stern lines. When he went back to his library he stood perfectly still, his hands in his pockets, staring straight ahead of him. Once or twice his whole face quivered. Suddenly he struck his clenched fist hard on the table: "Well!" he said, aloud, violently, "what difference does it make?" He lit a cigar and sat down, his legs stretched out in front of him, his feet crossed. He sat there for an hour, biting on his extinguished cigar. Then he said in an unsteady voice, "She is a heavenly creature." The vigil in his library, which lasted until the dawn was white above Mercer's smoke, left Robert Ferguson shaken to the point of humility. He no longer combated Mrs. Maitland's wandering words; they did not matter. What mattered was the divine discovery that they did not matter! Or rather, that they opened his eyes to the glory of the human soul.

To a man of his narrow and obstinate council of perfection, the realization, not only that it was possible to enter into holiness through the door of sin--that low door that bows the head that should be upright--but that his own possibilities of tenderness were wider than he knew,--such a realization was conversion. It was the recognition that in the matter of forgiveness he and his Father were one. Helena might or might not "have something on her conscience." If she had, then it proved that she in her humility was a better woman than, with nothing on his conscience, he in his arrogance was a man; and when he said that, he began to understand, with shame, that in regard to other people's wrong- doing he had always been, as Sarah Maitland expressed it, "more particular than his Creator." He thought of her words now, and his lean face reddened. "She hit me when she said that. I've always set up my own Ebenezer. What a fool I must have seemed to a woman like Helena... . She's a heavenly creature!" he ended, brokenly; "what difference does it make how she became so? But if _that's_ the only reason she keeps on refusing me--"

When Elizabeth and David met in Mr. Ferguson's library at noon the next day, everybody was, of course, elaborately unconscious.

Elizabeth came in last. As she entered, Miss White, nibbling speechlessly, was fussing with the fire-irons of a grate filled with white lilacs. Mrs. Richie, turning her back upon her son, began to talk entirely at random to Robert Ferguson, who was rapidly pulling out books from the bookcase at the farther end of the room. David was the only one who made no pretense. When he heard the front door close and knew that she was in the house, he stood staring at the library door. Elizabeth, entering, walked straight up to him, and put out her hand.

"How are you, David?" she said.

David, taking the small, cold hand in his, said, calmly, "How're you, Elizabeth?" Then their eyes met. Hers held steadfast; it was his which fell.

"Have you seen Nannie?" she said.