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THE IRON WOMAN
BY
MARGARET DELAND
"_This was the iniquity ... fulness of bread, and abundance of
idleness...._"--EZEKIEL, xvi., 49
TO MY
PATIENT, RUTHLESS, INSPIRING CRITIC LORIN DELAND
August 12, 1911
ILLUSTRATIONS
"LOOK!"
"BLAIR IS IN LOVE WITH ME!"
"I THINK YOU ARE REASONABLE ENOUGH FOR BOTH OF US"
"ELIZABETH, MARRY ME!"
"OF COURSE YOU KNOW MY OPINION OF YOU"
SHE WHEELED ABOUT, AND STOOD, SWAYING WITH FRIGHT
"WILL YOU LIVE? WILL YOU GIVE ME LIFE?"
CLUTCHING HER SHOULDER, SHE LOOKED HARD INTO THE YOUNGER
WOMAN'S FACE
THE IRON WOMAN
CHAPTER I
"Climb up in this tree, and play house!" Elizabeth Ferguson commanded.
She herself had climbed to the lowest branch of an apple-tree in the
Maitland orchard, and sat there, swinging her white-stockinged legs so
recklessly that the three children whom she had summoned to her side,
backed away for safety. "If you don't," she said, looking down at them,
"I'm afraid, perhaps, maybe, I'll get mad."
Her foreboding was tempered by a giggle and by the deepening dimple in
her cheek, but all the same she sighed with a sort of impersonal regret
at the prospect of any unpleasantness. "It would be too bad if I got
mad, wouldn't it?" she said thoughtfully. The others looked at one
another in consternation. They knew so well what it meant to have
Elizabeth "mad," that Nannie Maitland, the oldest of the little group,
said at once, helplessly, "Well."
Nannie was always helpless with Elizabeth, just as she was helpless
with her half-brother, Blair, though she was ten and Elizabeth and
Blair were only eight; but how could a little girl like Nannie be
anything but helpless before a brother whom she adored, and a wonderful
being like Elizabeth?--Elizabeth! who always knew exactly what she
wanted to do, and who instantly "got mad," if you wouldn't say you'd do
it, too; got mad, and then repented, and hugged you and kissed you, and
actually cried (or got mad again), if you refused to accept as a sign
of your forgiveness her new slate-pencil, decorated with strips of
red-and-white paper just like a little barber's pole! No wonder Nannie,
timid and good-natured, was helpless before such a sweet, furious
little creature! Blair had more backbone than his sister, but even he
felt Elizabeth's heel upon his neck. David Richie, a silent, candid,
very stubborn small boy, was, after a momentary struggle, as meek as
the rest of them. Now, when she commanded them all to climb, it was
David who demurred, because, he said, he spoke first for Indians
tomahawking you in the back parlor.
"Very well!" said the despot; "play your old Indians! I'll never speak
to any of you again as long as I live!"
"I've got on my new pants," David objected.
"Take 'em off!" said Elizabeth. And there is no knowing what might have
happened if the decorous Nannie had not come to the rescue.
"That's not proper to do out-of-doors; and Miss White says not to say
'pants.'"
Elizabeth looked thoughtful. "Maybe it isn't proper," she admitted;
"but David, honest, I took a hate to being tommy-hocked the last time
we played it; so please, _dear_ David! If you'll play house in the
tree, I'll give you a piece of my taffy." She took a little sticky
package out of her pocket and licked her lips to indicate its
contents;--David yielded, shinning up the trunk of the tree,
indifferent to the trousers, which had been on his mind ever since he
had put them on his legs.
Blair followed him, but Nannie squatted on the ground content to merely
look at the courageous three.
"Come on up," said Elizabeth. Nannie shook her little blond head. At
which the others burst into a shrill chorus: "'Fraid-cat! 'fraid-cat!
'fraid-cat!" Nannie smiled placidly; it never occurred to her to deny
such an obviously truthful title. "Blair," she said, continuing a
conversation interrupted by Elizabeth's determination to climb, "Blair,
_why_ do you say things that make Mamma mad? What's the sense? If it
makes her mad for you to say things are ugly, why do you?"
"'Cause," Blair said briefly. Even at eight Blair disliked both
explanations and decisions, and his slave and half-sister rarely
pressed for either. With the exception of his mother, whose absorption
in business had never given her time to get acquainted with him, most
of the people about Blair were his slaves. Elizabeth's governess, Miss
White--called by Elizabeth, for reasons of her own, "Cherry-pie"--had
completely surrendered to his brown eyes; the men in the Maitland Works
toadied to him; David Richie blustered, perhaps, but always gave in to
him; in his own home, Harris, who was a cross between a butler and a
maid-of-all-work, adored him to the point of letting him make candy on
the kitchen stove--probably the greatest expression of affection
possible to the kitchen; in fact, little Elizabeth Ferguson was the
only person in his world who did not knuckle down to this pleasant and
lovable child. But then, Elizabeth never knuckled down to anybody!
Certainly not to kind old Cherry-pie, whose timid upper lip quivered
like a rabbit's when she was obliged to repeat to her darling some new
rule of Robert Ferguson's for his niece's upbringing; nor did she
knuckle down to her uncle;--she even declared she was not at all afraid
of him! This was almost unbelievable to the others, who scattered like
robins if they heard his step. And she had greater courage than this;
she had, in fact, audacity! for she said she was willing--this the
others told each other in awed tones--she said she had "just as lieves"
walk right up and speak to Mrs. Maitland herself, and ask her for
twenty cents so she could treat the whole crowd to ice-cream! That is,
she would just as lieves, _if she should happen to want to_. Now, as
she sat in the apple-tree swinging her legs and sharing her taffy, it
occurred to her to mention, apropos of nothing, her opinion of Mrs.
Maitland's looks:
"I like Blair's mother best; but David's mother is prettier than
Blair's mother."
"It isn't polite to brag on mothers," said David, surveying his new
trousers complacently, "but I know what I think."
Blair, jouncing up and down on his branch, agreed with unoffended
candor. "'Course she's prettier. Anybody is. Mother's ugly."
"It isn't right to say things like that out of the family," Nannie
observed.
"This _is_ the family. You're going to marry David, and I'm going to
marry Elizabeth. And I'm going to be awfully rich; and I'll give all
you children a lot of money. Jimmy Sullivan--he's a friend of mine; I
got acquainted with him yesterday, and he's the biggest puddler in our
Works. Jimmie said, 'You're the only son,' he said, 'you'll get it
all.' 'Course I told him I'd give him some," said Blair.
At this moment Elizabeth was moved to catch David round the neck, and
give him a loud kiss on his left ear. David sighed. "You may kiss me,"
he said patiently; "but I'd rather you'd tell me when you want to. You
knocked off my cap."
"Say, David," Nannie said, flinging his cap up to him, "Blair can stand
on his head and count five. You can't."
At this David's usual admiration for Blair suffered an eclipse; he grew
very red, then exploded: "I--I--I've had mumps, and I have two warts,
and Blair hasn't. And I have a real dining-room at my house, and Blair
hasn't!"
Nannie flew to the rescue: "You haven't got a real mother. You are only
an adopted."
"Well, what are you?" David said, angrily; "you're nothing but a Step."
"I haven't got any kind of a mother," Elizabeth said, with complacent
melancholy.
"Stop fighting," Blair commanded amiably; "David is right; we have a
pigsty of a dining-room at our house." He paused to bend over and touch
with an ecstatic finger a flake of lichen covering with its serpent
green the damp, black bark in the crotch of the old tree. "Isn't that
pretty?" he said.
"You ought not to say things about our house," Nannie reproved him. As
Blair used to say when he grew up, "Nannie was born proper."
"Why not?" said Blair. "They know everything is ugly at our house.
They've got real dining-rooms at their houses; they don't have old
desks round, the way we do."
It was in the late sixties that these children played in the apple-tree
and arranged their conjugal future; at that time the Maitland house was
indeed, as poor little Blair said, "ugly." Twenty years before, its
gardens and meadows had stretched over to the river; but the estate had
long ago come down in size and gone up in dollars. Now, there was
scarcely an acre of sooty green left, and it was pressed upon by the
yards of the Maitland Works, and almost islanded by railroad tracks.
Grading had left the stately and dilapidated old house somewhat above
the level of a street noisy with incessant teaming, and generally
fetlock-deep in black mud. The house stood a little back from the badly
paved sidewalk; its meager dooryard was inclosed by an iron fence--a
row of black and rusted spears, spotted under their tines with
innumerable gray cocoons. (Blair and David made constant and furtive
attempts to lift these spears, socketed in crumbling lead in the
granite base, for of course there could be nothing better for fighting
Indians than a real iron spear.) The orchard behind the house had been
cut in two by a spur track, which brought jolting gondola cars piled
with red ore down to the furnace. The half dozen apple-trees that were
left stretched gaunt arms over sour, grassless earth; they put out
faint flakes of blossoms in the early spring, and then a fleeting show
of greenness, which in a fortnight shriveled and blackened out of all
semblance of foliage. But all the same the children found it a
delightful place to play, although Blair sometimes said sullenly that
it was "ugly." Blair hated ugly things, and, poor child! he was
assailed by ugliness on every side. The queer, disorderly dining-room,
in which for reasons of her own Mrs. Maitland transacted so much of her
business that it had become for all practical purposes an office of her
Works, was perhaps the "ugliest" thing in the world to the little boy.
"Why don't we have a real dining-room?" he said once; "why do we have
to eat in a office?"
"We'll eat in the kitchen, if I find it convenient," his mother told
him, looking at him over her newspaper, which was propped against a
silver coffee-urn that had found a clear space on a breakfast table
cluttered with papers and ledgers.
"They have a bunch of flowers on the table up at David's house," the
little boy complained; "I don't see why we can't."
"I don't eat flowers," Mrs. Maitland said grimly.
"I don't eat papers," Blair said, under his breath; and his mother
looked at him helplessly. How is one to reply to a child of eight who
makes remarks of this kind? Mrs. Maitland did not know; it was one of
the many things she did not know in relation to her son; for at that
time she loved him with her mind rather than her body, so she had none
of those soft intuitions and persuasions of the flesh which instruct
most mothers. In her perplexity she expressed the sarcastic anger one
might vent upon an equal under the same circumstances:
"You'd eat nothing at all, young man, let me tell you, if it wasn't for
the 'papers,' as you call 'em, in this house!" But it was no wonder
that Blair called it ugly--the house, the orchard, the Works--even his
mother, in her rusty black alpaca dress, sitting at her desk in the
big, dingy dining-room, driving her body and soul, and the bodies and
souls of her workmen--all for the sake of the little, shrinking boy,
who wanted a bunch of flowers on the table. Poor mother! Poor son! And
poor little proper, perplexed half-sister, looking on, and trying to
make peace. Nannie's perplexities had begun very far back. Of course
she was too young when her father married his second wife to puzzle
over that; but if she did not, other people did. Why a mild, vague
young widower who painted pictures nobody bought, and was as
unpractical as a man could be whose partnership in an iron-works was a
matter of inheritance--why such a man wanted to marry Miss Sarah Blair
was beyond anybody's wisdom. It is conceivable, indeed, that he did not
want to.
There were rumors that after the death of Nannie's mother, Herbert
Maitland had been inclined to look for consolation to a certain Miss
Molly Wharton (she that afterward married another widower, Henry
Knight); and everybody thought Miss Molly was willing to smile upon
him. Be that as it may, he suddenly found himself the husband of his
late partner's daughter, a woman eight years older than he, and at
least four inches taller; a silent, plain woman, of devastating common
sense, who contradicted all those femininities and soft lovelinesses so
characteristic, not only of his first wife but of pretty Molly Wharton
also.
John Blair, the father of the second Mrs. Maitland, an uneducated,
extremely intelligent man, had risen from puddling to partnership in
the Maitland Works. There had been no social relations between Mr.
Maitland, Sr., and this new member of the firm, but the older man had a
very intimate respect, and even admiration for John Blair. When he came
to die he confided his son's interests to his partner with absolute
confidence that they would be safe. "Herbert has no gumption, John," he
said; "he wants to be an 'artist.' You've got to look after him." "I
will, Mr. Maitland, I will," said John Blair, snuffling and blowing his
nose on a big red pocket-handkerchief. He did look after him. He put
Herbert's affairs ahead of his own, and he made it clear to his
daughter, who in business matters was, curiously enough, his right-hand
man, that "Maitland's boy" was always, as he expressed it, "to have the
inside track."
"I ain't bothering about you, Sally; I'll leave you enough. And if I
didn't, you could scratch gravel for yourself. But Maitland's boy ain't
our kind. He must be taken care of."
When John Blair died, perhaps a sort of faithfulness to his wishes made
his Sally "take care" of Herbert Maitland by marrying him. "His child
certainly does need a mother," she thought;--"an intelligent mother,
not a goose." By and by she told Herbert of his child's need; or at any
rate helped him to infer it. And somehow, before he knew it, he married
her. By inheritance they owned the Works between them; so really their
marriage was, as the bride expressed it, "a very sensible arrangement";
and any sensible arrangement appealed to John Blair's daughter. But
after a breathless six months of partnership--in business if in nothing
else--Herbert Maitland, leaving behind him his little two-year-old
Nannie, and an unborn boy of whose approaching advent he was ignorant,
got out of the world as expeditiously as consumption could take him.
Indeed, his wife had so jostled him and deafened him and dazed him that
there was nothing for him to do but die--so that there might be room
for her expanding energy. Yet she loved him; nobody who saw her in
those first silent, agonized months could doubt that she loved him. Her
pain expressed itself, not in moans or tears or physical prostration,
but in work. Work, which had been an interest, became a refuge. Under
like circumstances some people take to religion and some to drink; as
Mrs. Maitland's religion had never been more than church-going and
contributions to foreign missions, it was, of course, no help under the
strain of grief; and as her temperament did not dictate the other means
of consolation, she turned to work. She worked herself numb; very
likely she had hours when she did not feel her loss. But she did not
feel anything else. Not even her baby's little clinging hands, or his
milky lips at her breast. She did her duty by him; she hired a reliable
woman to take charge of him, and she was careful to appear at regular
hours to nurse him. She ordered toys for him, and as she shared the
naive conviction of her day that church-going and religion were
synonymous, she began, when he was four years old, to take him to
church. In her shiny, shabby black silk, which had been her Sunday
costume ever since it had been purchased as part of her curiously
limited trousseau she sat in a front pew, between the two children, and
felt that she was doing her duty to both of them. A sense of duty
without maternal instinct is not, perhaps, as baleful a thing as
maternal instinct without a sense of duty, but it is sterile; and in
the first few years of her bereavement, the big, suffering woman seemed
to have nothing but duty to offer to her child. Nannie's puzzles began
then. "Why don't Mamma hug my baby brother?" she used to ask the nurse,
who had no explanation to offer. The baby brother was ready enough to
hug Nannie, and his eager, wet little kisses on her rosy cheeks sealed
her to his service while he was still in petticoats. Blair was three
years old before, under the long atrophy of grief, Sarah Maitland's
maternal instinct began to stir. When it did, she was chilled by the
boy's shrinking from her as if from a stranger; she was chilled, too,
by another sort of repulsion, which with the hideous candor of
childhood he made no effort to conceal. One of his first expressions of
opinion had been contained in the single word "uggy," accompanied by a
finger pointed at his mother. Whenever she sneezed--and she was one of
those people who cannot, or do not, moderate a sneeze--Blair had a
nervous paroxysm. He would jump at the unexpected sound, then burst
into furious tears. When she tried to draw his head down upon her
scratchy black alpaca breast, he would say violently, "No, no! No, no!"
at which she would push him roughly from her knee, and fall into hurt
silence. Once, when he was five years old, she came in to dinner hot
from a morning in the Works, her moist forehead grimy with dust, and
bent over to kiss him; at which the little boy wrinkled up his nose and
turned his face aside.
"What's the matter?" his mother said; and called sharply to the nurse:
"I won't have any highfalutin' business in this boy! Get it out of
him." Then resolutely she took Blair's little chin in her hand--a big,
beautiful, powerful hand, with broken and blackened nails--and turning
his wincing face up, rubbed her cheek roughly against his. "Get over
your airs!" she said, and sat down and ate her dinner without another
word to Blair or any one else. But the next day, as if to purchase the
kiss he would not give, she told him he was to have an "allowance." The
word had no meaning to the little fellow, until she showed him two
bright new dollars and said he could buy candy with them; then his
brown eyes smiled, and he held up his lips to her. It was at that
moment that money began to mean something to him. He bought the candy,
which he divided with Nannie, and he bought also a present for his
mother,--a bottle of cologne, with a tiny calendar tied around its neck
by a red ribbon. "The ribbon is pretty," he explained shyly. She was so
pleased that she instantly gave him another dollar, and then put the
long green bottle on her painted pine bureau, between two of his
photographs.
In the days when the four children played in the orchard, and had
lessons with Miss White, in the school-room in Mr. Ferguson's garret,
and were "treated" by Blair to candy or pink ice-cream--even in those
days Mercer was showing signs of what it was ultimately to become: the
apotheosis of materialism and vulgarity. Iron was entering into its
soul. It thought extremely well of itself; when a new mill was built,
or a new furnace blown in, it thought still better of itself. It prided
itself upon its growth; in fact, its complacency, its ugliness and its
size kept pace with one another.
"Look at our output," Sarah Maitland used to brag to her general
manager, Mr. Robert Ferguson; "and look at our churches! We have more
churches for our size than any town west of the Alleghanies."
"We need more jails than any town, east or west," Mr. Ferguson
retorted, grimly.
Mrs. Maitland avoided the deduction. Her face was full of pride. "You
just wait! We'll be the most important city in this country yet,
because we will hold the commerce of the world right here in our
mills!" She put out her great open palm, and slowly closed the strong,
beautiful fingers into a gripping fist. "The commerce of the world,
right _here_!" she said, thrusting the clenched hand, that quivered a
little, almost into his face.
Robert Ferguson snorted. He was a melancholy man, with thin, bitterly
sensitive lips, and kind eyes that were curiously magnified by
gold-rimmed eyeglasses, which he had a way of knocking off with
disconcerting suddenness. He did not, he declared, trust anybody.
"What's the use?" he said; "you only get your face slapped!" For his
part, he believed the Eleventh Commandment was, "Blessed is he that
expecteth nothing, because he'll get it."
"Read your Bible!" Mrs. Maitland retorted; "then you'll know enough to
call it a Beatitude, not a Commandment."
Mr. Ferguson snorted again. "Bible? It's all I can do to get time to
read my paper. I'm worked to death," he reproached her. But in spite of
being worked to death he always found time on summer evenings to weed
the garden in his back yard, or on winter mornings to feed a flock of
Mercer's sooty pigeons; and he had been known to walk all over town to
find a particular remedy for a sick child of one of his molders. To be
sure he alleged, when Mrs. Maitland accused him of kindness, that, as
far as the child was concerned, he was a fool for his pains, because
human critters ("I'm one of 'em myself,") were a bad lot and it would
be a good thing if they all died young!
"Oh, you have a fine bark, friend Ferguson," she said, "but when it
comes to a bite, I guess most folks get a kiss from you."
"Kiss?" said Robert Ferguson, horrified; "not much!"
They were very good friends, these two, each growling at, disapproving
of, and completely trusting the other. Mrs. Maitland's chief
disapproval of her superintendent--for her reproaches about his bark
were really expressions of admiration--her serious disapproval was
based on the fact that, when the season permitted, he broke the Sabbath
by grubbing in his garden, instead of going to church. A grape-arbor
ran the length of this garden, and in August the Isabellas, filmed with
soot, had a flavor, Robert Ferguson thought, finer than could be found
in any of the vineyards lying in the hot sunshine on the banks of the
river, far out of reach of Mercer's smoke. There was a flagstone path
around the arbor, and then borders of perennials against brick walls
thick with ivy or hidden by trellised peach-trees. All summer long bees
came to murmur among the flowers, and every breeze that blew over them
carried some sweetness to the hot and tired streets outside. It was a
spot of perfume and peace, and it was no wonder that the hard-working,
sad-eyed man liked to spend his Sundays in it. But "remembering the
Sabbath" was his employer's strong point. Mrs. Maitland kept the Fourth
Commandment with passion. Her Sundays, dividing each six days of
extraordinary activity, were arid stretches of the unspeakable dullness
of idleness. When Blair grew up he used to look back at those Sundays
and shudder. There was church and Sunday-school in the morning, then a
cold dinner, for cold roast beef was Mrs. Maitland's symbol of
Sabbatical holiness. Then an endless, vacant afternoon, spent always
indoors. Certain small, pious books were permitted the two
children--_Little Henry and His Bearer, The Ministering Children_, and
like moral food; but no games, no walks, no playing in the orchard.
Silence and weary idleness and Little Henry's holy arrogances. Though
the day must have been as dreary to Mrs. Maitland as it was to her son
and daughter, she never winced. She sat in the parlor, dressed in black
silk, and read _The Presbyterian_ and the Bible. She never allowed
herself to look at her desk in the dining-room, or even at her
knitting, which on week-days when she had no work to do was a great
resource; she looked at the clock a good deal, and sometimes she
sighed, then applied herself to _The Presbyterian_. She went to bed at
half-past seven as against eleven or twelve on other nights, first
reading, with extraordinary rapidity, her "Chapter." Mrs. Maitland had
a "system" by which she was able to read the Bible through once a year.
She frequently recommended it to her superintendent; to her way of
thinking such reading was accounted to her as righteousness.
Refreshed by a somnolent Sunday, she would rush furiously into business
on Monday morning, and Mr. Robert Ferguson, who never went to church,
followed in her wake, doing her bidding with grim and admiring
thoroughness. If not "worked to death," he was, at any rate, absorbed
in her affairs. Even when he went home at night, and, on summer
evenings, fell to grubbing in his narrow back yard, where his niece
"helped" him by pushing a little wheelbarrow over the mossy
flagstones,--even then he did not dismiss Mrs. Maitland's business from
his mind. He was scrupulous to say, as he picked up the weeds scattered
from the wheelbarrow, "Have you been a good little girl to-day,
Elizabeth?" but all the while, in his own thoughts he was going over
matters at the Works. On Sundays he managed to get far enough away from
business to interrogate Miss White about his niece:
"I hope Elizabeth is behaving herself, Miss White?"
"Oh yes; she is a dear, good child."
"Well, you never can tell about children,--or anybody else. Keep a
sharp eye on her, Miss White. And be careful, please, about vanity. I
thought I saw her looking in the mirror in the hall this morning.
Please discourage any signs of vanity."
"She hasn't a particle of vanity!" Miss White said warmly.
But in spite of such assurances, Mr. Ferguson was always falling into
bleakly apprehensive thoughts of his little girl, obstinately denying
his pride in her, and allowing himself only the meager hope that she
would "turn out fairly decently." Vanity was his especial concern, and
he was more than once afraid he had discovered it: Elizabeth was not
allowed to go to dancing-school--dancing and vanity were somehow
related in her uncle's mind; so the vital, vivid little creature
expressed the rhythm that was in her by dancing without instruction,
keeping time with loud, elemental cadences of her own composing, not
always melodious, but always in time. Sometimes she danced thus in the
school-room; sometimes in Mrs. Todd's "ice-cream parlor" at the farther
end of Mercer's old wooden bridge; once--and this was one of the
occasions when Mr. Ferguson thought he had detected the vice he
dreaded--once she danced in his very own library! Up and down she went,
back and forth, before a long mirror that stood between the windows.
She had put a daffodowndilly behind each ear, and twisted a dandelion
chain around her neck. She looked, as she came and went, smiling and
dimpling at herself in the shadowy depths of the mirror, like a
flower--a flower in the wind!--bending and turning and swaying, and
singing as she danced: "Oh, isn't it joyful--joyful--joyful!"
It was then that her uncle came upon her; for just a moment he stood
still in involuntary delight, then remembered his theories; there was
certainly vanity in her primitive adornment! He knocked his glasses off
with a fierce gesture, and did his duty by barking at her,--as Mrs.
Maitland would have expressed it. He told her in an angry voice that
she must go to bed for the rest of the day! at least, if she ever did
it again, she must go to bed for the rest of the day.
Another time he felt even surer of the feminine failing: Elizabeth
said, in his presence, that she wished she had some rings like those of
a certain Mrs. Richie, who had lately come to live next door; at which
Mr. Ferguson barked at Miss White, barked so harshly that Elizabeth
flew at him like a little enraged cat. "Stop scolding Cherry-pie! You
hurt her feelings; you are a wicked man!" she screamed, and beating him
with her right hand, she fastened her small, sharp teeth into her left
arm just above the wrist--then screamed again with self-inflicted pain.
But when Miss White, dismayed at such a loss of self-control,
apologized for her, Mr. Ferguson shrugged his shoulders.
"I don't mind temper," he said; "I used to have a temper myself; but I
will _not_ have her vain! Better put some plaster on her arm.
Elizabeth, you must not call Miss White by that ridiculous name."
The remark about Mrs. Richie's rings really disturbed him; it made him
deplore to himself the advent as a neighbor of a foolish woman. "She'll
put ideas into Elizabeth's head," he told himself. In regard to the
rings, he had not needed Elizabeth to instruct him. He had noticed them
himself, and they had convinced him that this Mrs. Richie, who at first
sight seemed a shy, sad woman with no nonsense about her, was really no
exception to her sex. "Vain and lazy, like the rest of them," he said
cynically. Having passed the age when he cared to sport with Amaryllis,
he did not, he said, like women. When he was quite a young man, he had
added, "except Mrs. Maitland." Which remark, being repeated to Molly
Wharton, had moved that young lady to retort that the reason that Sarah
Maitland was the only woman he liked, was that Sarah Maitland was not a
woman! "The only feminine thing about her is her petticoats," said Miss
Wharton, daintily. For which _mot_, Robert Ferguson never forgave her.
He certainly did not expect to like this new-comer in Mercer, this Mrs.
Richie, but he had gone to see her. He had been obliged to, because she
wished to rent a house he owned next door to the one in which he lived.
So, being her landlord, he had to see her, if for nothing else, to
discourage requests for inside repairs. He saw her, and promised to put
up a little glass house at the end of the back parlor for a plant-room.
"If she'd asked me for a 'conservatory,'" he said to himself, "I
wouldn't have considered it for a moment; but just a few sashes--I
suppose I might as well give in on that? Besides, if she likes flowers,
there must be something to her." All the same, he was conscious of
having given in, and to a woman who wore rings; so he was quite gruff
with Mrs. Richie's little boy, whom he found listening to an harangue
from Elizabeth. The two children had scraped acquaintance through the
iron fence that separated the piazzas of the two houses. "I," Elizabeth
had announced, "have a mosquito-bite on my leg; I'll show it to you,"
she said, generously; and when the bite on her little thigh was
displayed, she tried to think of other personal matters. "My mother's
dead. And my father's dead."
"So's mine," David matched her, proudly. "I'm an adopted child."
"I have a pair of red shoes with white buttons," she said. David,
unable to think of any possession of his own to cap either bite or
boots, was smitten into gloomy silence.
In spite of the landlord's disapproval of his tenant's rings, the
acquaintance of the two families grew. Mr. Ferguson had to see Mrs.
Richie again about those "sashes," or what not. His calls were always
on business--but though he talked of greenhouses, and she talked of
knocking out an extra window in the nursery so that her little boy
could have more sunshine, they slipped after a while into
personalities: Mrs. Richie had no immediate family; her--her husband
had died nearly three years before. Since then she had been living in
St. Louis. She had come now to Mercer because she wanted to be nearer
to a friend, an old clergyman, who lived in a place called Old Chester.
"I think it's about twenty miles up the river," she said. "That's where
I found David. I--I had lost a little boy, and David had lost his
mother, so we belonged together. It doesn't make any difference to us,
that he isn't my own, does it, David?"
"Yes'm," said David,
"David! Why won't you _ever_ say what is expected of you? We don't know
anybody in Mercer," she went on, with a shy, melancholy smile, "except
Elizabeth." And at her kind look the little girl, who had tagged along
behind her uncle, snuggled up to the maternal presence, and rubbed her
cheek against the white hand which had the pretty rings on it. "I am so
glad to have somebody for David to play with," Mrs. Richie said,
looking down at the little nestling thing, who at that moment stopped
nestling, and dropping down on toes and finger-tips, loped up--on very
long hind-legs, to the confusion of her elders, who endeavored not to
see her peculiar attitude--and, putting a paw into David's pocket,
abstracted a marble. There was an instant explosion, in which David,
after securing his property through violent exertions, sought, as a
matter of pure justice, to pull the bear's hair. But when Mrs. Richie
interfered, separating the combatants with horrified apologies for her
young man's conduct, Elizabeth's squeals stopped abruptly. She stood
panting, her eyes still watering with David's tug at her hair; the
dimple in her right cheek began to lengthen into a hard line.
"You are very naughty, David," said Mrs. Richie, sternly; "you must beg
Elizabeth's pardon at once!" At which Elizabeth burst out:
"Stop! Don't scold him. It was my fault. I did it--taking his marble.
I'll--I'll bite my arm if you scold David!"
"Elizabeth!" protested her uncle; "I'm ashamed of you!"
But Elizabeth was indifferent to his shame; she was hugging David
frantically. "I hate, I hate, I _hate_ your mother--if she does have
rings!" Her face was so convulsed with rage that Mrs. Richie actually
recoiled before it; Elizabeth, still clamoring, saw that involuntary
start of horror. Instantly she was calm; but she shrank away almost out
of the room. It seemed as if at that moment some veil, cold and
impenetrable, fell between the gentle woman and the fierce, pathetic
child--a veil that was not to be lifted until, in some mysterious way,
life should make them change places.
The two elders looked at each other, Robert Ferguson with meager
amusement; Mrs. Richie still grave at the remembrance of that furious
little face. "What did she mean about 'biting her arm'?" she asked,
after Elizabeth had been sent home, the bewildered David being told to
accompany her to the door.
"I believe she bites herself when she gets angry," Elizabeth's uncle
said; "Miss White said she had quite a sore place on her arm last
winter, because she bit it so often. It's of no consequence," he added,
knocking his glasses off fiercely. Again Mrs. Richie looked shocked.
"She is my brother's child," he said, briefly; "he died some years ago.
He left her to me." And Mrs. Richie knew instinctively that the bequest
had not been welcome. "Miss White looks after her," he said, putting
his glasses on again, carefully, with both hands; "she calls her her
'Lamb,' though a more unlamblike person than Elizabeth I never met. She
has a little school for her and the two Maitland youngsters in the top
of my house. Miss White is otherwise known as Cherry-pie. Elizabeth, I
am informed, loves cherry-pie; also, she loves Miss White: ergo!" he
ended, with his snort of a laugh. Then he had a sudden thought: "Why
don't you let David come to Miss White for lessons? I've no doubt she
could look after another pupil."
"I'd be delighted to," Mrs. Richie said, gratefully. So, through the
good offices of Mr. Ferguson, the arrangement was made. Mr. Ferguson
did not approve of Mrs. Richie's rings, but he had no objection to
helping her about David.
And that was how it happened that these four little lives were thrown
together--four threads that were to be woven into the great fabric of
Life.