Mr. Ferguson made no protest in regard to Blair's increased allowance.
"If his mother wants to ruin him, it isn't my business," he said. The
fact was, he had not recovered from his astonished resentment at Sarah
Maitland's joke in Mrs. Richie's parlor. He thought about it
constantly, and asked himself whether he did not owe his neighbor an
apology of some kind. The difficulty was to know what kind, for after
all _he_ was perfectly innocent! "Such an idea never entered my head,"
he thought angrily; "but of course, if there has been anything in my
conduct to put it into Mrs. Maitland's head, I ought to be thrashed!
Perhaps I'd better not go in next door more than two or three times a
week?" So, for once, Robert Ferguson was distinctly out with his
employer, and when she told him to see that Blair had a hundred dollars
more a month, he said, in his own mind, "be hanged to him! What
difference does it make to me if she ruins him?" and held his
tongue--until the next day. Then he barked out a remonstrance: "I
suppose you know your own business, but if _I_ had a boy I wouldn't
increase his allowance because he was in debt."
"I want to keep him from getting in debt again," she explained, her
face falling into troubled lines.
"If you will allow me to say so--having been a boy myself, that's not
the way to do it."
Sarah Maitland flung herself back in her chair, and struck the desk
with her fist. "I am at my wit's end to know what to do about him! My
idea has been to make a man of him, by giving him what he wants, not
making him fuss over five-cent pieces. He's had everything; he's never
heard '_no_' in his life. And yet--look at him!"
"That's the trouble with him. He's had too much. He needs a few no's.
But he's like most rich boys; there isn't one rich man's son in ten who
is worth his salt. If he were _my_ boy," said Robert Ferguson, with
that infallibility which everybody feels in regard to the way other
people's children should be brought up, "if he were my son, I'd put him
to work this summer."
Mrs. Maitland blew her lips out in a great sigh; then nibbled her
forefinger, staring with blank eyes straight ahead of her. She was
greatly perplexed. "I'll think it over," she said; "I'll think it over.
Hold on; what's your hurry? I want to ask you something: your neighbor
there, Mrs. Richie, seems to be a very attractive woman; 'fair and
forty,' as the saying is--only I guess she's nearer fifty? But she's
mighty good-looking, whatever her age is."
The color came into Robert Ferguson's face; this time he was really
offended. Mrs. Maitland was actually venturing--"I have never noticed
her looks," he said stiffly, and rose.
"It just struck me when I caught you in there the other day," she
ruminated; "what do you know about her?" Buried deep in the casual
question was another question, but Robert Ferguson did not hear it; she
was _not_ going to venture! He was so relieved, that he was instantly
himself again. He told her briefly what little he knew: Mrs. Richie was
a widow; husband dead many years. "I have an idea he was a crooked
stick,--more from what she hasn't said than what she has said. There's
a friend of hers I meet once in a while at her house, a Doctor King,
and he intimated to me that her husband was a bad lot. It appears he
hurt their child, when he was drunk. She never forgave him. I don't
blame her, I'm sure; the baby died. It was after the death of the
husband that she adopted David. She has no relations apparently; some
friends in Old Chester, I believe; this Doctor King is one of 'em."
"Is she going to marry him?" Mrs. Maitland said.
"There might be objections on the part of the present incumbent," he
said, with his meager smile.
Mrs. Maitland admitted that the doctor's wife presented difficulties;
"but perhaps she'll die," she said, cheerfully; "I'm interested to know
that Mrs. Richie has friends; I was wondering--" She did not say what
she wondered. "She's a nice woman, Robert Ferguson, and a good woman,
_and_ a good-looking woman, too; 'fair and'--well, say 'fifty'! And if
you had any sense--"
But this time Robert Ferguson really did get out of the office.
His advice about Blair, however, seemed superfluous. So far as behavior
went, Mrs. Maitland had no further occasion to increase his allowance.
His remaining months in the university were decorous enough, though his
scholarship was no credit to him. He "squeaked through," as he
expressed it to his sister, gaily, when she came east to see him
graduate, three years behind the class in which he had entered college.
But as to his conduct, that domiciliary visit had hardened him into a
sort of contemptuous common sense. And his annoyed and humiliated
manhood, combined with his esthetic taste, sufficed, also, to keep
things fairly peaceful when he was at home, which was rarely for more
than a week or two at a time. Quarrels with his mother had become
excruciating experiences, like discords on the piano; they set his
teeth on edge, though they never touched his heart. To avoid them, he
would, he told Nannie, chuckling at her horror,--"lie like the devil!"
His lying, however, was nothing more serious than a careful and
entirely insincere politeness; but it answered his purpose, and "rows,"
as he called them, were very rare; although, indeed, his mother did her
part in avoiding them, too. To Sarah Maitland, a difference with her
son meant a pang at the very center of her being--her maternity; her
heart was seared by it, but her taste was not offended because she had
no taste. So, for differing reasons, peace was kept. The next fall,
after a summer abroad, Blair went back to the university and took two
or three special courses; also he began to paint rather seriously; all
of which was his way of putting off the evil day of settling down in
Mercer.
Meantime, life grew quite vivid to his sister. Elizabeth had once said
that Nannie was "born an old maid"; and certainly these tranquil,
gently useless years of being very busy about nothing, and living quite
alone with her stepmother, had emphasized in her a simplicity and
literalness of mind that was sometimes very amusing to the other three
friends. At any rate, hers was a pallid little personality--perhaps it
could not have been anything else in the household of a woman like
Sarah Maitland, with whom, domestically, it was always either peace, or
a sword! Nannie was incapable of anything but peace. "You are a
'fraid-cat," Elizabeth used to tell her, "but you're a perfect dear!"
"Nannie is unscrupulously good," Blair said once; and her soft
stubbornness in doing anything she conceived to be her duty, warranted
his criticism. But during the first year that David and Elizabeth were
engaged, her stagnant existence in the silent old house began to stir;
little shocks of reality penetrated the gentle primness of her thought,
and she came creeping out into the warmth and sunshine of other
people's happiness; indeed, her shy appreciation of the lovers'
experiences became almost an experience of her own, so closely did she
nestle to all their emotions! It was a real blow to her when it was
decided that David should enter a Philadelphia hospital as an interne.
"Won't he be at home even for the long vacations?" Nannie asked,
anxiously; when she was told that hospitals did not give "vacations,"
her only consolation was that she would have to console Elizabeth.
But when Robert Ferguson heard what was going to happen, he had nothing
to console him. "I'll have a love-sick girl on my hands," he complained
to Mrs. Richie. "You'll have to do your share of it," he barked at her.
He had come in through the green door in the garden wall, with a big
clump of some perennial in his hands, and a trowel under one arm.
"Peonies have to be thinned out in the fall," he said grudgingly, "and
I want to get rid of this lot. Where shall I put 'em?"
It was a warm October afternoon, and Mrs. Richie, who had been sitting
on the stone bench under the big hawthorn in her garden, reading, until
the dusk hid her page, looked up gratefully. "You are robbing yourself;
I believe that is your precious white peony!"
"It's only half of it, and I get as much good out of it here as in my
own garden," he grunted (he was sitting on his heels digging a hole big
enough for a clump of peonies with a trowel, so no wonder he grunted);
"besides, it improves my property to plant perennials; my next tenant
may appreciate flowers," he ended, with the reproving significance
which had become a joke between them.
"Oh," said Mrs. Richie, sighing, "I don't like to think of that 'next
tenant.'"
He looked up at her a little startled. "What do you mean? You are not
going to Philadelphia with David next April?"
"Why, you didn't suppose I would let David go alone?"
"What! You will leave Mercer?" he said. In his dismayed astonishment he
dropped his trowel and stood up. "Will you please tell me why I should
stay in Mercer, when David is in Philadelphia?"
Robert Ferguson was silent; then he tramped the earth in around the
roots of the white peony, and said, sullenly, "It never occurred to me
that you would go, too."
"You'll have to be extra nice to Elizabeth when we are not here," Mrs.
Richie instructed him. David's mother was very anxious to be nice to
Elizabeth herself; which was a confession, though she did not know it,
of her old misgivings as to David's choice.
"Be nice? _I_?" said Mr. Ferguson, and snorted; "did you ever know me
'nice'?"
"Always," she said, smiling.
But he would not smile; he went back to his garden for some more roots;
when he returned with a wedge taken from his bed of lemon-lilies, he
said crossly, "David can manage his own affairs; he doesn't need
apron-strings! I think I've mentioned that to you before?"
"I think I recall some such reference," she admitted, her voice
trembling with friendly amusement.
But he went on growling and barking: "Foolish woman! to try the
experiment at your age, of living in a strange place!"
At that she laughed outright: "That is the nicest way in the world to
tell a friend you will miss her."
Robert Ferguson did not laugh. In fact, as the winter passed and the
time drew near for the move to be made, nobody laughed very much.
Certainly not the two young people; since David had left the medical
school he had worked in Mercer's infirmary, and now they both felt as
if the world would end for them when they ceased to see each other
several times a day. David did his best to be cheerful about it; in
fact, with that common sense of his which his engagement had
accentuated, he was almost too cheerful. The hospital service would be
a great advantage, he said, So great that perhaps the three years'
engagement to which they were looking forward,--because David's
finances would probably not be equal to a wife before that; the three
years might be shortened to two. But to be parted for two years--it was
"practically parting," for visits don't amount to anything; "it's
tough," said David. "It's _terrific!_" Elizabeth said.
"Oh, well," David reminded her, "two years is a lot better than three."
It was curious to see how Love had developed these two young creatures:
Elizabeth had sprung into swift and glowing womanhood; with triumphant
candor her conduct confessed that she had forgotten everything but
Love. She showed her heart to David, and to her little world, as freely
as a flower that has opened overnight--a rose, still wet with dew, that
bares a warm and fragrant bosom to the sun. David had matured, too; but
his maturity was of the mind rather than the body; manhood suddenly
fell upon him like a cloak, and because his sense of humor had always
been a little defective, it was a somewhat heavy cloak, which hid and
even hampered the spontaneous freedom of youth. He was deeply and
passionately in love, but his face fell into lines of responsibility
rather than passion; lines, even, of care. He grew markedly older; he
thought incessantly of how soon he would be able to marry, and always
in connection with his probable income and his possible expenses.
Helena Richie was immensely proud of this sudden, serious manhood; but
Elizabeth's uncle took it as a matter of course:--had he not, himself,
ceased to be an ass at twenty? Why shouldn't David Richie show some
sense at twenty-five!
As for Elizabeth, she simply adored. Perhaps she was, once in a while,
a little annoyed at the rather ruthless power with which David would
calmly override some foolish wish of hers; and sometimes there would be
a gust of temper,--but it always yielded at his look or touch. When he
was not near her, when she could not see the speechless passion in his
eyes, or feel the tremor of his lips when they answered the demand of
hers, then the anger lasted longer. Once or twice, when he was away
from home, his letters, with their laconic taking of her love for
granted, made her sharply displeased; but when he came back, and kissed
her, she forgot everything but his arms. Curiously enough, the very
completeness of her surrender kept him so entirely reverent of her that
people who did not know him might have thought him cold--but Elizabeth
knew! She knew his love, even when, as she fulminated against the
misery of being left alone, David merely said, briefly, "Oh, well, two
years is a lot better than three."
The two years of absence were to begin in April. It was in February
that Robert Ferguson was told definitely just when his tenant would
terminate her lease; he received the news in absolute silence. Mrs.
Richie's note came at breakfast; he read it, then went into his library
and shut the door. He sat down at his writing-table, his hands in his
pockets, an unlighted cigar between his teeth. He sat there nearly an
hour. Then, throwing the cigar into his waste-basket, he knocked his
glasses off with a bewildered gesture; "Well, I'll be hanged," he said,
softly. It was at that moment that he forgave Mrs. Maitland her
outrageous joke of more than a year before. "I've always known that
woman was no fool," he said, smiling ruefully at the remembrance of his
anger at Sarah Maitland's advice. "It was darned good advice!" he said;
but he looked positively dazed. "And I've always said I wouldn't give
Life the chance to play another trick on me!" he reflected; "well, I
won't. This is no silly love-affair; it's good common sense." Ten
minutes later, as he started for his office, he caught sight of his
face in the mirror in the hall. He had lifted one hand to take his hat
from the rack, but as he suddenly saw himself, he stood stock-still,
with upraised arm and extended fingers; Robert Ferguson had probably
not been really aware of his reflection in a looking-glass for
twenty-five years. He saw now a lean, lined, sad face, a morose droop
of thin and bitter lips; he saw gray hair standing up stiffly above a
careworn forehead; he saw kind, troubled eyes. And as he looked, he
frowned. "I'm an ugly cuss," he said to himself, sighing; "and I look
sixty." In point of fact, he was nearly fifty. "But so is she," he
added, defiantly, and took down his hat. "Only, _she_ looks forty." And
then he thought of Mrs. Maitland's "fair and fifty," and smiled, in
spite of himself. "Yes, she is rather good-looking," he admitted.
And indeed she was; Mrs. Richie's quiet life with her son had kept her
forehead smooth, and her eyes--eyes the color of a brook which loiters
in shady places over last year's leaves--softly clear. There was a
gentle placidity about her; the curious, shy hesitation, the deep,
half-frightened sadness, which had been so marked when her landlord
knew her first, had disappeared; sometimes she even showed soft
gaieties of manner or speech which delighted her moody neighbor to the
point of making him laugh. And laughing had all the charm of novelty to
poor Robert Ferguson. "I never dreamed of her going away," he said to
himself. Well, yes; certainly Mrs. Maitland had some sense, after all.
When, a week later, blundering and abrupt, he referred to Mrs.
Maitland's "sense," Mrs. Richie could not at first understand what he
was talking about. "She 'knew more than you gave her credit for'? I
thought you gave her credit for knowing everything! Oh, you don't want
me to leave Mercer? I don't see the connection. _I_ don't know
everything! But you are very flattering, I'm sure. I am a 'good
tenant,' I suppose?"
"Please don't go." She laughed at what she thought was his idea of a
joke; then said, with half a sigh, that she did not know any one in
Philadelphia; "when David isn't at home I shall be pretty lonely," she
said.
"Please don't go," he said again, in a low voice. They were sitting
before the fire in Mrs. Richie's parlor; the glass doors of the
plant-room were open,--that plant-room, which had been his first
concession to her; and the warm air of the parlor was fragrant with
blossoming hyacinths. There was a little table between them, with a
bowl of violets on it, and a big lamp. Robert Ferguson rose, and stood
with his hands behind him, looking down at her. His hair, in a stiff
brush above his forehead, was quite gray, but his face in its unwonted
emotion seemed quivering with youth. He knocked off his glasses
irritably. "I never know how to say things," he said, in a low voice;
"but--please don't go."
Mrs. Richie stared at him in amazement.
"I think we'd better get married," he said.
"_Mr. Ferguson!_"
"I think I've cared about you ever since you came here, but I am such a
fool I didn't know it until Mrs. Maitland said that absurd thing last
fall."
"I--I don't know what you mean!" she parried, breathlessly; "at any
rate, please don't say anything more about it."
"I have to say something more." He sat down again with the air of one
preparing for a siege. "I've got several things to say. First, I want
to find out my chances?"
"You haven't any."
His face moved. He put on his glasses carefully, with both hands. "Mrs.
Richie, is there any one else? If so, I'll quit. I know you will answer
straight; you are not like other women. _Is there anybody else?_
That--that Old Chester doctor who comes to see you once in a while, I
understand he's a widower now; wife's just died; and if--"
"There is nobody; _never_ anybody."
"Ah!" he said, triumphantly; then frowned: "If your attachment to your
husband makes you say I haven't any chance--but it can't be that."
Her eyes suddenly dilated. "Why not? Why do you say it can't be that?"
she said in a frightened voice.
"I somehow got the impression--forgive me if I am saying anything I
oughtn't to; but I had kind of an idea that you were not especially
happy with him."
She was silent.
"But even if you were," he went on, "it is so many years; I don't mean
to offend you, but a woman isn't faithful to a memory for so many
years!" he looked at her incredulously; "not even you, I think."
"Such a thing is possible," she told him coldly; she had grown very
pale. "But it is not because of--of my husband that I say I shall never
marry again."
He interrupted her. "If it isn't a dead man nor a live man that's ahead
of me, then it seems to me you can't say I haven't any chance--unless I
am personally offensive to you?" There was an almost child-like
consternation in his eyes; "am I? Of course I know I am a bear."
"Oh, please don't say things like that!" she protested. "A bear? You?
Why, you are just my good, kind friend and neighbor; but--"
"Ah!" he said, "that scared me for a minute! Well, when I understood
what was the matter with me (I didn't understand until about a week
ago), I said to myself, 'If there's nobody ahead of me, that woman
shall be my wife.' Of course, I am not talking sentimentalities to you;
we are not David and Elizabeth! I'm fifty, and you are not far from it.
But I--I--I'm hard hit, Mrs. Richie;" his voice trembled, and he
twitched off his glasses with more than usual ferocity.
Mrs. Richie rose; "Mr. Ferguson," she said, gently, "I do appreciate
the honor you do me, but--"
"Don't say a thing like that; it's foolish," he interrupted, frowning;
"what 'honor' is it, to a woman like you, to have an ugly, bad-mannered
fellow like me, want you for a wife? Why, how could I help it! How
could any man help it? I don't know what Dr. King is thinking of, that
he isn't sitting on your doorsteps waiting for a chance to ask you! I
ought to have asked you long ago. I can't imagine why I didn't, except
that I supposed we would go on always living next door to each other.
And--and I thought anything like _this_, was over for me. . . . Mrs.
Richie, please sit down, and let me finish what I have to say."
"There is no use, Mr. Ferguson," she said; but she sat down, her face
falling into lines of sadness that made her look curiously old.
"There isn't anybody ahead of me: so far, so good. Now as to my
chances; of course I realize that I haven't any,--to-day. But there's
to-morrow, Mrs. Richie; and the day after to-morrow. There's next week,
and next year;--and I don't change. Look how slow I was in finding out
that I wanted you; it's taken me all these years! What a poor, dull
fool I am! Well, I know it now; and you know it; and you don't
personally dislike me. So perhaps some day," his harsh face was
suddenly almost beautiful; "some day you'll be--_my wife!_" he said,
under his breath. He had no idea that he was "talking
sentimentalities"; he would have said he did not know how to be
sentimental. But his voice was the voice of youth and passion.
She shook her head. "No," she said, quietly; "I can't marry you, Mr.
Ferguson."
"But you are generally so reasonable," he protested, astonished and
wistful; "why, it seems to me that you _must_ be willing--after a
while? Here we are, two people getting along in years, and our children
have made a match of it; and we are used to each other, that's a very
important thing in marriage. It's just plain common sense, after David
is on his own legs in the hospital, for us to join forces. Perhaps in
the early summer? I won't be unreasonably urgent. Surely"--he was
gaining confidence from his own words--"surely you must see how
sensible--"
Involuntarily, perhaps through sheer nervousness, she laughed. "Mrs.
Maitland's 'sensible arrangement'? No, Mr. Ferguson; please let us
forget all about this--"
He gave his snort of a laugh. "Forget? Now _that_ isn't sensible. No,
you dear, foolish woman; whatever else we do, we shall neither of us
forget this. This is one of the things a man and woman don't forget;"
in his earnestness he pushed aside the bowl of violets on the table
between them, and caught her hand in both of his. "I'm going to get you
yet," he said, he was as eager as a boy.
Before she could reply, or even draw back, David opened the parlor
door, and stood aghast on the threshold. It was impossible to mistake
the situation. The moment of sharp withdrawal between the two on either
side of the table announced it, without the uttering of a word; David
caught his breath. Robert Ferguson could have wrung the intruder's
neck, but Mrs. Richie clutched at her son's presence with a gasp of
relief: "Oh--David! I thought you were next door!"
"I was," David said, briefly; "I came in to get a book for Elizabeth."
"We were--talking," Mrs. Richie said, trying to laugh. Mr. Ferguson,
standing with his back to the fire, was slowly putting on his glasses.
"But we had finished our discussion," she ended breathlessly.
"For the moment," Mr. Ferguson said, significantly; and set his jaw.
"Well, David, have you and Elizabeth decided when she is to come and
see us in Philadelphia?" Mrs. Richie asked, her voice still trembling.
"She says she'll come East whenever Mr. Ferguson can bring her," David
said, rummaging among the books on the table. "But it's a pity to wait
as long as that," he added, and the hint in his words was inescapable.
Robert Ferguson did not take hints. "I think I can manage to come
pretty soon," he retorted.