Robert Ferguson, in his library, and poor Miss White in the hall,
listened with tense nerves for the wheels of the carriage that was to
bring David Richie "to breakfast."
"Send him in to me," Mr. Ferguson had said; and then had shut himself
into his library.
Miss White was quivering with terror when at last she heard the
carriage door bang. David came leaping up the steps, his face rosy as a
girl's in the raw morning air--it was a lowering Mercer morning, with
the street lamps burning at eight o'clock in a murk of smoke and fog.
He raked the windows with a smiling glance, and then stood, laughing
for sheer happiness, waiting for _her_ to open the door to him.
David had had a change of spirit, if not of mind, since he wrote his
eminently sensible letter to Elizabeth. He had been able to scrape up
enough money of his own to pay at least one of his bills, and things
had gone better with him at the hospital, so he no longer felt the
unreasonable humiliation which Elizabeth's proposal had accentuated in
him. The reproach which his mood had read into her letter had vanished
after a good night's sleep and a good day's work; now, it seemed to him
only an exquisite expression of most lovely love, which brought the
color into his face, and made his lips burn at the thought of her lips!
Of course her idea of marrying on her little money was not to be
thought of--he and Mr. Ferguson would laugh over it together; but what
an angel she was to think of it! All that night, in the journey over
the mountains, he had lain in his berth and looked out at the stars,
cursing himself joyously for a dumb fool who had had no words to tell
her how he loved her for that sweet, divinely foolish proposal, which
was "not to be thought of"! "But when I see her, I'll make her
understand; when I hold her in my arms--" he told himself, with all the
passion of twenty-six years which had no easy outlet of speech.
When Robert Ferguson's door opened, his heart was on his lips. "Eliz--"
he began, and stopped short. "Oh, Miss White. Good morning, Miss
White!" And before poor Cherry-pie knew it, he had given her a great
hug; "Where is Elizabeth? Not out of bed yet? Oh, the lazybones!" He
was so eager that, until he was fairly in the hall, with the front door
shut, and his overcoat almost off, he did not notice her silence. Then
he gave her a startled look. "Miss White! is anything the matter? Is
Elizabeth ill?"
"No; oh, no," she said breathlessly; "but--Mr. Ferguson will tell you.
No, she is not sick. Go, he will tell you. In the library."
The color dropped out of his face as a flag drops to half-mast. "She is
dead," he said, with absolute finality in his voice. "When did she
die?" He stood staring straight ahead of him at the wall, ghastly with
fright.
"No! no! She is not dead; she is well. Quite well; oh, very well. Go,
David, my dear boy--oh, my _dear_ boy! Go to Mr. Ferguson. He will tell
you. But it is--terrible, David."
He went, dazed, and saying, "Why, but what is it? If she is not--not--"
Robert Ferguson met him on the threshold of the library, drew him in,
closed the door, and looked him full in the face. "No, she isn't dead,"
he said; "I wish to God she were." Then he struck him hard on the
shoulder. "David," he said harshly, "be a man; they've played a damned
dirty trick on you. Yesterday she married Blair Maitland.... Take it
like a man, and be thankful you are rid of her." He wheeled about and
stood with his back to his niece's lover. He had guided the inevitable
sword, but he could not witness the agony of the wound. There was
complete stillness in the room; the ticking of the clock suddenly
hammered in Robert Ferguson's ears; a cinder fell softly from the
grate. Then he heard a long-drawn breath:
"Tell me, if you please, exactly what has happened."
Elizabeth's uncle, still with his back turned, told him what little he
knew. "I don't know where they are," he ended; "I don't want to know.
The scoundrel wrote to Nannie, but he gave no address. Elizabeth's
letter to me is on my table; read it."
He heard David move over to the library table; he heard the rustle of
the sheet of paper as it was drawn out of the envelope. Then silence
again, and the clamor of the clock. He turned round, in time to see
David stagger slightly and drop into a chair; perspiration had burst
out on his forehead. He was so white around his lips that Robert
Ferguson knew that for a moment his body shared the awful astonishment
of his soul. "There's some whiskey over there," he said, nodding toward
a side table. David shook his head. Then, still shuddering with that
dreadful sickness, he spoke.
"She ... has married--Blair? _Blair_?" he repeated, uncomprehendingly.
He put his hand up to his head with that strange, cosmic gesture which
horrified humanity has made ever since it was capable of feeling horror.
"Yes," Mr. Ferguson said grimly; "yes, Blair--your friend! Well, you
are not the first man who has had a sweetheart--and a 'friend.' A wife,
even--and a 'friend.' And then discovered that he had neither wife nor
friend. Damn him."
"Damn him?" said David, and burst into a scream of laughter. He was on
his feet now, but he rocked a little on his shaking legs. "Damnation is
too good for him; may God--" In the outburst of fury that followed,
even Robert Ferguson quailed and put up a protesting hand.
"David--David," he stammered, actually recoiling before that storm of
words. "David, he will get what he deserves. She was worthless!" David
stopped short. At the mention of Elizabeth, his hurricane of rage
dropped suddenly into the flat calm of absolute bewilderment. "Do not
speak of Elizabeth in that way, in my presence," he said, panting.
"She is her mother's daughter! She is bad, through and through. She--"
"Stop!" David cried, violently; "what in hell do you keep on saying
that for? I will not listen--I will not hear." . . . He was beside
himself; he did not know what he said.
But Robert Ferguson was silenced. When David spoke again, it was in
gasps, and his words came thickly as if his tongue were numb:
"What--what are we to do?"
"Do? There is nothing to do, that I can see."
"She must be taken away from him!"
"Nobody knows where they are. But if I did know, I wouldn't lift my
hand to get her away. She has made her bed--she can lie in it, so far
as I am concerned."
"But she didn't!" David groaned; "you don't understand. I am the one to
curse, not Elizabeth."
"What are you talking about?"
"I did it."
The older man looked at him with almost contemptuous incredulity. "My
dear fellow, what is the use of denying facts? You can't make black
white, can you? Day before yesterday you loved this--this," he seemed
to search for some epithet; glanced at David, and said, almost meekly:
"girl. Day before yesterday she expected to marry you. To-day she is
the wife of another man. Have you committed any crime in the last three
days which justifies that?"
"Yes," David said, in a smothered voice, "I have." Then he handed back
to the shamed and angry man the poor, pitiful little letter. "Don't you
see? She says, 'David didn't want'"--he broke off, unable to speak. A
moment later he added, "'E. _F_.' She isn't used to the--the other,
yet," he said, again with that bewildered look.
But Elizabeth's uncle was too absorbed in his own humiliation to see
confession in that tragic initial. "What is that nonsense about your
not wanting her?"
"She thought so. She had reason to think so."
"You had better explain yourself, David."
"She wrote to me," David said, after a pause; "she told me she would
have that money of hers on her birthday. She said we could be married
then." He reddened to his temples. "She asked me to marry her that day;
_asked_ me, you understand." He turned on his heel and went over to the
window; he stood there for some minutes with his back to Robert
Ferguson. The green door in the wall between the two gardens was
swinging back and forth on sagging hinges; David watched it with
unseeing eyes; suddenly a sooty pigeon came circling down and lit just
inside the old arbor, which was choked with snow shovelled from the
flagstones of the path. Who can say why, watching the pigeon's
teetering walk on the soot-specked snow, David should smell the
fragrance of heliotrope hot in the sunshine, and see Elizabeth drawing
Blair's ring from her soft young bosom? He turned back to her uncle,
with a rigid face: "Well, _I--I_ said--'no' to her letter. Do you
understand? I told her 'no.' '_No_,' to a girl like Elizabeth! Because,
in my--my filthy pride--" he paused, picked up a book, turned it over
and over, and then put it straight edge to edge with the table. His
hand was trembling violently. When he could speak again it was in a
whisper. "My cursed pride. I didn't want to marry until I could do
everything. I wasn't willing to be under obligations; I told her so. I
said--'no.' It made her angry. It would make any girl angry,--but
Elizabeth! Why, she used to bite herself when she was angry. When she
is angry, she will do--anything. _She has done it._ My God!"
Robert Ferguson could not look at him. He made a pretense of taking up
some papers from his desk, and somehow or other got himself out of the
room. He found Miss White in the hall, clasping and unclasping her
little thin old hands.
"How did he--?" she tried to say, but her poor nibbling lip could not
finish the question.
"How does a man usually take a stab in the back?" he flung at her.
"Don't be a--" He stopped short. "I beg your pardon, Miss White." But
she was too heartbroken to resent the rudeness of his suffering.
After that they stood there waiting, without speaking to each other.
Once Mr. Ferguson made as if he would go back to the library, but
stopped with his hand on the door-knob; once Miss White said brokenly,
"The boy _must_ have some breakfast"; but still they left him to
himself.
After a while, Cherry-pie sat down on the stairs and cried softly.
Robert Ferguson walked about; now out to the front door, with a feint
of looking at the thermometer in the vestibule; now the length of the
hall, into which the fog had crept until the gas burned in a hazy ring;
now into the parlor--from which he instantly fled as if a serpent had
stung him: her little basket of embroidery, overflowing with its pretty
foolishness, stood on the table.
When David Richie opened the library door and came into the hall he was
outwardly far steadier than they. "I think I'll go to the depot now,
sir. No, thank you, Miss White; I'll get something to eat there."
"Oh, but my dear boy," she said, trying to swallow her tears, "now
do--now don't--I can have your breakfast ready immejetly, and--"
"Let him alone," Mr. Ferguson said; "he'll eat when he feels like it.
David, must you go back this morning? I wish you'd stay."
"I have to go back, thank you, sir."
"You may find a letter from her at home; she didn't know you were to be
here to-day."
"I may," David said; and some dull note in his voice told Robert
Ferguson that the young man's youth was over.
"My boy," he said, "forget her! You are well rid of--" he stopped
short, with an apprehensive glance; but David made no protest;
apparently he was not listening.
"I shall take the express," he said; "I must see my mother, before I go
to the hospital to-night. She must be told. She will be--sorry."
"Your mother!" said Robert Ferguson. "Well, David, thank God you have
loved one woman who is good!"
"I have loved _two_ women who are good," David said. He turned and took
Miss White's poor old, shaking hands in his. "When she comes back--"
"Comes back?" the older man cried out, furiously; "she shall never come
back to this house!"
David did not notice him: "Miss White, listen. When you see her, tell
her I understand. Just tell her, 'David says, "I understand."' And Miss
White, say: 'He says, try to forgive him.'"
She sobbed so, that instinctively, but without tenderness, he put his
arm about her; his face was dull to the point of indifference. "Don't
cry, Miss White. And be good to her; but I know you will be good to
her!" He picked up his hat, put his coat over his arm, and stretched
out his hand to Robert Ferguson with a steady smile. "Good-by, sir."
Then the smile dropped and left the amazed and naked face quivering
before their eyes. Through the wave of merciful numbness which had
given him his hard composure, agony stabbed him. "For God's sake, don't
be hard on her. She has enough to bear! And blame me--_me_. I did it--"
He turned and fled out of the house, and the two unhappy people who
loved Elizabeth looked at each other speechlessly.