Mrs. Maitland and Nannie were having their supper at the big, cluttered
office table in the shabby dining-room--shabbier now by twenty years
than when Blair first expressed his opinion of it. In the midst of the
silent meal Sarah Maitland's eye fell on her stepdaughter, and hardened
into attention. Nannie looked pale, she thought; and frowned slightly.
It occurred to her that the girl might be lonely in the long evenings
over there in the parlor, with nothing to do but read foolish little
stories, or draw foolish little pictures, or embroider foolish little
tidies and things. "What a life!" she said to herself; it was a shame
Blair did not come in and cheer his sister up. Yes; Nannie was
certainly very solitary. What a pity David Richie had no sense! "Now
that he can't get Elizabeth, nothing could be more sensible," she said
to herself; then sighed. Young men were never very sensible in regard
to matrimony. "I suppose I ought to do something myself to cheer her
up," she thought--a little impatiently, for really it was rather absurd
to expect a person of her quality to cheer Nannie! Still, she might
talk to her. Of course they had only one topic in common:
"Seen your brother lately?"
"No, Mamma. He went East day before yesterday."
"Has he found anything to do?" This was the usual weary question;
Nannie gave the usual scared answer:
"I _think_ not; not yet. He is going to look up something in New York,
Elizabeth says."
"Tell Elizabeth I will take him on at the Works, whenever he is ready
to come. His belly will bring him to it yet!" she ended, with the old,
hopeful belief that has comforted parents ever since the fatted calf
proved the correctness of the expectation. Nannie sighed. Mrs. Maitland
realized that she was not "cheering" her very much. "You ought to amuse
yourself," she said, severely; "how do you amuse yourself?"
"I--draw," Nannie managed to say; she really could not think of any
other amusement.
Then her stepmother had an inspiration: "Would you like to come over to
the furnace and see the night cast? It's quite a sight, people say."
Nannie was dumfounded at the attention. Mamma offering to take her to
the Works! To be sure, it was the last thing on earth she would choose
to do, but if her stepmother asked her, of course she could not say no.
She said "yes," reluctantly enough, but Mrs. Maitland did not detect
the reluctance; she was too pleased with herself at having thought of
some way of entertaining the girl.
"Get your bonnet on, get your bonnet on!" she commanded, in high good
humor. And Nannie, quailing at the thought of the Works at night--"it's
dreadful enough in the daytime," she said to herself--put on her hat,
in trembling obedience. "Yes," Mrs. Maitland said, as she tramped down
the cinder path toward the mills, Nannie almost running at her
heels--"yes, the cast is a pretty sight, people say. Your brother once
said that it ought to be painted. Well, I suppose there are people who
care for pictures," she said, incredulously. "I know I'm $5,000 out of
pocket on account of a picture," she ended, with a grim chuckle.
As they were crossing the Yards, the cavernous glooms of the Works,
under the vast stretch of their sheet-iron roofs, were lighted for
dazzling moments by the glow of molten metal and the sputtering roar of
flames from the stacks; a network of narrow-gauge tracks spread about
them, and the noises from the mills were deafening. Nannie clutched
nervously at Mrs. Maitland's arm, and her stepmother grunted with
amusement. "Hold on to me," she shouted--she had to shout to make
herself heard; "there's nothing to hurt you. Why, I could walk around
here with my eyes shut!"
Nannie clung to her frantically; if she protested, the soft flutter of
her voice did not reach Mrs. Maitland's ears. A few steps farther
brought them into the comparative silence of the cast-house of the
furnace, and here they paused while Sarah Maitland spoke to one of the
keepers. Only the furnace itself was roofed; beyond it the stretch of
molded sand was arched by the serene and starlit night.
"That's the pig bed out there," Mrs. Maitland explained, kindly; "see,
Nannie? Those cross-trenches in the sand they call sows; the little
hollows on the side are the pigs. When they tap the furnace, the melted
iron will flow down into 'em; understand?"
"Mamma, I'd--I'd like to go home," poor Nannie managed to say; "it
scares me!"
Mrs. Maitland looked at her in astonishment. "Scares you? What scares
you?"
"It's so--dreadful," Nannie gasped.
"You don't suppose I'd bring you anywhere where you could get hurt?"
her stepmother said, incredulously. She was astonished to the point of
being pained. How could Herbert's girl be such a fool? She remembered
that Blair used to call his sister the "'fraid-cat." "Good name," she
thought, contemptuously. She made no allowance for the effect of this
scene of night and fire, of stupendous shadows and crashing noises,
upon a little bleached personality, which for all these years, had
lived in the shadow of a nature so dominant and aggressive that, quite
unconsciously, it sucked the color and the character out of any
temperament feebler than itself. Sarah Maitland frowned, and said
roughly, "Oh, you can go home, if you want to; Mr. Parks!" she called
to the foreman; "just walk back to the house, if you please, with my
daughter;" then she turned on her heel and went up to the furnace.
Nannie, clutching Parks's hand, stumbled out into the darkness. "It's
perfectly awful!" she confided to the good-natured man, when he left
her at her back door.
"Oh, you get used to it," he said, kindly. "You'd 'a knowed," he told
one of his workmen afterward, "that there wasn't hide nor hair of her
that belonged to the Old One. A slip of a thing, and scared to death of
the noise."
The "Old One," after Nannie had gone, poked about for a moment or
two,--"she noses into things, to save two cents," her men used to say,
with reluctant admiration of the ruthless shrewdness that was instant
to detect their shortcomings; then she went down the slight incline
from the furnace hearth to the open stretch of molding-sand; there was
a pile of rusty scrap at one side, and here, in the soft April darkness
under the stars, she seated herself, looking absently at the furnace
and the black, gnome-like figures of the helpers. She was thinking just
what Parks had thought, that Nannie had none of her blood in her.
"Afraid!" said Sarah Maitland. Well, Blair had never been afraid, she
would say that for him; he was a fool, and pig-headed, and a loafer;
but he wasn't a coward. He had even thought it fine, that scene of
power, where civilization made itself before his very eyes! When would
he think it fine enough to come in and go to work? Come in, and take
his part in making civilization? Then she noticed the bending figure of
the keeper opening the notch of the furnace; instantly there was a roar
of sparks, and a blinding white gush of molten iron flowing like water
down into the sand runner. The sudden, fierce illumination drowned the
stars overhead, and brought into clear relief her own figure, sitting
there on the pile of scrap watching the flowing iron. Tiny blue flames
of escaping gas danced and shimmered on its ineffable rippling
brightness, that cooled from dazzling snow to rose, then to crimson,
and out in the sand, to glowing gray. Blair had called it "beautiful."
Well, it was a pretty sight! She wished she had told him that she
herself thought it pretty; but the fact was, it had never struck her
before. "I suppose I don't notice pretty things very much," she
thought, in some surprise. "Well, I've never had time for foolishness.
Too busy making money for Blair." She sighed; after all, he wasn't
going to have the money. She had been heaping up riches, and had not
known who should gather them. She had been too busy to see pretty
things. And why? That orphan asylums and reformatories--and David
Richie's hospital--should have a few extra thousands! A month ago the
fund she was making for David had reached the limit she had set for it,
and only to-day she had brought the bank certificate of deposit home
with her. She had felt a little glow of satisfaction when she locked it
into the safe in her desk; she liked the consciousness of a good job
finished. She was going to summon the youngster to Mercer, and tell him
how he was to administer the fund; and if he put on any of his airs and
graces about accepting money, she would shut him up mighty quick! "I'll
write him to-morrow, if I've time," she had said. At the moment, the
sense of achievement had exhilarated her; yet now, as she sat there on
the heap of scrap, bending a pliant boring between her fingers, her
pillar of fire roaring overhead from the chimneys of the furnaces, the
achievement seemed flat enough. Why should she, to build a hospital for
another woman's son, have worked so hard that she had never had time to
notice the things her own son called "pretty"? Not his china beetles,
of course, or truck like that; but the shimmering flow of her iron,--or
even that picture, for which she was out of pocket $5,000. "I can see
you might call it pretty, if it hadn't cost so much," she admitted.
Yes, she had worked, she told herself, "as hard as a man," to earn
money for Blair!--only to make him idle and to have him say that thing
about her clothes which Goose Molly had said before he was born.
"Wonder if I've been a fool?" she ruminated.
It was at that moment that she noticed, at one side of the furnace,
between two bricks of the hearth, a little puff of white vapor;
instantly she leaped, shouting, to her feet. But it was too late. The
molten iron, seeping down through some crack in the furnace, creeping,
creeping, beneath the bricks of the pavement, had reached some
moisture...The explosion, the clouds of scalding steam, the terror of
the flowing, scattering fire, drowned her voice and hid her frantic
gestures of warning....
"Killed?" she said, furiously, as some one helped her up from the
scrap-heap against which she had been hurled; "of course not! I don't
get killed." Then suddenly the appalling confusion was dominated by her
voice:
"_Look after those men._"
She stood there in the center of the horror, reeling a little once or
twice, holding her skirt up over her left arm, and shouting her quick
orders. "Hurt?" she said again to a questioning helper. "I don't know.
I haven't time to find out. That man there is alive! Get a doctor!" She
did not leave the Works until two badly burned men had been carried
away, and two dead bodies lifted out of the reek of steam and the
spatter of half-chilled metal. Then, still holding her skirt over her
arm, she went alone, in the darkness, up the path to her back door.
"No! I don't want anybody to go home with me," she said, angrily; "look
after things here. Notify Mr. Ferguson. I'll come back." When she
banged open her own door, she had only one question:
"Is--Nannie--all--right?" Harris, gaping with dismay, and stammering,
"My goodness! yes'm; yes'm!" followed her to the dining-room, where she
crashed down like a felled tree, and lay unconscious on the floor.
When she began to come to herself, a doctor, for whom Harris had fled,
was binding up her torn arm, which, covered with blood, and black with
grit and rust, was an ugly sight. "Where's Blair?" she said, thickly;
then came entirely to her senses, and demanded, sharply, "Nannie all
right?" Reassured again on this point, she looked frowningly at the
doctor. "Come, hurry! I want to get back to the Works."
"Back to the Works! To-night? Impossible! You mustn't think of such a
thing," the young man protested. Mrs. Maitland looked at him, and he
shifted from one foot to the other. "It--it won't do, really," he said,
weakly; "that was a pretty bad knock you got on the back of your head,
and your arm--"
"Young man," she said, "you patch this up, _quick_. I've got to see to
my men. That's my business. You 'tend to yours."
"But my business is to keep you here," he told her, essaying to be
humorous. His humor went out like a little candle in the wind: "Your
business is to put on bandages. That's all I pay you for."
And the doctor put on bandages with expedition. In the front hall he
spoke to Nannie. "Your mother has a very bad arm, Miss Maitland; and
that violent blow on her head may have done damage. I can't tell yet.
You must make her keep still."
"_Make!_--Mamma?" said Nannie.
"She says she's going over to the Works," said the doctor, shrugging
his shoulders; "when she comes home, get her to bed as quickly as you
can. I'll come in and see her in the morning, if she wants me. But if
she won't do what I say about keeping quiet, I'd rather you called in
other advice." When Nannie tried to "make Mamma" keep still, the only
reply she received was: "You showed your sense in going home, my dear!"
And off she went, Harris, at Nannie's instigation, lurking along behind
her. "If Herbert's girl had been hurt!" she said, aloud, staggering a
little as she walked, "my God, what would I have done?"
Afterward, they said it was astounding that she had been able to go
back to the Works that night. She must have been in very intense pain.
When she came home, the pain conquered to the extent of sending her, at
midnight, up to her stepdaughter's room; she was red with fever, and
her eyes were glassy. "Got any laudanum, or stuff of that kind?" she
demanded. And yet the next day, when the bandages had been changed and
there was some slight relief, she persisted in going to the Works
again. But the third day she gave up, and attended to her business in
the dining-room.
"If only Blair would come home," Nannie said, "I think, perhaps, she
would be nice to him. Haven't you any idea where he is, Elizabeth?"
"Not the slightest," Elizabeth said, indifferently. She herself came
every day, and performed what small personal services Mrs. Maitland
would permit. Nannie did not amount to much as a nurse, but she was
really helpful in writing letters, signing them so exactly in Sarah
Maitland's hand that her stepmother was greatly diverted at her
proficiency. "I shall have to look after my check-book," she said, with
a chuckle.
It was not until a week later that they began to be alarmed. It was
Harris who first discovered the seriousness of her condition; when he
did, the knowledge came like a blow to her household and her office. It
was late in the afternoon. Earlier in the day she had had a violent
chill, during which she sat crouching and cowering over the dining-room
fire, refusing to go to bed, and in a temper that scared Nannie and
Harris almost to death. When the chill ceased, she went, flushed with
fever, to her own room, saying she was "all right," and banging the
door behind her. At about six, when Harris knocked to say that supper
was ready, she came out, holding the old German cologne bottle in her
hand. "_He_ gave me that," she said, and fondled the bottle against her
cheek; then, suddenly she pushed it into Harris's face. "Kiss it!" she
commanded, and giggled shrilly.
Harris jumped back with a screech. _"Gor!"_ he said; and his knees hit
together. The slender green bottle fell smashing to the floor. Mrs.
Maitland started, and caught her breath; her mind cleared instantly.
"Clean up that mess. The smell of the cologne takes my breath away.
I--I didn't know I had it in my hand."
That night Elizabeth sent a peremptory letter into space, telling Blair
that his mother was seriously ill, and he really ought to be at home.
But he had left the hotel to which she sent it, without giving any
address, so it lay in a dusty pigeonhole awaiting his return a week
later.
The delirium came again the next day; then Sarah Maitland cried,
because, she said, Nannie had hidden the Noah's ark; "and Blair and I
want to play with it," she whined. But a moment afterward she looked at
her stepdaughter with kind eyes, and said, as she had said a dozen
times in the last ten days, "Lucky you went home that night, my dear."
Of course by this time the alarm was general. The young doctor was
supported, at Robert Ferguson's insistence, by an old doctor, who, if
he was awed by his patient, at least did not show it. He was even
courageous enough to bring a nurse along with him.
"Miss Baker will spare your daughter," he said, soothingly, when Sarah
Maitland, seeing the strange figure in her bedroom, had declared she
wouldn't have a fussing woman about. "Miss Nannie needs help," the
doctor said. Mrs. Maitland frowned, and yielded.
But the nurse did not have a good time. In her stiffly starched skirt,
with her little cap perched on her head, she went fluttering prettily
about, watched all the while by the somber, half-shut eyes. She moved
the furniture, she dusted the bureau, she arranged the little row of
photographs; and then she essayed to smooth Mrs. Maitland's hair--it
was the last straw. The big, gray head began to lift slowly; a
trembling finger pointed at the girl; there was only one word:
"_Stop_."
The startled nurse stopped,--so abruptly that she almost lost her
balance.
"Clear out. You can sit in the hall. When I want you, I'll let you
know."
Miss Baker fled, and Mrs. Maitland apparently forgot her. When the
doctor came, however, she roused herself to say: "I won't have that
fool girl buzzing round. I don't like all this highfalootin' business
of nurses, anyhow. They are nothing but foolish expense." Perhaps that
last word stirred some memory, for she added abruptly: "Nannie, bring
me that--that picture you have in the parlor. The Virgin Mary, you
know. Rags of popery, but I want to look at it. No; I can't pay $5,000
for 14 X 18 inches of old master, and hire nurses to curl my hair,
too!" But nobody smiled at her joke.
When Nannie brought the picture, she bade her put it on a chair by the
bedside, and sometimes the two girls saw her look at it intently. "I
think she likes the child," Elizabeth said, in a low voice; but Nannie
sighed, and said, "No; she is provoked because Blair was extravagant."
After Miss Baker's banishment, Elizabeth did most of the waiting on
her, for Nannie's anxious timidity made her awkward to the point of
being, as Mrs. Maitland expressed it, wearily, "more bother than she
was worth." Once she asked where Blair was, and Elizabeth said that
nobody knew. "He heard of some business opening, Mrs. Maitland, and
went East to see about it."
"Went East? What did he go East for? He's got a business opening at
home, right under his nose," she said, thickly.
After that she did not ask for him. But from her bed in her own room
she could see the dining-room door, and she lay there watching it, with
expectation smoldering in her half-shut eyes. Once, furtively, when no
one was looking, she lifted the hem of the sheet with her fumbling
right hand and wiped her eyes. For the next few days she gained, and
lost, and gained again. There were recurrent periods of lucidity,
followed by the terrible childishness that had been the first
indication of her condition. At the end of the next week she suddenly
said, in a loud voice, "I won't stay in bed!" And despite Nannie's
pleadings, and Miss Baker's agitated flutterings, she got up, and
shuffled into the dining-room; she stood there, clutching with her
uninjured hand a gray blanket that was huddled around her shoulders.
Her hair was hanging in limp, disordered locks about her face, which
had fallen away to the point of emaciation. She was leaning against the
table, her knees shaking with weakness. But it was evident that her
mind was quite clear. "Bed is a place to die in," she said; "I'm well.
Let me alone. I shall stay here." She managed to get over to her desk,
and sank into the revolving chair with a sigh of relief. "Ah!" she
said, "I'm getting out of the woods. Harris! Bring me something to
eat." But when the food was put before her, she could not touch it.
Robert Ferguson, who almost lived at the Maitland house that week, told
her, soothingly, that she really ought to go back to bed, at which she
laughed with rough goodnature. "Don't talk baby-talk. I'm getting well.
But I've been sick; I've had a scare; so I'm going to write a letter,
in case--Or here, you write it for me."
"To Blair?" he said, as he took his pen out of his pocket.
"Blair? No! To David Richie about that money. Don't you remember I told
you I was going to give him a lot of money for a hospital? That I was
going to get a certificate of deposit"--her voice wavered and she
seemed to doze. A moment later, when her mind cleared again, her
superintendent said, with some effort: "Aren't you going to do
something for Blair? You will get well, I'm sure, but--in case--Your
will isn't fair to the boy; you ought to do something for him."
Instantly she was alert: "I have. I've done the best thing in the world
for him; I've thrown him on his own legs! As for getting well, of
course I'm going to get well. But if I didn't, everything is closed up;
my will's made; Blair is sure of poverty. Well; I guess I won't have
you write to David to-day; I'm tired. When I'm out again, I'll tell
Howe to draw up a paper telling him just what the duties of a trustee
are.... Why don't you ... why don't you marry his mother, and be done
with it? I hate to see a man and woman shilly-shally."
"She won't have me," he said, good-naturedly; in his anxiety he was
willing to let her talk of anything, merely to amuse her.
"Well, she's a nice woman," Sarah Maitland said; "and a good woman; I
was afraid _you_ were doing the shilly-shallying. And any man who would
hesitate to take her, isn't fit to black her boots. Friend Ferguson, I
have a contempt for a man who is more particular than his Creator."
Robert Ferguson wondered what she was driving at, but he would not
bother her by a question.
"What was that I used to say about her?" the sick woman ruminated, with
closed eyes; "'fair and--What was it? Forty? No, that wasn't it."
"Fifty," he suggested, smiling.
She shook her head peevishly. "No, that wasn't it. 'Fair, and,
and'--what was it? It puts me out of patience to forget things! 'Fair
and--_frail_!' That was it; frail! 'Fair and frail.'" She did not pause
for her superintendent's gasp of protest. "Yes; first time I saw her, I
thought there was a nigger in the woodpile. She won't marry you, friend
Ferguson, because she has something on her conscience. Tell her I say
not to be a fool. The best man going is none too good for her!"
Robert Ferguson's heart gave a violent plunge in his breast, but before
his angry denial could reach her brain, her thought had wandered. "No!
no! no! I won't go to bed. Bed is where people die." She got up from
her chair, to walk about and show how well she was; but when she
reached the center of the room she seemed to crumple up, sinking and
sliding down on to the floor, her back against one of the carved legs
of the table. Once there, she would not get up. She became so violently
angry when they urged her to let them help her to her feet, that they
were obliged to yield. "We will do more harm by irritating her," the
doctor said, "than any good we could accomplish by putting her back to
bed forcibly." So they put cushions behind her, and there she sat,
staring with dim, expectant eyes at the dining room door; sometimes
speaking with stoical endurance, intelligently enough; sometimes, when
delirious, whimpering with the pain of that terrible arm, swollen now
to a monstrous mass of agony.
Late in the afternoon she said she wanted to see '"that picture"; and
Elizabeth knelt beside her, holding the little dark canvas so that she
could look at it; she sat staring into it for a long time. "Mary didn't
try to keep her baby from the cross," she said, suddenly; "well, I've
done better than that; I brought the cross to my baby." Her face fell
into wonderfully peaceful lines. Just at dusk she tried to sing.
"'Drink to me only with thine eyes'"
she quavered; "my boy sings that beautifully. I must give him a
present. A check. I must give him a check."
But when Nannie said, eagerly, "Blair has written Elizabeth that he
will be at home to-morrow; I'll tell him you want to see him; and oh,
Mamma, won't you please be nice to him?"--she looked perfectly blank.
Toward morning she sat silently for a whole hour sucking her thumb.
When, abruptly, she came to herself and realized what she had been
doing, the shamed color rose in her face. Nannie, kneeling at her side,
caught at the flicker of intelligence to say, "Mamma, would you like to
see the Rev. Mr. Gore? He is here; waiting in the parlor. Sha'n't I
bring him in?"
Mrs. Maitland frowned. "What does he come for now? I'm sick. I can't
see people. Besides, I sent him a check for Foreign Missions last
month."
"Oh, Mamma!" Nannie said, brokenly, "he hasn't come for money; I--I
sent for him."
Sarah Maitland's eyes suddenly opened; her mind cleared instantly.
"Oh," she said; and then, slowly: "Um-m; I see." She seemed to meditate
a moment; then she said, gravely: "No, my dear, no; I won't see little
Gore. He's a good little man; a very good little man for missions and
that sort of thing. But when it comes to _this_--" she paused; "I
haven't time to see to him," she said, soberly. A minute later,
noticing Nannie's tears, she tried to cheer her: "Come, come! don't be
troubled," she said, smiling kindly, "I can paddle my own canoe, my
dear." After that she was herself for nearly half an hour. Once she
said. "My house is in order, friend Ferguson." Then she lost herself
again. To those who watched her, huddled on the heap of cushions,
mumbling and whimpering, or with a jerk righting her mind into stony
endurance, she seemed like a great tower falling and crumbling in upon
itself. At that last dreadful touch of decay, when she put her thumb in
her mouth like a baby, her stepdaughter nearly fainted.
All that night the mists gathered, and thinned, and gathered again. In
the morning, still lying on the floor, propped against all the pillows
and cushions of the house, she suddenly looked with clear eyes at
Nannie.
"Why!" she said, in her own voice, and frowning sharply, "that
certificate of deposit! I got it from the Bank the day of the accident,
but I haven't indorsed it! Lucky I've got it here in the house. Bring
it to me. It's in the safe in my desk. Take my keys."
Nannie, who for the moment was alone with her, found the key, and
opening the little iron door in the desk, brought the certificate and a
pen dipped in ink; but even in those few moments of preparation, the
mist had begun to settle again: "I told the cashier it was a present I
was going to make," she chuckled to herself; "said _he'd_ like to get a
present like that. I reckon he would. Reckon anybody would." Her voice
lapsed into incoherent murmurings, and Nannie had to speak to her twice
before her eyes were intelligent again; then she took the pen and
wrote, her lips faintly mumbling: "Pay to the order of--what's the
date?" she said, dully, her eyes almost shut. "Never mind; I don't have
to date it. But I was thinking: Blair gave me a calendar when he was a
little boy. Blair--Blair--" And as she spoke his name, she wrote it:
"_Blair Maitland_." But just as she did so, her mind cleared, and she
saw what she had written. "Blair Maitland?" she said, and smiled and
shook her head. "Oh, I've written that name too many times. Too many
times. Got the habit." She lifted her pen heavily, perhaps to draw it
through the name, but her hand sagged.
"Aren't you going to sign it, Mamma?" Nannie asked, breathlessly; and
her stepmother turned faintly surprised eyes upon her. Nannie, kneeling
beside her, urged again: "Mamma, you want to give it to Blair! Try, do
try--" But she did not hear her.
At noon that day, through the fogged and clogging senses, there was
another outburst of the soul. They had been trying to give her some
medicine, and each time she had refused it, moving her head back and
side-wise, and clenching her teeth against the spoon. Over and over the
stimulant was urged and forced upon her; when suddenly her eyes flashed
open and she looked at them with the old power that had made people
obey her all her life. The mind had been insulted by its body beyond
endurance; she lifted her big right hand and struck the spoon from the
doctor's fingers: "_I have the right to die_."
Then the flame fluttered down again into the ashes.
When Blair reached the house that afternoon, she was unconscious. Once,
at a stab of pain, she burst out crying with fretful wildness; and once
she put her thumb into her mouth.
At six o'clock that night she died.