When the doctor came to tell Nannie that Sarah Maitland was dead, he
found her in the parlor, shivering up against her brother. Blair had
come to his mother's house early that afternoon; a note from Elizabeth,
awaiting him at the River House, had told him of the gravity of Mrs.
Maitland's condition, and bidden him "come instantly." As he read it,
his face grew tense. "Of course I must go," he said; but there was no
softening in his eyes. In all these months, in which his mother's
determination had shown no weakening, his anger had deepened into the
bitterest animosity. Yet curiously enough, though he hated her more, he
disliked her less. Perhaps because he thought of her as a Force rather
than as a mother; a power he was fighting--force against force! And the
mere sense of the grapple gave him a feeling of equality with her which
he had never had. Or it may have been merely that his eyes and ears did
not suffer constant offense from her peculiarities. He had not
forgotten the squalor of the peculiarities, but they did not strike him
daily in the face, so hate was not made poignant by disgust. But
neither was it lessened by the possibility of her death.
"I wonder if she has changed her will?" he said to himself, with fierce
curiosity. But whether she had done so or not, propriety demanded his
presence in her house if she were dying. As for anything more than
propriety,--well, if by destroying her iniquitous will she had showed
proper maternal affection, he would show proper filial solicitude. It
struck him, as he stepped into a carriage to drive down to Shanty town,
that such an attitude of mind on his part was pathetic for them both.
"She never cared for me," he thought; and he knew he had never cared
for her. Yes, it was pathetic; if he could have had for a mother such a
woman as--he frowned; he would not name David Richie's mother even in
his thoughts. But if he could have had a gentle and gracious woman for
a mother, how he would have loved her! He had always been motherless,
he thought; it was not today which would make him so. Still, it was
strangely shaking, this idea of her death. When Nannie came into the
parlor to greet him, he was silent while she told him, shivering and
crying, the story of the last two weeks.
"She hasn't been conscious since noon," she ended, "but she may call
for you; and oh, if she does. Blair, you will be lovely to her, won't
you?"
His grave silence seemed an assent.
"Will you go in and see her?" she said, weeping. But Blair, with the
picture she had given him of that awful figure lying on the floor,
shook his head.
"I will wait here.--I could not bear to see it," he added, shuddering.
"Elizabeth is with her," Nannie said, "so I'll stay a little while with
you. I don't believe it will be before morning."
Now and then they spoke in whispers; but for the most part they were
silent, listening to certain sinister sounds that came from the room
across the hall.
It was a warm May twilight; above the gaunt outline of the foundry, the
dim sickle of a young moon hung in a daffodil sky; the river, running
black between banks of slag and cinders, caught the sheen of gold and
was transfigured into glass mingled with fire. Through the open
windows, the odor of white lilacs and the acrid sweetness of the
blossoming plum-tree, floated into the room. The gas was not lighted;
sometimes the pulsating flames, roaring out sidewise from under the
half-shut dampers of the great chimneys, lighted the dusk with a red
glare, and showed Blair's face set in new lines. He had never been so
near the great Reality before; never been in a house where, on the
threshold, Death was standing; his personal affairs, angers or
anxieties, dropped out of his mind. So sitting and listening and not
speaking, the doctor found them.
"She has gone," he said, solemnly. Nannie began to cry; Blair stood up,
then walked to the window and looked out at the Yards. _Dead?_ For a
moment the word had no meaning. Then, abruptly, the old, elemental
meaning struck him like a blow; that meaning which the animal in us
knows, before we know the acquired meanings which grief and faith have
put into the word: his mother "was not." It was incredible! He gasped
as he stood at the window, looking out over the blossoming lilacs at
the Works, black against a fading saffron sky. Ten minutes ago his
mother was in the other room, owning those Works; now--? The sheer
impossibility of imagining the cessation of such a personality filled
him with an extraordinary dismay. He was conscious of a bewildered
inability to believe what had been said to him.
Mr. Ferguson, who had been with Sarah Maitland when the end came,
followed the doctor into the parlor; but neither he nor Blair
remembered personalities. They stood together now, listening to what
the doctor was saying; Blair, still dazed and unbelieving, put his arm
round Nannie and said, "Don't cry, dear; Mr. Ferguson, tell her not to
cry!" And the older man said, "Make her sit down, Blair; she looks a
little white." Both of them had forgotten individual resentments or
embarrassments.
When some people die, it is as if a candle flame were gently blown out;
but when, on the other side of the hall, this big woman lay dead on the
floor, it seemed to the people who stood by as if the whole machinery
of life had stopped. It was so absorbing in its astonishment that
everything else became simple. Even when Elizabeth entered, and came to
put her arms around Nannie, Blair hardly noticed her. As the doctor and
Robert Ferguson spoke together in low tones, of terrible things they
called "arrangements," Sarah Maitland's son listened, and tried to make
himself understand that they were talking of--his mother!
"I shall stay until everything has been done," Mr. Ferguson said, after
the doctor left them. "Blair, you and Elizabeth will be here, of
course, to-night? Or else I'll stay. Nannie mustn't be alone."
Blair nodded. "Of course," he said. At which Nannie, who had been
crying softly to herself, suddenly looked up.
"I would rather be by myself. I don't want any one here. Please go home
with Elizabeth, Blair. Please!"
"But Nannie dear, I want to stay," Blair began, gently; she interrupted
him, almost hysterically:
"No! _Please!_ It troubles me. I would rather you didn't. I--I want to
be alone."
"Well," Blair said, vaguely; he was too dazed to protest.
Robert Ferguson yielded too, though with a little surprise at her
vehemence. Then he turned to Blair; "I'll give you some telegrams that
must be sent," he said, in the old friendly voice. It was only when he
wrote a despatch to David's mother that the world was suddenly adjusted
to its old levels of anger and contempt. "I'll send this myself," he
said, coldly. Blair, with instant intuition, replied as coldly, "Oh,
very well."
He and Elizabeth went back to the hotel in silence, each deeply shaken
by the mere physical fact of death. When they reached the gloomy
granite columns of the old River House, Blair left his wife, saying
briefly something about "walking for a while." He wanted to be alone.
This was not because he felt any lack of sympathy in Elizabeth; on the
contrary, he was nearer to her than at any time since their marriage;
but it was a moment that demanded solitude. So he wandered about
Mercer's streets by himself until after midnight--down to the old
covered bridge, past Mrs. Todd's ice-cream saloon, out into the
country, where the wind was rising, and the tree-tops had begun to sway
against the sky.
There is a bond, it appears, between mother and child which endures as
long as they do. It is independent of love; reason cannot weaken it;
hate cannot destroy it. When a man's mother dies, something in the man
dies, too. Blair Maitland, walking aimlessly about in the windy May
midnight, standing on the bridge watching the slipping twinkle of a
star in the inky ripples below him, was vaguely conscious of this. He
thought, with a reluctance that was almost repulsion, of her will. He
did not want to think of it, it was not fitting! Yet he knew, back in
his mind, that within a few days, as soon as decency permitted, he
would take the necessary steps to contest it. Nor did he think
definitely of her; certainly not of all the unbeautiful things about
her, those acute, incessant trivialities of ugliness which had been a
veil between them all his life. Now, the veil was rent, and behind it
was a holy of holies,--the inviolable relation of the child and the
mother. It was of this that he thought, inarticulately, as he stood on
the bridge, listening to the rush of the wind; this, and the bare and
unbelievable fact that she "was not." As he struggled to realize her
death, he was aware of a curious uneasiness that was almost fright.
When he came to Nannie the next morning, he was still deeply absorbed;
and when she put something into his hands and said it was from his
mother, he suddenly wept.
* * * * *
They had respected Nannie's desire to be alone that night, but it was
nearly twelve before she was really left to herself, and the house was
silent. Robert Ferguson had made her go up-stairs to bed, and bidden
the worn-out nurse sleep in the room next to her so that she would not
be so entirely solitary. He himself did not go home until those soft
and alien footsteps that cross our thresholds, and dare as business the
offices that Love may not essay, had at last died away. Nannie, in her
bedroom, sat wide-eyed, listening for those footsteps. Once she said to
herself: "When _they_ have gone--" and her heart pounded in her throat.
At last "they" went; she heard the front door close; then, out in the
street, another door banged softly; after that there was the sound of
wheels.
"Now!" she said to herself. But still she did not move.... Was the
nurse asleep? Was Harris up in his room in the garret? Was there any
one downstairs--except Death? Death in Mrs. Maitland's bedroom. "For
God's sake, _lock her door!_" Harris had said. And they locked it. We
generally lock it. Heaven knows why! Why do we turn the key on that
poor, broken, peaceful thing, as if it might storm out in the night,
and carry us back with it into its own silence?
It was almost dawn--the high spring dawn that in May flushes even
Mercer's skies at three o'clock in the morning, when, lamp in hand,
Nannie Maitland opened her bedroom door and peered into the upper hall.
Outside, the wind, which had begun to blow at sunset, was roaring
around the old house; it rumbled in the chimneys, and a sudden gust
tore at a loose shutter, and sent it banging back against the bricks.
But in the house everything was still. The window over the front door
was an arch of glimmering gray barred by the lines of the casement; but
toward the well of the staircase there was nothing but darkness. Nannie
put a hesitating foot across her own threshold, paused, then came
gliding out into the hall; at the head of the stairs she looked down
into a gulf of still blackness; the close, warm air of the house seemed
to press against her face. She listened intently: no sound, except the
muttering indifference of the wind about the house. Slowly, step by
step, shivering and shrinking, she began to creep down-stairs. At the
closed door of the dining-room--next to that other room which Harris
had bidden them lock up; she stood for a long time, her fingers
trembling on the knob; her lamp, shaking in her hand, cast a nimbus of
light around her small gray figure. It seemed to her as if she could
not turn that knob. Then, with gasp of effort, it was done, and she
entered. Her first look was at that place on the floor, where for the
last two days the pillows had been piled. The pillows were not there
now; the room was in new, bleak order. Instantly, after that shrinking
glance at the floor, she looked toward Mrs. Maitland's room, and her
hand went to her throat as if she could not breathe. A moment afterward
she began to creep across the floor, one terrified step dragging after
another; she walked sidewise, always keeping her head turned toward
that silent room. Just as she reached the big desk, the wind, sucking
under the locked door, shook it with sly insinuation;--instantly she
wheeled about, and stood, swaying with fright, her back against the
desk. She stood there, panting, for a full minute. The terror of that
furtively shaken door was agonizing. Then, very slowly, with a sidewise
motion so that she could look toward the room, she put her lamp down on
the top of the desk, and began, with constant bird-like glances over
her shoulder, to search.... Yes; there it was! just where she herself
had put it, slipped between the pages of a memorandum-book, so that if,
in another gleam of consciousness, Blair's mother should ask for it,
there need be no delay in getting it. When her fingers closed on it,
she turned, swiftly, so that the room might not be behind her. Always
watching the locked door, she groped for pen and ink and some sheets of
paper, which she carried over to the table. Then she drew up a chair,
folded back the sleeves of her wrapper, propped the
memorandum-book--which had on the inside page the flowing signature of
its owner--open before her. Then, slowly and steadily, she began to do
the thing she had come to do. Instantly she was calmer. When a great
gust of wind rumbled suddenly in the chimney, and a wraith of ashes
blew out of the fireplace, she did not even raise her eyes; but once
she looked over toward the room, and smiled, as if to say "It is all
right. I am making it all right!"
It took her a long time, this business that would make it "all right,"
this business that brought her, a creature who all her life had been
afraid of her own shadow, creeping down to the dining-room, creeping
past the room into which Death had been locked, creeping over to the
desk, to that unsigned indorsement which had been meant for Blair! It
took a long time. Sheet after sheet of paper was scrawled over, held up
beside the name in the notebook, then tossed into the empty grate. At
last she did it:
_Sarah Maitland_
When she had finished, her relief, in having done what she could to
carry out the purpose of the dying hand, was so great that she was
able, without once looking over her shoulder, to put the pen and ink
back into the desk and set a match to the papers in the fireplace.
Indeed, as she took up her lamp to creep up-stairs again, she even
stopped and touched the knob of the locked door with a sort of caress.
But when, with a last breathless rush across the upper hall, she
regained her own room, she bolted her door with furious panic-stricken
hands, then sank, almost fainting, upon her bed.
[Illustration: SHE WHEELED ABOUT AND STOOD, SWAYING WITH FRIGHT]