The Iron Woman

"Elizabeth, did you see how he looked at me? _Some day your son will look that way at you._"

CHAPTER XL

No one spoke. The murmuring crash along the sands was suddenly loud in their ears, but the room was still. It was the stillness of finality; David had lost Elizabeth.

He knew it; but he could not have said why he knew it. Perhaps none of the great decisions of pa.s.sion can at the moment say "why." Under the lash of some invisible whip, the mind leaps this way or that without waiting for the approval of Reason. Certainly David did not wait for it to know that all was over between him and Elizabeth. He did not reason--he only cringed back, his eyes hidden in his bent arm, and gasped out those words which, scourging his mother, arraigned himself. Nor was there any reason in Elizabeth"s cry of "Oh, Mrs. Richie, I love you"; or in her run across the room to drop upon the floor beside David"s mother, clasping her and pressing her face against the older woman"s shaking knees. "I _do_ love you--" Only in Helena Richie"s mind could there have been any sort of logic. "This," her ravaged and exalted face seemed to say, "this was why he was given to me." Once he had told her that her goodness had saved him; that night her goodness had not availed. And G.o.d had used her sin!

Aloud, all that she said was:

"David, don"t feel so badly. It isn"t as if I were your own mother, you know; you needn"t be so un-happy, David." Her eyes yearned over him. "You won"t do it?" she said, in a breathless whisper.

To himself he was saying: "It makes no difference! What difference can it possibly make? Not a particle; not a particle."

Yet some deeper self must have known that the difference was made, for at that whispered question he seemed to shake his head.

But Elizabeth, weeping, said:

"No; we won"t--we won"t! Dear Mrs. Richie, I love you. David!

Speak to her."

He got up with a stupid look, then his eye fell on his mother"s face. "You are worn out," he said in a dazed way, "You"ll come up-stairs now? Elizabeth, make her go up-stairs."

She was worn out; she nodded, with a sort of meek obedience, and put out her hand to Elizabeth. David opened the door for them and followed them up-stairs. Would his mother have this or that?

Could he do anything? Nothing, nothing. No, Elizabeth must not stay with her, please; she would rather be alone. As he turned away she called to him, "Elizabeth and I will take the noon train, David."

And he said, "Yes, I will have a carriage here."

The door closed; on one side of it was the mother, exhausted almost to unconsciousness, yet elate, remembering no more the anguish for joy of what had been born out of it. On the other side these two, still ignorant--as the new-born always are--of the future to which that travail had pledged them. They stood together in the narrow upper hall and their pitiful eyes met in silence. Then David took her in his arms and held her for a long moment. Then he kissed her. She whispered, "Good-by, David." But he was speechless. He went with her to her own door, left her without a word, and went down-stairs.

In the clamorous emptiness of the living-room he looked about him; noticed that the table-cover was still crumpled from his mother"s hands and smoothed it automatically; then he sat down.

He had the sensation, spiritually, that a man might have physically whose face had been violently and repeatedly slapped.

The swiftness of the confounding experiences of the last nine hours made him actually dizzy. His thoughts rushed to one thing, then to another. Elizabeth? No, no; he could not think of her yet. His mother? No, he could not think of her, either. It occurred to him that he was cold, and getting up abruptly, he went to the fireplace, and kicked the charred sticks of driftwood together over a graying bed of ashes. Then he heard a chair pushed back overhead and a soft, tired step, and he wondered vaguely if his mother"s room was comfortable. Reaching for the bellows, he knelt down and blew the reluctant embers into a faint glow; when a hesitant flicker of flame caught the half-burned logs he got on his feet and stood, his fingers on the mantelpiece, his forehead on the back of his hand, watching the fire catch and crackle into cheerful warmth. He stood there for a long time. Suddenly his cheek grew rigid: some man, some _beast_, had--my G.o.d! wronged Materna! It was the first really clear thought; instantly some other thought must have sprung up to meet it, for he said, under his breath, "No, because I didn"t mean ... it is different with us; quite different!"

The thought, whatever it was, must have persisted, for it stung him into restless movement. He began to walk about; once or twice he stumbled over a footstool, that his eyes, looking blindly at the floor, apparently did not see. Once he stood stock-still, the blood surging in his ears, his face darkly red. But his mind was ruthlessly clear. He was remembering; he was putting two and two together. She was a widow; he knew that. Her marriage had been unhappy; he knew that. There had been a man--he dimly remembered a man. He had not thought of him for twenty years! ... "d.a.m.n him," David said, and the tears stood in his eyes. Then again that thought must have come to him, for he said to himself, violently, "But I _love_ Elizabeth, it is different with me!" Perhaps that persistent inner voice said, "In what way?" for he said again, "Entirely different! It is the only way to make him divorce her so we can be married." Again he stood still and stared blindly at the floor. That a man could live who would be base enough to take advantage of--_Materna!_ Between rage and pity, and confusion he almost forgot Elizabeth, until suddenly the whirl of his thoughts was pierced by the poignant realization that his outcry of dismay at his mother"s confession had practically told Elizabeth that he was willing to let her do what he found unthinkable in his mother. His whole body winced with mortification. It was the first p.r.i.c.k of the sword of shame-- that sword of the Lord! Even while he reddened to his forehead the sword-thrust came again in a flash of memory. It was only a single sentence; neither argument nor entreaty nor remonstrance; merely the statement of a fact: "_you did not love her enough to accept her money._" At the time those ironical words were spoken they had scarcely any meaning to him, and what meaning they had was instantly extinguished by anger. Now abruptly they reverberated in his ears. He forgot his mother; he forgot the "beast," who was, after all, only the same kind of a beast that he was himself. "You, who could not accept a girl"s money could take her good name; could urge her to a course which in your mother overwhelms you with horror; could ask her to give you that which ranks a man who accepted it from your mother as a "beast.""

David had never felt shame before; he had known mortification, and regret, too, to a greater or less degree; and certainly he had known remorse; he had experienced the futile rage of a man who realizes that he has made a fool of himself; these things he had known, as every man nearly thirty years old must know them.

Especially and cruelly he had known them when he understood the effect of the reasoning egotism of his letter upon Elizabeth. But the beneficent agony of shame he had never known until this moment.

In the next hour or two, while the flame of the lamp still burning on the table, whitened in the desolating morning light that crept into the room, David Richie did not reason things out consecutively. His thoughts came without apparent sequence; sometimes he wondered, dully, if it were still raining; wondered how he would get a carriage in the morning; wondered if Elizabeth was asleep; wondered if she would go back to Blair Maitland? "No, no, no!" he said aloud; "not that; that can"t be." Yet through all this disjointed thought his eyes, cleared by shame, saw Reason coming slowly up to explain and confirm his conviction that, whatever Elizabeth did or did not do, for the present he had lost her. And Reason, showing him his likeness to that other "beast," showing him his arrogance to his mother, his cruelty to his poor girl, his poor, pitiful Elizabeth! showed him something else: his a.s.sertions of his intrinsic right to Elizabeth--how much of their force was due to love for her, how much to hatred of Blair? David"s habit of corroborating his emotions by a mental process had more than once shackled him and kept him from those divine impetuosities that add to the danger and the richness of life; but this time the logical habit led him inexorably into deeper depths of humiliation. It was dawn when he saw that he had hated Blair more than he had loved Elizabeth. This was the most intolerable revelation of all; he had actually been about to use Love to express Hate!

Up-stairs Elizabeth had had her own vision; it was not like David"s. There was no sense of shame. There was only Love! Love, pitiful, heart-breaking, remorseful. When David left her she sank down on the edge of her bed and cried--not for disappointment or dread or perplexity, not for herself, not for David, but for Helena Richie. Once she crept across the hall and listened at the closed door. Silence. Then she pushed it open and listened again.

Oh, to go to her, to put her arms about her, to say, "I will be good, I will do whatever you say, I love you." But all was still except for soft, scarcely heard, tranquil breathing. For David"s mother slept.

When Elizabeth came down the next morning it was to the crackle of flames and the smell of coffee and the sight of David scorching his face over toasting bread. It was so unheroic that it was almost heroic, for it meant that they could keep on the surface of life. David said, simply, "Did you get any sleep, Elizabeth?" and she said: "Well, not much. Here, let me make the toast; you get something for your mother." But when she carried a little tray of food up to Mrs. Richie, and kneeling by the bedside took the soft mother-hand in hers, she went below the surface.

"I am going back to him," she said; and put Mrs. Richie"s hand against her lips.

David"s mother gave her a long look, but she had nothing to say.

Later, as they came down-stairs together, Elizabeth, still holding that gentle hand in hers, felt it tremble when Helena Richie met her son. Perhaps his trembled, too. Yet his tenderness and consideration for her, as he told her how he had arranged for her journey to town was almost ceremonious; it seemed as if he dared not come too near her. It was not until he was helping her into the carriage that he made any reference to the night before:

"I have given her up," he said, almost in a whisper, "but she can"t go back to him, you know--that can"t be! Mother, that can"t be?"

But she was silent. Then Elizabeth came up behind him and got into the carriage; there were no good-bys between them.

"I shall come to town to-morrow on the noon train," he told his mother; and she looked at him as one looks at another human creature who turns his face toward the wilderness. There was nothing more that she could do for him; he must hunger and know how he might be fed; he must hear the lying whisper that if he broke the Law, angelic hands would prevent the law from breaking him; he must see the Kingdom he desired, the glory of it, and its easy price. He must save himself.

Elizabeth, groping for Mrs. Richie"s hand, held it tightly in hers, and the old carriage began its slow tug along the road that wound in and out among the dunes....

The story of David and Elizabeth and Blair pauses here.

Or perhaps one might say it begins here. A decision such as was reached in the little house by the sea is not only an end, it is also a beginning. In their bleak certainty that they were parted, David and Elizabeth had none of that relief of the dismissal of effort, which marks the end of an experience. Effort was all before them; for the decision not to change conditions did not at the moment change character; and it never changed temperaments.

Elizabeth was as far from self-control on the morning after that decision as she had been in the evening that preceded it. There had to be many evenings of rebellion, many mornings of taking up her burden; the story of them begins when she knew, without reasoning about it, that the hope of escape from them had ceased.

Because of those gray hours of dawn and shame and self-knowledge, love did not end in David, nor did he cease to be rational and inarticulate; there had to be weeks of silent, vehement refusal to accept the situation: something must be done! Elizabeth must get a divorce "somehow"! It would take time, a long time, perhaps; but she must get it, and then they would marry. There had to be weeks of argument: "why should I sacrifice my happiness to "preserve the ideal of the permanence of marriage"?" There had to be weeks of imprisonment in himself before a night came when his mother woke to find him at her bedside: "Mother--mother-- mother," he said. What else he said, how in his agonizing dumbness he was able to tell her that she was the mother, not, indeed, of his body, but of his soul--was only for her ears; what his face, hidden in her pillow, confessed, the quiet darkness held inviolate. This silent man"s experiences of shame and courage, began that night when, in the fire-lit room, besieged by darkness and the storm, that other experience ended.

Blair"s opportunity--the divine opportunity of sacrifice, had its beginning in that same desolate End. But there had to be angry days of refusing to recognize any opportunity--life had not trained him to such courageous recognition! There had to be days when the magnanimity of his prisoner in returning to her prison was unendurable to him. There had to be months, before, goaded by his G.o.d, he urged his hesitating manhood to abide by the decision of chance whether or not he should offer her her freedom. There even had to be days of deciding just what the chance should be!

There had to be for these three people, caught in the mesh of circ.u.mstance, time for growth and for hope, and that is why their story pauses just when the angel has troubled the water. All the impulses and the resolutions that had their beginnings in that End, are like circles on that troubled water, spreading, spreading, spreading, until they touch Eternity. At first the circles were not seen; only the turmoil in the pool when the angel touched it. And how dark the water was with the sediment of doubt and fear and loss in the days that followed that decision which was the beginning of all the circles!

Robert Ferguson and David"s mother used to wonder how they could any of them get through the next few months. "But good is going to come out of it somehow," Helena Richie said once. "Oh, you mean "character" and all that sort of thing," he said, sighing.

"I tell you what it is, I"m a lot more concerned about my child"s happiness than her "character." Elizabeth is good enough for me as she is."

David"s mother had no rebuke for him; she looked at him with pitying eyes; he was so very unhappy in his child"s unhappiness!

She herself was doing all she could for the "child"; she was in Mercer most of that winter. "No, I won"t hire the house," she told the persistent landlord; "I can"t afford it; I"m only here for a few days at a time. No, you _sha"n"t_ lower the rent!

Robert, Robert, what shall I do to keep you from being so foolish? I wouldn"t live there if you gave me the house! I want to stay at the hotel and be near Elizabeth."

In her frequent visits in those next few months she grew very near to Elizabeth; it was a wonderfully tender relation, full of humility on both sides.

"I never knew how good you were, Mrs. Richie," Elizabeth said.

"I never really understood you, dear child," Helena Richie confessed. She drew near Blair, too; she knew how he had borne the story Elizabeth told him when she came back to Mercer; she knew the recoil of anger and jealousy, then the reaction of cringing acceptance of the fact; she knew his pa.s.sionate efforts, as the winter pa.s.sed, to buy his way into his wife"s friendship by doing everything he fancied might please her. She knew why he asked Mr. Ferguson to find a place for him in the Works, and why he induced Nannie to take the money he believed to be his, and build a hospital. "He is going to use the old house for it," Mrs.

Richie told Mr. Ferguson; "well! it"s one way of getting Nannie out of it, though I"m afraid he"ll have to turn the workmen in and rebuild over her head before he can move her."

"It"s the bait in the trap," Robert Ferguson said, contemptuously. "Well, suppose it is? Can you blame him for trying to win her?"

"He"ll never succeed. If he was half-way honest he would have offered to let her go in the first place. If he expects any story-book business of "duty creating love" he"ll come out the small end of the horn."

"I suppose he hopes," she admitted. But she sighed. She knew those hopes would never be realized, and she felt the pain of that poor, selfish, pa.s.sionate heart until her own ached. Yes, of course he ought to "offer to let her go." She knew that as well as Elizabeth"s uncle himself. "And he will," she said to herself.

Then her face was softly illuminated by the lambent flame of some inner serenity: "But she won"t go!"

Those were the days when Blair would not recognize his opportunity. It was not because it was not pointed out to him.

"I"m certain that a divorce could be fixed up some way," Robert Ferguson said once, "and I hinted as much to him. I told him she couldn"t endure the sight of him."

"Do you call that a hint?"

"Well, he didn"t take it, anyway. Of course, if nothing moves him, I suppose I can shoot him?"

She smiled. "You won"t have to shoot him. He is very unhappy.

Wait."