The Iron Woman Part 14

Mrs. Maitland walked through her Iron Works as some women walk through a garden:--lovingly. She talked to her son rapidly; this was so and so; there was such and such a department; in that new shed she meant to put the draftsmen; over there the timekeeper;-- she paused. Blair had left her, and was standing in an open doorway of the foundry, watching, breathlessly, a jibcrane bearing a great ladle full of tons of liquid metal that s.h.i.+mmered above its white-hot expanse with the s.h.i.+fting blue flames of escaping gas. Seething and bubbling, the molten iron slopped in a flas.h.i.+ng film over the side of the caldron, every drop, as it struck the black earth, rebounding in a thousand exploding points of fire. Above the swaying ladle, far up in the glooms under the roof, the shadows were pierced by the lurching dazzle of arc- lamps; but when the ladle tipped, and with a crackling roar the stream of metal flowed into a mold, the sizzling violet gleam of the lamps was abruptly extinguished by the intolerable glare of light.

"Oh," Blair said breathlessly, "how wonderful!"

"It _is_ wonderful," his mother said. "Thomas, here, can move the lever that tips the ladle with his two fingers--and out comes the iron as neatly as cream out of a jug!"

Blair was so entirely absorbed in the fierce magnificence of light, and in the glowing torsos of the molders, planted as they were against the profound shadows of the foundry, that when she said, "Come on!" he did not hear her. Mrs. Maitland, standing with her hands on her hips, her feet well apart, held her head high; she was intensely gratified by his interest. "If his father had only lived to see him!" she said to herself. In her pride, she almost swaggered; she nodded, chuckling, to the molder at her elbow:

"He takes to it like a duck to water, doesn't he, Jim?" "And,"

said Jim, telling the story afterward, "I allowed I'd never seen a young feller as knowing about castings as him. She took it down straight. You can't pile it on too thick for a woman, about her young 'un."

"Somebody ought to paint it," Blair said, under his breath.

Mrs. Maitland's face glowed; she came and stood beside him a moment in silence, resting her big, dirty hand on his shoulder.

Then she said, half sheepishly, "I call that ladle the 'cradle of civilization.' Think what's inside of it! There are rails, that will hold New York and San Francisco together, and engines and machines for the whole world; there are telegraph wires that will bring--think of all the kinds of news they will bring, Blair,-- wars, and births of babies! There are bridges in it, and pens that may write--well, maybe love-letters," she said, with sly and clumsy humor, "or even write, perhaps, the liberty of a race, as Lincoln's pen wrote it. Yes!" she said, her face full of luminous abstraction, "the cradle of civilization!"

He could hardly hear her voice in the giant tumult of exploding metal and the hammering and cras.h.i.+ng in the adjacent mill; but when she said that, he looked round at her with the astonishment of one who sees a familiar face where he has supposed he would see a stranger. He forgot his shame in having a mother who ran an iron-mill; he even forgot that impudent thrust in the ribs; a spark of sympathy leaped between them as real in its invisibility as the white glitter of the molten iron sputtering over their heads. "Yes," he said, "it's all that, and it is magnificent, too!"

"Come on!" she said, with a proud look. Over her shoulder she flung back at him figures and statistics; she told him of the tons of bridge materials on the books; the rail contract she had just taken was a big thing, very big! "We've never handled such an order, but we can do it!"

They were walking rapidly from the foundry to the furnaces; Sarah Maitland was inspecting piles of pig, talking to puddlers, all the while bending and twisting between her strong fingers, with their blackened nails, a curl of borings, perhaps biting on it, thoughtfully, while she considered some piece of work, then blowing the crumbs of iron out from between her lips and bursting into quick directions or fault-finding. She stood among her men, in her short skirt, her gray hair straggling out over her forehead from under her shabby bonnet, and gave her orders; but for the first time in her life she was self-conscious--Blair was looking on! listening! thinking, no doubt, that one of these days he would be doing just what she was doing! For the moment she was as vain as a girl; then, abruptly, her happy excitement paused.

She stood still, flinching and wincing, and putting a hand up to her eye.

"Ach!" she said; "a filing!" she looked with the other sympathetically watering eye at her son. "Here, take this thing out."

"_I_?" Blair said, dismayed. "Oh, I might hurt you." Then, in his helplessness and concern--for, ignorant as he was, he knew enough of the Works to know that an iron filing in your eye is no joke--he turned, with a flurried gesture, to one of the molders.

"Get a doctor, can't you? Don't stand there staring!"

"Doctor?" said Mrs. Maitland. She gave her son a look, and laughed. "He's afraid he'll hurt me!" she said, with a warm joyousness in her voice; "Jim, got a jack-knife? Just dig this thing out." Jim came, dirty and hesitating, but prepared for a very common emergency of the Works. With a black thumb and forefinger he raised the wincing lid, and with the pointed blade of the jack-knife lifted, with delicacy and precision, the irritating iron speck from the eyeball. "'Bliged," Mrs. Maitland said. She clapped a rather grimy handkerchief over the poor red eye, and turned to Blair. "Come on!" she said, and struck him on the shoulder so heartily that he stumbled. Her cheek was blackened by the molder's greasy fingers, and so smeared with tears from the still watering eye that he could not bear to look at it. He hesitated, then offered her his handkerchief, which at least had the advantage of being clean. She took it, glanced at its elaborate monogram, and laughed; then she dabbed her eye with it. "I guess I'll have to put some of that cologne of yours on this fancy thing. Remember that green bottle with the calendar and the red ribbons on it, that you gave me when you were a little fellow? I've never had anything of my own fine enough to use the stuff on!"

When they got back to the office again she was very brief and business-like with him. She had had a fine morning, but she couldn't waste any more time! "You can keep all this that you have seen in your mind. I don't know just where I shall put you.

If you have a preference, express it." Then she told him what his salary would be when he got to work, and what allowance he was to have for the present.

"Now, clear out, clear out!" she said; "good-by"; and turned her cheek toward him for their semi-annual parting. Blair, with his eyes shut, kissed her.

"Good-by, Mother. It has been awfully interesting. And I am awfully obliged to you about the allowance." On the threshold of the office he halted. "Mother," he said,--and his voice was generous even to wistfulness; "Mother, that cradle thing was stunning."

Mrs. Maitland nodded proudly; when he had gone, she folded his handkerchief up, and with a queer, shy gesture, slipped it into the bosom of her dress. Then she rang her bell. "Ask Mr. Ferguson to step here." When her superintendent took the chair beside her desk, she was all business; but when business was over and he got up, she stopped him: "Tell the bookkeeper to double Blair's allowance, beginning to-day."

Ferguson made a memorandum.

"And Mr. Ferguson, I have told Blair that I consent to his engagement with Elizabeth, and I shall make it possible for them to be married as soon as he graduates--"

"But--"

"I do this," she went on, her satisfaction warm in her voice, "because I think he needs the incentive that comes to a young man when he wants to get married. It is natural and proper. And I will see that things are right for them."

"In the first place," said Robert Ferguson, "I would not permit Elizabeth to marry Blair; but fortunately we need not discuss that. They have quarreled, and there is no longer any question of such a thing."

"Quarreled! but only this morning, not an hour ago, he let me suppose--" She paused. "Well, I'm sorry." She paused again, and made aimless marks with her pen on the blotter. "That's all this morning, Mr. Ferguson." And though he lingered to tell her, with grim amus.e.m.e.nt, of Elizabeth's angry bath, she made no further comment.

When he had left the office she got up and shut the door. Then she went back to her chair, and leaning an elbow on her desk, covered her lips with her hand. After she had sat thus for nearly ten minutes, she suddenly rang for an office-boy. "Take this handkerchief up to the house to my son," she said; "he forgot it."

CHAPTER IX

For the next five or six years Blair was not often at home. At the end of his freshman year he was conditioned, and found a tutor and the seash.o.r.e and his sketching--for he painted with some enthusiasm just at that time--much more attractive than his mother and Mercer. After that he went to Europe in the long vacations.

"How much vacation have I had since I began to run his business for him?" his mother said once in answer to Nannie's intercession that he might be allowed to travel. But she let him go. She did not know how to do anything else; she always let him do what he pleased, and have what he wanted; she gave him everything, and she exacted no equivalent, either in scholars.h.i.+p or conduct. It never occurred to her to make him appreciate his privileges by paying for them, and so, of course, she pauperized him.

"Blair likes Europe," she said one Sunday afternoon to David Richie, who had come in to see Nannie, "but as for me, I wouldn't take an hour of my good time, or spend a dollar of my good money, to see the best of their cathedrals and statues and things. Do you mean to say there is a cathedral in the world as handsome as my new foundry?"

"Well," David said modestly, "I haven't seen any cathedrals, you know, Mrs. Maitland."

"It's small loss to you, David," she said kindly. "But I wish I'd thought to invite you to go along with Blair last summer. You might have liked it, though you are a pretty sensible fellow in most things." "Oh, I can't go to Europe till I can earn enough to pay my own way," David replied, and added with a quick look at Nannie, "besides, I like being in Mercer."

"Blair has no need to earn money," said Mrs. Maitland carelessly; then she blew out her lips in a bubbling sigh. "And he would rather see a cathedral than his mother."

The pathos of that p.r.i.c.ked even the pleasant egotism of youth; David winced, and Nannie tried to murmur something of her brother's needing the rest.

Mrs. Maitland gave her grunt of amus.e.m.e.nt. "Rest! What's he ever done to tire him? Well! Clear out, clear out, you two,--if you're going to take a walk. I'm glad _you_ came back for your vacation, David, at any rate. Nannie needs shaking up. She sticks at home here with me, and a girl ought to see people once in a while." She glanced at the two young creatures shrewdly. "Why not?" she reflected. She had never thought of it before, but "why not?" It would be a very sensible arrangement. The next moment she had decided that it should be! Nannie's money would be a help to the boy, and he needn't depend on his doctoring business. "I must put it through," she said to herself, just as she might have said that she should put through a piece of work in the office.

This match-making purpose made her invite David to supper very frequently, and every time he came she was apt, after he had taken his departure, to tramp into Nannie's parlor in the hope of being told that the "sensible arrangement" had been made. When she found them together, and caught a word or two about Elizabeth, she had no flash of insight. But, except to her, the situation as regarded David and Elizabeth was perfectly clear.

When, seven years before, the two boys had gone off together to college, Blair had confided to his friend that his faith in women was forever destroyed, "Though I shall love Elizabeth, always,"

he said.

"Maybe she'll come round?" David tried to comfort him.

"If she doesn't, I shall never love another woman," Blair said darkly.

David was silent. But as he and Blair were just then in the Damon and Pythias stage, and had sworn to each other that "no woman should ever come between them," he gave a hopeless shrug. "That dishes me," he said to himself; "so long as he will never love any other girl, I can't cut in."

It would have been rather a relief to Mrs. Richie to know that her son had reached this artless conclusion, for the last thing she desired was that David's calflove should harden into any real purpose. Elizabeth--sweet-hearted below the careless selfishness of a temper which it never occurred to her must be controlled-- was a most kissable young creature to her elders, and Mrs. Richie was heartily fond of her; but all the same she did not want a daughter-in-law with a temper! Elizabeth, on her part, repelled by David's mother's unattainable perfections, never allowed the older woman to feel intimate with her. That first meeting so many years ago, when they had each recoiled from the other, seemed to have left a gulf between them, which had never quite closed up.

So Mrs. Richie was just as well pleased that in the next few years David, for one reason or another, did not see his old neighbor very often. By the time he was twenty-four, and well along in his course at the medical school, she had almost forgotten her vague apprehensions. The pause in the intimacy of the mother and son--the inevitable pause that comes between the boy's seventeenth and twentieth years--had ended, and David and his mother were frank and confidential friends again; yet, though she did not know it, one door was still closed between them: "He's forgotten all about it," Mrs. Richie told herself comfortably; and never guessed that in silence he remembered. Of course David's boyish idea of honor was no longer subject to the claim of friends.h.i.+p, for Blair had entirely recovered from his first pa.s.sion. The only thing he feared now was his own unworth.

After all, what had a dumb fellow like himself to offer such a radiant being?

For indeed she was radiant. The girl he had known nearly all his life, impetuous, devoid of self-consciousness, giving her sweet, s.e.xless love with both generous hands, had vanished with the old frank days of dropping an uninvited head on a boy's shoulder.

Now, though she was still impetuous, still unconscious of self, she was glowing with womanhood, and ready to be loved. She was not beautiful, except in so far as she was young, for youth is always beautiful; she was tall, of a sweet and delicate thinness, and with the faint coloring of a blush-rose; her dimple was exquisite; her brows were straight and fine, shading eyes wonderfully star-like, but often stormy--eyes of clear, dark amber, which, now that David had come home, were full of dreams.

Before her joyous personality, no wonder poor inarticulate David was torn with apprehensions! He did not share them with his mother, who, with more or less misgiving, began to guess how things were for herself; he knew instinctively that Mrs. Richie's gentle, orderly mind could not possibly understand Elizabeth, still less appreciate the peculiar charm to his inherent reasonableness of her sweet, stormy, undisciplined temperament.

Nannie Maitland could not understand either, and yet it was to Nannie--kind, literal little Nannie, who never understood anything abstract, that David revealed his heart. She was intensely sympathetic, and having long ago relinquished the sister-in-law dream, encouraged him to rave about Elizabeth to his heart's content; in fact, for at least a year before Mrs.

Maitland had evolved that "sensible arrangement" for her stepdaughter, David, whenever he was at home, used to go to see Nannie simply to pour out his hopes or his dismays. It was mostly dismays, for it seemed to him that Elizabeth was as uncertain as the wind! "She does--she doesn't," he used to say to himself; and then he would question Nannie, who, having received certain confidences from the other side, would rea.s.sure him so warmly that he would take heart again.

At the time that he finally dared to put his fate to the touch, Mrs. Maitland's match-making intentions for Nannie had reached a point where she had made up her mind to put the matter through without any more delay. "I'll speak to Mrs. Richie about it, and get the thing settled," she said to herself; "no use dawdling along this way!" But just the day before she found time to speak to Mrs. Richie--it was in David's midwinter recess--something happened.

Elizabeth had accepted--not too eagerly, of course--an invitation to walk with him; and off they went, down Sandusky Street to the river and across the old covered bridge. They stopped to say how do you do to Mrs. Todd, who was peering out from behind the scarlet geraniums in the window of the "saloon." Elizabeth took the usual suggestive joke about a "pretty pair" with a little hauteur, but David beamed, and as he left the room he squeezed Mrs. Todd suddenly round her fat waist, which made her squeak but pleased her very much. "Made for each other!" she whispered wheezily; and David slipped a bill into her hand through sheer joy.