The Iron Woman Part 34

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 G.o.d!"

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-k.n.o.b; 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d'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.

CHAPTER XXI

Except in his gust of primitive fury when he first knew that he had been robbed, and in that last breaking down in the hall, David knew what had happened to him only, if one may say so, with the outside of his mind. Even while he was talking with comparative calmness to Mr. Ferguson, his thoughts were whirling, and veering, in dizzying circles--bewildered rage, pity, fright, revolt,--and then back again to half-dazed fury. But each time he tried to realize exactly what had happened, something in him seemed to swerve, like a shying horse; he could not get near enough to the fact, to understand it. In a numb way he must have recognized this, because in those moments by himself in the library he deliberately shut a door upon the blasting truth.

Later, of course, he would have to open it and look in upon the ruin of his life. Somewhere back in his thoughts he was aware that this moment of opening the Door would come, and come soon.

But while he talked to Robert Ferguson, and tried, dully, to comfort Miss White, and even as he went down the steps up which he had bounded not an hour before, he was holding that moment off. His one clear feeling was a desire to be by himself. Then, he promised himself, when he was alone, he would open the Door, and face the Thing that lay behind it. But as he walked along the street, the Door was closed, bolted, locked, and his back was against it. "Elizabeth has married Blair," he said to himself, softly. The words seemed to have no meaning. "Elizabeth has married Blair," he insisted again; but was only cognizant that the blur of fog around a street-lamp showed rainbow lines in a wonderful pattern. "They are all at right angles," he said; "that's interesting," and looked ahead to see if the next light repeated the phenomenon. Then automatically he took out his watch: "Nine-thirty. Elizabeth has married Blair. The train leaves at ten. I had better be going to the depot. _Elizabeth has married Blair_." And he walked on, looking at the lamps burning in the fog. Then suddenly, as if the closed Door showed a crack of light, he decided that he would not go back on the express; an inarticulate impulse pierced him to the quick,--the impulse to resist, to fight, to save himself and her! But almost with the rending pang, the Door slammed to again and the impulse blurred--like the street-lamps. Still, the impetus of it was sufficient to keep him from turning toward the railroad station.

"h.e.l.lo!" some one said; Harry Knight was standing, grinning, directly in front of him; "you needn't run down a friend of your youth, even if you don't condescend to live in Mercer any more!"

"Oh, h.e.l.lo," David heard himself say.

"When did you come to town? I'd ask you to lunch with me, but I suppose your lady-love would object. Wait till you get to be an old married man like me; then she'll be glad to get rid of you!"

David knew that he gave the expected laugh, and that he said it was a foggy day, and Philadelphia had a better climate than Mercer; ("he hasn't heard it yet," he was saying to himself) "yes, dark old hole; I'm going back to-night. Yes; awfully sorry I can't--good-by--good-by. (He'll know by to-night.") He did not notice when Knight seemed to melt into the mist; nor was he conscious that he had begun to walk again--on, and on, and on.

Suddenly he paused before the entrance of a saloon, which bore, above "x.x.x Pale Ale," in gilt letters on the window, the sign "Landis' Hotel."

He was aware of overpowering fatigue. Why not go in here and sit down? He would not meet any one he knew in such a place. "Better take a room for an hour or two," he thought. He knew that he must be alone to open that Door, but he did not say so; instead his mind, repeating, parrot-like, "Elizabeth has married Blair," made its arrangements for privacy, as steadily as a surgeon might make arrangements for a mortal operation.

As he entered the hotel, a woman on her hands and knees, slopping a wet cloth over the black and white marble floor of the office, looked up at him, and moved her bucket of dirty water to let him pa.s.s. "Huh! He's got a head on him this morning," she thought knowingly. But the clerk at the desk gave him an uneasy glance.

Men with tragic faces and bewildered eyes are not welcomed by hotel clerks.

"Say," he said, pleasantly enough, as he handed out a key, "don't you want a pick-me-up? You're kind o' white round the gills."

David nodded. "Where's the bar?" he said thickly. He found his way to it, and while he waited for his whisky he lifted a corkscrew from the counter and looked at it closely. "That's something new, isn't it?" he said to the man who was rinsing out a gla.s.s for him; "I never saw a corkscrew (Elizabeth has married Blair) with that hook thing on the side." He took his two fingers of whisky, and followed the bell-boy to a room.

"I don't like that young feller's looks," the clerk told the scrub-woman; "we don't want any more free reading notices in the papers of this hotel being a roadhouse on the way to heaven." And when the bell-boy who had shown the unwelcome guest to his room came back to his bench in the office, he interrogated him, with a grin that was not altogether facetious: "Any revolvers lyin'

round up in No. 20, or any of those k.n.o.bby blue bottles?"

"Naw," said the bell-boy, disgustedly, "ner no dimes, neither."

David, in the small, unfriendly hotel bedroom that looked out upon squalid back yards and smelled as if its one window had not been opened for a year, was at last alone. Down in the alley, a hand-organ was shrilling monotonously: Kafoozleum--Kafoozleum.

He looked about him for a minute, then tried to open the window, but the sash stuck; he shook it violently, then shoved it up with such force that a cracked pane of gla.s.s clattered out; a gust of raw air came into the stagnant mustiness of the narrow room.

After that he sat down and drew a long breath. Then he opened the Door....

Down-stairs the clerk was sharing his uneasiness with the barkeeper. "He came in looking like death. Wild-eyed he was. Mrs.

Maloney there will tell you. She came up to me and remarked on it. No, sir, men, like that ain't healthy for this hotel."

"That's so," the barkeeper agreed. "Why didn't you tell him you were full up?"

"Well, he seemed the gentleman," the clerk said. "I didn't just see my way--"

"Huh!" the other flung back at him resentfully. "'Tain't only a poor man that puts his hand in the till, and then hires a room in a hotel"--he made a significant gesture and rolled up his eyes.

"He didn't register," the clerk said. "Only wanted the room for a couple of hours."

"A couple of hours is long enough to--" said the barkeeper.

"Good idea to send a boy up to ask if he rung?"

"_I'd_ have sent him ten minutes ago," the barkeeper said scornfully.

So it was that David, staring in at his ruin, was interrupted more than once that morning: "No, I didn't ring. Clear out." And again: "No; I'm not waiting for anybody. Shut that door." But the third time he was frantic: "d.a.m.n it, if you knock on my door again I'll kick you down-stairs! Do you understand?" And at that the office subsided.

"They don't do it when they're swearing mad," the barkeeper said.

"I guess his girl has given him the mitten. You ladies are always making trouble for us, Mrs. Maloney. You drive us to suicide for love of you!" Mrs. Maloney simperingly admitted her baleful influence. "As for you," he jeered at the clerk, "you're fresh, I guess. That little affair in 18 got on your nerves."

"Well, if you'd found him as I did, I guess it would 'a' got on your nerves," the clerk said, affrontedly; he added under his breath that they could kill themselves all over the house, and he wouldn't lift a finger to stop 'em. "You don't get no thanks," he told himself gloomily. But after that, No. 20 was not disturbed.