"Dear" (she stopped to kiss the paper), "dear, I hope you won't burn it up, because I am tired of waiting, and I hope you are too;"—when she wrote those last words, she was suddenly shy; "Uncle is to give me the money on my birthday—let us be married that day. I want to be married. I am all yours, David, all my soul, and all my mind, and all my body. I have nothing that is not yours to take; so the money is yours. No, I will not even give it to you! it belongs to you already—as I do. Dear, come and take it—and me. I love you—love you—love you. I want you to take me. I want to be your wife. Do you understand? I want to belong to you. I am yours."

So she tried, this untutored creature, to put her soul and body into words, to write the thing that cannot even be spoken, whose utterance is silence. The mailing of the letter was a rite in itself; in the dusk, as she held the green lip of the post-box open, she kissed the envelope, as she had kissed the glowing sheet an hour before. She said to herself that she was "too happy to live!" As she said it, a wave of pity blotted out her usual shamed resentment at that poor mother of hers who had not been happy;—and whose lack of self-control was, Elizabeth believed, her legacy to her child. But her gravity was only for a moment; forgetting Blair, and the possible chance of meeting him, she flew down to Nannie's to tell her that the die had been cast—the letter had been written! Nannie, sitting by herself in the parlor, brooding over her brother's troubles, was trying to draw; but Elizabeth brushed aside pencils and crusts of bread and india-rubbers, and flung her arms about her, pressing her face against hers and pouring the happy secret into her ear:

"Oh, Nannie—I've told him! We'll be married on my birthday. Go ahead and get your dress!" she said, breathlessly, and Nannie tried her best to be happy, too.

For the next three days Elizabeth moved about in a half-dream, sometimes reddening suddenly; sometimes breathing a little quickly, with a faint fright in her eyes,—had she said too much? would he understand? Then a gush of confident love filled her like music. "I couldn't say too much! I want him to know that I feel—that way."

When David read that throbbing letter, he grew scarlet to his temples. There had been many moments during their engagement when Elizabeth, in slighter ways, had bared her soul to him, and always he had had the impulse to cover his eyes, as in a holy of holies. He had never, in those moments, dared to take advantage of such divine nakedness, even by a kiss. But she had never before trusted her passion to the coldness of pen and ink; it had had the accompaniment of eyes and lips, and eager, breaking voice. Perhaps if the letter had come at a different moment, he could more easily have called up that voice, and those humid eyes; he might have felt again the rose-pressure of the soft mouth. As it was, he read it in troubled preoccupation; then reddened sharply: he was a worthless cuss; he couldn't stand on his own legs and get married like a man; his girl had to urge her uncle to let her support her lover! "Damn," said David softly.

A letter is a risky thing; the writer gambles on the reader's frame of mind. David's frame of mind when he read those words about urging Robert Ferguson, was not hospitable to other people's generosity, for Elizabeth's hot letter came on what had been, figuratively speaking, a very cold day. In the morning he had been reprimanded by the House officer for some slight forgetfulness—a forgetfulness caused by his absorption in planning an experiment in the laboratory. At noon he made the experiment, which, instead of crowning a series of deductions with triumphant proof, utterly failed. Then he had had pressing reminders of bills, still unpaid, for a pair of trousers and a case of instruments, and he had admitted to himself that he would have to ask his mother for the money to meet them. "I am a fizzle, all round," he had told himself grimly. "Can't remember anything overnight. Can't count on a doggone reaction. Can't pay for my own pants! I won't be able to marry for ten years. If Elizabeth is wise, she will throw me over. She'll be tired of waiting for me, before I can earn enough to buy my instruments— let alone the shoe-strings Mr. Ferguson talked about!"

Then her letter came. It was a spur on rowelled flesh. Elizabeth was tired of waiting! She said so. But she would help him; she had induced her uncle to consent that she should "give" him money; that she should, in fact, support him!—just as his mother had been doing all his life. He was sore with disappointment at himself, yet, when he answered her letter his eyes stung at the thought of the loveliness of her love! He held her letter in his hand as he wrote, and once he put it to his lips. All the same he wrote, as he had to write, laconically:

"DEAR ELIZABETH,—I'm sure Mr. Ferguson will agree with me that your money cannot be mine, by any gift. Calling it so won't make it so. Anyhow, it would not support us two years. By that time, as things look now, I shall probably not be earning any kind of an income. I am sorry you are tired of waiting, but I can't let you be imprudent. And apart from prudence, I could not respect myself if you supported me. It has been misery to me to have Materna saddled with a big, lazy brute of a fellow like me, who ought by this time to be taking care of you both. I am sure, if you think it over, you would be ashamed of me if I asked your uncle to help me out by letting you marry me now. Anyhow, I should be ashamed of myself. Well, the Lord only knows when I will come up to time! You might as well make up your mind to it that I'm a fizzle. I am discouraged with myself and everything else, and I see you are too; Heaven knows I don't blame you. I know you think it is an awfully long time to wait, but it isn't as long to you as it is to me. Dear, I love you; I can't tell you how I love you. I haven't words, as you have, but you know I do— and yet sometimes I feel as if I oughtn't to marry you."

Elizabeth, running down the steps to meet the postman, saw a familiar imprint on the corner of an envelope, and drew it from the pack before the good-natured man could hand it to her.

"Guess you don't want no Philadelphia letter?" he said slyly.

"Of course I don't!" she retorted; and the trudging postman smiled for a whole block because of the light in her face. In the house, the letter in her hand, she stopped to hug Miss White. "Cherry-pie! the letter has come. I'm to be married on my birthday!"

"Oh, my lamb," said Cherry-pie, "however shall I get things ready in time!" Elizabeth did not wait to help her in her housekeeping anxieties. She fled singing up to her room.

"Oh, that will be joyful, joyful, joyful, Oh, that will be joyful, To meet to part no more!"

Then she opened the letter.... She read the last lines with unseeing eyes; the first lines were branding themselves into her soul. She folded the brief sheet with deliberation, and slowly put it back into the envelope. Then the color began to fall out of her face. Her eyes smoldered, glowed, then suddenly blazed: "He is sorry I am tired waiting."

Something warm, like a lifting tide of heat, was rising just below her breast-bone; it rose, and rose, and surged, until she gasped, and cried out hoarsely: "If 'I think it over,' I'll be 'ashamed,' will I? 'Couldn't respect himself? What about me respecting myself?" And the intolerable wave of heat still rose, swelling and bursting until it choked her; she was strangling! She clutched at her throat, then flung out clenched hands. "He 'can't let' me marry him? It's 'a long time for me to wait'! I must 'make up my mind to it'! I hate him—I want to kill him—I want to tear him! What did I tell him? 'to come and take me'? And he doesn't want me! And Nannie knows I told him to come, and Miss White and Uncle know it. And they will know he didn't want me. Oh, how could I have told him I wanted him? I must kill him. I must kill myself—" Her wild outpouring of words was without sense or meaning to her. She shuddered violently, something crimson seemed to spread before her eyes, but the pallor of her face was ghastly. She began to pace up and down the room. Once she unfolded the letter, and glancing again at those moderate words, laughed loudly. "'His,'" she said, "I told him I was 'his'? I must have been out of my head. Well, I'll 'think it over!' I'll 'think it over!'—he needn't worry about that. Oh, I could kill myself! And I told Cherry-pie I was going to be—" she could not speak the word. She stood still and gasped for breath.

The paroxysm was so violent, and so long in coming to its height before there could be any ebb, that suddenly she reeled slightly. A gray mist seemed to roll up out of the corners of the room. She sank down on the floor, crumpling up against her bed. When she opened her eyes, the mist had gone, and she felt very stiff and a little sick. "Why, where am I?" she said aloud, "what's the matter with me?" Then, dully, she remembered David's letter. "I was so angry I fainted," she thought, in listless astonishment. For the moment she was entirely without feeling, neither angry, nor wounded, nor ashamed. Then, little by little, the dreadful wave, which had ebbed, began to rise again. But now it was cold, not hot. She said to herself, quietly, that she would write to David Richie, and tell him she had 'thought it over'; and that neither she nor her money was his, or any further concern of his. "He needn't trouble himself; there would be no more 'imprudence.' Oh, fool! fool! immodest fool! to have told him he 'could have her for the taking,' and he said it was 'long' for her to wait!" It was an unbearable recollection. "His," she had said; "soul and body." She saw again the written words that she had kissed, and she had an impulse to tear the flesh of the lovely young body she had offered this man, and he had— declined. "His?" She blushed until she had to put her cold hands on her cheeks and forehead to ease the scorch. The modesty which a great and simple moment had obliterated came back with intolerable sharpness.

By and by she got on her feet and dragged herself to a chair; she looked very wan and languid. For the moment the fire was out. It had burned up precious things.

"I'll write to him to-morrow," she thought. And through the cold rage she felt a hot stab of satisfaction; her letter—"a rather different letter, this time!" would make him suffer! But not enough. Not enough. She wished she could make him die, as she was dying. But she could not write at that moment; the idea of taking up a pen turned her sick with the remembrance of what her pen had written three days before. Instead of writing, she would go out and walk, and walk, and walk, and think how she could punish him— how she could kill him! Where should she go? Never mind! anywhere; anywhere. Just let her get out, let her be alone, where nobody could speak to her. How could she ever speak to people again?—to Miss White, who was down in the dining-room, now, planning for the—wedding! To Nannie, who knew that David had been summoned, and who must be told that he refused to come; to Blair, who would guess—she paused, remembering that she was angry with Blair. There was a perceptible instant before she could recollect why; when she did, she felt a pang of relief in her agony of humiliation. Blair, whatever else he was, was a man, a man who could love a woman! It occurred to her that the girl Blair loved would not be thought immodest if she showed him how much she loved him.

She began to put on her things to go out, and as she fastened her hat she looked at herself in the glass. "I have a wicked sort of face," she thought, with a curious detachment from the situation which was almost that of an outside observer. She packed a small hand-bag, and then opened her purse to see if she had money enough to carry out a vague plan of going somewhere to spend the night, "to get away from people." It was noon when she went down- stairs; in the hall she called to Miss White that she was going out.

"But it's just dinner-time, my lamb," Miss White called back from the dining-room; "and I must talk to you about—"

"I—I want to see Nannie," Elizabeth said, in a smothered voice. It occurred to her that, later, she would go and tell Nannie that she had broken her engagement; it would be a satisfaction to do that, at any rate!

"Oh, you're going to take dinner with her?" Miss White said, peering out into the hall; "well, tell her to come in this afternoon and let us talk things over. There is so much to be done between now and the wedding," Cherry-pie fretted happily.

"Wedding!" Elizabeth said to herself; then slipped back the latch of the front door: "I sha'n't come back until to-morrow."

"Oh, my lamb!" Miss White remonstrated, "I must ask you some questions about the wedding!" Then she remembered more immediate questions: "Is your satchel packed? Have you plenty of clean pocket-handkerchiefs? Elizabeth! be careful not to take cold, and ask Nannie how many teaspoons she can lend us—" The door slammed. It seemed to Elizabeth that she could never look Cherry-pie in the face again. She had a frantic feeling that if she could not escape from that intolerable insistence on the—the wedding, she would die. In the street, the mere cessation of Miss White's joyous twittering was a relief. Well, she must go where she could be alone. She walked several blocks before she thought of Willis's; it would take at least two hours to get there, and she could think things over without interruption. She would think how she could save her self-respect before Miss White and her uncle and Nannie; and she would also think of some dreadful way, some terrible way to punish David Richie! Yes; she would walk out to Willis's. . . .

"Elizabeth!" some one said, at her elbow, and with a start she turned to see Blair. As they looked at each other, these two unhappy beings, each felt a faint pity for the other. Blair's face was haggard; Elizabeth's was white to the point of ghastliness, but there was a smudge of crimson just below the glittering amber of her eyes. "Elizabeth!" he said, shocked, "what is it? You are ill! What has happened?"

"Nothing. I—am tired." She was so unconscious of everything but the maelstrom realization that she hated David that she did not remember that the hesitating man beside her was under the ban of her displeasure. Her only thought was that she wished he would leave her to herself.

"Dark day, isn't it?" Blair said; but his voice broke in his throat.

"I think we are going to have rain," Elizabeth answered, mechanically. She was perfectly unaware of what she said, for at that moment she saw, on the other side of the street, the friendly postman who two hours ago had brought her David Richie's insult; now, his empty pouch over his shoulder, he was trudging back to the post-office. Against the clamoring fury of her thoughts and the instant vision of David's letter, Blair's presence was no more to her than the brush of a wing across the surface of a torrent.

As for Blair, he was dazed, and then ecstatic. She had not sent him away! She was perfectly matter-of-fact! "'I think we are going to have rain.'" She must have forgiven him! "May I walk home with you, Elizabeth?" he said breathlessly.

"I'm not going home. I am—just walking."

"So am I," he said. He had got himself in hand by this time; every faculty was alert; he had his chance to ask for pardon! "Come out to Mrs. Todd's, and have some pink ice-cream. Elizabeth, do you remember the paper roses on those dreadful marble-topped tables that were sort of semi-transparent?"

Elizabeth half smiled. "I had forgotten them; how horrid they were!" With the surface of her mind she was conscious that his presence was a relief; it was like a veil between her and the flames.

Blair, watching her furtively, said: "I'll treat. Come along, let's have a spree!"

"You always did do the treating," she said absently. Blair laughed. The primitive emotions are always naked; but how inevitably most of us try to cover them with the fig-leaf of trivial speech—a laugh, perhaps, or a question about the weather; somehow, in some way, the nakedness must be covered! So now, Love and Hate, walking side by side in Mercer's murky noon, were for the moment hidden from each other. Blair laughed, and said he would make her "treat" for a change, and she replied that she couldn't afford it.

At the toll-house he urged again, with gay obstinacy. "Oh, come in! You needn't eat the stuff, but just for the fun of the thing; Mrs. Todd will be charmed to see us, I'm sure."

"Well," Elizabeth agreed; for a moment the vapid talk was like balm laid upon burnt flesh. Then suddenly she remembered how David had sprung up that snowy path to the toll-house, to knock on the window and cry, "I've got her!" Ah, he was a little too sure; a little too sure! She was not so easy to get as all that, not so cheap as he seemed to think—though she had offered herself; had even told him she was "tired of waiting"! (And at home Cherry-pie was counting the teaspoons for the wedding breakfast.)

Blair heard that fierce intake of her breath, and quivered without knowing why. "Yes, let us go!" Elizabeth said fiercely. At least this chuckling old woman should see that David had not "got her"; she should see her with Blair, and know that there were men in the world who cared for her, if David Richie did not.

Mrs. Todd was not at home; perhaps, if she had been. . . .

But instead of the big, motherly old figure, beaming at them from the toll-house door, a slatternly maid-servant said her mistress was out. "We ain't doin' much cream now," she said, wrapping her arms in her apron and shivering; "it's too cold. I ain't got anything but vanilla."

"We'll have vanilla, then," Blair said, in his rather courtly way, and the girl, opening the door of the "saloon," scurried off. "By Jove!" said Blair, "I believe these are the identical blue paper roses—look at them!"

She sat down wearily. "I believe they are," she said, and began to pull off her gloves. Outside in the tollhouse garden the frosted stems of last summer's flowers stood upright in the snow. She remembered that Mrs. Todd's geraniums had been glowing in the window that winter day when David had shouted his triumphant news. Probably they were dead now. Everything else was dead.

"Still the tissue-paper star on the ceiling!" Blair cried, gaily, "yes, everything is just the same!" And indeed, when the maid, glancing with admiring eyes at the handsome gentleman and the cross-looking lady, put down on the semi-translucent marble top of the table two tall glasses of ice-cream, each capped with its dull and dented spoon, the past was completely reproduced. As the frowsy little waitress left them, they looked at the pallid, milky stuff, and then at each other, and their individual preoccupations thinned for a moment. Blair laughed; Elizabeth smiled faintly:

"You don't expect me to eat it, I hope?"

"I won't make you eat it. Let's talk."

But Elizabeth took up her gloves. "I must go, Blair."

He pushed the tumblers aside and leaned toward her; one hand gripped the edge of the table until the knuckles were white: the other was clenched on his knee. "Elizabeth," he said, in a low voice, "have you forgiven me?"

"Forgiven you? What for?" she said absently; then remembered and looked at him indifferently. "Oh, I suppose so. I had forgotten."

"I wouldn't have done it if I hadn't loved you. You know that."

She was silent.

"Do you hate me for loving you?" On Elizabeth's cheeks the smudge of crimson began to flame into scarlet. "I don't hate you. I think you were a fool to love me. I think anybody is a fool to love anybody."

In a flash Blair understood. She had quarrelled with David!

It seemed as if all the blood in his body surged into his throat; he felt as if he were suffocating; but he spoke quietly. "Don't say I was a fool; say I am a fool, if you want to. Because I love you still. I love you now. I shall never stop loving you."

Elizabeth glanced at him with a sort of impersonal interest. So that was the way a man might love? "Well, I am sorry for you, Blair. I'm sorry, because it hurts to love people who don't love you. At least, I should think it did. I don't love anybody, so I don't know much about it."

"You have broken with David," he said slowly.

"How did you know?" she said, with a surprised look; then added listlessly, "Yes; I've done with David. I hate him." She looked blankly down at her muff, and began to stroke the fur. It occurred to her that before going to Willis's she must see Nannie, or else she would have told Miss White a lie; again the double working of her mind interested her; rage, and a desire to be truthful, were like layers of thought. She noted this, even while she was saying again, between set teeth, "I hate him."

"He has treated you badly," Blair said.

"How did you know?" she said, startled.

"I know David. What does a man like David know about loving a woman? He would talk his theories and standards to her, when he could be silent—in her arms!" He flung out his hand and caught her roughly by the wrist. "Elizabeth, for God's sake, marry me."



He had risen and was leaning toward her, his fingers gripped her wrist like a trap, his breath was hot against her neck, his eyes glowed into hers. "Marry—me, Elizabeth."

The moment was primal; the intensity of it was like a rapier- thrust, down through her fury to the quick of womanly consciousness; she shrank back. "Don't," she said, faintly; "don't—" For one instant she forgot that she hated David. Instantly he was tender.

"Dearest, dearest, I love you. Be my wife. Elizabeth, I have always loved you, always; don't you remember?" He was kneeling beside her, lifting the hem of her skirt and kissing it, murmuring crazy words; but he did not touch her, which showed that the excuse of passion was not yet complete. And indeed it was not, for somewhere in the tumult of his mind he was defending himself—perhaps to his god: "I have the right. It's all over between them. Any man has the right now." Then, aloud: "Elizabeth, I love you. I shall love you forever. Marry me. Now. To-night." When he said that, it was as if he had struck his god upon the mouth—for the accusing Voice ceased. And when it ceased, he no longer defended himself. Elizabeth looked at him, dazed. "No, I know you don't care for me, now," he said. "Never mind that! I will teach you to care; I will teach you—" he whispered: "the meaning of love! He couldn't teach you; he doesn't know it himself; he doesn't"—he was at a loss for a word; some instinct gave him the right one—"want you."

It was the crack of the whip! She answered it with a look of hate. But still she was silent.

"You love him," he flung at her.

"I do not. I hate him! hate him! hate him! I wish he were dead in this room, so I could trample on him!" Even in the scorch of that insane moment, Blair Maitland flinched at such a declaration of hate. Hate like that is the left hand of Love. He had sense enough left in his madness to know that, and he could have killed David because he was jealous of such precious hate.

"You'll get over that," he assured her; neither of them saw in such an assurance the confession that he knew she loved David still. And still his smitten god was silent! "You—you hate him because he slighted you," Blair said, stammering with passion. "But for God's sake, Elizabeth, show him that you hate him. Since he despises you, despise him! Will you let him slap you in the face, and still love him?"

"I do not love him."

They were both standing; Elizabeth, staring at him with unseeing eyes, seemed to be answering some fierce interrogation in her own thought: What? was this the way to kill David Richie? That it would kill her, too, never occurred to her. If it had occurred to her, it would have seemed worth while—well worth while!

"Then why do you let him think you love him?" Blair was insisting, in a violent whisper, "why do you let him think you are under his heel still? Show him you hate him—if you do hate him? Marry me, that will show him."

They were standing, now, facing each other—Love and Hate. Love, radiant, with glorious eyes, with beautiful parted lips, with outstretched hands that prayed, and threatened, and entreated: "Come! I must have you,—God, I must!" And Hate, black- browed, shaking from head to foot, with dreadful set stare, and hands clenched and trembling; hands that reached for a dagger to thrust, and thrust again! Hands reaching out and finding the dagger in that one, hot, whispered word: "Come." Yes; that would "show him"!

"When?" she said, trembling.

And he said, "Now."

Elizabeth flung up her head with a look of burning satisfaction.

"Come!" she said; and laughing wildly, she struck her hand into his.



CHAPTER XIX

When Robert Ferguson came in to luncheon the next day, he asked for Elizabeth. "She hasn't come home yet from Nannie's," Miss White told him; "I thought she would be here immejetly after breakfast. I can't imagine what keeps her, though I suppose they have a great deal to talk over!"

"Well, she'll have to wait for her good news," Mr. Ferguson said; and handed a telegram to Miss White. "Despatch from David. He's bringing a patient across the mountains to-night; says he'll turn up here for breakfast. He'll have to go back on the ten-o'clock train, though."

Cherry-pie nibbled with excitement; "I guess he just had to come and talk the arrangements over with her!"

"What arrangements?" Mr. Ferguson asked, vaguely; when reminded by Miss White, he looked a little startled. "Oh, to be sure; I had forgotten." Then he smiled:

"Well, I suppose I shall have to say 'yes.' I think I'll go East myself next week!" he added, fatuously; but the connection was not obvious to Miss White.

"Elizabeth got a letter from him yesterday," she said, beaming; "they've decided on her birthday—if you are willing."

"Willing? I guess it's a case of 'he had to be resigned!'" said Robert Ferguson—thinking of that trip East, he was positively gay. But Cherry-pie's romance lapsed into household concerns: "We must have something the boy likes for breakfast."

"Looking at Elizabeth will be all the breakfast he wants," Elizabeth's uncle said, with his meager chuckle. "David's as big a donkey as any of 'em, though he hasn't the gift of gab on the subject."

When he had gone to his office, Miss White propped the telegram up on the table, so that Elizabeth's eyes might brighten the moment she opened the front door But to her dismay, Elizabeth did not open the door all that afternoon. Instead came a note, plainly in her hand, addressed to Mr. Ferguson. "Why! she is sending word that she's going to stay all night again with Nannie," Miss White thought, really disturbed. If such a thing had been possible, Cherry-pie would have been vexed with her beloved "lamb," for after all, Elizabeth really ought to be at home attending to things! Miss White herself had spent every minute since the wonderful news had been flung at her, in attending to things. She had made a list of the people who must be invited to the wedding, she had inspected the china-closet, she had calculated how many teaspoons would be needed,—"Better borrow some forks from Nannie, too," she said, beginning, like every good housekeeper, to look careworn. "There's so much to be done!" said Cherry-pie, excitedly. Yet this scatter-brain girl evidently meant to stay away from home still another night. "Well, she can't, that's all there is to it!" Miss White said, decidedly; "she must come home, so as to be here in the morning when David arrives. Perhaps I'd better go down to Mrs. Maitland's and take her the despatch."

She was getting ready to go, when the first rumble of the hurricane made itself heard. Nannie dropped in, and—

"'Where's Elizabeth?' I'm sure I don't know. Isn't she at home? 'Stayed with me last night?' Why, no, she didn't. I haven't seen Elizabeth for two days, and—"

Nannie sprang to catch poor old Miss White, who reeled, and then tried, as she sank into a chair, to speak: "What? What? Not with you last night? Nannie! She must have been. She told me she was going—" Miss White grew so ghastly that Nannie, in a panic, called a servant.

"Send for her uncle!" the poor lady stammered. "Send—send. Oh, what has happened to my child?" Then she remembered the letter addressed to Mr. Ferguson, lying on the table beside David's telegram. "Perhaps that will say where she is. Oh, tell him to hurry!"

When Robert Ferguson reached home he found the two pallid, shaking women waiting for him in the hall. Miss White, clutching that unopened letter, tried to tell him: Elizabeth had not been at Nannie's; she had not come home; she had—

"Give me the letter," he said. They watched him tear it open and run his eye over it; the next instant he had gone into his library and slammed the door in their faces.

Outside in the hall the trembling women looked at each other in silence. Then Nannie said with a gasp, "She must have gone to—to some friend's."

"She has no friend she would stay all night with but you."

"Well, you see she has written to Mr. Ferguson, so there can't be anything much the matter; he'll tell us where she is, in a minute! If he can't, I'll make Blair go and look for her. Dear, dear Miss White, don't cry!"

"There has been an accident. Oh, how shall we tell David? He's coming to-morrow to talk over the wedding, and—"

The library door opened: "Miss White."

"Mr. Ferguson! Where—? What—?"

"Miss White, that—creature, is never to cross my threshold again. Do you understand me? Never again. Nannie, your brother is a scoundrel. Read that." He flung the letter on the floor between them, and went back to his library. They heard the key turn in the lock. Miss White stared at the shut door blankly; Nannie picked up the letter. It was headed "The Mayor's Office," and was dated the day before; no address was given.

"Dear Uncle Robert: I married Blair Maitland this afternoon. David did not want me. E.F."

They read it, looked at each other with astounded eyes, then read it again. Nannie was the first to find words:

"I—don't understand." Miss White was dumb; her poor upper lip quivered wildly.

"She and David are to be married," Nannie stammered. "How can she marry—anybody else? I don't understand."

Then Miss White broke out, "I understand. Oh, wicked boy! My child, my lamb! He has killed my child Elizabeth!"

"Who has? What do you mean? What are you talking about!"

"He has lured her away from David," the old woman wailed shrilly. "Nannie, Nannie, your brother is an evil, cruel man—a false man, a false friend. Oh, my lamb! my girl!"

Nannie, staring at her with horrified eyes, was silent. Miss White sank down on the floor, her head on the lowest step of the staircase; she was moaning to herself: "They quarrelled about something, and this is what she has done! Oh, she was mad, my lamb, my poor lamb! She was crazy; David made her angry; I don't know how. And she did this frightful thing. Oh, I always knew she would do some terrible thing when she was angry!"

Nannie looked at the closed door of the library, then at Miss White, lying there, crying and moaning to herself with her poor old head on the stairs; once she tried to speak, but Miss White did not hear her; it was intolerable to see such pain. Blair's sister, ashamed with his shame, stammered something, she did not know what, then opening the front door, slipped out into the dusk. The situation was so incredible she could not take it in. Blair and Elizabeth—married? She kept saying it over and over. But it was impossible! Elizabeth was to marry David on her birthday. "I feel as if I were going out of my mind!" Nannie told herself, hurrying down into Mercer's black, noisy heart. When she reached the squalor of Maitland's shantytown and saw the great old house on the farther side of the street, looming up on its graded embankment, black against a smoldering red sunset, she was almost sobbing aloud, and when Harris answered her ring, she was in such tension that she burst out at him: "Harris! where is Mr. Blair? Do you know? Have you heard—anything?" She seized the old man's arm and held on to it. "Where is Mr. Blair, Harris?"

"My laws, Miss Nannie! how do I know? Ain't he at the hotel? There's a letter come for you; it come just after you went out. Looks like it was from him. There, now, child! Don't you take on like that! I guess if Mr. Blair can write letters, there ain't much wrong with him."

When he brought her the letter, she made him wait there in the dimly lighted hall until she opened it, she had a feeling that she could not read it by herself, "Oh, Harris!" she said, and began to tremble; "it's true! He did.... They are—oh, Harris!" And while the old man drew her into the parlor, and scuffled about to light the gas and bring her a glass of water, she told him, brokenly—she had to tell somebody—what had happened. Harris's ejaculations were of sheer amazement, untouched by disapproval: "Mr. Blair? Married to Miss Elizabeth? My land! There! He always did git in ahead!" His astounded chuckle was as confusing as all the rest of it. Nannie, standing under the single flaring jet of gas, read the letter again. It was, at any rate, more enlightening than Elizabeth's to her uncle:

"Dear Nannie: Don't have a fit when I tell you Elizabeth and I are married. She had a row with David, and broke her engagement with him. We were married this afternoon. I'm afraid mother won't like it, because, I admit, it's rather sudden. But really it is the easiest way all round, especially for—other people. It's on the principle of having your tooth pulled quick!—if you have to have it pulled, instead of by degrees. I'll amount to something, now, and that will please mother. You tell her that I will amount to something now! I want you to tell her about it before I write to her myself—which, of course, I shall do to- morrow—because it will be easier for her to have it come from you. Tell her marrying Elizabeth will make a business man of me. You must tell her as soon as you get this, because probably it will be in the newspapers. I feel like a cur, asking you to break it to her, because, of course, it's sort of difficult. She won't like it, just at first; she never likes anything I do. But it will be easier for her to hear it first from you. Oh, you dear old Nancy!—I am nearly out of my head, I'm so happy. . . .

"P.S. We are going off for a month or so. I'll let you know where to address us when I know myself."

Nannie dropped down into a chair, and tried to get her wits together. If Elizabeth had broken with David, why, then, of course, she could marry Blair; but why should she marry him right away? "It isn't—decent!" said Nannie. And when did she break with David? Only day before yesterday she was expecting to marry him. "It is horrible!" said Nannie; and her recoil of disgust for a moment included Blair. But the habit of love made her instant with excuses: "It's worse in Elizabeth than in him. Mamma will say so, too." Then she felt a shock of terror: "Mamma!" She smoothed out the letter, crumpled in her shaking hand, and read it again: "'I want you to tell her—' Oh, I can't!" Nannie said; "'it will be easier for her to have it come from you—' And what about me?" she thought, with sudden, unwonted bitterness; "it won't be 'easy' for me."

She began to take off her things; then realized that she was shivering. The few minutes of stirring the fire which was smoldering under a great lump of coal between the brass jambs of the grate, gave her the momentary relief of occupation; but when she sat down in the shifting firelight, and held her trembling hands toward the blaze, the shame and fright came back again. "Poor David!" she said; but even as she said it she defended her brother; "if Elizabeth had broken with him, of course Blair had a right to marry her. But how could Elizabeth! I can never forgive her!" Nannie thought, wincing with disgust. "To be engaged to David one day, and marry Blair the next!—Oh, Blair ought not to have done it," she said, involuntarily; and hid her face in her hands. But it was so intolerable to her to blame him, that she drove her mind back to Elizabeth's vulgarity; she could bear what had happened if she thought of Blair as a victim and not as an offender.

"I can never feel the same to Elizabeth again," she said. Then she remembered what her brother had bidden her do, and quailed. For a moment she was actually sick with panic. Then she, too, knew the impulse to get the tooth pulled "quick." She got up and went swiftly across the hall to the dining-room. It was empty, except for Harris, who was moving some papers from the table to set it for supper.

"Oh, Harris," she said, with a gasp of relief, "she isn't here! Harris, I have got to tell her. You don't think she'll mind much, do you?"

But by this time Harris's chuckling appreciation of Mr. Blair's cleverness in getting in ahead had evaporated. "My, my, my, Miss Nannie!" he said, his weak blue eyes blinking with fright, "I wouldn't tell her, not if you'd gimme the Works!"

"Harris, if you were in my place, would you try to, at supper?"

"Now, Miss, how can I tell? She'll be wild; my, my; wild!"

"I don't see why. Mr. Blair had a right to get married."

"He'd ought to have let on to her about it," Harris said.

For a few minutes Nannie was stricken dumb. Then she sought encouragement again: "Perhaps if you had something nice for supper, she'd be—pleased, you know, and take it better?"

"There's to be cabbage. Maybe that will soften her up. She likes it; gor, how she likes cabbage!" said Harris, almost weeping.

"Harris, how do you think she'll take it?"

"She won't take it well," the old man said. "Miss Elizabeth was Mr. David's girl. When I come to think it over, I don't take it well myself, Miss Nannie. Nor you don't, neither. No, she won't take it well."

"But Miss Elizabeth had broken with Mr. David," Nannie defended her brother; "Mr. Blair had a right—" then she shivered. "But I've got to tell her! Oh, Harris, I think she wouldn't mind so much, if he told her himself?"

Harris considered. "Yes, Miss, she would. Mr. Blair don't put things right to his ma. He'd say something she wouldn't like. He'd say something about some of his pretty truck. Them things always make her mad. That picture he bought—the lady nursin' the baby, in your parlor; she ain't got over that yet. Oh, no, she'll take it better from you. You be pretty with her, Miss Nannie. She likes it when you're pretty with her. I once seen a chippy sittin' on a cowcatcher; well, it made me think o' you and her. You be pretty to her, and then tell her, kind of—of easy," Harris ended weakly.

Easy! It was all very well to say "easy"; Harris might as well say knock her down "easy." At that moment the back door banged.

Mrs. Maitland burst into the room in intense preoccupation; the day had been one of absorbing interest, culminating in success, and she was alert with satisfaction. "Harris, supper! Nannie, take my bonnet! Is your brother to be here to-night? I've something to tell him! Where's the evening paper?"

Nannie, breathless, took the forlorn old bonnet, and said, "I—I think he isn't coming, Mamma." Harris came running with the newspaper; they exchanged a frightened glance, although the mistress of the house, with one hand on the carving-knife, was already saying, "Bless, O Lord—"

At supper Mrs. Maitland, eating—as the grocer said so long ago, "like a day-laborer"—read her paper. Nannie watching her, ate nothing at all and said nothing at all.

When the coarse, hurried meal was at an end, and Harris, blinking with horrified sympathy, had shut himself into his pantry, Nannie said, faintly, "Mamma, I have something to tell you."

"I guess it will keep, my dear, I guess it will keep! I'm too busy just now to talk to you." She crumpled up her newspaper, flung it on the floor, and plunged over to her desk.

Nannie looked helplessly at the back of her head, then went off to her parlor. She sat there in the firelit darkness, too distracted and frightened to light the gas, planning how the news must be told. At eight o'clock there was a fluttering, uncertain ring at the front door, and Cherry-pie came quivering in: had Nannie heard anything more? Did she know where they were? "I asked her uncle to come down here and see if Mrs. Maitland had heard anything, but—he was dreadful, Nannie, dreadful! He said he would see the whole family in—I can't repeat where he said he would see them!" She broke down and cried; then, crouching at Nannie's side, she read Blair's letter by the uncertain light of the fire. After that, except for occasional whispered ejaculations of terror and pain, they were silent, sitting close together like two frightened birds; sometimes a lump of coal split apart, or a hissing jet of gas bubbled and flamed between the bars of the grate, and then their two shadows flickered gigantic on the wall behind them; but except for that the room was very still. When the older woman rose to go, Nannie clung to her:

"Oh, won't you tell her? Please—please!" Poor old Miss White could only shake her head:

"I can't, my dear, I can't! It would not be fitting. Do it now, my dear; do it immejetly, and get it over."

When Cherry-pie had wavered back into the night, Nannie gathered up her courage to "get it over." She went stealthily across the hall; but at the dining-room door she stood still, her hand on the knob, not daring to enter. Strangely enough, in the midst of the absorbing distress of the moment, some trick of memory made her think of the little 'fraid-cat, standing outside that door, trying to find the courage to open it and get for Blair—for whose sake she stood there now—the money for his journey all around the world! In spite of her terror, she smiled faintly; then she opened the door and looked in. Mrs. Maitland was still at work, and she retreated noiselessly. At eleven she tried again.

Except for the single gas-jet under a green shade that hung above the big desk, the room was dark. Mrs. Maitland was in her chair, writing rapidly; she did not hear Nannie's hesitating footstep, or know that she was in the room, until the girl put her hand on the arm of her chair.

"Mamma."

"Yes?"

"Mamma, I have something to—to tell you."

Mrs. Maitland signed her name, put her pen behind her ear, flung a blotter down on the heavily written page, and rubbed her fist over it. "Well?" she said cheerfully; and glanced up at her stepdaughter over her steel-rimmed spectacles, with kind eyes; "what are you awake for, at this hour?" Then she drew out a fresh sheet of paper, and began to write: "My dear Sir:—Yours received, and con—"

"Mamma . . . Blair is married."

The pen made a quick, very slight upward movement; there was a spatter of ink; then the powerful, beautiful hand went on evenly "—tents noted." She rubbed the blotter over this line, put the pen in a cup of shot, and turned around. "What did you say?"

"I said . . . Blair is married."

Silence.

"He asked me to tell you."

Silence.

"He hopes you will not be angry. He says he is going to be a—a tremendous business man, now, because he is so happy."

Silence. Then, in a loud voice: "How long has this been going on?"

"Oh, Mamma, not any time at all, truly! I am perfectly sure it— it was on the spur of the moment."

"Married, 'on the spur of the moment'? Good God!"

"I only mean he hasn't been planning it. He—"

"And what kind of woman has married him, 'on the spur of the moment'?"

"Oh,—Mamma . . ."

Her voice was so terrified that Mrs. Maitland suddenly looked at her. "Don't be frightened, Nannie," she said kindly. "What is it? You have something more to tell me, I can see that. Come, out with it! Is she bad?"

"Oh, Mamma! don't! don't! It is—she is—Elizabeth—"

Then she fled.

That night, at about two o'clock, Mrs. Maitland entered her stepdaughter's room. Nannie was dozing, but started up in her bed, her heart in her throat at the sight of the gaunt figure standing beside her. Blair's mother had a candle in one hand, and the other was curved about it to protect the bending flame from the draught of the open door; the light flickered up on her face, and Nannie was conscious of how deep the wrinkles were on her forehead and about her mouth.

"Nannie, tell me everything."

She put the candle on the table at the head of the bed, and sat down, leaning forward a little, as if a weight were resting on her shoulders. Her clasped hands, hanging loosely between her knees, seemed, in the faint light of the small, pointed flame, curiously shrunken and withered. "Tell me," she said heavily.

Nannie told her all she knew. It was little enough.

"How do you know that Elizabeth had broken with David Richie?" her stepmother said. Nannie silently handed her Blair's letter. Mrs. Maitland took up her candle, and holding it close to the flimsy sheet, read her son's statement. Then she handed it back. "I see; some sort of a squabble; and Blair—" She stopped, almost with a groan. "His friend," she said, and her chin shook; "your father's son!" she said brokenly.

"Mamma!" Nannie protested—she was sitting up in bed, her hair in its two braids falling over her white night-dress, her eyes, so girlish, so frightened, fixed on that quivering iron face; "Mamma! remember, he was in love with Elizabeth long ago, before David ever thought—"

"In love with Elizabeth? He was never in love with anybody but himself."

"Oh, Mamma, please forgive him! It's done now, and it can't be undone."

"What has my forgiveness got to do with it? It's done, as you say. It can't be undone. Nothing can be undone. Nothing; nothing. All the years that remain cannot undo the years that I have been building this up."

Nannie stared at her blankly. And suddenly the hard face softened. "Lie down. Go to sleep." She put her big roughened hand gently on the girl's head. "Go to sleep, my child." She took up her candle, and a moment later Nannie heard the stairs creak under her heavy tread.

Sarah Maitland did not sleep that night; but after the first outburst, when Nannie had panted out, "It is—Elizabeth," and then fled, there had been no anger. When the door closed behind her stepdaughter, Blair's mother put her hand over her eyes and sat perfectly still at her desk. Blair was married. And he had not told her,—that was the first thought. Then, into the pitiful, personal dismay of mortification and wounded love, came the sword-thrust of a second thought: he had stolen his friend's wife.

It was not a moment for nice discriminations; the fact that Elizabeth had not been married to David seemed immaterial. This was because, to Sarah Maitland's generation, the word, in this matter of getting married, was so nearly as good as the bond, that a broken engagement was always a solemn, and generally a disgraceful thing. So, when she said that Blair had "stolen David's wife," she cringed with shame. What would his father say to such conduct! In what had she been wanting that Herbert's son could disgrace his father's name—and hate his mother? For of course he must hate her to shut her out of his life, and not tell her he was going to get married! Her mind seemed to oscillate between the abstraction of his dishonor and a more intimate and primitive pain,—the sense of personal slight. "Oh, my son, my son, my son," she said. She was bending over, her elbows on her knees, her furrowed forehead resting on her clenched hands; her whole big body quivered. He had shut her out.... He hated her.... He had never loved her.... "My son! my son!" Then a sharp return of memory to the shame of his conduct whipped her to her feet and set her walking about the room. It was long after midnight before she said to herself that the first thing to do was to learn exactly what had happened. Nannie must tell her. It was then that she went up to her stepdaughter's room.

When Nannie had told her, or rather when Blair's letter had made the thing shamefully clear, she went down-stairs and faced the situation. Who was responsible for it? Who was to blame—before she could add, in her mind, "Elizabeth or Blair?" some trick of memory finished her question: who was to blame—"this man or his parents?" The suggestion of personal responsibility was like a blow in the face. She flinched under it, and sat down abruptly, breathing hard. How could it be possible that she was to blame? What had she left undone that other mothers did? She had loved him; no mother could have loved him more than she did!— and he had never cared for her love. In what had she been lacking? He had had a religious bringing up; she had begun to take him to church when he was four years old. He had had every educational opportunity. All that he wanted he had had. She had never stinted him in anything. Could any mother have done more? Could Herbert himself have done more? No; she could not reproach herself for lack of love. She had loved him, so that she had spared him everything—even desire! All that he could want was his before he could ask for it.

In the midst of this angry justifying of herself, tramping up and down the long room, she stopped suddenly and looked about her; where was her knitting? Her thoughts were in such a distracted tangle that the accustomed automatic movement of her fingers was imperative. She tucked the grimy pink ball of zephyr under her arm, and tightening her fingers on the bent and yellowing old needles, began again her fierce pacing up and down, up and down. But the room seemed to cramp her, and by and by she went across the hall into Nannie's parlor, where the fire had sprung into cheerful flames; here she paused for a while, standing with one foot on the fender, knitting rapidly, her unseeing eyes fixed on the needles. Yes; Blair had had no cares, no responsibilities,— and as for money! With a wave of resentment, she thought that she would find out in the morning from her bookkeeper just how much money she had given him since he was twenty-one. It was then that a bleak consciousness, like the dull light of a winter dawn, slowly began to take possession of her: money. She had given him money; but what else had she given him? Not companionship; she had never had the time for that; besides, he would not have wanted it; she knew, inarticulately, that he and she had never spoken the same language. Not sympathy in his endless futilities; what intelligent person could sympathize with a man who found serious occupation in buying—well, china beetles? Or pictures! She glanced angrily over at that piece of blackened canvas by the door, its gold frame glimmering faintly in the firelight. He had spent five thousand dollars on a picture that you could cover with your two hands! Yes; she had given him money; but that was all she had given him. Money was apparently the only thing they had in common.

Then came another surge of resentment,—that pitiful resentment of the wounded heart; Blair had never cared how hard she worked to make money for him! It occurred to her, perhaps for the first time in her life, that she worked very hard; she said to herself that sometimes she was tired. Yes, she had never thought of it before, but she was sometimes very tired. But what did Blair care for that? What did he care how hard she worked? Even as she said it, with that anger which is a confession of something deeper than anger, her mind retorted that if he had never cared how hard she worked for their money, she had never cared how easily he spent it. She had been irritated by his way of spending it, and she had been contemptuous; but she had never really cared. So it appeared that they did not have even money in common. The earning had been all hers; the spending had been all his. If she had liked to buy gimcracks, they would have had that in common, and perhaps he would have been fond of her? "But I never knew how to be a fool," she thought, simply. Yes; she didn't know how to spend, she only knew how to earn. Of course, if he had had to earn what he spent, they would have had work as a bond of sympathy. Work! Blair had never understood that work was the finest thing in the world. She wondered why he had not understood it, when she herself had worked so hard—worked, in fact, so that he might be beyond the need of working. As she said that, her fingers were suddenly rigid on her needles; it seemed as if her soul had felt a jolt of dismay; why didn't her son understand the joy of work? Because she had spared him all necessity for it!— for the work she had given him to do was not real, and they both knew it. Spared him? Robbed him! "Who hath sinned, this man or his parents?" "This man," her selfish, indolent, dishonorable son, or she herself, whose hurry to possess the one thing she wanted, that finest thing in the world, Work!—had pushed him into the road of pleasant, shameful idleness, the road that always leads to dishonor? Good God! what a fool she had been not to make him work.

Sarah Maitland, tramping back and forth, the ball of pink worsted dragging behind her in a grimy tangle, thought these things with a sledge-hammer directness that spared herself nothing. She wanted the truth, no matter how it made her cringe to find it! She would hammer out her very heart to find the truth. And the truth she found was that she had never allowed Blair to meet the negations of life—to meet those No's, which teach the eternal affirmations of character. He had had everything; he had done nothing. The result was as inevitable as the action of a law of nature! In the illuminating misery of this terrible night, she saw that she had given her son, as Robert Ferguson had said to her once, "fullness of bread and abundance of idleness." And now she was learning what bread and idleness together must always make of a man.

Walking up and down the dimly lighted room, she had a vision of her sin that made her groan. She had made Blair what he was: because it had been easy for her to make things easy for him, she had given him his heart's desire, and brought leanness withal to his soul. In satisfying her own hunger for work, she had forgotten to give it to him, and he had starved for it! She had left, by this time, far behind her the personal affront to her of his reserves; she took meekly the knowledge that he did not love her: she even thought of his marriage as unimportant, or as important only because it was a symptom of a condition for which she was responsible. And having once realized and accepted this fact, there was only one solemn question in her mind:

"What am I going to do about it?"

For she believed, as other parents have believed before her—and probably will go on believing as long as there are parents and sons—she believed that she could, in some way or other, by the very strength of her agonizing love, force into her son's soul from the outside that Kingdom of God which must be within. "Oh, what am I going to do?" she said to herself.

She stood still and covered her face with her hands. "God," she said, "don't punish him! It's my fault; punish me."

Perhaps she had never really prayed before.



CHAPTER XX

Robert Ferguson, in his library, and poor Miss White in the hall, listened with tense nerves for the wheels of the carriage that was to bring David Richie "to breakfast."

"Send him in to me," Mr. Ferguson had said; and then had shut himself into his library.

Miss White was quivering with terror when at last she heard the carriage door bang. David came leaping up the steps, his face rosy as a girl's in the raw morning air—it was a lowering Mercer morning, with the street lamps burning at eight o'clock in a murk of smoke and fog. He raked the windows with a smiling glance, and then stood, laughing for sheer happiness, waiting for her to open the door to him.

David had had a change of spirit, if not of mind, since he wrote his eminently sensible letter to Elizabeth. He had been able to scrape up enough money of his own to pay at least one of his bills, and things had gone better with him at the hospital, so he no longer felt the unreasonable humiliation which Elizabeth's proposal had accentuated in him. The reproach which his mood had read into her letter had vanished after a good night's sleep and a good day's work; now, it seemed to him only an exquisite expression of most lovely love, which brought the color into his face, and made his lips burn at the thought of her lips! Of course her idea of marrying on her little money was not to be thought of—he and Mr. Ferguson would laugh over it together; but what an angel she was to think of it! All that night, in the journey over the mountains, he had lain in his berth and looked out at the stars, cursing himself joyously for a dumb fool who had had no words to tell her how he loved her for that sweet, divinely foolish proposal, which was "not to be thought of"! "But when I see her, I'll make her understand; when I hold her in my arms—" he told himself, with all the passion of twenty-six years which had no easy outlet of speech.

When Robert Ferguson's door opened, his heart was on his lips. "Eliz—" he began, and stopped short. "Oh, Miss White. Good morning, Miss White!" And before poor Cherry-pie knew it, he had given her a great hug; "Where is Elizabeth? Not out of bed yet? Oh, the lazybones!" He was so eager that, until he was fairly in the hall, with the front door shut, and his overcoat almost off, he did not notice her silence. Then he gave her a startled look. "Miss White! is anything the matter? Is Elizabeth ill?"

"No; oh, no," she said breathlessly; "but—Mr. Ferguson will tell you. No, she is not sick. Go, he will tell you. In the library."

The color dropped out of his face as a flag drops to half-mast. "She is dead," he said, with absolute finality in his voice. "When did she die?" He stood staring straight ahead of him at the wall, ghastly with fright.

"No! no! She is not dead; she is well. Quite well; oh, very well. Go, David, my dear boy—oh, my dear boy! Go to Mr. Ferguson. He will tell you. But it is—terrible, David."

He went, dazed, and saying, "Why, but what is it? If she is not— not—"

Robert Ferguson met him on the threshold of the library, drew him in, closed the door, and looked him full in the face. "No, she isn't dead," he said; "I wish to God she were." Then he struck him hard on the shoulder. "David," he said harshly, "be a man; they've played a damned dirty trick on you. Yesterday she married Blair Maitland.... Take it like a man, and be thankful you are rid of her." He wheeled about and stood with his back to his niece's lover. He had guided the inevitable sword, but he could not witness the agony of the wound. There was complete stillness in the room; the ticking of the clock suddenly hammered in Robert Ferguson's ears; a cinder fell softly from the grate. Then he heard a long-drawn breath:

"Tell me, if you please, exactly what has happened."

Elizabeth's uncle, still with his back turned, told him what little he knew. "I don't know where they are," he ended; "I don't want to know. The scoundrel wrote to Nannie, but he gave no address. Elizabeth's letter to me is on my table; read it."

He heard David move over to the library table; he heard the rustle of the sheet of paper as it was drawn out of the envelope. Then silence again, and the clamor of the clock. He turned round, in time to see David stagger slightly and drop into a chair; perspiration had burst out on his forehead. He was so white around his lips that Robert Ferguson knew that for a moment his body shared the awful astonishment of his soul. "There's some whiskey over there," he said, nodding toward a side table. David shook his head. Then, still shuddering with that dreadful sickness, he spoke.

"She ... has married—Blair? Blair?" he repeated, uncomprehendingly. He put his hand up to his head with that strange, cosmic gesture which horrified humanity has made ever since it was capable of feeling horror.

"Yes," Mr. Ferguson said grimly; "yes, Blair—your friend! Well, you are not the first man who has had a sweetheart—and a 'friend.' A wife, even—and a 'friend.' And then discovered that he had neither wife nor friend. Damn him."

"Damn him?" said David, and burst into a scream of laughter. He was on his feet now, but he rocked a little on his shaking legs. "Damnation is too good for him; may God—" In the outburst of fury that followed, even Robert Ferguson quailed and put up a protesting hand.

"David—David," he stammered, actually recoiling before that storm of words. "David, he will get what he deserves. She was worthless!" David stopped short. At the mention of Elizabeth, his hurricane of rage dropped suddenly into the flat calm of absolute bewilderment. "Do not speak of Elizabeth in that way, in my presence," he said, panting.

"She is her mother's daughter! She is bad, through and through. She—"

"Stop!" David cried, violently; "what in hell do you keep on saying that for? I will not listen—I will not hear." . . . He was beside himself; he did not know what he said.

But Robert Ferguson was silenced. When David spoke again, it was in gasps, and his words came thickly as if his tongue were numb: "What—what are we to do?"

"Do? There is nothing to do, that I can see."

"She must be taken away from him!"

"Nobody knows where they are. But if I did know, I wouldn't lift my hand to get her away. She has made her bed—she can lie in it, so far as I am concerned."

"But she didn't!" David groaned; "you don't understand. I am the one to curse, not Elizabeth."

"What are you talking about?"

"I did it."

The older man looked at him with almost contemptuous incredulity. "My dear fellow, what is the use of denying facts? You can't make black white, can you? Day before yesterday you loved this—this," he seemed to search for some epithet; glanced at David, and said, almost meekly: "girl. Day before yesterday she expected to marry you. To-day she is the wife of another man. Have you committed any crime in the last three days which justifies that?"

"Yes," David said, in a smothered voice, "I have." Then he handed back to the shamed and angry man the poor, pitiful little letter. "Don't you see? She says, 'David didn't want'"—he broke off, unable to speak. A moment later he added, "'E. F.' She isn't used to the—the other, yet," he said, again with that bewildered look.

But Elizabeth's uncle was too absorbed in his own humiliation to see confession in that tragic initial. "What is that nonsense about your not wanting her?"

"She thought so. She had reason to think so."

"You had better explain yourself, David."

"She wrote to me," David said, after a pause; "she told me she would have that money of hers on her birthday. She said we could be married then." He reddened to his temples. "She asked me to marry her that day; asked me, you understand." He turned on his heel and went over to the window; he stood there for some minutes with his back to Robert Ferguson. The green door in the wall between the two gardens was swinging back and forth on sagging hinges; David watched it with unseeing eyes; suddenly a sooty pigeon came circling down and lit just inside the old arbor, which was choked with snow shovelled from the flagstones of the path. Who can say why, watching the pigeon's teetering walk on the soot-specked snow, David should smell the fragrance of heliotrope hot in the sunshine, and see Elizabeth drawing Blair's ring from her soft young bosom? He turned back to her uncle, with a rigid face: "Well, I—I said—'no' to her letter. Do you understand? I told her 'no.' 'No,' to a girl like Elizabeth! Because, in my—my filthy pride—" he paused, picked up a book, turned it over and over, and then put it straight edge to edge with the table. His hand was trembling violently. When he could speak again it was in a whisper. "My cursed pride. I didn't want to marry until I could do everything. 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 God!"

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-knob; 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 God 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 God'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.

"Hello!" 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, hello," 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 "XXX 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 pass. "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 glass 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 knobby 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 glass 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: "Damn 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.

At first, when David opened his closed Door and looked in, there had been the shock again. He was stunned with incredulous astonishment. Then his mind cleared. With the clearing came once more that organic anger of the robbed man; an anger that has in it the uncontrollable impulse to regain his property. It could not be—this thing that had happened. It should not be!

He would see her; he would take her. As for him—David's sinewy fingers closed as talons might close into the living flesh of a man's neck. He knew the lust of murder, and he exulted in it. Yet even as he exulted, the baseness of what Blair had done was so astounding, that, sitting there in the dreary room, his hands clenched in his pockets, his legs stretched out in front of him, David Richie actually felt a sort of impersonal amazement that had nothing to do with anger. For one instant the unbelievableness of Blair's dishonor threw him back into that clamoring confusion from which he had escaped since he opened the Door. Blair must have been in love with her! Had Elizabeth suspected it? She certainly had never hinted it to him; why not? Some girlish delicacy? But Blair—Blair, a dishonorable man? In the confounding turmoil of this uprooting of old admirations, he was conscious of the hand-organ down in the alley, pounding out its imbecile refrain. He even found himself repeating the meaningless words:

"In ancient days there lived a Turk, A horrid beast within the East, ...... Oh, Kafoozleum, Kafoozleum"—

His mind righted itself; he came back to facts, and to the simple incisive question: what must he do? It was not until the afternoon that, by one tortuous and torturing line of reasoning after another, he came to know that, as her uncle had said, for the present he could do nothing.

"Nothing?" At first, David had laughed savagely; he would turn the world upside down before he would leave her in her misery! For that she was in misery he never doubted; nor did he stop to ask himself whether she had repented her madness, he only groaned. He saw, or thought he saw, the whole thing. There was not one doubt, not one poisonous suspicion of Elizabeth herself. That she was disloyal to him never entered his head. To David she was only in a terrible trap, from which, at any cost, she must be rescued. That her own mad temper had brought her to such a pass was neither here nor there; it had nothing to do with the matter in hand, namely her rescue—and then the killing of the man who had trapped her! It came into David's head—like a lamp moving toward him through a mist—that perhaps she had written to him? He had not really grasped the idea when Robert Ferguson suggested it; but now he was suddenly certain that a letter must be awaiting him in Philadelphia! Perhaps in it she called on him to come and help her? The thought was like a whip. He forgot his desire to kill Blair; he leaped to his feet, fumbling in his pocket for a time-table; then realized that there was no train across the mountains until night. Should he telegraph his mother to open any letter from Elizabeth, and wire him where she was? No; even in the whirl of his perplexity, he knew he could not let any other eyes than his own see what, in her abasement, Elizabeth must have written. He began to pace frantically up and down; then stood and looked out of the window, beating his mind back to calmness,—for he must be calm. He must think what could be done. He would get the letter as soon as he reached home; until he got it and learned where she was, the only thing to do was to decide how she should be saved.

And so it was that, not allowing himself to dip down into that elemental rage of the wronged man, not even daring to think of his own incredible blunder which had kindled her crazy anger, still less venturing to let his thought rest on the suffering that had come to her, he kept his mind steadily on that one imperative question: what was to be done? At first the situation seemed almost simple: she must leave Blair instantly. "To-day!" he said to himself, striking the rickety table before him with his fist; "to-day!" Next, the marriage must be annulled. That was all; annulled! These were the premises from which he started. All that long, dark morning, well into the afternoon, he followed blind alleys of thought, ending always in the same impasse—there was nothing he could do. He did not even know where she was, until the letter in Philadelphia should tell him,—at that thought he looked at his watch again. Oh, how many endless hours before he could go and get that letter! And after all, she was Blair Maitland's wife. Suppose she did leave him, would the swine give her her freedom? Not without long, involved processes of law; he knew his man well enough to know that. Yes, there would have to be dreadful publicity, heart-breaking humiliation for his poor, mad darling. She would have to face those things. Oh, if he only knew where she was, so that he could go that moment and help her to take that first step of flight. She must go at once to his mother. Yes, his mother would shelter her from the beast. If he could only get word to her, to go, instantly, to his mother. But he did not know where she was! He cursed himself for not having taken the ten o'clock express! He could have been at home that night, had her letter, and started out again to go to her. As it was, nothing could be done until to-morrow morning. Then he would know what to do, because then he would know where she was. But meantime— meantime...

There is no doubt that when the frantic man realized his befogging ignorance, and found himself involved in this dreadful delay, the hotel clerk's apprehensions were, at least for wild moments, justified. But only for moments—Elizabeth was to be rescued! David could not consider escape from his own misery until that task had been accomplished. Yet consider: his girl, his woman—another man's; and he helpless! And suppose he did rescue her; suppose he did drag her from the arms of the thief who had been his friend—could it ever be the same? Never. Never. Never. His Elizabeth was dead. The woman whom he meant to have yet—somehow, sometime, somewhere; the woman whom Blair Maitland had filched from him, was not his Elizabeth. The rose, trampled in the mire, may be lifted, it may be revived, it may be fragrant—but it has known the mire!

There were, in the early darkening afternoon, crazy moments for David Richie. Moments of murderous hate of Blair, moments of unbearable consciousness of his own responsibility, moments of almost repulsion for the tragic, marred creature he loved; and at this last appalling revelation to himself of his own possibilities—moments of absolute despair. And when one of those despairing moments came, he put his head down on the table, on his folded arms, and cried for his mother. He cried hard, like a child: "Materna!"

And so it was that he arose and went to his mother.



CHAPTER XXII

When, after his interview with David, Robert Ferguson went into Mrs. Maitland's office at the Works, he looked older by twenty years than when he had left it the night before. Sarah Maitland, sitting at her desk, heard his step, and wheeled round to greet him.

"Better shut that door," she said briefly; and he gave the door in the glass partition a shove with his foot. Then they looked at each other. "Well," she said; and stretched out her hand. "We're in the same box. I guess we'd better shake hands." She grinned with pain, but she forced her grunt of a laugh. "What's your story? Mine is only his explanation to Nannie."

"Mine isn't even that. She merely wrote me she had married him; that was all. Miss White told me what he wrote to Nannie. What do you know about it?"

"That's all I know," she said, and gave him Blair's note.

He read it, and handed it back in silence.

"Well, what are you going to do?" she asked.

"Do? There's nothing to do. I'm done with her!"

"He's my son," Sarah Maitland said. "I have got to do something."

"But there's nothing to be done," he pointed out; it was not like this ruthless woman to waste time crying over spilt milk. "They are both of age, and they are married; that's all there is to it. I went into the mayor's office and found the registry. The marriage is all right so far as that goes. As for David—men don't go out with a gun or a horsewhip in these fine times. He won't do anything. For that matter, he is well rid of her. I told him so. I might have added that the best thing a jilted man can do is to go down on his knees and thank God that he's been jilted; I know what I'm talking about! As for your son—" he stopped.

"Yes," she said, "my son?" And even in his fury, Robert Ferguson felt a pang at the sight of her torn and ravaged face that quivered so that he turned his eyes away out of sheer decency. "I must do something for my son. And I think I know what it will be." She bit her forefinger, frowning with thought. "I think I know ... I have not done right by Blair."

"No, you haven't," he said dryly. "Have you just discovered that? But I don't see what you or I or God Almighty can do now! They're married."

"Oh, I can't do anything about this marriage," she said, with a gesture of indifference; "but that's not the important thing."

"Not important? What do you mean?"

"I mean that the important thing is to know what made Blair behave in this way; and then cure him."

"Cure him! There's no cure for rottenness." He was so beside himself with pain that he forgot that she was a woman, and Blair's mother.

"I blame myself for Blair's conduct," she said.

"Oh, Elizabeth is as bad as he is!" But he waited for her contradiction.

It did not come. "Probably worse." Involuntarily he raised a protesting hand.

"But I mean to forgive her," said Sarah Maitland, with cold determination.

"Forgive Elizabeth?" he said, angrily, and his anger was the very small end of the wedge of his own forgiveness; "forgive her? It strikes me the boot is on the other leg, Mrs. Maitland."

"Oh, well," she said, "what difference does it make? I guess it's a case of the pot and the kettle. I'm not blaming your girl overmuch; although a bad woman is always worse than a bad man. In this case, Elizabeth acted from hate, and Blair from love; the result is the same, of course, but one motive is worse than the other. But never mind that—Blair has got her, and he will be faithful to her; for a while, anyhow. And Elizabeth will get used to him—that's Nature, and Nature is bigger than a girl's first fancy. So if David doesn't interfere—you think he won't? you don't know human nature, Friend Ferguson! David isn't a saint—at least I hope he isn't; I don't care much about twenty-seven-year- old male saints. David may not be able to interfere, but he'll try to, somehow. You wait! As for Blair, as I say, if David doesn't put his finger in the pie, Blair isn't hopeless."

"I'm glad you think so."

"I do think so. Blair is young yet; and if she costs him something, he may value her—and I think I can manage to make her cost him something! A man doesn't value what comes cheap; and all his life everything has come cheap to Blair."

"I don't see what you're driving at."

"Just this," she explained; "Blair has had everything he wanted,— oh, yes, yes; it's my fault!" she struck an impatient fist upon the arm of her chair. "I told you it was my fault. Don't take precious time to argue over that. It is all my fault. There! will that satisfy you? I've given him everything. So he thought he could have everything. He doesn't know the meaning of 'no.' He has got to learn. I shall teach him. I have thought it all out. I'm going to make a man of him."

"How?" said Robert Ferguson.

"I haven't got the details clear in my mind yet, but this is the gist of it: NO money but what he earns."

"No money?"

"After this, it will be 'root, hog, or die.'"

"But Blair can't root," her superintendent said, fair in spite of himself. And at that her face lighted with a sort of awful purpose.

"Then he must die! Ferguson, don't you see—he has begun to die already?" Again her face quivered. "Look at this business of taking David's wife—oh, I know, they weren't married yet, but the principle is the same; what do you call that but dying? Look at his whole life: what has he done? Received—received! Given nothing. Ferguson, you can't fool God: you've got to give something! A privilege means an obligation—the obligation of sweat! Sweat of your body or your brains. Blair has never sweated. He's always had something for nothing. That is the one immorality that damns. It has damned Blair. Of course, I ought to have realized it before, but I—I suppose I was too busy. Yes; I tell you, if Blair had had to work for what he's got, as you and I have worked for what we've got, he wouldn't be where he is to- day. You know that! He'd have had something else to think of than satisfying his eyes, or his stomach, or his lust. He'd have been decent."

"He might have been," Robert Ferguson said drearily, "but I doubt it. Anyway, you can't, by making him earn or go without, or anything else, give David's girl back to him."

"No," she said heavily, and for a moment her passion of hope flagged; "no, I can't do that. But I shall try to make it up to David in some way, of course. Where is he?" she broke off.

He told her briefly of David's arrival and departure. "He's gone back to his mother," he ended; "she'll comfort him." Then, with a bark of anger, he added, "Mrs. Richie was always saying that Elizabeth would turn out well. I wonder what she will say now? I knew better; her mother, my brother Arthur's wife, was—no good. Yet I let Mrs. Richie bamboozle me into building on her. I always said Life shouldn't play the same trick on me twice—but it has done it! It has done it. My heart was set on Elizabeth. Yes, Mrs. Maitland, I've been fooled again—but so have you."

"Nothing of the kind! I never was fooled before," Sarah Maitland said; "and I sha'n't be again. I am going to make a man of my son! As for your girl, forgive her, Ferguson. Don't be a fool; you take it out of yourself when you refuse forgiveness."

"I'll never forgive her," said Robert Ferguson; "she's hurt the woman I—I have a regard for; she's made David's mother suffer. I'm done with her!"



CHAPTER XXIII

When, on drunken and then on leaden feet, there came to Elizabeth the ruthless to-morrow of her act, her first clear thought was to kill herself ....

After the marriage in the mayor's office—where they paused long enough to write the two notes that were received the next day— Blair had fled with her up into the mountains to a little hotel, where they would not, he felt certain, encounter any acquaintances.

Elizabeth neither assented nor objected. From the moment she had struck her hand into his, there in the tawdry "saloon" of the toll-house, and cried out, "Come!" she let him do as he chose. So he had carried her away to the city hall, where, like any other unclassed or unchurched lovers, they were married by a hurried city official. She had had one more crisis of rage, when in the mayor's office, as she stood at a high wall desk and wrote with an ink-encrusted pen that brief note to her uncle, she said to herself that, as to David Richie, he could hear the news from her uncle—or never hear it; she didn't care which. Then for an instant her eyes glittered again; but except for that one moment, she seemed stunned, mind and body. To Blair, her silent acquiescences had been signs that he had won something more than her consent to revenge herself upon David,—and he wanted more! In all his life he had never deeply cared for anybody but himself; but now, under the terrible selfishness of his act, under the primitive instinct that he called love, there was, trembling in the depths of his nature, Love. It had been born only a little while ago, this new, naked baby of Love. It had had no power and no knowledge; unaided by that silent god of his, it had not been strong enough to save him from himself, or save Elizabeth from him. But he did love her, in spite of his treason to her soul, for he was tender with her, and almost humble; yet his purpose was inflexible. It seemed to him it must find response in her. Such purpose might strike fire from the most unbending steel—why not from this yielding, silent thing, Elizabeth's heart? But numb and flaccid, perfectly apathetic, stunned by that paroxysm of fury, she no more responded to him than down would have responded to the blow of flint ...

It was their second day in the mountains. Blair, going down- stairs very early in the morning, stopped in the office of the hotel to write a brief but intensely polite note to his mother, telling her of his marriage. "Nannie will have broken it to her— poor, dear old Nannie!" he said to himself, pounding a stamp down on the envelope, "but of course it's proper to announce it myself." Then he dropped the "announcement" into the post-bag, and went out for a tramp in the woods. It was a still, furtive morning of low clouds, with an expectancy of snow in the air. But it was not cold, and when, leaving the road and pushing aside the frosted ferns and underbrush, he found himself in the silence of the woods, he sat down on a fallen tree trunk to think.... The moment had come when the only god he knew would no longer be denied.

"I might as well face it," he said; and slowly lit a cigar. But instead of "facing it," he began to watch the first sparse and fitful beginnings of snow—hesitant flakes that sauntered down to rest for a crystal moment on his coat sleeve. Suddenly he caught his thoughts together with a jerk: "I've got to think it out!" he said. Curiously enough, when he said this his thought did not turn with any especial distinctness to David Richie.

Instead, in the next hour of reasonings and excuses, there was always, back in his mind, one face—scornful, contemptuous even; a face he had known only as gentle, and sometimes tender; the face of David's mother. Once he swore at himself, to drive that face out of his mind. "What a fool I am! Elizabeth had broken her engagement with him. I had the right to speak before the thing was smoothed over again. Anybody would say so, even—even Mrs. Richie if she could really understand how things were. But of course she will only see his side." All his excuses for his conduct were in relation to David Richie; he did not think of Elizabeth. He honestly did not know that he had wronged her. He loved her so crazily that he could not realize his cruelty.

It was snowing steadily now; he could hear the faint patter of small, hard flakes on the dry oak leaves over his head. Suddenly some bleached and withered ferns in front of him rustled, and he saw wise, bright eyes looking at him. "I wish I had some nuts for you, bunny," he said—and the bright eyes vanished with a furry whirl through the ferns. He picked up the empty half of a hickory-nut, and turning it over in his fingers, looked at the white grooves left by small sharp teeth. "You little beggars must get pretty hungry in the winter, bunny," he said; "I'll bring a bag of nuts out here for you some day." But while he was talking to the squirrel, he was wrestling with his god. It was characteristic of him that never once in that struggle to justify himself did he use the excuse of Elizabeth's consent. His code, which had allowed him to injure a woman, would not permit him to blame her—even if she deserved it. Instead, over and over he heaped up his own poor defense: "If I had waited, he might have patched it up with her." Over and over the defense crumbled before his eyes: "it was contemptible not to give him the chance to patch it up." Then would come his angry retort: "That's nonsense! Besides it is better, infinitely better, for her to marry me than a poor man like him. I can give her everything,— and love her! God, how I love her. Apart from any selfish consideration, it is a thousand times better for her." For an instant his marrying her seemed actually chivalrous; and at that his god laughed. Blair reddened sharply; to recognize his hypocrisy was the "touch on the hollow of the thigh; and the hollow of the thigh was out of joint"! He pitched the nut away with a vicious fling, and knew, inarticulately, that there was no use lying to himself any longer.