The Iron Woman | Page 3

up, "Nannie was born proper."
"Why not?" said Blair. "They know everything is ugly at our house.
They've got real dining-rooms at their houses; they don't have old desks
round, the way we do."
It was in the late sixties that these children played in the apple-tree and
arranged their conjugal future; at that time the Maitland house was
indeed, as poor little Blair said, "ugly." Twenty years before, its
gardens and meadows had stretched over to the river; but the estate had
long ago come down in size and gone up in dollars. Now, there was
scarcely an acre of sooty green left, and it was pressed upon by the
yards of the Maitland Works, and almost islanded by railroad tracks.
Grading had left the stately and dilapidated old house somewhat above
the level of a street noisy with incessant teaming, and generally
fetlock-deep in black mud. The house stood a little back from the badly
paved sidewalk; its meager dooryard was inclosed by an iron fence--a
row of black and rusted spears, spotted under their tines with

innumerable gray cocoons. (Blair and David made constant and furtive
attempts to lift these spears, socketed in crumbling lead in the granite
base, for of course there could be nothing better for fighting Indians
than a real iron spear.) The orchard behind the house had been cut in
two by a spur track, which brought jolting gondola cars piled with red
ore down to the furnace. The half dozen apple-trees that were left
stretched gaunt arms over sour, grassless earth; they put out faint flakes
of blossoms in the early spring, and then a fleeting show of greenness,
which in a fortnight shriveled and blackened out of all semblance of
foliage. But all the same the children found it a delightful place to play,
although Blair sometimes said sullenly that it was "ugly." Blair hated
ugly things, and, poor child! he was assailed by ugliness on every side.
The queer, disorderly dining-room, in which for reasons of her own
Mrs. Maitland transacted so much of her business that it had become
for all practical purposes an office of her Works, was perhaps the
"ugliest" thing in the world to the little boy.
"Why don't we have a real dining-room?" he said once; "why do we
have to eat in a office?"
"We'll eat in the kitchen, if I find it convenient," his mother told him,
looking at him over her newspaper, which was propped against a silver
coffee-urn that had found a clear space on a breakfast table cluttered
with papers and ledgers.
"They have a bunch of flowers on the table up at David's house," the
little boy complained; "I don't see why we can't."
"I don't eat flowers," Mrs. Maitland said grimly.
"I don't eat papers," Blair said, under his breath; and his mother looked
at him helplessly. How is one to reply to a child of eight who makes
remarks of this kind? Mrs. Maitland did not know; it was one of the
many things she did not know in relation to her son; for at that time she
loved him with her mind rather than her body, so she had none of those
soft intuitions and persuasions of the flesh which instruct most mothers.
In her perplexity she expressed the sarcastic anger one might vent upon
an equal under the same circumstances:

"You'd eat nothing at all, young man, let me tell you, if it wasn't for the
'papers,' as you call 'em, in this house!" But it was no wonder that Blair
called it ugly--the house, the orchard, the Works--even his mother, in
her rusty black alpaca dress, sitting at her desk in the big, dingy
dining-room, driving her body and soul, and the bodies and souls of her
workmen--all for the sake of the little, shrinking boy, who wanted a
bunch of flowers on the table. Poor mother! Poor son! And poor little
proper, perplexed half-sister, looking on, and trying to make peace.
Nannie's perplexities had begun very far back. Of course she was too
young when her father married his second wife to puzzle over that; but
if she did not, other people did. Why a mild, vague young widower
who painted pictures nobody bought, and was as unpractical as a man
could be whose partnership in an iron-works was a matter of
inheritance--why such a man wanted to marry Miss Sarah Blair was
beyond anybody's wisdom. It is conceivable, indeed, that he did not
want to.
There were rumors that after the death of Nannie's mother, Herbert
Maitland had been inclined to look for consolation to a certain Miss
Molly Wharton (she that afterward married another widower, Henry
Knight); and everybody thought Miss Molly was willing to smile upon
him. Be that as it may,