David Fleming's Forgiveness

by Margaret M. Robertson

Elizabeth rose and took the brush from its hook, and swept up the ashes and embers that had fallen upon the hearth. Then she seated herself in her own low chair by the window, and took up her work, but laid it down again, and folded her hands on her lap.

Mr Maxwell smiled. “I see I am not expected to stay much longer. But really, Miss Holt, I don’t quite see ‘the pity’ of it. Why am I not to know all that is going on as well as the rest? Besides, if your father had not told me, some one else would have done so.”

“True.”

“And I might in such a case have committed myself to the doing or saying of something foolish at a first hearing, as I should have done to-day but that your face made me pause.”

“Did it?” said Elizabeth, demurely.

“And if silence is the thing to be desired, I shall be all the more likely to keep silence to others, if you give me the right and true version of troubles past, and of troubles possible in the future, with regard to this matter. Will you take up your work again, and tell me all? Or shall I come another time, Miss Elizabeth?”

But Miss Elizabeth had little to add to the story which her father had told. Jacob was hard, she supposed, just as business men were obliged to be hard sometimes. But then Mr Fleming was not to be regarded just as another man in the same position might be regarded—especially he was not to be so regarded by her brother Jacob. In the sore troubles that had come into the old man’s life. Jacob had had a part. What part Elizabeth did not know she did not even know the nature of the trouble, but she knew, though she had only learned it lately, that the very sight of her brother was like wormwood to Mr Fleming; that even Mrs Fleming, friendly and sweet to all the world, was cold and distant to Jacob. And all this seemed to Elizabeth a sufficient reason why he should be more gentle and forbearing with them than with others, that he should be willing to forego his just claims rather than to lay himself open to the charge of wishing or even seeming to be “hard on them.”

“For what is a little land, more or less, to Jacob, who has so much? And why should he wish to take even a small part of what old Mr Fleming has worked so hard to improve—has put his life into, as one may say?”

“But does he want to take it? Have you ever spoken to your brother about this?”

“He is supposed to want it for the site of the new buildings to be put up for the manufacturing company—if it ever comes into existence. But he does not want it without a sufficient allowance to the old man for it. Only, I suppose, the debt would cover it all. But I have never spoken about it to Jacob. It is not easy to speak to him about business unless he wishes,” said Elizabeth, hesitating. “But Clifton, who is quite inclined to be hard on Jacob, laughs at the idea of his doing unjustly or even severely by Mr Fleming.”