"Now, Nannie, don't be silly."
"If you can't overlook it, because of our old friendship, you will have to drop me, too, Elizabeth."
Nannie was so pitiful and trembling that Elizabeth put her arms around her. "I'll never drop you, dear old Nannie!"
So, as far as the two girls were concerned, the habit of affection persisted; but Mrs. Maitland was not annoyed by having Elizabeth present when Blair came to supper.
Blair did not come to supper very often now; he did not come to the
Works. "Is your brother sick?" Sarah Maitland asked her stepdaughter
three or four days later. "He hasn't been at his desk since Monday.
What's the matter with him?"
"He is worried about something, Mamma."
"Worried? What on earth has he got to worry him?" she grunted. In her own worry she had come across the hall to speak to Nannie, and find out, if she could, something about Blair. As she turned to go back to the dining-room, a little more uneasy than when she came in, her eye fell on that picture which Blair had left, a small oasis in the desert of Nannie's parlor, and with her hand on the door-knob she paused to look at it. The sun was lying on the dark oblong, and in those illuminated depths maternity was glowing like a jewel. Sarah Maitland saw no art, but she saw divine things. She bent forward and looked deep into the picture; suddenly her eyes smiled until her whole face softened. "Why, look at his little foot," she said, under her breath; "she's holding it in her hand!" She was silent for a moment; then she spoke as if to herself: "When Blair was as big as that, I bought him a pair of green morocco slippers. I don't suppose you remember them, Nannie? They buttoned round the ankle; they had white china buttons. He used to try to pick the buttons off." She smiled again vaguely; then blinked as if awakening from a dream, and blew a long bubbling sigh through her closed lips; "I can't imagine why he doesn't come to the office!"
In the dining-room, as she took up her pen, she frowned. "Debt again?" she asked herself. But when, absorbed and irritable, Blair came into her office at the Works, and sat down at his desk to write endless letters that he tore up as soon as they were written, she did not ask for any explanation. She merely told Robert Ferguson to tell the bookkeeper to make a change in the pay-roll. "I'm going to raise Blair's salary," she said. Money was the only panacea Mrs. Maitland knew anything about.
That next fortnight left its marks on Blair Maitland. People who have always had what they want, have a sort of irrational certainty of continuing to have what they want. It makes them a little unhumanly young. Blair's face, which had been as irresponsible as a young faun's, suddenly showed those scars of thwarted desire which mean age. There was actual agony in his sweet, shallow eyes, and with it the half-resentful astonishment of one who, being unaccustomed to suffering, does not know how to bear it. He grew very silent; he was very pale; in his pain he turned to his sister with an openness of emotion which frightened and shamed her; he had no self-control and no dignity.
"I must see her. I must, I must! Go and ask her to see me for a moment. I've disgusted her"—Nannie blushed; "but I'll make her forgive me." Sometimes he burst out in rages at David: "What does he know about love? What kind of a man is he for Elizabeth? She's a girl now, but if he gets her, God help him when she wakes up, a woman! Not that I mean to try to get her. Understand that. Nothing is farther from my mind than that. She belongs to him; I play fair. I don't pretend to be a saint, but I play fair. I don't cut in, when the man's my friend. No; I just want to see her and ask her to forgive me. That's all. Nannie, for God's sake ask her if she won't see me, just for five minutes!"