"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.