Mrs. Maitland had said it was a pity she could not live to see Blair fight her will; she "would like the fun of it." She would not have found any food for mirth if she could have seen her son in that law-office reading with set teeth, her opinion of himself, her realization of her responsibility in making him what he was, and her reason for leaving him merely a small income from a trust fund. Had it not been for the certificate—in itself a denial of her cruel words—lying at that moment in his breast pocket, he would have been unable to control his fury. As it was, underneath his anger was the consciousness that she had made what reparation she could.
When he folded the copy of the will and thrust it into his pocket his face was very pale, but he could not resist saying to old Mr. Howe as he passed him in the outer office, "I hope you will be pleased, sir, in view of your protest about this will, to know that my mother regretted her course toward me, and left a message to that effect with my sister."
"I am glad to hear it," the astonished lawyer said, "but—"
Blair did not wait to hear the end of his sentence. He said to himself that even before he made up his mind what to do about the will he must get possession of his money—"or the first thing I know some of their confounded legal quibbles will make trouble for me," he said.
Certainly there was no trouble for him as yet; the process of securing his mother's gift involved nothing more than the depositing of the certificate in his own bank. The cashier, who knew Sarah Maitland's name very well indeed on checks payable to her son, ventured to offer his condolences: "Your late mother was a very wonderful woman, Mr. Maitland. There was no better business man this side of the Alleghanies than your mother, sir."
Blair bowed; he was too absorbed to make any conventional reply. The will: should he or should he not contest it? His habit of indecision made the mere question—apart from its gravity—acutely painful; not even the probabilities of the result of such a contest helped him to decide what to do. The probabilities were grimly clear. Blair had, perhaps, a little less legal knowledge than the average layman, but even he could not fail to realize that Sarah Maitland's will was, as Mr. Howe had said, "iron." Even if it could be broken, it might take years of litigation to do it. "And a 'bird in the hand'!" Blair reminded himself cynically. "But," he told Nannie, a week or two later when she was repeating nervously, for the twentieth time, just how his mother had softened toward him,—"but those confounded orphan asylums make me mad! If she wanted orphans, what about you and me? Charity begins at home. I swear I'll contest the will!"
Nannie did not smile; she very rarely smiled now. Miss White thought she was grieving over her stepmother's death; and Elizabeth said, pityingly, "I didn't realize she was so fond of her." Perhaps Nannie did not realize it herself until she began to miss her stepmother's roughness, her arrogant generosity, her temper,—to miss, even, the mere violence of her presence; then she began to grieve softly to herself. "Oh, Mamma, I wish you hadn't died," she used to say, over and over, as she lay awake in the darkness. She lay awake a great deal in those first weeks.
All her life Nannie had been like a little leaf whirled along by a great gale of thundering power and purpose which she never attempted to understand, much less contend with; now, abruptly, the gale had dropped, and all her world was still. No wonder she lay awake at night to listen to such stillness! Apart from grief the mere shock of sudden quietness might account for her nervousness, Robert Ferguson said; but he was perplexed at her lack of interest in her own affairs. She seemed utterly unaware of the change in her circumstances. That she was a rich woman now was a matter of indifference to her. And she seemed equally unconscious of her freedom. Apparently it never occurred to her that she could alter her mode of life. Except that, at Blair's insistence, she had a maid, and that Harris had cleared the office paraphernalia from the dining-room table, life in the stately, dirty, melancholy old house still ran in those iron grooves which Mrs. Maitland had laid down for herself nearly thirty years before. Nannie knew nothing better than the grooves, and seemed to desire nothing better. She was indifferent to her surroundings, and what was more remarkable, indifferent to Blair's perplexities; at any rate, she was of no assistance to him in making up his mind about the will. His vacillations hardly seemed to interest her. Once he said, suppose instead of contesting it, he should go to work? But she only said, vaguely, "That would be very nice."
Curiously enough, in the midst of his uncertainties, a little certainty had sprung up: it was the realization that work, merely as work, might be amusing. In these months of tormenting jealousy, of continually crushed hope that Elizabeth would begin to care for him, of occasional shamed consciousness of having taken advantage of a woman—Blair Maitland had had very little to amuse him. So, in those hesitating weeks that followed his mother's death, work, which her will necessitated, began to interest him. Perhaps the interest, if not the amusement, was enhanced by one or two legal opinions as to the possibility of breaking the will. Harry Knight read it, and grinned:
"Well, old man, as you wouldn't give me the case anyhow, I can afford to be perfectly disinterested and tell you the truth. In my opinion, it would put a lot of cash into some lawyer's pocket to contest this will; but I bet it would take a lot out of yours! You'd come out the small end of the horn, my boy."