Elizabeth's color came and went; she reminded herself that she must be fair to Blair; his mother had a right to show her forgiveness by leaving the money to him instead of David. Yes; she must remember that; she must be just to him. But even as she said so she ground her teeth together.
"Blair did not try to influence his mother, Uncle Robert," she said, "if that's what you are thinking of. He didn't see her while she was sick. He has never seen her since—since—" "There are other ways of influencing people than by seeing them. He wrote to Nannie, didn't he?"
"If I thought," Elizabeth said in a low voice, "that Blair had induced Nannie to influence Mrs. Maitland, I would—" But she did not finish her sentence. "Good-by, Uncle Robert. I'm going to see Nannie."
As she hurried down toward Shantytown through the Sunday emptiness of the hot streets, she said to herself that if Nannie had made her stepmother give the money to Blair, she, Elizabeth, would do something about it! "I won't have it!" she said, passionately.
It had been a long time since Elizabeth's face had been so vivid. The old sheet-lightning of anger began to flash faintly across it. She did not know what she would do to Nannie if Nannie had induced Mrs. Maitland to rob David, but she would do something! Yet when she reached the house, her purpose waited for a minute; Nannie's tremor of loneliness and perplexity was so pitifully in evidence that she could not burst into her own perplexity.
She had been trying, poor Nannie! to make up her mind about many small, crowding affairs incident to the situation. In these weeks since Mrs. Maitland's death, Nannie, for the first time in her life, found herself obliged to answer questions. Harris asked them: "You ain't a-goin' to be livin' here, Miss Nannie; 'tain't no use to fill the coal-cellar, is it?" Miss White asked them: "Your Mamma's clothes ought to be put in camphor, dear child, or else given away; which do you mean to do?" Blair asked them: "When will you move out of this terrible house, Nancy dear?" A dozen times a day she was asked to make up her mind, she whose mind had always been made up for her!
That hot Sunday morning when Elizabeth was hurrying down to Shantytown with the lightning flickering in her clouded eyes, Nannie, owing to Miss White's persistence about camphor, had gone into Mrs. Maitland's room to look over her things.
Oh, these "things"! These pitiful possessions that the helpless dead must needs leave to the shrinking disposal of those who are left! How well every mourner knows them, knows the ache of perplexity and dismay that comes with the very touch of them. It is not the valuables that make grief shrink,—they settle themselves; such-and-such books or jewels or pieces of silver belong obviously to this or that side of the family. But what about the dear, valueless, personal things that neither side of the family wants? Things treasured by the silent dead because of some association unknown, perhaps, to those who mourn. What about these precious, worthless things? Mrs. Maitland had no personal possessions of intrinsic value, but she had her treasures. There was a little calendar on her bureau; it was so old that Nannie could not remember when it had not been there hanging from the slender neck of a bottle of German cologne. She took it up now, and looked at the faded red crescents of the new moon; how long ago that moon had waxed and waned! "She loved it," Nannie said to herself, "because Blair gave it to her." Standing on the bureau was the row of his photographs; on each one his mother had written his age and the date when the picture had been taken. In the disorder of the top drawer, tumbled about among her coarse handkerchiefs, her collars, her Sunday black kid gloves, were relics of her son's babyhood: a little green morocco slipper, with a white china button on the ankle-band; a rubber rattle, cracked and crumbling…. What is one to do with things like these? Burn them, of course. There is nothing else that can be done. Yet the mourner shivers when the flame touches them, as though the cool fingers of the dead might feel the scorch! Poor, frightened Nannie was the last person who could light such a holy fire; she took them up—the slipper or the calendar, and put them down again. "Poor Mamma!" she said over and over. Then she saw a bunch of splinters tied together with one of Blair's old neckties; she held it in her hand for a minute before she realized that it was part of a broken cane. She did not know when or why it had been broken, but she knew it was Blair's, and her eyes smarted with tears. "Oh, how she loved him!" she thought, and drew a breath of satisfaction remembering how she had helped that speechless, dying love to express itself.
She was standing there before the open drawer, lifting things up, then putting them back again, unable to decide what to do with any of them, when Elizabeth suddenly burst in:
"Nannie!"