"At any rate, he's a man! He doesn't live like this"—she made a contemptuous gesture; "muddling with silks and paintings, and pictures of bad women! What kind of a room is this for a man? Full of flowers and stinking jars, and cushions, and truck? It's more fit for a—a creature like that picture"—she set her heel on the smiling face; "than for a man! I ought never to have sent you here. I ought to have put you to puddling." She looked at him in growing agitation. "My God! Blair, what are you—living this way, with silks and perfumery and clay baby dolls? You've got no guts to you! I didn't mind your making a fool of yourself; that's natural; nobody can get to be a man till he's been a fool; but this—" She stood there, with one hand on the mantelpiece beside the row of photographs and bits of carving and little silver trinkets, and looked at him in positive fright. "And you are my son," she said.
The torrent of her angry shame suddenly swept Blair's manhood of twenty-four years away; her very power stripped him bare as a baby; it almost seemed as if she had sucked his masculinity out of him and incorporated it into herself. He stood there like a cringing schoolboy expecting to be whipped. "One of the men gave me that picture; I—"
"You ought to have slapped his face! Listen to me: you are going to be looked after,—do you hear me? You are going to be watched. Do you understand?" She gathered up the whole row of photographs, innocent and offensive together, and threw them into the fire. "You are going to walk straight, or you are coming home, and going to work."
It was a match to gunpowder; in an instant Blair's temper, the terrific temper of the uniformly and lazily amiable man, flashed into furious words.
Stammering with rage, he told her what he thought of her; to record his opinion is not for edification. Even Sarah Maitland flinched before it. She left him with a bang. She saw the Dean again, and her recommendations of espionage were so extreme and so unwise that he found himself taking Blair's part in his effort to save the young man from the most insolent intrusion upon his privacy. She went back to Mercer in a whirl of anger but in somber silence. She had scorched and stung under the truths her son told her about herself; she had bled under the lies she had told him as to her feeling for him. She looked ten years older for that hour in his room. But she had nothing to say. She told poor, frightened Nannie that she had "seen Master Blair"; she added that he was a fool. To Robert Ferguson she was a little more explicit:
"Blair has not been behaving himself; he's in debt; he has been gambling. See that all these bills are paid. Tell Watson to give him a hundred dollars more a month; I won't have him running in debt in this way. Now what about the Duluth order?"
CHAPTER XII
Mr. Ferguson made no protest in regard to Blair's increased allowance. "If his mother wants to ruin him, it isn't my business," he said. The fact was, he had not recovered from his astonished resentment at Sarah Maitland's joke in Mrs. Richie's parlor. He thought about it constantly, and asked himself whether he did not owe his neighbor an apology of some kind. The difficulty was to know what kind, for after all he was perfectly innocent! "Such an idea never entered my head," he thought angrily; "but of course, if there has been anything in my conduct to put it into Mrs. Maitland's head, I ought to be thrashed! Perhaps I'd better not go in next door more than two or three times a week?" So, for once, Robert Ferguson was distinctly out with his employer, and when she told him to see that Blair had a hundred dollars more a month, he said, in his own mind, "be hanged to him! What difference does it make to me if she ruins him?" and held his tongue—until the next day. Then he barked out a remonstrance: "I suppose you know your own business, but if I had a boy I wouldn't increase his allowance because he was in debt."
"I want to keep him from getting in debt again," she explained, her face falling into troubled lines.
"If you will allow me to say so—having been a boy myself, that's not the way to do it."