The Iron Woman | Page 4

he suddenly found himself the husband of his
late partner's daughter, a woman eight years older than he, and at least
four inches taller; a silent, plain woman, of devastating common sense,
who contradicted all those femininities and soft lovelinesses so
characteristic, not only of his first wife but of pretty Molly Wharton
also.
John Blair, the father of the second Mrs. Maitland, an uneducated,
extremely intelligent man, had risen from puddling to partnership in the
Maitland Works. There had been no social relations between Mr.
Maitland, Sr., and this new member of the firm, but the older man had a
very intimate respect, and even admiration for John Blair. When he
came to die he confided his son's interests to his partner with absolute
confidence that they would be safe. "Herbert has no gumption, John,"
he said; "he wants to be an 'artist.' You've got to look after him." "I will,
Mr. Maitland, I will," said John Blair, snuffling and blowing his nose

on a big red pocket-handkerchief. He did look after him. He put
Herbert's affairs ahead of his own, and he made it clear to his daughter,
who in business matters was, curiously enough, his right-hand man,
that "Maitland's boy" was always, as he expressed it, "to have the inside
track."
"I ain't bothering about you, Sally; I'll leave you enough. And if I didn't,
you could scratch gravel for yourself. But Maitland's boy ain't our kind.
He must be taken care of."
When John Blair died, perhaps a sort of faithfulness to his wishes made
his Sally "take care" of Herbert Maitland by marrying him. "His child
certainly does need a mother," she thought;--"an intelligent mother, not
a goose." By and by she told Herbert of his child's need; or at any rate
helped him to infer it. And somehow, before he knew it, he married her.
By inheritance they owned the Works between them; so really their
marriage was, as the bride expressed it, "a very sensible arrangement";
and any sensible arrangement appealed to John Blair's daughter. But
after a breathless six months of partnership--in business if in nothing
else--Herbert Maitland, leaving behind him his little two-year- old
Nannie, and an unborn boy of whose approaching advent he was
ignorant, got out of the world as expeditiously as consumption could
take him. Indeed, his wife had so jostled him and deafened him and
dazed him that there was nothing for him to do but die-- so that there
might be room for her expanding energy. Yet she loved him; nobody
who saw her in those first silent, agonized months could doubt that she
loved him. Her pain expressed itself, not in moans or tears or physical
prostration, but in work. Work, which had been an interest, became a
refuge. Under like circumstances some people take to religion and
some to drink; as Mrs. Maitland's religion had never been more than
church-going and contributions to foreign missions, it was, of course,
no help under the strain of grief; and as her temperament did not dictate
the other means of consolation, she turned to work. She worked herself
numb; very likely she had hours when she did not feel her loss. But she
did not feel anything else. Not even her baby's little clinging hands, or
his milky lips at her breast. She did her duty by him; she hired a
reliable woman to take charge of him, and she was careful to appear at

regular hours to nurse him. She ordered toys for him, and as she shared
the naive conviction of her day that church-going and religion were
synonymous, she began, when he was four years old, to take him to
church. In her shiny, shabby black silk, which had been her Sunday
costume ever since it had been purchased as part of her curiously
limited trousseau she sat in a front pew, between the two children, and
felt that she was doing her duty to both of them. A sense of duty
without maternal instinct is not, perhaps, as baleful a thing as maternal
instinct without a sense of duty, but it is sterile; and in the first few
years of her bereavement, the big, suffering woman seemed to have
nothing but duty to offer to her child. Nannie's puzzles began then.
"Why don't Mamma hug my baby brother?" she used to ask the nurse,
who had no explanation to offer. The baby brother was ready enough to
hug Nannie, and his eager, wet little kisses on her rosy cheeks sealed
her to his service while he was still in petticoats. Blair was three years
old before, under the long atrophy of grief, Sarah Maitland's maternal
instinct began to stir. When it did, she was chilled by the boy's
shrinking from her as if from a