Part 5

Lydia Eaton answered, stammering and incoherent, something about the cold weather; and then, she was so overstrained and nervous, she burst out crying. “Oh, won’t you please let me give you this?” she said, and put some money into the woman’s hand.

She went away, stumbling, because her eyes were blurred with tears, and saying to herself,--

“What _shall_ I do?”

She almost ran into Mr. West on Baker Street, and stopped abruptly, putting her hands on his arm, and, in her agitation, shaking it violently, her whole face convulsed and terrified.

“Tell me--you know; you are good: whose fault is it? Robert’s--for all--this?”

He understood instantly, and was very gentle with her.

“My dear Mrs. Eaton, that is a very big question. It isn’t any one man’s fault. It seems strange, but the weather in India may be the reason we are all so wretched in Mercer. Your brother may be forced to make this cut by great laws, which, perhaps, you cannot understand.”

“But _we_ go on being warm,” she said, “and it is cold. Oh, those little children had to get warm on the slag! Oh, sir, I don’t believe the Saviour would have been warm while the children were cold!”

She looked at him passionately, abruptly applying the precepts of the Founder of his religion.

“Ah, well, you know,” William West said kindly, “this whole matter is so enormously complicated”--And then he stammered a little, for, after all, how could he explain to this poor little frightened, ignorant soul that we have learned how injurious to the race would be the literal application of the logic of the Sermon on the Mount? Nowadays the disciple is wiser than his master, and the servant more prudent than his Lord; we know that to feed the five thousand with loaves and fishes, without receiving some equivalent, would be to pauperize them. But of course Mrs. Eaton could not be made to understand that. The clergyman quieted her, somehow; perhaps just by his gentle pitifulness; or else her reverence for him silenced her. She did not ask him any more questions; and there was no one else to ask, except her brother, and just now it would have been hard to find the chance to ask Robert Blair anything.

The strike had slowly involved all the mills owned by a syndicate of which he was chairman. He had to go to South Bend, where the great smelting furnaces are; he was mobbed there, though with no worse results than the unpleasantness of eggs and cabbage stalks; still, the wickedness of those dreadful creatures was something too awful, Mrs. Blair said, crying with anger and fright over the newspaper account. At still another mill town a ghastly box reached him, labeled: “Starved by the Blair syndicate.” Robert Blair paled and sickened at its contents, but he swore under his breath: “Let them starve their brats, if they want to; it isn’t my business. There’s work for them if they want it; but the curs would rather loaf. This country can go to the devil before I’ll give in to them!”

He did not get back to Mercer until December. “I wouldn’t let the fools keep me from you on Christmas,” he told his wife savagely, and caught her in his arms with a sort of rage. “Were you very lonely? You’ve been nervous--I can see it in your face. You are paler!” He ground his teeth; that those brutes should have made her paler!

“Of course I was lonely,” she said, smiling, though her eyes were bright with tears, “and I’ve been frightened almost to death about you, too. Oh, that mob!”

“You little goose; didn’t I tell you there was no danger? I always had two detectives. But I used to get anxious about you. I telegraphed the mayor to detail an officer to be always about the house. Heaven knows what’s going to be the end of this business, Nell! Well, sweetheart, may I have some dinner, or must I go and dress first?”

“No. You’re dreadfully dusty, but I can’t lose sight of you for a moment,” she said gayly. “Robert, I should have died if you hadn’t been at home for Christmas!”

His sister and the children met him at the dining-room door--Silas, capering about with delight; Esther, prettier than ever, coming to hang on his arm, and rub her cheek against his shoulder, and say how glad she was to see him.

“Robert, it’s perfectly disgusting,” Mrs. Blair complained, “but a delegation insists upon seeing you to-night; they are coming about eight.”

“Oh, confound it!” he said frowning; “the strike, of course? A lot of parsons meddling with what they know nothing about.”

“There are parsons, I suppose,” she said, “but the mayor is coming. Do get rid of them as soon as you can, so that I may have a little of you.”

She looked so pretty as she sat at the head of her table, beseeching him, that he declared he would kick the delegation out if they stayed over ten minutes; then he tossed a small white velvet box across the roses in the big silver bowl in the middle of the table, and watched her flash of joy as she opened it.

“It seems to me I have some more boxes, somewhere,” he said good-humoredly. “There, Essie! if your aunt Eleanor had packed me off to get into my dress-suit, I wouldn’t have found this one in my pocket. Lydia, you sober old lady, can you wear that? As for you, Silas, you don’t want any gewgaws, do you? We fellows think more of a bit of paper with three figures on it, hey?”

“There! there’s the bell. It’s your horrid delegation,” Mrs. Blair cried. “Just let them wait till you finish dinner. And do get rid of them quickly. Mr. Hudson, Lydia’s minister, will be there; tell him to wait a minute when the others have gone. I want to speak to him.”

“I thought little Hudson had more sense,” Robert Blair grumbled, rising and going into the library to meet a dozen of his fellow-citizens, some of them men with grave and startled faces, who from pity for the three thousand fools who were turning Mercer upside down, and from good-humored interest in the affairs of their powerful townsman, were beginning to feel the sting of personal alarm about their own concerns.

These men were saying to each other what the newspapers had been saying for two months, that Robert Blair, for vanity or obstinacy or greed, was bringing alarming disaster not merely upon a few thousand desperate and hungry and unreasonable puddlers, but upon the respectable well-to-do business population of his city.

“And he’s got to stop it!” the mayor said angrily.

“It would be a good job if somebody would blow him up with dynamite,” said the Baptist deacon, who was the wealthiest merchant in town. “He’ll swamp us all, if we don’t look out.”

As for the clergyman, he looked very miserable, for he had the expenses of his church and his own salary in mind, and between offending Mr. Blair and not protesting against the continuance of the strike, the poor little man was between the devil and the deep sea.

“Gentlemen,” said Robert Blair, calm and hard (“as nails,” the Baptist deacon said), “I appreciate the honor of your call, and I hope I have listened with proper courtesy and patience to what you had to say; but allow me to call your attention to certain facts which seem to contradict your assertions that you suspect that I am not acting for the public good in this matter of the strike. Mr. Mayor, if my wealth had been gained by the subversion of law and order, as you suggest, I am sure you could not have accepted any of it for your campaign--ah--_expenses_. For you, Mr. Davis, a church member, a deacon, if I mistake not, I need only remind you of your willingness to borrow, I will not say how many thousands, as the basis of your most successful business (though I would not be thought to underrate your own prudence and economy in paying your women clerks a little less than they can live on). And as for my worthy friend here, the Rev. Mr. Hudson, if my money were, as he has so delicately implied, ‘blood-money,’ I cannot think he would have accepted the contribution I had the privilege of making towards the alterations of his church. Gentlemen, you have felt it your duty to remonstrate with me upon my way of making money; so long as you are content to spend that money, I cannot believe that your remonstrances are based upon anything else than the inconvenience to yourselves of certain exigencies which I deeply regret, but which result from methods which commend themselves to me, and which, I observe, you apply in your own concerns: you all pay as little as you can for what you want; I pay as little as I can for labor. For your particular request that I submit to the demands of the strikers, I can only say that when Mr. Davis will give away in charity the fortune built upon the outcome of those methods; when his honor the Mayor will refund the--ah--_expenses_ of his recent successful campaign and call it conscience-money; when the Rev. Mr. Hudson will give up improving his church--in fact, when you will all consent to buy your shirts or your potatoes in the dearest market--I will consent to alter the methods whereby I have had the honor of serving you. We will all reduce together. When we can do that, I will recognize a moral issue, as Mr. Hudson so admirably expresses it. Until then I will try to mind my own business. If it were not perhaps discourteous, I would recommend a like course of action to this committee. Gentlemen, I bid you good-evening.”

He was pale with rage. He forgot his wife’s message to the minister; he bowed, and stood with folded arms watching the withdrawal of the humiliated and angry delegation, “with their tails between their legs,” the little clergyman said to himself, stung by the impudent injustice of it all.

Mr. Blair went into the drawing-room, breathing hard with the restraint he had put upon himself, for his coldly insolent words had been no outlet to his anger. “Don’t talk about it,” he said violently. “I won’t hear another word on the subject. Nell, I thought that little Hudson was not entirely a jackass, though he is a parson; he had the impertinence to say that ‘Brother West’ agreed with him. I don’t believe it! But if it’s true, why, then, West is a meddling idiot, like all the rest of these damned self-seeking philanthropists.”

“Robert, _dear_! the children,” murmured Mrs. Blair nervously.

His face was dully red, and his blue, fierce eyes cut like knives; one felt an unspoken epithet applied to the children, who watched him furtively, with frightened glances, and moved about awkwardly, speaking to each other in undertones. A moment before, everything had been full of charm and graciousness; their pretty aunt sat, indolent and graceful, on a yellow sofa, leaning back against some ivory-satin cushions, with a great yellow-shaded lamp shining down on her delicate dark beauty; the flicker of the fire behind the sparkling brass dogs went leaping softly about the room, glowing on the walls, which were covered above the white wainscoting with yellow damask, on which the candle-light from the high sconces fell with a yellow shine; everything was golden and bright and rich, and the warm still air was delicate with the scent of violets. Then into it burst this violent and angry presence.

There is no embarrassment quite like the embarrassment of listening to a person for whom one has a regard making a fool of himself. Nobody spoke. Robert Blair tramped up and down, kicked a little gilded stool half across the room, caught his foot in a rug, stumbled, and then swore. Mrs. Blair’s fox-terrier, Pat, shrunk under a table and looked at him, trembling.

“Silas,” said Mrs. Eaton, “you and Esther must go upstairs.”

“The trouble is,” said her brother to his wife, “these men don’t know what they are talking about; they don’t know anything about the market; they don’t know anything about the necessities of trade; all they know is their dividends; if _they_ were cut, there’d be a howl! But they presume to dictate to us; to tell us the money is blood-money; all the same, they are ready enough to spend it on their own carcasses!”

Mrs. Eaton had closed the door on her children, and came and stood by a little silver-cluttered table, under the big yellow lamp. “I think Robert is quite right,” she said.

The approval of this mild creature was like an edge laid against the tense thread of Robert Blair’s anger. He burst into a laugh.

“Bless your heart, Lydia, I didn’t know you were in the room. Well, my dear, I’m glad you approve of me.”

“I don’t, brother.”

“Oh, you don’t? Where are the chicks? Sent them out of the room because I used bad words? Well, I oughtn’t to swear in the drawing-room, that’s a fact. _Place aux Dames!_ But after all, I only dropped the ‘_place_.’”

“Oh!” his wife said; and then, “you are very naughty;” and pouted, and pulled him down on his knees beside her.

“I thought it was very natural to be angry at the rug,” Mrs. Eaton said breathlessly; “I’ve often felt like speaking that way myself”--

“Do, Lydia, do!” Mr. Blair interrupted, with a laugh.

“--but Mr. Eaton would never have allowed the children to hear, and”--

“Come, now! Haven’t I apologized? Don’t rub it in. I’ll give you something extra to put in the plate on Sunday, because I did pitch into your man Hudson like the devil! I told him so long as he spent ‘blood-money’ for his darned improvements, he couldn’t reproach me for earning it.”

“Oh,” Lydia Eaton said, her hands squeezed together,--“oh, no! He is quite different from--me. It is _you_ who are spending the--blood-money on the improvements. If he were spending it on himself, like--like me, it would be different.”

Her brother looked up at her from his footstool at his wife’s feet, first amused, and then bored.

“My dear Lily, I’m sure I don’t know what you are talking about. I’m sorry if I stepped on your toes about your parson. He means well. Only he is a parson, so I suppose he can’t help being rather ladylike in business matters. Do drop the subject; I am sick of the whole thing. How is your conservatory, Nell? Are those violets the result of your agricultural efforts?”

“I think, Robert,” his sister said in her low voice, that shivered and broke, “I must just say one thing more: I must give you back this beautiful thing you gave me at dinner. And I must go away with the children.”

“What under the sun!” he began, frowning; then he got up and stood on the hearth-rug, his back to the fire. “Lydia, I hope you are not going to be a fool? What are you talking about? Sit down,--sit down! You’re as white as a ghost. Lily, I’m afraid you’re a great goose. What’s the matter?” He could not help softening as he looked at her. She stood there by the little tottering table, loaded with its dozens of foolish bits of silver, so tense and quivering that even his impatient eyes could not fail to see her agitation.

“Robert, you have been so kind to us; you are so good to us,--oh, I don’t know how I can do it!” she broke into an anguished sob,--“but I must. Mr. Eaton would never have let the children be supported on money that was not--that was not good.”

There was silence; the clock in the hall chimed ten. Then Eleanor Blair, sitting up, pale and angry, said,--

“Well, upon my word!”

Her husband looked at his sister with sudden kindness in his eyes. “Lily, you don’t understand. When I said what I did to Mr. Hudson,--of course, that has put it into your head,--I didn’t really mean it. In the first place, I’m an honest man (I’ll just mention that in passing), and it is not your business nor his to judge my business methods. It isn’t a pretty thing to look a gift-horse in the mouth, Lil.”

“It isn’t what you said to Mr. Hudson,” she answered. “I’ve been thinking about it for nearly a year. Robert, you pay them so little, and I--I have all this.”

She looked about the beautiful room with a sort of fright: it seemed to her that the warm and stately walls hid human misery lying close outside,--hunger and hatred, cold and sickness, and the terror of to-morrow. The impudent luxury of this enormous wealth struck her like a blow on the mouth.

“They,” she said, with a sob, “_are hungry_.”

Her brother, divided between irritation and amusement, was touched in spite of himself.

“My dear Lily,” he said, “you can’t understand this thing. To put it vulgarly, you’ve bitten off more than you can chew. Look here, the men can go to work to-morrow if they want to; but they don’t want to. I offer them work, and they can take it or leave it. Well, they leave it. It’s their affair, not mine.”

But she shook her head miserably. “I don’t understand it. If you were poor, too, it would be different.”

“Well, really!” said Mrs. Blair.

But Robert Blair was wonderfully patient.

“There’s another thing you must remember, Lily; these people are far better off on what I am willing to pay them than they were in Europe, where most of them came from.”

“But, Robert,” she said passionately, “because they could be worse off doesn’t seem to be any reason why they shouldn’t be better off. And--_it isn’t kind_.”

“Kind?” Her brother looked at her blankly, and then, with a shout of laughter, “Lydia, you are as good as a play! No, my dear; I don’t run my mills for kindness.”

“But,” she said, almost in a whisper, “whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you”--

Mrs. Blair made a gesture of disgust.

“--oh, brother, I didn’t mean to find fault with you. Only with myself. I--I haven’t any right to spend money that I--don’t know about.”

“Well, anything more?” Robert Blair said, a little tired of her foolishness. “My dear, like the parson, you mean well; but you are a great goose!”

As for his wife, she did not even answer Mrs. Eaton’s tremulous “good-night.”

V

The husband and wife looked at each other; then Robert Blair flung his head back with a laugh.

“She is perfectly delicious!”

“She is perfectly ungrateful, and I believe she means it.”

“Oh, nonsense! Lil hasn’t mind enough to mean anything; and I’ll tell you another thing: in spite of her quiet ways, she really has a good deal of worldly wisdom. She knows what it is to those two children to have me interested in them. Don’t worry your little head”--

“Oh, I don’t worry,” she answered. “If she is going to presume to criticise you, I don’t want her under my roof; the sooner she leaves the better!”

“Spitfire!” he told her, kissing her pretty hand, and forgetting all about his sister’s absurdity, and the strike, and the men and women shivering in the tenements down in the miserable mill town.

But he remembered it all the next morning at the breakfast-table, for Lydia Eaton’s white face was too striking to escape comment. Mrs. Blair was not present, preferring to be, at what she called the “brutal hour of eight,” in her own room, with a tray and her maid and a novel.

“What’s the matter?” Mr. Blair said kindly. “Are you ill, Lily?”

“It’s what I told you last night, Robert,” she said nervously.

The solemn Samuel, all ears, but looking perfectly deaf, brought a dish to his master’s elbow. Robert Blair closed his lips with a snap. Then he said,--

“Please make no reference to that folly before Eleanor.”

But of course it was only a respite. The folly had to be repeated to Eleanor--discussed, argued, denounced, until the whole atmosphere of the house was charged with excitement.

Through it all Lydia Eaton came and went, and did her packing.

“Well,” her sister-in-law said contemptuously, “perhaps you’ll tell me how you mean to _feed_ Esther and Silas? You have a right to starve yourself, but I have some feeling for the children!”

“I am going to work,” the other answered, trembling.

“Lydia,” Mrs. Blair said passionately, “next to your ingratitude to your brother, I must say your selfishness in ruining your own children is the most dreadful thing I ever heard of!”

But Mrs. Eaton’s preparations went on. Not that there was so much to do; but she had to find rooms, and then she had to find work. It was the latter exigency which fanned Robert Blair’s contemptuous annoyance, which refused to take the matter seriously, into sudden flames of rage, for his sister saw fit to apply at a shop for the position of saleswoman. Of course it came to his ears, and that night the storm burst on Mrs. Eaton’s head. As for Robert Blair, when the interview was over, during which he spared Mrs. Eaton no detail of his furious mortification, he said savagely to his wife: “I wish you’d go and see if West cannot bring her to her senses. Get him to influence her to some decency. Tell him, if she’s set in this outrageous ingratitude, I wish he would persuade her to let me send her East, to some other place, and let her work (and starve!) where she won’t disgrace me. Think of it, Eleanor--that man Davis coming whining and grinning, and saying he ‘would do what he could to give my sister a position as saleslady, but I knew the times were bad’! Damn him!”

“Good heavens, Robert! You don’t mean to say she’s been to Davis’s? My dear, she is insane! Yes, I’ll go and see Mr. West to-morrow.”

She went. It was a raw, bleak morning; the thin, chill winter rain blurred the windows of her brougham, and the mud splashed up against the glass; the wheels sunk into deep ruts of the badly paved streets, and the uncomfortable jolt and sway of the softly padded carriage added to her indignation at her sister-in-law.

William West did not live in the new part of Mercer, with its somewhat gorgeous houses; nor yet in the old part, which was charming and dignified, and inclined to despise everything not itself; but in the middle section, near the rows of rotten and tumbling tenements, and within a stone’s throw of bleak and hideous brick blocks, known as “Company boarding-houses.” He had come here to live shortly after a certain crash in his own life; a personal blow, which left him harder, and more silent, and more earnest. He had been jilted, people said, and wondered why, for a while, and then forgot it, as he, absorbed in his work, seemed also to forget it.

Mrs. Blair, her fox-terrier under one arm, stepped out of the carriage, frowning to find herself in this squalid street; but once inside the big, plain, comfortable house where William West lived all by himself, her face relaxed and took a certain arch and charming discontent; there was a big fire blazing in the minister’s library, and the dignity and refinement of the room, the smell of leather-covered books, the gleam of pictures and bronzes, and a charming bit of tapestry hanging on the chimney-piece restored her sense of mental as well as physical comfort. When he entered, and dragged a big chair in front of the fire for her, and looked at her with that grave attention which seems like homage, and was part of the man, being called forth by his washerwoman as well as by Mrs. Robert Blair, she felt almost happy again, and assured that everything would come out right.

“Mr. West,” she began, “you’ve got to help us; we’re in such absurd difficulties! Will you?”

“Command me,” he said, smiling.

“You haven’t heard, then? It’s Lydia--Mr. Blair’s sister, you know. She has taken it into her head that”--the color came into Mrs. Blair’s face--“that she won’t let Robert support her, because she thinks he isn’t treating the strikers properly. I’m sure I don’t know what idea she has! But she won’t accept his money. Did you ever hear of such a thing?”

William West’s face sobered instantly. “I have not seen Mrs. Eaton for a fortnight,” he said; “I had no idea”--He got up, frowning, the lines about his lips perplexed and anxious.

“I’m sure,” the pretty woman went on, growing angrier as she spoke, “I don’t care what _she_ does,--I’ve lost all patience with her,--but to throw the children’s future away! And it’s so embarrassing for Robert.” Then she told him fully the whole situation. “She keeps saying,” Mrs. Blair ended, “that ‘Mr. Eaton’ wouldn’t have allowed the children to be supported on money that ‘_wasn’t good_.’ Did you ever hear such impertinence?”