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?”
“Ah, well,” he protested good-naturedly, “I’m sure Mrs. Eaton does not mean to be impertinent; and I’m sure she does appreciate her brother’s kindness. Only, she is trying to work out a great problem on an individual basis, which is of course very foolish. But the dear little lady must not be allowed—And yet”—He paused, frowning and perplexed.
“Ah, but, Mr. West, when she has the assurance to quote the Bible to her own brother—it seems to me that’s rather impertinent? Fancy! something about ‘doing unto others’—and ‘being partaker’ if she spent the money that had been ‘wrung from the strikers.’ Upon my word! ‘Wrung!’ As I said to my husband, ‘Upon my word, I never heard of such a thing.’”
“Neither did I,” William West said dryly. “We are all of us in the habit of taking our dividends, and not looking at the way they are earned. Mrs. Eaton is certainly unusual.”
“Well, do you think you can influence her?” Mrs. Blair insisted. “I don’t mean to stay with us; I don’t think that would be possible or desirable now. But to let Mr. Blair give her an allowance, so that she can take care of the children. It is positively wicked to think how she is ruining the children!”
“Won’t she take any money from your husband?”
“Not a cent, if you please! Not a penny. She keeps saying that if she can’t feel that the source of the money is all right, she can’t spend it.” Mrs. Blair cuffed her dog prettily with her muff, and kissed his little sleek head. “Isn’t she a goose, Pat, you darling?”
“Her principle would turn the world upside down,” the clergyman said.
“That’s just what I say!” cried Mrs. Blair.
“If we all said we would have nothing to do with the ‘blood of the just person,’ what would become of the railroads and the coal-mines and the oil trusts? What would become of our dividends from industrial stocks if we insisted on knowing that the workmen were honestly paid? How could we eat meat, if we looked into the slaughter-house?”
Mrs. Blair looked puzzled.
“And she is going to work for her living?” He was profoundly moved. “Good heavens, out of the mouths of babes! What a primitive expression of social responsibility! But surely, Mrs. Blair, we must respect her honesty? As for her judgment, that’s another matter.”
Eleanor Blair’s blank astonishment left her speechless for a moment; then she flung up her head haughtily.
“Mr. West, do you mean to say”—she began.
“My dear Mrs. Blair,” he said quietly, “I mean to say that little Mrs. Eaton, in her simple way, puts her finger right on the centre of this whole miserable question, in which, directly or indirectly, we are all involved: she has recognized our complicity. Of course she is going to work the wrong way—at least, I suppose she is. God knows! But what courage,—what directness!”
“Do I understand,” Eleanor Blair said, rising, “that you approve of my sister-in-law’s extraordinary conduct?”
“I approve of her,” he said, smiling. “If you ask me whether I think she is doing right, I should say ‘Yes,’ because she is acting upon her conscience. Is she doing wisely? No; because civilization is compromise. We have either got to bow in the House of Rimmon, or go and live in the woods like Thoreau and eat dried peas. I’ll tell her so, if you want me to. But as for attempting to influence her, I cannot do that. The place whereon we stand is holy ground.”
Mrs. Blair picked up her dog and set her teeth; then she looked slightly beyond the clergyman, with half-shut eyes, and said,—
“Will you be good enough to have my carriage called?”