“And you know very well,” answered Elsie, all the brightness dying out of her face and leaving it gray and cold, “that there is no friendship possible between us. I resolutely refuse to consider the slightest chance of such a thing.”
Stung to the quick, Herbert turned on his heel, saying vehemently, “Very well. So emphatic a statement as that must be heeded; but I am very much mistaken if you do not some day regret it.”
Elsie had never known such a weariness of body as she carried up the long flight of stairs to her room, and it was with a feeling of having been hunted and driven to bay that she threw herself across the bed and burst into tears. All the pent-up feeling of years seemed to burst its bonds as sob after sob shook the slight frame and floods of tears rolled their tempestuous way over her cheeks. At last the force of the storm was spent and she sat up in bed, weak but relieved.
“I couldn’t have been fiercer if I’d been Vesuvius in action,” she said ruefully as she tried to collect her scattered senses. “But I’ve done one virtuous act, anyway! ‘Regret it!’ Ah, if he only knew the silly little heart I carry here, and how heavy it is and always will be! Meg, dear, duty didn’t find your little Elsie on the coward’s side, after all, and yet how I should have enjoyed saying ‘Thank you, sir,’ after the regulation order. He’ll forget all about me in a day or two, and it is a good deal better than if I had tried the miserable farce of friendship only to have it surely end in trouble. Now I’m the only one to suffer, and henceforth I shall look upon myself as quite a heroine. I don’t think there’s much fun in being one, though,” and with this doleful reflection Elsie, like a sensible girl, turned off the gas and went to bed. If her sleep had not the peace of the care-free, it was yet sufficiently healthy to bring back the color to her cheeks and the lustre to her eyes, and no one dreamed of the tempest of pain that had swept over her the night before.
CHAPTER XIV.
The week following Elsie’s memorable visit to Idlewild found Margaret and Gilbert domiciled in rooms some ten blocks removed from the Mason mansion; that being the nearest approach of cheap rents to the aristocratic thoroughfare. The rooms were situated in an apartment-house, as such are nowadays called under the approved nomenclature of progressive ideas; but the building was some decades behind its imposing name. It was indeed a type of the old shabbily-built, inconvenient, and miasma-breeding tenement-house. It was a long, narrow, five-storied structure, poorly lighted and equally as poorly ventilated; but it was in fact the only house with a reasonable rent which could be found near enough to Elsie to warrant a nightly visit from her. Margaret chose, out of several vacant rooms, four in the fifth story, because in these she had both light and air, and she felt she could better endure the inconvenience of the four long flights of stairs than the absence of two such essentials to health and comfort. The condition of the halls, which the majority of the tenants seemed to consider a lodging-place for refuse of various kinds, was a terrible eyesore to her housewifely instincts, and she had not been many days in her new quarters before she put her wits to work to effect a change in their untidy aspect. So far as her own flight of stairs and its contiguous hallways were concerned, the solution was simply a compound of soap, water, and muscle; but when it came to the consideration of those below her, something like generalship was needed to induce the desired cleanliness. To perform an undue share of the public work did not by any means enter into her scheme of the general good. The responsibility of the individual was the one hobby, if such it could be called, which Margaret permitted herself. To arouse the latent instinct of self-dependence and development was an almost unconscious exhalation of the sturdy faith which had always made circumstances only a means unto an end, and that end the uplifting of the better elements of character. To be her brother’s keeper in so far as that keeping could induce a heartfelt aspiration or a simple kindness, had been but an outgrowth of the unselfishness of her aims. Few people looked with as lenient an eye upon the shortcomings of humanity, or were actuated by as sincere a desire to lend a hand to retrieve a false step, as Margaret Murchison. Yet it was with a good deal of delicacy that she reviewed the means whereby she might bring an air of greater thrift and cleanliness into the desolate halls below. Like all refined and sensitive people, she felt a hesitancy about bringing even an inferential reflection of uncleanliness upon those whose co-operation she desired.
“It will be impossible to do it,” she sighed, “until I have made their acquaintance, and won their confidence. They will be distrustful and think in their vernacular that I am putting on airs if I broach the subject before.”
If the condition of the halls dismayed Margaret, the condition of the living-rooms of the inmates of the building was much more disheartening. Not that poverty in its severest aspect was present, for in nearly all cases the rooms were occupied by the families of porters, office clerks, and under salesmen, and although a decent amount of food and clothing was to be had by the closest economy, there was such a lack of homeness that it turned Margaret heart-sick. The women were, for the most part, good-natured, well-intentioned souls, but tried beyond endurance in the almost hopeless task of making both ends meet on the scanty dole of the one wage-earner. Children were everywhere; for whatever other blessings may be denied the toiler, the children always come to lighten his heart and empty his pocket. Ambition was well-nigh dead in their bosoms; for the daily grind of hard work, the lowering cloud of capitalistic oppression, and the constantly-increasing tide of mongrel, half-starved immigrants, who stood ever ready to snatch the crust from their lips, had left very little opportunity for the better classes of American workingmen to look forward with any degree of hope.
There was a wholesomeness about Margaret that made both men and women trust her, and with the natural volubility of their class, the women had poured the whole story of their daily struggles into her willing ears before she had been ten days in the house. There were twelve families in the building, a number of rooms being unoccupied; and barren as had been Margaret’s own life in the little parsonage at Barnley, and later at Idlewild, she felt that it had been a broad way of peace and plenty beside the narrow line of these toilers. With her, above meagre outlines and practical details had been the wide field of growth, the plenitude of hope, and the infinite realm of thought. With these people, cabined and confined year in and year out within smoke-begrimed walls, life had become a sordid round of ministering to material needs, with no blue skies to call their eyes upward or song of birds to awaken benumbed hearts.
“I would not have thought poverty could wear so pitiless an aspect,” she mused. “Something must be done to bring back the revivifying influence of hope to these people. But what can I do, burdened with a like poverty, against the greed and extortion of these capitalists? Just think of men with families compelled to live and pay rent on six, seven, and nine dollars a week, working twelve and fourteen hours a day, and Sundays too, if the ‘boss’ so wills, without a penny’s extra pay! Oh, it makes my blood boil when I see such injustice! Is there no relief for all this? Are there no thunderbolts of heaven to strike these slave-drivers who compel their men to this life, by telling them the market is overstocked with unorganized workers, and that a body of lean and hungry wolves stands ever ready to snatch their scanty crusts? Small wonder that ambition dies, and that there are only mutterings of discontent and savage envy and malignant plottings against the mighty magnates who instigate and abet this monstrous cruelty. What can I do for these overworked and disheartened mothers, these joyless children and sullen fathers? How can I help them to smile, to look for sunshine instead of clouds? Out of the abundance with which I am blessed I must devise some way.”