The man handed him some greasy bills. "You look sick," he said. "You had better go down to the free-lunch counter at the saloon, and have a good square meal."
Stephen Trimble went and ate and drank to excess. He did not look for his little son, and he did not return to the dynamiters' the next morning, for he was drunk—and drunk for three days thereafter. Then he sobered down and applied himself to the task which they had set him—a task intended to bring ruin to the class which had wronged him. He knew the aims, now, of the men for whom he was working, and he believed that he sympathized with them. They told him how they had borne imprisonment and torture for no wrong in Russia, and had come to this country expecting to find it the land of justice and kindness, but had met only the same tyranny of the rich over the poor—the rich, who cared for nothing but their own pleasures, and ground the poor under their chariot wheels.
As he worked he thought of his own private wrongs, and determined that as soon as his task was done he would seek out the man who had defrauded him. He was sure now that the check which the men had seen had something to do with his invention, but he believed that the true criminal was some one behind Solomon Meyer, the man to whom the agent said he had given his invention—the landlord of Rickett's Court. It was like a man who would compel human beings to live in such a state as this to commit such a fraud. He would hunt him down presently, and in the name of his tenants, as well as in his own cause, wreak such revenge that the ears of those who heard should tingle.
The landlord of Rickett's Court, all unconscious of the volcano upon which he was treading, attended the closing exercises of Madame's school, and listened with pride to his daughter's prize essay on "The Dangerous Classes."
There was a quotation from Ruskin at the close which pricked his heart a little, and made him regret that it was not convenient to carry out his good intentions just at present. How charming she looked in the white India silk, and how well she read that final quotation!
"If you can fix some conception of a true human state of life to be striven for—life for all men as for yourselves—if you can determine some honest and simple order of existence following those trodden ways of wisdom, which are pleasantness, and seeking those quiet and withdrawn paths, which are peace; then, and so sanctifying wealth into 'commonwealth,' all your art, your literature, your daily labors, your domestic affection, and citizen's duty, will join and increase into one magnificent harmony. You will know, then, how to build well enough; you will build with stone well, but with flesh better—temples not made with hands, but riveted of hearts, and that kind of marble, crimson-veined, is indeed eternal."
Mr. Armstrong entirely ruined a new pair of kid gloves in applauding his daughter.
He consigned her to Mrs. Roseveldt for the summer, and in reply to that lady's urgent request that he would visit them, explained that Narragansett Pier was fraught with so many memories that he had never been able to revisit it. "I own a cottage a little distance from the town," he said. "It was there that both my children were born. We were in the habit of occupying it every summer, but since my wife's death I have neither been able to bring myself to go there, or to rent it, and it has remained closed."
"O papa, will you not let me have it for the summer?" Adelaide asked.
"Certainly, Puss, if you want to fit it up for a studio or that sort of thing; but it is in a lonely wood, and you must have suitable company with you if you think of staying there. If you manage to change the place and infuse new life in it, I may bring myself to look in upon you there. At all events, I will join you at the Roseveldts' as soon as I can; just now important business detains me."