If he had succeeded in nothing else, he had at least succeeded in drawing her out, and in leading her to give expression to her grievance. But she had attacked the Church in a vulnerable spot, and it was his duty as a priest to defend the institution and its people.
“I believe,” he said, “that you unwittingly do the men and women of Christ Church an injustice. There are many of them who are rich, it is true. But there are many of these who have warm hearts and a keen sense of human justice. You know there are such persons as Christian capitalists.”
“Yes, I know. There,” pointing to the body in the next room, “lies one of their victims. John Bradley was killed by Christian capitalists.”
“Mrs. Bradley, you are severe and unjust.”
“Am I? Let me tell you.” She did not resent his reproof. She was perfectly calm; she was even smiling. But she wanted now to be heard. “Two years ago my husband worked in the Brookside factory, two miles down the river. You know the place. The company rented all the houses to its men. We had to take what they gave us; a miserable, dilapidated shack on the edge of a stagnant pond. My little girl took sick and pined away and the doctor said we ought not to keep her in such a place. When we thought she would die my husband went to the manager of the mills—he’s a shining light in the Church; not your church, but that doesn’t matter—and begged him, for the sake of the child, to give us a better house to live in. He told my husband that if he was not satisfied with the house the company had provided for him he was at liberty to quit his job; that his place could be filled in three hours’ time. Well, John did quit his job, and found work here at the Malleson. But it was too late—to save—my baby’s life.”
She paused, and a mist came over her eyes. For a moment the imperishable mother-love dominated her soul and silenced her tongue.
“That was very sad,” said the rector.
She repeated his words. “That was very sad.” After a moment she continued: “They gave John a good enough place at the Malleson, as good wages as any skilled workman gets; they drove him and bullied him as they do all of his kind—you know they are mere slaves, these factory workmen—and one day they put him into a cage, and some one there dropped him into a pit. When they took him out—well, he might better have been dead. You know; you saw him. Mr. Malleson sent a messenger to me with a paltry sum. I must accept it, not as compensation, but as a gift. And I must release all claims for damages. Naturally, I refused. I employed an attorney to bring suit and get what was justly due us. Mr. Malleson, he’s a pillar in your church, fought our claim with every weapon at his command. Mr. Westgate, his lawyer, a member of your vestry, set all of his wits to work to deprive us of our rights. But we would have won out against all of them if it hadn’t been that the judge on the bench, also a member, I believe, of your vestry, refused at the last minute to let the jury pass upon the case, and decided it himself, in favor of the Mallesons. I’m not a lawyer; I don’t know how it was done; perhaps you do. I only know that it was cruel and horribly unjust. Mr. Farrar, do you wonder that with these shining examples of your religion before me, and with two dead victims of your Christian capitalists to mourn over, I am not falling over myself in my haste to get into your Church?”
She turned her piercing eyes away from the minister’s face, to let them rest for a moment on the rigid, sheet-covered figure lying in the next room. Her cheeks were aglow, her breast was heaving, she had spoken from the fulness of a bitter heart. And the rector of Christ Church could not answer her. She used a kind of concrete logic that he was not prepared at that moment to refute. The best he could do was to try to postpone the issue.