“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.