“Well, mater, you see we were talking freely together as man to man—and—hang it all! you know, it is your affair and Mrs. Monkton’s, more than old Monkton’s and father’s. I don’t suppose they care so very much.”
Mrs. Hope slowly raised her glasses to her eyes and stared at her son, who was looking at the hearth-rug now, resting his weight on his toes and then coming down on his heels.
“I haven’t the least idea what you are talking about, Barnard.”
“I am talking about the proposed strike, mater; about the demands of the men.”
“Requests, my son. The men request an audience with Mr. Sartwell, and he refuses it, as if he were Prime Minister.”
“That’s just what I said to Sartwell. ‘Sartwell,’ said I, ‘you’re high-handed with the men.’ He admitted it, but held that if he had a conference with them, no good would be accomplished unless he acceeded to their dem——requests.”
“He could compromise—he could make some concessions and then everything would go smoothly again. He has no tact.”
“Quite so, quite so. But you see the men want only one thing, not several. They are perfectly logical about it—I had a talk with them and they were very much gratified to hear that you were on their side. There will be no trouble with them in future if Sartwell is only reasonable. They look at it like this: they work ten hours a day and get on an average a pound a week—or—ah—something like that—I forget the exact amount, although they had it there in shillings and pence. Now father and Monkton work four or five hours a day—not very hard either—and go to Switzerland in the summer and Algiers in the winter, yet they draw twenty thousand pounds a year each out of the business. This, the men claim, is unjust, and of course I quite agree with them. It’s outrageous, and I said so. Well, the men are prepared to do the most generous things. In order to compromise, they will allow the partners ten times what the real workers get; Monkton and father are each to draw five hundred pounds a year out of the business, and the forty thousand pounds is to be divided among the workers. I thought that it was an exceedingly liberal proposal, and I told them so.”
During this able, if mythical, exposition of the workmen’s views, Mrs. Hope gazed at her son with ever-increased amazement. When he had concluded, she was standing up, apparently speechless, with an ominous frown on her brow. Lady Mary looked with timid anxiety from one to the other. There seemed to be a sweet reasonableness in the young man’s argument, and yet something hopelessly wrong about the proposition.
“Five hundred pounds a year!—to me!” cried Mrs. Hope, at last.