A Red Wallflower Part 87

'A n.o.bleman!' cried Betty.

'The Duke of Trefoil.'

'A n.o.bleman!' Betty repeated. 'A duke, and a lace-mender, and five shillings a week!'

'The gla.s.s roofs of his hothouses and greenhouses would cover an acre of ground. His wife sits in a boudoir opening into a conservatory where it is summer all the year round; roses bloom and violets, and geraniums wreathe the walls, and palm trees are grouped around fountains. She eats ripe strawberries every day in the year if she chooses, and might, like Judah, "wash her feet in the blood of the grape," the fruit is so plenty, the while my lace-mender strains her eyes to get half-a-crown a week for his Grace. All that alley and its poor crowded lodgings belong to him.'

'I don't wonder she looks bitter, poor thing. Do you suppose she knows how her landlord lives?'

'I doubt if she does. She perhaps never heard of the house and gardens at Trefoil Park. But in her youth she was a servant in a good house in the country,--not so great a house,--and she knows something of the difference between the way the rich live and the poor. She is very bitter over the contrast, and I cannot much blame her!'

'Yet it is not just.'

'Which?' said Pitt, smiling.

'That feeling of the poor towards the rich.'

'Is it not? It has some justice. I was coming home one night last winter, late, and found my way obstructed by the crowd of arrivals to an entertainment given at a certain great house. The house stood a little back from the street, and carpeting was laid down for the softly shod feet to pa.s.s over. Of course there were gathered a small crowd of lookers-on, pressing as near as they were allowed to come; trying to catch, if they might, a gleam or a glitter from the glories they could not approach. I don't know if the contrast struck them, but it struck me; the contrast between those satin slippers treading the carpet, and the bare feet standing on the muddy stones; feet that had never known the touch of a carpet anywhere, nor of anything else either clean or soft.'

'But those contrasts must be, Mr. Dallas.'

'Must they? Is not something wrong, do you think, when the Duke of Trefoil eats strawberries all the year long, and my lace-mender, in the height of the season, perhaps never sees one?--when the d.u.c.h.ess sits in her bower of beauty, with the violets under her feet and the palms over her head, and the poor in her husband's houses cannot get a flower to remind them that all the world is not like a London alley? Does not something within you say that the scales of the social balance might be a little more evenly adjusted?'

'How are you going to do it?'

'If you do not feel that,' Pitt went on, 'I am afraid that some of the lower cla.s.ses do. I said I did not know whether the contrast struck the people that night, but I do know it did. I heard words and saw looks that betrayed it. And when the day comes that the poor will know more and begin to think about these things, I am afraid there will be trouble.'

'But what can you do?'

'That is exactly what I was going to ask you,' said Pitt, changing his tone and with a genial smile. 'Take my lace-mender for an example.

These things must be handled in detail, if at all. She is bitter in the feeling of wrong done her somewhere, bitter to hatred; what can, not you, but I, do for her, to help her out of it?'

'I should say that is the Duke of Trefoil's business.'

'I leave his business to him. What is mine?'

'You have done something already, I can see, for she makes an exception of you.'

'I have not done much,' said Pitt gravely. 'What do you think it was?

Her boy was ill; he had met with an accident, and was a thin, pale, wasted-looking child when I first saw them. I took him a rosebush, in full flower.'

'Were they so glad of it?'

Pitt was silent a minute.

'It was about as much as I could stand, to see it. Then I got the child some things that he could eat. He is well now; as well as he ever will be.'

'I did not see the rosebush.'

'Ah, it did not live. Nothing could there.'

'Well, Mr. Pitt, haven't you done your part, as far as this case is concerned?'

'Have I? Would _you_ stop with that?'

Betty sat very quiet, but internally fidgeted. What did Pitt ask her these questions for? Why had he taken her on this expedition? She wished she had not gone; she wished she had not come to England; and yet she would not be anywhere else at this moment but where she was, for any possible consideration. She wished Pitt would be different, and not fill his head with lace-menders and London alleys; and yet--even so--things might be worse. Suppose Pitt had devoted his energies to gambling, and absorbed all his interests in hunters and racers. Betty had known that sort of thing; and now summarily concluded that men must make themselves troublesome in one way or another. But this particular turn this man had taken did seem to set him so far off from her!

'What would you do, Mr. Pitt?' she said, with a somewhat weary cadence in her voice which he could not interpret.

'Look at it, and tell me, from your standpoint.'

'If you took that woman out of those lodgings, there would come somebody else into them, and you might begin the whole thing over again. In that way the Duke of Trefoil might give you enough to do for a lifetime.'

'Well?--the conclusion?'

'How can you ask? Some things are self-evident.'

'What do you think that means: "He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none"?'

'I don't think it means _that_,' said Betty. 'That you are to give away all you have, till you haven't left yourself an overcoat.'

'Are you sure? Not if somebody else needed it more? That is the question. We come back to the--"Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you." "Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils." How, do you think, can I best do that in the case of Mrs.

Mills and her boy? One thing at a time. Never mind what the Duke of Trefoil may complicate in the future.'

'Raise the dead!' Betty echoed.

'Ay,' he said. 'There are worse deaths than that of the body.'

Betty paused, but Pitt waited.

'If they are to be kept alive in any sense,' she said at last, 'they must be taken out of that hole where they are now.'

'And, as you truly suggest that the number of persons wanting such relief is unlimited, the first thing to be done is to build proper houses for the poor. That is what I have set about.'

'_You_ have!' cried Betty.

'I cannot do much. True, but that is nothing whatever to the question.

I have begun to put up a few houses, which shall be comfortable, easy to keep clean, and rentable for what the industrious poor can afford to pay. That will give sufficient interest for the capital expended, and even allow me, without further outlay, to go on extending my accommodations. Mrs. Mills will move into the first of my new houses, I hope, next month.'

'What have you taken me all this day's expedition for, Mr. Dallas?'

Betty asked suddenly. The pain of the thing was pressing her.

'You remember, you asked a question of me; to wit, whether I were minded still as I seemed to be minded last year. I have showed you a fraction of the reasons why I should not have changed, and you have approved them.'

Betty found nothing to answer; it was difficult not to approve them, and yet she hated the conclusion. The conversation was not resumed immediately. All the quiet beauty of the scene around them spoke, to Betty, for a life of ease and luxury; it seemed to say, Keep at a distance from disagreeable things; if want and squalor are in the world, you belong to a different part of the world; let London be London, you stay in Kensington Gardens. Take the good of your advantages, and enjoy them. That this was the n.o.blest view or the justest conclusion, she would not say to herself; but it was the view in which she had been brought up; and the leopard's spots, we know, are persistent. Pitt had been brought up so too; what a tangent he had taken from the even round of society in general! Not to be brought back?

'I see,' she began after a while,--'from my window at your house I see at some distance what looks like a large and fine mansion, amongst trees and pleasure grounds; whose is it?'