Part 36 (1/2)

He laughed easily. ”Ah, that's where you're wrong,” he said. ”She doesn't care about anything but gardening. That's her hobby. She's crazy about it. We've laid out more in new greenhouses alone, not counting the plants, than would rebuild this building. I'm not sure the heating apparatus wouldn't come to that, alone. And then the plants! What do you think of six and eight guineas for a single root? Those are the amaryllises--and if you come to orchids, you can pay hundreds if you like. Well, that's her pa.s.sion. That's what she really loves.”

”That's what she seizes upon to keep her from just dying of loneliness,”

Louisa retorted, obstinately, and at a sign of dissent from her brother she went on. ”Oh, I know what I'm talking about. I have three or four customers--ladies in the country, and one of them is a lady of t.i.tle, too--and they order gardening books and other books through me, and when they get up to town, once a year or so, they come here and they talk to me about it. And there isn't one of them that at the bottom of her heart doesn't hate it. They'd rather dodge busses at Charing Cross corner all day long, than raise flowers as big as cheeses, if they had their own way. But they don't have their own way, and they must have something to occupy themselves with--and they take to gardening. I daresay I'd even do it myself if I had to live in the country, which thank G.o.d I don't!”

”That's because you don't know anything about the country,” he told her, but the retort, even while it justified itself, had a hollow sound in his own ears. ”All you know outside of London is Margate.”

”I went to Yarmouth and Lowestoft this summer,” she informed him, crus.h.i.+ngly.

Somehow he lacked the heart to laugh. ”I know what you mean, Lou,” he said, with an affectionate attempt at placation. ”I suppose there's a good deal in what you say. It is dull, out there at my place, if you have too much of it. Perhaps that's a good hint about my wife. It never occurred to me, but it may be so. But the deuce of it is, what else is there to do? We tried a house in London, during the Season----”

”Yes, I saw in the papers you were here,” she said impa.s.sively, in comment upon his embarra.s.sed pause.

”I didn't look you up, because I didn't think you wanted much to see me”--he explained with a certain awkwardness--”but bye-gones are all bye-gones. We took a town house, but we didn't like it. It was one endless procession of stupid and tiresome calls and dinners and parties; we got awfully sick of it, and swore we wouldn't try it again. Well there you are, don't you see? It's stupid in Hertfords.h.i.+re, and it's stupid here. Of course one can travel abroad, but that's no good for more than a few months. Of course it would be different if I had something to do. I tell you G.o.d's truth, Lou--sometimes I feel as if I was really happier when I was a poor man. I know it's all rot--I really wasn't--but sometimes it SEEMS as if I was.”

She contemplated him with a leaden kind of gaze. ”Didn't it ever occur to you to do some good with your money?” she said, with slow bluntness.

Then, as if fearing a possible misconception, she added more rapidly: ”I don't mean among your own family. We're a clannish people, we Thorpes; we'd always help our own flesh and blood, even if we kicked them while we were doing it--but I mean outside, in the world at large.”

”What have I got to do with the world at large? I didn't make it; I'm not responsible for it.” He muttered the phrases lightly enough, but a certain fatuity in them seemed to attract his attention when he heard their sound. ”I've given between five and six thousand pounds to London hospitals within the present year,” he added, straightening himself. ”I wonder you didn't see it. It was in all the papers.”

”Hospitals!”

It was impossible to exaggerate the scorn which her voice imported into the word. He looked at her with unfeigned surprise, and then took in the impression that she was upon a subject which exceptionally interested her. Certainly the display of something approaching animation in her glance and manner was abnormal.

”I said 'do some GOOD with your money,'” she reminded him, still with a vibration of feeling in her tone. ”You must live in the country, if you think London hospitals are deserving objects. They couldn't fool Londoners on that point, not if they had got the Prince to go on his hands and knees. And you give a few big cheques to them,” she went on, meditatively, ”and you never ask how they're managed, or what rings are running them for their own benefit, or how your money is spent--and you think you've done a n.o.ble, philanthropic thing! Oh no--I wasn't talking about humbug charity. I was talking about doing some genuine good in the world.”

He put his leg over the high stool, and pushed his hat back with a smile. ”All right,” he said, genially. ”What do you propose?”

”I don't propose anything,” she told him, after a moment's hesitation.

”You must work that out for yourself. What might seem important to me might not interest you at all--and if you weren't interested you wouldn't do anything. But this I do say to you, Joel--and I've said it to myself every day for this last year or more, and had you in mind all the time, too--if I had made a great fortune, and I sat about in purple and fine linen doing nothing but amuse myself in idleness and selfishness, letting my riches acc.u.mulate and multiply themselves without being of use to anybody, I should be ASHAMED to look my fellow-creatures in the face! You were born here. You know what London slums are like. You know what Clare Market was like--it's bad enough still--and what the Seven Dials and Drury Lane and a dozen other places round here are like to this day. That's only within a stone's throw.

Have you seen Charles Booth's figures about the London poor? Of course you haven't--and it doesn't matter. You KNOW what they are like. But you don't care. The misery and ignorance and filth and hopelessness of two or three hundred thousand people doesn't interest you. You sit upon your money-bags and smile. If you want the truth, I'm ashamed to have you for a brother!”

”Well, I'm d.a.m.ned!” was Thorpe's delayed and puzzled comment upon this outburst. He looked long at his sister, in blank astonishment. ”Since when have you been taken this way?” he asked at last, mechanically jocular.

”That's all right,” she declared with defensive inconsequence. ”It's the way I feel. It's the way I've felt from the beginning.”

He was plainly surprised out of his equanimity by this unlooked-for demonstration on his sister's part. He got off the stool and walked about in the little cleared s.p.a.ce round the desk. When he spoke, it was to utter something which he could trace to no mental process of which he had been conscious.

”How do you know that that isn't what I've felt too--from the beginning?” he demanded of her, almost with truculence. ”You say I sit on my money-bags and smile--you abuse me with doing no good with my money--how do you know I haven't been studying the subject all this while, and making my plans, and getting ready to act? You never did believe in me!”

She sniffed at him. ”I don't believe in you now, at all events,” she said, bluntly.

He a.s.sumed the expression of a misunderstood man. ”Why, this very day”--he began, and again was aware that thoughts were coming up, ready-shaped to his tongue, which were quite strangers to his brain--”this whole day I've been going inch by inch over the very ground you mention; I've been on foot since morning, seeing all the corners and alleys of that whole district for myself, watching the people and the things they buy and the way they live--and thinking out my plans for doing something. I don't claim any credit for it. It seems to me no more than what a man in my position ought to do. But I own that to come in, actually tired out from a tramp like that, and get blown-up by one's own sister for selfishness and heartlessness and miserliness and all the rest of it--I must say, that's a bit rum.”

Louisa did not wince under this reproach as she might have been expected to do, nor was there any perceptible amelioration in the heavy frown with which she continued to regard him. But her words, uttered after some consideration, came in a tone of voice which revealed a desire to avoid offense. ”It won't matter to you, your getting blown-up by me, if you're really occupying your mind with that sort of thing. You're too used to it for that.”

He would have liked a less cautious acceptance of his a.s.surances than this--but after all, one did not look to Louisa for enthusiasms. The depth of feeling she had disclosed on this subject of London's poor still astonished him, but princ.i.p.ally now because of its unlikely source. If she had been notoriously of an altruistic and free-handed disposition, he could have understood it. But she had been always the hard, dry, unemotional one; by comparison with her, he felt himself to be a volatile and even sentimental person. If she had such views as these, it became clear to him that his own views were even much advanced.

”It's a tremendous subject,” he said, with loose largeness of manner.