Part 87 (1/2)

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

'The Duke of Trefoil.'

'A n.o.bleman!' Betty repeated. 'A duke, and a lace-mender, and five s.h.i.+llings 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.'