The Market-Place Part 36

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.

"Only a man who works hard at it can realize how complicated it is. The only way is to start with the understanding that something is going to be done. No matter how many difficulties there are in the way, SOMETHING'S GOING TO BE DONE! If a strong man starts out with that, why then he can fight his way through, and push the difficulties aside or bend them to suit his purpose, and accomplish something."

Mrs. Dabney, listening to this, found nothing in it to quarrel with--yet somehow remained, if not skeptical, then pa.s.sively unconvinced. "What are your plans?" she asked him.

"Oh, it's too soon to formulate anything," he told her, with prepared readiness. "It isn't a thing to rush into in a hurry, with half baked theories and limited information. Great results, permanent results, are never obtained that way."

"I hope it isn't any Peabody model-dwelling thing."

"Oh, nothing like it in the least," he a.s.sured her, and made a mental note to find out what it was she had referred to.

"The Lord-Rowton houses are better, they say," she went on, "but it seems to me that the real thing is that there shouldn't be all this immense number of people with only fourpence or fivepence in their pocket. That's where the real mischief lies."

He nodded comprehendingly, but hesitated over further words. Then something occurred to him. "Look here!" he said. "If you're as keen about all this, are you game to give up this footling old shop, and devote your time to carrying out my plans, when I've licked 'em into shape?"

She began shaking her head, but then something seemed also to occur to her. "It'll be time enough to settle that when we get to it, won't it?"

she observed.

"No--you've got to promise me now," he told her.

"Well that I won't!" she answered, roundly.

"You'd see the whole--the whole scheme come to nothing, would you?"--he scolded at her--"rather than abate a jot of your confounded mulishness."

"Aha!" she commented, with a certain alertness of perception s.h.i.+ning through the stolidity of her mien. "I knew you were humbugging! If you'd meant what you said, you wouldn't talk about its coming to nothing because I won't do this or that. I ought to have known better. I'm always a goose when I believe what you tell me."

A certain abstract justice in her reproach impressed him. "No you're not, Lou," he replied, coaxingly. "I really mean it all--every word of it--and more. It only occurred to me that it would all go better, if you helped. Can't you understand how I should feel that?"

She seemed in a grudging way to accept anew his professions of sincerity, but she resisted all attempts to extract any promise. "I don't believe in crossing a bridge till I get to it," she declared, when, on the point of his departure, he last raised the question, and it had to be left at that. He took with him some small books she had tied in a parcel, and told him to read. She had spoken so confidently of their illuminating value, that he found himself quite committed to their perusal--and almost to their endors.e.m.e.nt. He had thought during the day of running down to Newmarket, for the Cesarewitch was to be run on the morrow, and someone had told him that that was worth seeing. By the time he reached his hotel, however, an entirely new project had possessed his mind. He packed his bag, and took the next train for home.

CHAPTER XXV

"I DIDN'T ask your father, after all," was one of the things that Thorpe said to his wife next day. He had the manner of one announcing a concession, albeit in an affable spirit, and she received the remark with a scant, silent nod.

Two days later he recurred to the subject. They were again upon the terrace, where he had been lounging in an easy-chair most of the day, with the books his sister had bid him read on a table beside him. He had glanced through some of them in a desultory fas.h.i.+on, cutting pages at random here and there, but for the most part he had looked straight before him at the broad landscape, mellowing now into soft browns and yellows under the mild, vague October sun. He had not thought much of the books, but he had a certain new sense of enjoyment in the fruits of this placid, abstracted rumination which perhaps they had helped to induce.

"About your father," he said now, as his wife, who had come out to speak with him on some other matter, was turning to go away again: "I'm afraid I annoyed you the other day by what I said."

"I have no recollection of it," she told him, with tranquil politeness, over her shoulder.

He found himself all at once keenly desirous of a conversation on this topic. "But I want you to recollect," he said, as he rose to his feet. There was a suggestion of urgency in his tone which arrested her attention. She moved slowly toward the chair, and after a little perched herself upon one of its big arms, and looked up at him where he leant against the parapet.

"I've thought of it a good deal," he went on, in halting explanation.

His purpose seemed clearer to him than were the right phrases in which to define it. "I persisted in saying that I'd do something you didn't want me to do--something that was a good deal more your affair than mine--and I've blamed myself for it. That isn't at all what I want to do."

Her face as well as her silence showed her to be at a loss for an appropriate comment. She was plainly surprised, and seemingly embarra.s.sed as well. "I'm sure you always wish to be nice," she said at last. The words and tone were alike gracious, but he detected in them somewhere a perfunctory note.

"Oh--nice!" he echoed, in a sudden stress of impatience with the word.