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Red Wallflower

<h2 id="id04049" style="margin-top: 4em">CHAPTER XLIV.</h2> <h5 id="id04050"> THE DUKE OF TREFOIL.</h5> They drove a long distance, much of the way through uninteresting regions. Pitt stopped the cab at last, took Betty out, and led her through one and another street and round corner after corner, till at last he turned into an alley again. 'Where are you taking me now, Mr. Pitt?' she asked, in some trepidation. 'Not another Martin's Court?' 'I want you to look well at this place.' 'I see it. What for?' asked Betty, casting her eyes about her. It was a very narrow alley, leading again, as might be seen by the gleam of light at the farther end, into a somewhat more open space—another court. Here the word open had no application. The sides of the alley were very near together and very high, leaving a strange gap between walls of brick, at least strange when considered with reference to human habitation; all of freedom or expanse there was indicated anywhere being a long and very distant strip of blue sky overhead when the weather was clear. Not even that to-day. The heavy clouds hung low, seeming to rest upon the house-tops, and shutting up all below under their breathless envelopment. Hot, sultry, stifling, the air felt to Betty; well-nigh unendurable; but Pitt seemed to be of intent that she should endure it for a while, and with some difficulty she submitted. Happily the place was cleaner than Martin's Court, and no dead cats nor decaying vegetables poisoned what air there was. But surely somewhat else poisoned it. The doors of dwellings on the one side and on the other stood open, and here and there a woman or two had pressed to the opening with her work, both to get light and to get some freshness, if there were any to be had. Half way down the alley, Pitt paused before one of these open doors. A woman had placed herself as close to it as she could, having apparently some fine work in hand for which she could not get light enough. Betty could without much difficulty see past her into the space behind. It was a tiny apartment, smaller than anything Miss Frere had ever seen used as a living room; yet a living room it was. She saw that a very minute stove was in it, a small table, and another chair; and on some shelves against the wall there was apparently the inmate's store of what stood to her for china and plate. Two cups Betty thought she could perceive; what else might be there the light did not serve to show. The woman was respectable-looking, because her dress was whole and tolerably clean; but it showed great poverty nevertheless, being frequently mended and patched, and of that indeterminate dull grey to which all colours come with overmuch wear. She seemed to be middle-aged; but as she raised her head to see who had stopped in front of her, Betty was so struck by the expression and tale-telling of it that she forgot the question of age. Age? she might have been a hundred and fifty years old, to judge by the life-weary set of her features. A complexion that told of confinement, eyes dim with over-straining, lines of face that spoke weariness and disgust; and further, what to Betty's surprise seemed a hostile look of defiance. The face cleared, however, as she saw who stood before her; a great softening and a little light came into it; she rose and dropped a curtsey, which was evidently not a mere matter of form. 'How do you do, Mrs. Mills?' said Pitt, and his voice was very gentle as he spoke, and half to Betty's indignation he lifted his hat also. 'This is rather a warm day!' 'Well, it be, sir,' said the woman, resuming her seat. 'It nigh stifles the heart in one, it do!' 'I am afraid you cannot see to work very well, the clouds are so thick?' 'I thank you, sir; the clouds is allays thick, these days. Had you business with me, Mr. Dallas?' 'Not to-day, Mrs. Mills. I am showing this lady a bit of London.' 'And would the lady be your wife, sir?' 'Oh no,' said Pitt, laughing a little; 'you honour me too much. This is an American lady, from over the sea ever so far; and I want her to know what sort of a place London is.' 'It's a bitter poor place for the likes of us,' said the woman. 'You should show her where the grand folk lives, that built these houses for the poor to be stowed in.' 'Yes, I have showed her some of those, and now I have brought her to see your part of the world.' 'It's not to call a part o' the world!' said the woman. 'Do you call this a part of the world, Mr. Dallas? I mind when I lived where trees grow, and there was primroses in the grass; them's happier that hasn't known it. If you axed me sometimes, I would tell you that this is hell! Yet it ain't so bad as most. It's what folk call very decent. Oh yes! it's decent, it is, no doubt. I'll be carried out of it some day, and bless the day!' 'How is your boy?' 'He's fairly, sir, thank you.' 'No better?' said Pitt gently. 'He won't never be no better,' the woman said, with a doggedness which Betty guessed was assumed to hide the tenderer feeling beneath. 'He's done for. There ain't nothin' but ill luck comes upon folks as lives in such a hole, and couldn't other!' 'I'll come and see you about Tim,' said Pitt. 'Keep up a good heart in the mean while. Good-bye! I'll see you soon.' He went no farther in that alley. He turned and brought Betty out, called another cab, and ordered the man to drive to Kensington Gardens. Till they arrived there he would not talk; bade Betty wait with her questions. The way was long enough to let her think them all over several times. At last the cab stopped, Pitt handed her out, and led her into the Gardens. Here was a change. Trees of noble age and growth shadowed the ground, greensward stretched away in peaceful smoothness, the dust and the noise of the great city seemed to be escaped. It was fresh and shady, and even sweet. They could hear each other speak, without unduly raising their voices. Pitt went on till he found a place that suited him, and they sat down, in a refreshing greenness and quiet. 'Now,' said Betty, 'I suppose I may ask. What did you take me to that last place for?' 'That will appear in due time. What did you think of it?' 'It is difficult to tell you what I think of it. Is much of London like that?' 'Much of it is far worse.' 'Well, there is nothing like that in New York or Washington.' 'Do not be too sure. There is something like that wherever rich men are congregated in large numbers to live.' 'Rich men!' cried Betty. 'Yes. So far as I know, this sort of thing is to be found nowhere else, but where rich men dwell. It is the growth of their desire for large incomes. That woman we visited—what did you think of her?' 'She impressed me very much, and oddly. I could not quite read her look. She seemed to be in a manner hostile, not to you, but I thought to all the world beside; a disagreeable look!' 'She is a lace-mender'— 'A lace-mender!' broke in Betty. 'Down in that den of darkness?' 'And she pays— Did you see where she lived?' 'I saw a room not bigger than a good-sized box; is that all?' 'There is an inner room—or box—without windows, where she and her child sleep. For that lodging that woman pays half-a-crown a week—that is, about five shillings American money—to one of the richest noblemen in England.' 'A nobleman!' cried Betty. 'The Duke of Trefoil.' 'A nobleman!' Betty repeated. 'A duke, and a lace-mender, and five shillings a week!' 'The glass 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 pass 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 duchess 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 classes 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 noblest 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?' 'That is Holland House.' 'Holland House! It looks very handsome outside.' 'It is one of the finest houses about London. And it is better inside than outside.' 'You have been inside?' 'A number of times. I am sorry I cannot take you in; but it is not open to strangers.' 'How did you get in?' 'With my uncle.' 'Holland House! I have heard that the society there is very fine.' 'It has the best society of any house in London; and that is the same, I suppose, as to say any house in the world.' 'Do you happen to know that by experience?' 'Yes; its positive, not its relative character,' he said, smiling. 'But you— However, I suppose you pass for an Englishman.' 'Yes, but I have seen Americans there. My late uncle, Mr. Strahan, was a very uncommon man, full of rare knowledge, and very highly regarded by those who knew him. Lord Holland was a great friend of his, and he was always welcomed at Holland House. I slipped in under his wing.' 'Then since Mr. Strahan's death you do not go there any more?' 'Yes, I have been there. Lord Holland is one of the most kindly men in the kingdom, and he has not withdrawn the kindness he showed me as Mr. Strahan's nephew and favourite.' 'If you go there, you must go into a great deal of London society,' said Betty, wondering. 'I am afraid you have been staying at home for our sakes. Mrs. Dallas would not like that.' 'No,' said Pitt, 'the case is not such. Once in a while I have gone to Holland House, but I have not time for general society.' 'Not time!' 'No,' said Pitt, smiling at her expression. 'Not time for society! That is—is it possibly—because of Martin's court, and the Duke of Trefoil's alley, and the like?' 'What do you think?' said Pitt, his eyes sparkling with amusement. 'There is society and society, you know. Can you drink from two opposite sides of a cup at the same time?' 'But one has duties to Society!' objected Betty, bewildered somewhat by the argument and the smile together. 'So I think, and I am trying to meet them. Do not mistake me. I do not mean to undervalue real society; I will take gladly all I can that will give me mental stimulus and refreshment. But the round of fashion is somewhat more vapid than ever, I grant you, after a visit to my lace-mender. Those two things cannot go on together. Shall we walk home? It is not very far from here. I am afraid I have tired you!' Betty denied that; but she walked home very silently. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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