Robert Blair came into the dining-room, holding the “dollar
telegram” in his hand. His wife looked up at him, smiling.
“It is really shameful the way business pursues you! I am going to
tell Samuel to burn all dispatches that come here. Your office is
the place for those horrid yellow papers.”
“It isn’t business this time, Nellie; it’s death.”
“Oh, Robert!”
“Oh,” he hastened to explain, “it’s nothing that touches us. My
sister Lydia’s husband is dead. You have heard me speak of my
sister Lydia, haven’t you? It was long before your day, you baby,
that she married him. Ah, well, what a pretty girl she was!” He
sat down, shook his head when the man offered him some soup, and
opened his napkin thoughtfully. “Well, he’s dead. He was a most
objectionable person”--
Mrs. Blair looked at the butler’s back as he stood at the
sideboard, and raised her eyebrows; but her husband went on, a
wrinkle like a cut deepening on his forehead:--
“My father forbade it--did I never tell you about it?--but Lydia,
who had always been a nonentity, suddenly acquired a will, and
married him. My father never forgave her. She evidently didn’t care
for any affection that didn’t include him, and cut herself off from
all of us. Of course I’m sorry for her now; but I don’t feel that
I have anything to reproach myself with.” He tapped the table with
impatient fingers, and told the butler that he didn’t want his
claret _boiled_. “Haven’t you any sense, Samuel? You’re a perfect
fool about wine; here, throw that out of the window, and get me a
fresh bottle!”
Mrs. Blair was a beautiful young woman, who, two years before, had
married this irascible, successful, dogmatic man, and (so Mercer
said) could wind him round any one of her pretty jeweled fingers
whenever she wanted to. He certainly was very much in love--and so
was she, though her particular world never believed it, alleging
that she was not indifferent to the loaves and fishes.
But the fact was Mrs. Blair took the loaves and fishes with a
childlike delight which meant appreciation, certainly, but not
avarice. She enjoyed her wealth, and her life, and herself,
immensely and openly; and that was her charm to her husband, a
man immersed in large affairs, sagacious, powerful, and without
imagination. He was a cultivated man, because his forbears had been
educated people, of sober, comfortable wealth; hence he had gone
to college, like other young men of his class, and had traveled,
and had acquired an intellectual, or rather a commercial knowledge
of Art. But, until he married, every instinct was for power, and
the making of money. After that, though the guiding principle
remained the same, a sense of beauty did awaken in him. He never
flagged in his fierce and joyous and cruel passion for getting;
but he delighted in his wife--perhaps as one of his own enormous
machines might have delighted in a ray of sunlight dancing across
its steel shafts, and flickering through the thunderous whir of its
driving-wheel. He loaded the girl he married with every luxury;
almost immediately she found she had nothing left to desire--from
dogs to diamonds, houses, yachts, or pictures. She, poor child,
realized no deprivation in seeing every wish fulfilled, and
thought herself the luckiest and the happiest woman in the world.
Her money, combined with a good deal of common-sense, gave her
the power to interfere helpfully in the lives of less fortunate
people. She called it Philanthropy, and found playing Providence
to the halt, the maimed, and the blind a really keen interest. Her
impulse was always to “manage”; and so, when her husband, frowning,
and perhaps a little less satisfied with himself than usual,
began to talk about his sister’s affairs, Mrs. Blair was instantly
interested.
“Of course her husband’s death will make a difference in her
income?” she said, as they went upstairs to the library. “A country
minister’s salary doesn’t amount to much anyhow; but”--
“Well, she made her bed,” he interrupted sharply; “she ought to be
willing to lie in it!”
“Oh, yes, of course; but now the man is dead, it’s different. I
know you want to do something for her, you are so generous.”
He pulled her pretty ear at that, and told her she was a flattering
little humbug. “What do you want, diplomat? You’ll bankrupt me
yet. Am I to build a palace for Lily? Look here, I wrote that West
Virginia college president to-day and told him I’d give him the
money he wanted. It’s all your doing, but I get the name of a great
educator.”
“Oh, Robert, how good you are! I think that ought to silence the
people that say you ‘grind the face of the poor.’ I saw that in the
paper to-day. Beasts! and you are so generous! I tell you what
I want: I want you to have them come here, your sister and the
children”--
“You angel!” he said. “No; that’s dangerous. We mightn’t like the
brats. The boy’s name is Silas. I don’t think I could stand a cub
named Silas. But the girl wouldn’t be so bad. As for Lily (we
used to call her Lily when she was a girl), she is one of those
gentle, colorless women, all virtue and no opinions, whom anybody
could live with. Rather a fool, you know. But we’ll have them come
and make us a visit, if it won’t bore you. If we like it, we can
prolong it. Anyhow, I’ll see that poor Lil has a decent income. You
know, my father didn’t leave her a cent. The old gentleman said he
wouldn’t have ‘that hell-fire Presbyterian use any of his money for
his damned heathen!’ But I’ll look after her now.”
* * * * *
Thus it was that a home was prepared for Silas Eaton’s widow;
the offer of it came the day after the funeral, when she sat
down to face the future. She had gone over her assets, in her
halting, feminine way, counting up the dollars on her fingers, and
subtracting the debts with a stubby lead-pencil on the back of an
old envelope; and she had discovered that when all the expenses of
the funeral were paid she would have in the bank one hundred and
seventy-five dollars. If she could manage to sell her husband’s
very limited library, she might add a few dollars to that sum; but
very few.
One hundred and seventy-five dollars! She must go to some city, and
go to work, so that Silas and Esther might be educated. She had
got as far as that when her brother’s letter came. He would have
come himself, he said, but was detained by an annoying strike in
one of his rolling-mills, and so wrote to ask her to come, with the
children, and visit him for a little while; “then we’ll see what
can be done; but don’t worry about ways and means. I will see to
all that.”
She read the straightforward, kindly words, her heart beating so
she could scarcely breathe. Then she covered her face with her
hands, and trembled with excitement and relief. “Oh,” she said,
“the children won’t be poor! Robert will take care of us.”