"Of course it will be best," he replied cheerfully, as he drew up in the wide portico.
"The housekeeper, please!" he called, glad for once of the decorous hurry of obedience. "Take Mrs. Cruttenden, if you please, Mrs. Adgers, and let her rest for a little," he said to the dignified lady who appeared as if by magic. Then, only waiting to add in a lower voice, "and look after her; you understand," he was in the car again before it had had time to run down, and was off over a short cut to St.
Helena's Hospital, which lay on the hill about three miles off.
Thence he returned in twenty minutes with Sister Ann, leaving Dr.
Ramsay to follow more leisurely.
Finally, having sent the car in charge of a _chauffeur_ to bring Ted along, he sat in the library and smoked, feeling half derisive at the irony of fate. If he had indeed been Aura's husband, and the father of this coming child, what more could he have done?
Dr. Ramsay arrived cool and collected and went upstairs. Ted arrived in a terrible state of fuss and also went upstairs. Then the house reverted to its usual staid routine. The gong sounded at dressing-time, and, clad in due decorum, Ned dined alone in the huge red dining-room which looked like a big mouth ready to swallow him up.
The footman, overlooked by the butler, handed him the courses gravely, the butler filled his glass with '98 Pomeroy. Ned had not asked for it this time, but it was considered the proper thing with sudden and serious illness in the house. And all the while he was thinking how little life and death would affect him, if all these things could be swept away, and he be indeed nothing more than Carlyle's forked radish with a consciousness.
Then he smoked and read again till ten o'clock, when the footman, overlooked by the butler, brought the whisky and water into the library, and Dr. Ramsay came with it.
"I shall want help," he said, "but I don't want to alarm him--her husband. She is as brave as possible, but he--so I thought you----"
"Whom do you want?" asked Ned, going to the telephone.
Dr. Ramsay named a London specialist, and Ned looked up quickly.
"As bad as that?" he asked.
"As bad as it can be, I'm afraid," replied the doctor.
After the specialist had been summoned and duly bribed, there was nothing to do but sit and smoke again, since the memory of those beautiful eyes with the eternal hope of the world's immortality in them, haunted him beyond the cure of sleep. If he had been her husband, could he have done more, could he have felt more?
The London man arrived about one o'clock, and Ned, after the slight bustle of his coming and going upstairs, heard no more noise. The house seemed to settle down into the usual silence of night.
What was going on upstairs? Would she pass into the Unseen? Would she settle the question once and for all?
It was just as the red October sunrise was beginning to glow through the trees of the park, that Ned, standing at the window to watch it, heard the click of the door handle behind him, and turned to see the London doctor, a tall man with eyeglasses and a stoop.
"Well!" he said eagerly. "How is she?"
"As well as can--ah--ah--be expected," said the specialist, who appeared to be afflicted with a stammer, "after such a very serious--ah--ah--operation as--ah--ah--was necessary to save the--the--the interesting patient's life. But--ah--ah--D.V. it is saved, and--and I need hardly say we--we have every reason to be thankful, even though the future is, or may be--of course----"
Here Dr. Ramsay entered the room, and he turned to him. "I was just preparing Mr. Cruttenden for the--ah--possibility----"
"This is Lord Blackborough, sir," interrupted Peter Ramsay impatiently. "I told you I had given Mr. Cruttenden a sleeping draught after the immediate danger to life was over. Mrs. Cruttenden was brought to Lord Blackborough's house just after the accident. Now, sir, if you are in a hurry they are ready to take you to the station."
"Just so--ah!" murmured the great man, a trifle confused. "Very pleased to make your acquaintance, my lord. Thanks, Doctor--ah----"
"Ramsay," said the latter, carrying him off still blandly stuttering.
When Peter Ramsay returned he found Ned looking at the sunrise once more. The whole sky was growing red, the daylight was outpaling the lamp beside which Ned had watched for this dawn.
Suddenly he spoke. "Is it worth while, I wonder, saving life--sometimes? Considering what motherhood means to some women, I doubt it."
And then without another word he turned from the window, and sitting down at the writing-table rested his head on his hand, and stared out vacantly into the room, seeing nothing but those beautiful eyes, twin stars of two souls.
Those eyes that were never to be satisfied! No, it was not worth it.
Then he glanced round at the doctor who stood professionally silent.
"I'll give you a piece of advice," he said, "and then we'll drop the subject. If you have anything to say, tell her, not him. You will make it easier for her, I expect, than he will."
CHAPTER XXIV
"We refuse your terms, your lordship," said the leader of the deputation.
Outside the manager's office where the meeting of delegates was being held, the works of the Biggie factory lay deserted in the autumn sunlight. There was no sign of harvest there for man or beast. The huge engines seemed asleep, the tall factory chimney showed a cenotaph proclaiming a dead life. Here and there among the rows of workmen's houses were knots of men despondently expectant, a shrill woman or two voiced her wrongs aggressively, the children in the gutter looked dirty, unkempt, pale.
Lord Blackborough stared steadily at the speaker. "Then you hold that I am bound to start these works again, despite the fact that they have been running at a loss for some years; and you hold also that I am bound to give you a rise in wages?"
"The men in these works cannot accept a less wage than that received in others which, excuse me, being better managed, pay their owners well--far too well," replied Mr. Green. He was a singularly able-looking man, curiously taut and trim in words, speech, manner, apparently in soul.
"Then I am not only to receive no return on my capital, but I am to spend other capital in paying you, until Germany ceases to make our goods cheaper than we can. Is this fair?" asked Lord Blackborough.
"Quite fair, your lordship," replied the leader; "if only because the capital you own has been wrung unjustly from us--from labour."
"All capital must be, as you call it, 'wrung' from labour. It does not create itself. I offer you this capital at a very low rate of interest, one and a half per cent. If labour cannot hope to make even so much, over and above livelihood, that seems an end to any enlargement of trade."
There was a pause; then Lord Blackborough smiled. "I cannot complain if the figures before you make you hesitate; for to me they are convincing. Let us, therefore, pass over that offer. My next is one to re-open the works, but on a different system. An eight-hours' day, piecework, and no limitations of trades-unions or any other organisation regarding the out-run of any individual."
A faint stir could be heard amongst some of the older men; but Mr.
Green still stood spokesman.
"That is absolutely out of the question, your lordship," he said decisively; "we are all of us trades-union men. Labour must reserve to itself the right to legislate for the general good of the labourer; if it does not, who will? No one!" His tone grew bitter. "We have no right to accept a form of payment which will not give a living wage to----"
"To the weakest, to the bad workmen, the laziest, the most drunken,"
put in Lord Blackborough. "Personally, I do not see any reason at all why that class of worker should continue to live. You only have to level down to them. But I am not here to combat your views, only to receive your ultimatum. You refuse?"
Mr. Green brought his hand down on the table with dramatic force.
"In the name of Labour we refuse the unjust, iniquitous----"
"Thank you," said Lord Blackborough urbanely, then turned to the secretary. "Mr. Woods! Have you those documents ready?"
"They are here, your lordship." Ned Blackborough threw off his gravity, and holding the papers given him in his hand, smiled round the company, which, as if moved thereto by some magic in his manner, rose also. Mr. Green looked from one to the other. "What had this tyrannical employer of labour up his sleeve?
"Men," said the employer of labour frankly, "I am going to pay you with these," he waved the papers, "for listening to me for five minutes. Labour, they say, is dissociating itself from Capital, Capital from Labour. That may be so. I have nothing to do with that.
Personally I have money. I have no work. I don't want money and I do want work. That is my position.
"But what I do see here in this England of ours is that labour is dissociating itself from work. It is labouring all day, and bringing forth--as little as it can! It claims the right to do this little.
Well! let it if it likes! But why should it deny to any man the right to work at the rate of which he was born physically capable? Why should it make a swift worker take eight hours to do what he can do in four? If I were to put any one of you on oath, you would admit that it is far harder work to dawdle through eight hours than to work through eight hours. I've seen many bricklayers, painters, plasterers lately hard put to it how to eke out the time, and yet preserve an air of occupation, and I have no doubt you have most of you felt this. Now, think what this means. It is labour, _hard labour!_ this, the enslavement of free work. Neither body nor mind gain full exercise, muscles and brain decay, the type goes down. But this is the system of the day; we begin it in school, where we let children dawdle eleven years over what they ought to learn in half the time. It greets the boy in his first workshop--it dogs his footsteps everywhere, turning work into labour. Work is--is play! Labour is--is the Devil! What beats me is this. Why, instead of slaving and dawdling, shouldn't the good workman, classed together, of course, be allowed to work, say, four hours, and then go their way? It would give us some chance of breeding a type of Englishman that is now fast dying out, that soon must pass away altogether. Men! don't be fools! Men! don't be slaves.