CHAPTER XII

Howard Cardew was in his dressing room, sitting before the fire.  His man had put out his dinner clothes and retired, and Howard was sifting before the fire rather listlessly.

In Grace’s room, adjoining, he could hear movements and low voices.  Before Lily’s return, now and then when he was tired Grace and he had dined by the fire in her boudoir.  It had been very restful.  He was still in love with his wife, although, as in most marriages, there was one who gave more than the other.  In this case it was Grace who gave, and Howard who received.  But he loved her.  He never thought of other women.  Only his father had never let him forget her weaknesses.

Sometimes he was afraid that he was looking at Grace with his father’s eyes, rather than his own.

He had put up a hard fight with his father.  Not about Grace.  That was over and done with, although it had been bad while it lasted.  But his real struggle had been to preserve himself, to keep his faiths and his ideals, and even his personality.  In the inessentials he had yielded easily, and so bought peace.  Or perhaps a truce, of a sort.  But for the essentials he was standing with a sort of dogged conviction that if he lowered his flag it would precipitate a crisis.  He was not brilliant, but he was intelligent, progressive and kindly.  He knew that his father considered him both stupid and obstinate.

There was going to be a strike.  The quarrel now was between Anthony’s curt “Let them strike,” and his own conviction that a strike at this time might lead to even worse things.  The men’s demands were exorbitant.  No business, no matter how big, could concede them and live.  But Howard was debating another phase of the situation.

Not all the mills would go down.  A careful canvass of some of the other independent concerns had shown the men eighty, ninety, even one hundred per cent, loyal.  Those were the smaller plants, where there had always been a reciprocal good feeling between the owners and the men; there the men knew the owners, and the owners knew the men, who had been with them for years.

But the Cardew Mills would go down.  There had been no liaison between the Cardews and the workmen.  The very magnitude of the business forbade that.  And for many years, too, the Cardews had shown a gross callousness to the welfare of the laborers.  Long ago he had urged on his father the progressive attitude of other steel men, but Anthony had jeered, and when Howard had forced the issue and gained concessions, it was too late.  The old grievances remained in too many minds.  To hate the Cardews bad become a habit.  Their past sins would damn them now.  The strike was wrong, a wicked thing.  It was without reason and without aim.  The men were knocking a hole in the boat that floated them.  But—­

There was a tap at his door, and he called “Come in.”  From her babyhood Lily had had her own peculiar method of signaling that she stood without, a delicate rapid tattoo of finger nails on the panel.  He watched smilingly for her entrance.