Part 48 (1/2)
I could not finish the sentence.
”You wrote? He has warned us, but he never mentioned your name. He spoke of his knowledge as having been picked up by himself at personal risk to his clerical character.”
”The risk, I presume, of being known to have actually received a letter from a Chartist; but I wrote--on my honour I wrote--a week ago; and received no word of answer!”
”Is this true?” she asked.
”A man is not likely to deal in useless falsehoods, who knows not whether he shall live to see the set of sun!”
”Then you are implicated in this expected insurrection?”
”I am implicated,” I answered, ”with the people; what they do I shall do.
Those who once called themselves the patrons of the tailor-poet, left the mistaken enthusiast to languish for three years in prison, without a sign, a hint of mercy, pity, remembrance. Society has cast me off; and, in casting me off, it has sent me off to my own people, where I should have stayed from the beginning. Now I am at my post, because I am among my cla.s.s. If they triumph peacefully, I triumph with them. If they need blood to gain their rights, be it so. Let the blood be upon the head of those who refuse, not those who demand. At least, I shall be with my own people. And if I die, what better thing on earth can happen to me?”
”But the law?” she said.
”Do not talk to me of law! I know it too well in practice to be moved by any theories about it. Laws are no law, but tyranny, when the few make them, in order to oppress the many by them.”
”Oh!” she said, in a voice of pa.s.sionate earnestness, which I had never heard from her before, ”stop--for G.o.d's sake, stop! You know not what you are saying--what you are doing. Oh! that I had met you before--that I had had more time to speak to poor Mackaye! Oh! wait, wait--there is a deliverance for you! but never in this path--never. And just while I, and n.o.bler far than I, are longing and struggling to find the means of telling you your deliverance, you, in the madness of your haste, are making it impossible!”
There was a wild sincerity in her words--an almost imploring tenderness in her tone.
”So young!” said she; ”so young to be lost thus!”
I was intensely moved. I felt, I knew, that she had a message for me. I felt that hers was the only intellect in the world to which I would have submitted mine; and, for one moment, all the angel and all the devil in me wrestled for the mastery. If I could but have trusted her one moment....
No! all the pride, the spite, the suspicion, the prejudice of years, rolled back upon me. ”An aristocrat! and she, too, the one who has kept me from Lillian!” And in my bitterness, not daring to speak the real thought within me, I answered with a flippant sneer--
”Yes, madam! like Cordelia, so young, yet so untender!--Thanks to the mercies of the upper cla.s.ses!”
Did she turn away in indignation? No, by Heaven! there was nothing upon her face but the intensest yearning pity. If she had spoken again she would have conquered; but before those perfect lips could open, the thought of thoughts flashed across me.
”Tell me one thing! Is my cousin George to be married to ----” and I stopped.
”He is.”
”And yet,” I said, ”you wish to turn me back from dying on a barricade!”
And without waiting for a reply, I hurried down the street in all the fury of despair.
I have promised to say little about the Tenth of April, for indeed I have no heart to do so. Every one of Mackaye's predictions came true. We had arrayed against us, by our own folly, the very physical force to which we had appealed. The dread of general plunder and outrage by the savages of London, the national hatred of that French and Irish interference of which we had boasted, armed against us thousands of special constables, who had in the abstract little or no objection to our political opinions. The practical common sense of England, whatever discontent it might feel with the existing system, refused to let it be hurled rudely down, on the mere chance of building up on its ruins something as yet untried, and even undefined. Above all, the people would not rise. Whatever sympathy they had with us, they did not care to show it. And then futility after futility exposed itself. The meeting which was to have been counted by hundreds of thousands, numbered hardly its tens of thousands; and of them a frightful proportion were of those very rascal cla.s.ses, against whom we ourselves had offered to be sworn in as special constables. O'Connor's courage failed him after all. He contrived to be called away, at the critical moment, by some problematical superintendent of police. Poor Cuffy, the honestest, if not the wisest, speaker there, leapt off the waggon, exclaiming that we were all ”humbugged and betrayed”; and the meeting broke up pitiably piecemeal, drenched and cowed, body and soul, by pouring rain on its way home--for the very heavens mercifully helped to quench our folly--while the monster-pet.i.tion crawled ludicrously away in a hack cab, to be dragged to the floor of the House of Commons amid roars of laughter--”inextinguishable laughter,” as of Tennyson's Epicurean G.o.ds--
Careless of mankind.
For they lie beside their nectar, and their bolts are hurled Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curled Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world.
There they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands, Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands, Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking s.h.i.+ps, _and praying hands.
But they smile, they find a music, centred in a doleful song, Steaming up, a lamentation, and an ancient tale of wrong, Like a tale of little meaning, though the words are strong_ Chanted by an ill-used race of men that cleave the soil, Sow the seed and reap the harvest with enduring toil, Storing little yearly dues of wheat, and wine, and oil; Till they perish, and they suffer--some, 'tis whispered, down in h.e.l.l Suffer endless anguis.h.!.+--
Truly--truly, great poets' words are vaster than the singers themselves suppose!