Part 36 (2/2)

”My dear fellow, is it reasonable?”

”I dislike things that are reasonable.”

”There is but one way of getting at you. Have you thought of Natalie?”

”Ah!” said the other, quickly raising himself into an expectant att.i.tude.

”You will listen now, I suppose, to reason, to common-sense. Do you think it likely that, with the possibility of her becoming my wife, I am going to throw away this certainty and leave her to all chances of the world? Lind says that the Society amply provides for its officers. Very well; that is quite probable. I tell him that I am not afraid for myself; if I had to think of myself alone, there is no saying what I might not do, even if I were to laugh at myself for doing it. But how about Natalie? Lind might die. I might be sent away to the ends of the earth. Do you think I am going to leave her at the mercy of a lot of people whom she never saw?”

Lord Evelyn was silent.

”Besides, there is more than that,” his friend continued, warmly. ”You may call it selfishness, if you like, but if you love a woman and she gives her life into your hands--well, she has the first claim on you. I will put it to you: do you think I am going to sell the Beeches--when--when she might live there?”

Lord Evelyn did not answer.

”Of course I am willing to subscribe largely,” his friend continued; ”and Natalie herself would say yes to that. But I am not ambitious. I don't want to enter that grade. I don't want to sit in Lind's chair when he gets elected to the Council, as has been suggested to me. I am not qualified for it; I don't care about it; I can best do my own work in my own way.”

At last Lord Evelyn spoke; but it was in a meditative fas.h.i.+on, and not very much to the point. He lay back in his easy-chair, his hands clasped behind his head, and talked; and his talk was not at all about the selling of Hill Beeches in Buckinghams.h.i.+re, but of much more abstract matters. He spoke of the divine wrath of the reformer--what a curious thing it was, that fiery impatience with what was wrong in the world; how it cropped up here and there from time to time; and how one abuse after another had been burnt up by it and swept away forever. Give the man possessed of this holy rage all the beauty and wealth and ease in the world, and he is not satisfied; there is something within him that vibrates to the call of humanity without; others can pa.s.s by what does not affect themselves with a laugh or a shrug of indifference; he only must stay and labor till the wrong thing is put right. And how often had he been jeered at by the vulgar of his time; how Common-Sense had pointed the finger of scorn at him; how Respectability had called him crazed! John Brown at Harper's Ferry is only a ridiculous old fool; his effort is absurd; even gentlemen in the North feel an ”intellectual satisfaction” that he is hanged, because of his ”preposterous miscalculation of possibilities.” Yes, no doubt; you hang him, and there is an end; but ”his soul goes marching on,” and the slaves are freed!

You want to abolish the Corn-laws?--all good society shrieks at you at first: you are a Radical, a regicide, a Judas Iscariot; but in time the nation listens, and the poor have cheap bread. ”Mazzini is mad!” the world cries: ”why this useless bloodshed? It is only political murder.”

Mazzini is mad, no doubt: but in time the beautiful dream of Italy--of ”Italia, the world's wonder, the world's care”--comes true. And what matter to the reformer, the agitator, the dreamer, though you stone him to death, or throw him to the lions, or clap him into a nineteenth-century prison and shut his mouth that way? He has handed on the sacred fire. Others will bear the torch; and he who is unenc.u.mbered will outstrip his fellows. The wrong must be put right.

And so forth, and so forth. Brand sat and listened, recognizing here and there a proud, pathetic phrase of Natalie's, and knowing well whence the inspiration came; and as he listened he almost felt as though that beautiful old place in Buckinghams.h.i.+re was slipping through his fingers.

The sacrifice seemed to be becoming less and less of a sacrifice; it took more and more the form of a duty; would Natalie's eyes smile approval?

Brand jumped up, and took a rapid turn or two up and down the room.

”I won't listen to you, Evelyn. You don't know anything about money-matters. You care for nothing but ideas. Now, I come of a commercial stock, and I want to know what guarantee I have that this money, if I were to give it up, would be properly applied. Lind's a.s.surances are all very well--”

”Oh yes, of course; you have got back to Lind,” said Lord Evelyn, waking up from his reveries. ”Do you know, my dear fellow, that your distrust of Lind is rapidly developing into a sharp and profound hatred?”

”I take men as I find them. Perhaps you can explain to me how Lind should care so little for the future of his daughter as to propose--with the possibility of our marrying--that she should be left penniless?”

”I can explain it to myself, but not to you; you are too thorough an Englishman.”

”Are you a foreigner?”

”I try to understand those who are not English. Now, an Englishman's theory is that he himself, and his wife and children--his domestic circle, in fact--are the centre of creation; and that the fate of empires, as he finds that going one way or the other in the telegrams of the morning paper, is a very small matter compared with the necessity of Tom's going to Eton, or d.i.c.k's marrying and settling down as the bailiff of the Worcesters.h.i.+re farm. That is all very well; but other people may be of a different habit of mind. Lind's heart and soul are in his present work; he would sacrifice himself, his daughter, you, or anybody else to it, and consider himself amply justified. He does not care about money, or horses, or the luxury of a big establishment; I suppose he has had to live on simple fare many a time, whether he liked it or not, and can put up with whatever happens. If you imagine that you may be cheated by a portion of your money--supposing you were to adopt his proposal--going into his pocket as commission, you do him a wrong.”

”No, I don't think that,” Brand said, rather unwillingly. ”I don't take him to be a common and vulgar swindler. And I can very well believe that he does not care very much for money or luxury or that kind of thing, so far as he himself is concerned. Still, you would think that the ordinary instinct of a father would prevent his doing an injury to the future of his daughter--”

”Would he consider it an injury. Would she?”'

”Well,” Brand said, ”she is very enthusiastic, and n.o.ble, and generous, and does not know what dependence or poverty means. But he is a man of the world, and you would think he would look after his own kith and kin.”

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