Chapter VIII

There stands, or some years ago there stood, in a noble park some five miles to the south of the ancient town of Stafford, a large and imposing edifice, built of a dull red brick, grown russet-hued with age, a house, one judged, reared in the days when Anne was queen. The outer door, stout almost as the portal of a jail, opened into a spacious hall, cheered by the fire of a commodious grate, its walls adorned, or one had perhaps better say furnished, by gloomy portraits of departed worthies and their beloved spouses. Dining-room and breakfast or morning-room opened right and left into the hall, whilst a noble staircase of oak, dark with age, with broad, shallow steps, worn by the feet of many generations, led to the upper storeys. In a room, on the second floor, snug, cosy, but somewhat severely furnished, sat in the early gloom of a wintry afternoon two maidens, both passing fair and good to look upon, and yet of a fairness how unlike—the one dark, tall, queenly of port and mien, and the other of slenderer form, of a gentler aspect, of a softer gaze, the one born to sway imperious, the other to win by the soft persuasion of tender look and soft appeal. The house is the home of Mrs. Jane Fairfax, relict of a former burgess and mayor of the town, whose trade—the townsfolk proudly boast—is trodden under foot by all the world—and it is the home also of her niece, ward, and heiress, Gertrude Fairfax.

Gertrude Fairfax and her old schoolfellow, Eleanor St. Clair, the proud and imperious beauty who, as a girl, had ruled her classmates and sorely tried the patience of her teachers, and to whom the gentler maiden had yielded a ready and adoring submission when both were in short frocks and wore their hair in a pig-tail, were in the intimate converse of afternoon tea.

“My dearest Eleanor,” the younger girl is saying, as she hands cake and tea to her friend reclined in the deep, soft-cushioned basket chair, “I cannot tell you how delighted I am to see you after all these years. Why, you had almost ceased to write, and, lo! when I could not have dreamed of such a pleasure, with just one day’s warning, you drop, as it were, out of the clouds. And how beautiful you are, Eleanor. Oh! how beautiful. But you always were. Don’t you remember how we used to call you Lady Macbeth, and vow you would wed at least an earl. You were born to move resplendent in imperial courts, waited upon by adoring slaves, laying their coronets at your feet.”

Eleanor laughed complacently.

“Well, if I was so born, I’m not going to fulfil my destiny. I don’t know that courts will know much of me, unless they are some horrid, low, fusty, musty law courts. Heigho! I shudder at the thought of them. No! destiny’s out of it this time for me. But you, Gertrude, you, if you like, are fulfilling your destiny. Didn’t we call you Saint Cecilia, and the Puritan maiden, and Miss Prim, and all that? And there you sit, I declare, dressed in a plain serge, with a plain linen collar and cuffs, your hair confined as tight and brushed as smooth as its inherent rebelliousness will permit, without a ribbon or a ring, and just a cheap jet brooch at a neck you hide as though you were ashamed of it. You might be a nun, or what is it you remind me of? I have it. You only want a poke bonnet and a tambourine and you’re the picture of a Salvation Army lass; but sure the prettiest and the sweetest Salvation Army lass that ever travestied religion.”

“Well, I am a Salvation Army lass, if it comes to that; but I don’t know, Eleanor, that I travesty religion. I try to live it, not to parody it.”

“You, a Salvation Army lass! Angels and ministers of grace defend us! You, Gertrude, that simply roll in money, you that live in this grand old house, you with a maid of your own a butler like a bishop, a footman with calves that are simply thrown away in Staffordshire, you with a carriage and a lovely pair, and a coachman as gorgeous as the Lord Mayor’s, you a Salvation Army lass! As the Scotch parson said: ‘Good Lord! it’s juist rideeculous!’”

“My dear Eleanor, you forget. The house is not mine, the maid, the groom, the coachman, and the carriage and the pair—these are not mine. They are my dear aunt’s. Mine they never may be. Should they be destined some day to be mine, may that day be far, far distant.”

“Amen, with all my heart. Your aunt’s a dear. But to all intents and purposes they’re yours, or will be some day, and you know it. I wish I were as certain of heaven. And, heigho! don’t I just wish that some of that filthy dross you Salvationists affect to despise were mine. Money’s just thrown away on you. It’s a ridiculous waste of the good things of life to lavish them on a girl I verily believe would just as soon have a steel as a diamond brooch at her breast, and a slip of velvet round her neck as a rope of pearls.”

“Sooner,” said Gertrude. “I think it’s simply sinful to spend precious money on pearls and diamonds when so many of my sisters perish for lack of very bread. I do not judge others, Eleanor, God forbid that I should. It may not be sinful for others, but it would for me, seeing as I see and thinking and feeling as I think and feel. And, indeed, it is no sacrifice for me to be without fine apparel and costly jewels. I take neither pride nor pleasure in them. A bit of coloured glass is to me as beautiful as the rarest gem, and a rose or a violet more beautiful than either. I often think people value jewels not for what they see in them, but from a curious sense that their costliness denies them to others. I don’t think it is an enviable frame of mind. But you haven’t told me, dear, why you wished particularly to be in Staffordshire just now. You hinted in your letter there was a reason. Is it a secret?”

“It is, and it isn’t. Oh! Gertrude, I am the happiest and the most miserable of girls. I’ve given my heart and promised my hand to nearly the last man in the world I ought to have loved, and papa simply won’t hear a word of our being engaged, and as for being married, it may come off when I’m ready for one of those old-age pensions those horrid Radicals dangle before the silly people’s eyes. But, I forgot, I’m a Radical myself now, or I suppose I ought to be.”

“You a Radical, Gertrude! Yes, when I’m a Tory. But why must you?”

“Why, because Edward’s a Radical. Isn’t that reason enough? But I forget. You’re but a schoolgirl yet. You know nothing of such things. And there’s that goose of a Squire Wright—never leaves me alone, follows me like my shadow, and the more I snub him the more he seems to like it. He grows sleek on cruelty and positively beams under despiteful usage.”

“And Edward is, I presume, the fortunate suitor. Edward what? Who is he? Where did you meet him? You’ve never mentioned him in your letters.”

“Edward Beaumont. See, this is his portrait,” and Eleanor drew a locket from her bosom and handed it to her friend. “Isn’t he handsome? Now don’t say yes if you don’t think so; but I’ll just shake you if you don’t.” Gertrude Fairfax gazed long upon the face encircled in its golden frame, and a close observer would have seen a deeper colour suffuse her cheeks and brow only to leave them paler than before. She clasped the locket nervously and returned it to her companion.

“It is a good face,” she said quietly. “I have seen it before. I know Mr. Beaumont slightly, and, Eleanor, I think you should be a very happy girl.”

Then she told of that adventure in Huddersfield which has been already chronicled in these veracious pages.

“And you love him, Eleanor?” she concluded, “and he loves you, and soon the glad marriage-bells will ring and you will live happy ever after.”

“I’m not so sure of all that, Gertrude. There’s the Archdeacon to reckon with, and though he’s the best of fathers, he can put his foot down when he likes, and it’s a heavy one. Then, yes, I suppose it’s true enough, and I may as well say it, there’s Eleanor St. Clair to reckon with. You see, Edward’s not rich, a successful attorney at the best. That is what he is now, and if I marry now I marry what he is now, not what he may be. And I really don’t think I could marry a poor man of no position worth talking of. Why, I might as well marry a curate.”

“But you love him, Eleanor?”

“Oh! that’s well enough in novels. But I’ve been told on high authority that when poverty comes in at the door, love flies out at the window. Fancy me, Eleanor St. Clair, living in a cheap villa, with a horrid garden patch in front and a yard for drying clothes at the back; a slip-shod servant-maid with a sniffing nose, doing my own laundry work, cooking my own meals and my lord’s, cold mutton and rice pudding most days. I don’t think I could bear it for the best man living, and that’s flat!”

“Perhaps it won’t be so bad as all that, Eleanor. Does Mr. Beaumont know how you look at things?”

“Pretty well, I fancy, and he has more sense than to expect anything else. Don’t you know he’s trying for Parliament? Why, bless me, I forget to tell you. He’s to be in Stafford to-night, speaking in the Town Hall, I’ve never heard him make a speech, so I trumped up an invitation from my old school friend and here I am. You’ll go with me to the Hall to-night, won’t you, dear? He mustn’t see me nor know I’m in Stafford, but I do so want to see and hear him.”

That was a memorable meeting in the Stafford Town Hall. It was to be, so far as possible, a county meeting. From all parts of the Southern Division men teemed into Stafford—farmers, greatly daring, who braved the wrath of their landlords, shop-keepers, agricultural labourers, and the miners from Cannock Chase. An ex-Cabinet Minister was to be on the platform, Joseph Arch, the peasant’s pride, was to speak, and the new Radical candidate was to address the electors and non-electors. And Edward Beaumont had resolved that that night he would deliver his soul, let the result be what it might. He would speak not to win this election, for that he was convinced no Radical could do and be honest, but so speak that either he or some better man should hereafter win elections by an emancipated electorate. He would not water down his creed to conciliate the half-hearted or to disarm the prejudiced. The people should know his soul, his whole soul and nothing short of it. He knew his speech would shock, would wound, would alienate; but he had learned his political creed amid the free, outspoken, fearless, and enlightened citizens of the North; and that creed, or none at all, from him the more dull and decorous Midlands should have. The chairman, a pursy, podgy alderman of the town, gasped with horror, the ex-Cabinet Minister grew frigid with haughty resentment, the black-clothed citizens looked into each other’s eyes in blank dismay, but the ruddy peasants and the grimy miners roared themselves hoarse as he warmed to his work and spoke the convictions of his mind.

“You have heard,” he said, “from the right hon. gentleman who has just resumed his seat that a much-needed, long-delayed measure of electoral reform cannot much longer be denied. You met that declaration with much cheering, and rightly so. But I wish you to ask yourselves what use are you prepared to make of the vote when you get it? Are you so content with your present lot that you look forward to ending your lives as most of you have begun and so far spent them? You miners, you stalwart sons of the soil, has the future no fairer promise for you than the lot you and your fathers have known. To what measures are our legislators to put their hands when Liberal, perchance a Radical, House sits to carry into law the people’s behests? I tell you your votes will be of no value unless you are resolved to use them as the crowbars and the jemmies with which to force the safes of privilege and plunder, use them not to steal what is not your own, but to regain that of which the people have been despoiled, to win back for yourselves your own, but that which has been so long enjoyed by others you have almost forgotten your imprescriptible rights. Is it a law of Nature that one should spend his toil and another enjoy its fruits? Is it an immutable decree of heaven that there should be for ever and for aye the inordinately rich and the abjectly poor? Is it marked down in holy Writ that Dives should always be clad in purple and fine linen and fare sumptuously every day, whilst Lazarus lies at his gates and the dogs lick his sores? Is it to be endured for ever that the miner should toil in the bowels of the earth—shut out from God’s sunshine and daring all the perils of a sudden and awful death, whilst the mine-owner rolls lordly in his carriage and cossets himself on partridge and champagne? Is it to be endured that so long as this earth shall last the owners of the soil may live in pampered luxury upon the earnings of the harassed farmer and the sweating and sweated hind? No, by heavens, gentlemen, if I am to be your candidate I shall stand for measures that will humble the pride of those in high places, measures that will strip the coronetted peers of the power they now possess to thwart the people’s will, measures that will humble the bishop’s bench and strip the haughty hierarchy of its ungodly privileges, measures that will give back to the people the wealth the people earn by their sinews and their brain. A time shall come when England shall be Merry England once more, aye, if we have to make a holocaust of the title-deeds by which its broad acres have been tied in parchment bonds; a time when honest toil shall be honestly rewarded; a time when he who toils not shall see himself and be seen as the parasite he is; a time when no man shall wield political power merely because he chances to be ‘the tenth transmitter of a foolish face’; a time when no man and no woman shall be poor who is willing and able to work; a time when the Workhouse shall no longer be the only asylum for decent poverty, a time when the wealth-winners shall be the wealth-enjoyers. Woe in that day to the man, aye, though he boast the blood of the Plantagenets, who owes his pride and station, his pomp and luxury, to the rentals of common land stolen from the peasant; woe in that day to the capitalist who grinds the faces of the poor; woe in that day to all who sit at the feast they have not spread and quaff the goblet they have not filled. But glad, glad that day for all who give unstinting of brain or muscle and by honest toil add their measure to the common wealth and win thereby the right to share to the full in the generous bounty of Nature’s ungrudging hand. I do not come to you with mincing gait and honeyed words. No kid-glove politician I. You know my mind. Say, shall I be your spokesman at the people’s House?”

And that vast audience, almost to a man, sprang to feet, and thundered back an “Aye” that shook the very walls. But the chairman paled in his puffy cheeks and the ex-minister’s brow was dark. And even as the cheers rolled and rolled again a messenger handed to Beaumont as, flushed and exultant, he gazed upon the sea of faces, a message flashed across the wires by his confidential clerk:—

“Petition in Bankruptcy against you by Bank and Schofield.”

“See, Eleanor,” whispered Gertrude Fairfax, who, seated in the balcony beside her friend, had drunk in with enraptured ears the fervent periods of the speaker. “See, he has had bad news. He pales, I can see it even here. He is ghastly white. Oh! I am sure he has had some terrible blow. And at such a moment! Cannot you go to him and comfort him?”

But Eleanor made no sign.