“Come in! Come in! Indeed I am fain and glad to see you!” and all the way through the great hall, and into her parlour, she was beaming and uttering welcomes. “First of all, you must have a bit of eating and drinking,” she said, “and then you will tell me about my boy.”
“Thank you. I will take a glass of ale, if it will please you.”
“It will please me beyond everything. You shall have it from the Squire’s special tap: ale smooth as oil, sweet as milk, clear as amber, fourteen years old next twenty-ninth of March. And so you know my son Edgar?”
“I know him, and I love him with all my heart. He is as good as gold, and as true as steel.”
“To be sure, he is. I’m his mother, and I ought to know him; and that is what I say. How did you come together?”
“We met first at Cambridge; but we were not in the same college or set, so that I only knew him slightly there. Fortune had appointed a nobler introduction for us. I was in Glasgow nearly a year ago, and I wandered down to the Green, and was soon aware that the crowd was streaming to one point. Edgar was talking to this crowd. Have you ever heard him talk to a crowd?”
The mother shook her head, and Kate said softly: “We have never heard him.” She had taken off her hat, and her face was full of interest and happy expectation.
“Well,” continued North, “he was standing on a platform of rough boards that had been hastily put together, and I remembered instantly his tall, strong, graceful figure, and his bright, purposeful face. He was tanned to the temples, his cheeks were flushed, the wind was in his hair, the sunlight in his eyes; and, with fiery precipitance of assailing words, he was explaining to men mad with hunger and injustice the source of all their woes and the remedy to be applied. I became a man as I listened to him. That hour I put self behind me and vowed my life, and all I have, to the cause of Reform; because he showed me plainly that Parliamentary Reform included the righting of every social wrong and cruelty.”
“Do you really think so?” asked Kate.
“Indeed, I am sure of it. A Parliament that represented the great middle and working classes of England would quickly do away with both black and white slavery,–would repeal those infamous Corn Laws which have starved the working-man to make rich the farmer; would open our ports freely to the trade of all the world; would educate the poor; give much shorter hours of labour, and wages that a man could live on. Can I ever forget that hour? Never! I was born again in it!”