"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 class. 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 passionate earnestness, which I had never heard from her before, "stop—for God'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 nobler 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!"