“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?”