She stopped. The men, worried and puzzled and surprised, looked a little sheepishly at each other.
“Oh, well,” said he of the hostler type, “my leddy, no offense, seein’ how you feel about it. Hi say—’ave your way.”
“Yes, yes,” squealed the preacher, “if the empty badges of mournin’ give ennyone—ennyone—satisfaction, why it’s not in reason to question their motives in this excroociating moment.”
“Gad! the lady’s right,” shouted the former belligerent, whose prompt hint had at first nearly precipitated the riot, “She’s got the right ring—and I’m damned if anyone teches the rags there I’ll bust his cock-eyed head aff his shoulders.”
This vociferous statement produced a hubbub of approval, and won many distinct admissions of entire acquiescence—and with these reassuring murmurs the lady retired, after telling her thanks, and the gathering withdrew down the street.
Leacraft and Thomsen continued their way westward. Before them suddenly, after a half-hour’s sauntering, shone an avenue of military splendor. They were in Charing Cross, having pushed down the Strand, and they were on the south side of Trafalgar Square, and not far from the equestrian statue of Charles I. Trafalgar Square was filled with troops. The effect of color was transporting. The massed regiments of infantry were broken by parks of artillery, while immediately under Nelson’s column the Nineteenth Hussars—the “Dumpies of 1759,” the Fifteenth Hussars—“Elliott’s Light Horse,” the Sixteenth Lancers—“the Queen’s,” and the Thirteenth Hussars—“the ragged brigade”—were confusedly stationed, their mingling busbies and dependent bags looking like a garden patch.
From point to point issued galloping videttes, carrying their pennants on lance-heads affixed to the stirrups, which undulated in the air, as the horses pranced and caracolled. The tramp of troops, the sighing of bugles, and the resounding surges of music, surrounded them. It was afternoon. The beginning of the first day’s procession from the Abbey doubtless was at hand. The stirring air communicated the thrills of an immense event, and the people, petrified into attention, stood crushed against each other in rows of forlorn expectancy. The suffocating excitement was unbearable, the more so because of its immobility. Leacraft decided to rush through London, and reach Victoria Park, the Hackney Marshes and Clapton, in order to determine the attitude, the action, of the poorer classes. Thomsen was unwilling to desert the fermenting throngs around Trafalgar Square, or miss, for a moment, the kaleidoscope of changing soldiery, and so Leacraft, leaving him, entered a hansom and shot off.
He was not averse to this solitude. His affections for Miss Tobit had lately warmed into a less indifferent kindliness, and he began to feel a gnawing anxiety lest the pretty Scotch woman thought less of him—in the way lovers like—than she did of her cousin, the handsome and obnoxiously unconcerned Thomsen. Thomsen knew exactly Leacraft’s feelings, and regarded them with unconcealed forbearance, and—what was more provoking—with a frank condescension of sympathy. And yet the men had become good friends; they had talked long and seriously, with all the elements of critical guidance they could summon, about the strange reversal or revolution in the nation’s affairs. But at these moments they were in an impersonal frame of contact, and the personal exigencies which later crept between them, were all absent. Leacraft’s intellectual weight easily made itself felt in these discussions, and Thomsen, with cordial alacrity, assumed the obedient position of audience and pupil.
As Leacraft was driven eastward in the swinging vehicle, he flung himself against its cushions, and again thought of the monstrous and incredible metamorphosis in the fortunes of his people. The vigorous life of ten centuries, with all its memories, the heaped up riches of its achievements, the splendid literary legacy of the past, with its art, its lineaments of beauty, its dusky shadows, the solicitous charm of its contrasted periods of history, the deep encrustation, nay, rather, the unfathomable deposits of character, and accomplishment which overlaid the Kingdom of England, and, in this city of London, the beating heart of its vast interests, thickly choked each avenue and current of its life—to abandon all this at the summons of a temperatural caprice, at the tempestuous whim of an earthquake, before the blind violence of frost and snow and ice, was the most unendurable of humiliations! It bit too deeply at the generalized assumption of the whole world, that man ruled the earth; it soured the contentment of his avid vanity, and to the Englishman it assailed the hitherto impregnable fortress of his heroic conceit. And yet—the old dream of a greater England arose, as it had arisen a hundred times before, in all these troubling and disconcerting months—an England leaping forward, as an exultant youth, bearing in his hands the trophies of new and brighter conquests, flushed under changed environments, with the inspiration of new ambitions, and new powers of creation, issuing into a greater chapter of human growth than had ever before been conceived or written.
And yet what an eviction! This glorious old England, with its sweet homes, its innumerable beauties, its convincing happiness of downs and glade and gardens, flowering into clouds of blossoms, its lakes, its gentle streams, its æsthetic softness and dimness, its manifold and opulent charm of landscape, the hurrying and constant kisses of its moist skies, in league with all the graces of the seasons—to cast this aside, and begin again, elsewhere, in regions drear and sterile of all these things; ah! that was too hard! too hard! and, as he had often done, Leacraft covered his face with his hands and sobbed.