Leacraft soon tired of sums, schedules, names, and lists, and wandered away over the park through the scattered groups, many centred around one of those popular tribunes, who, by reason of a little more leisure, perhaps a little more application, and always much more labial facility, influence their class profoundly. The broad lawns were filled with these improvised parliaments, in which too banter, argument, retort, query, admonition bore a part. The perplexing thing was the average satisfaction shown by the people, a kind of holiday anticipation, as if they were off for an excursion. To them perhaps it seemed a new start in life, with the ground less encumbered by rivals, by restrictions, less shadowed by priority, and favors for a few, and by the intimidation of a necessary subserviency. They almost seemed happy in the thought of change. There was bitterness in this, and yet to Leacraft with his undissembling and emancipated mind it was understood. It meant chance to these people—this removal; and to most of them chance never came, never could come as they were. And then to linger, was starvation, loneliness, disuse, death. The business of the country had enormously shrunken, its productive power had been halved, commerce was drifting in stronger and steadier currents elsewhere, and no where so strongly as to Germany, while the over mastering pre-eminence of America loomed up in proportions that paralysed conjecture.
Pondering on all these things Leacraft, in his absorbed way, stumbled over a little girl on the edge of one of the shaded walks. He quickly stooped and picked her up, and confronted the young mother, already hastening to the rescue of her child.
“I should have been more careful,” said the embarrassed gentleman. “Well, indeed we have all good reason to be thinking more than seeing, these times,” said the smiling mother, “I wonder what we’ll all be like this time, come twelve month.”
“Oh, I dare say that we shall be doing much the same thing that we do here, in a different place—and then we shall be a year older;” the young woman laughed, and attested a complete willingness to talk more, as she raised the ruffled child from the grass and moved nearer to Leacraft. Nor was Leacraft indifferent. He felt nettled, and willful, with a subconsciousness of disappointment and fear. This human and healthy mother, with the fresh guerdon of her blushing youth in her arms, was a helpful companion, and then she carried the solace of some new story, perhaps a new need, and Leacraft was not averse to being sympathetic or helpful.
“Willie, that’s my man, sir,” continued the girl, “is right glad to get away. Last Candlemas his mother died, and left Willie her savings, and that, and what we have, will tide us to America, and Willie he says that he can get a home, and have a little land, and Willie will be better of his sickness. He’s not here the day, because of his cough and the fever that he has. Ah! sir, it makes me chill at my heart to see him, and to think that we are going so far,” and the sweet face looked piteously at Leacraft, and the tears overran the sad gray eyes. Leacraft saw it all; a consumptive father, poor, out of work, staking everything now to reach that bourne, where the hopeless of all nations saw the welcome light of opportunity. As he thought of this he saw how great this avulsion was, what a tearing up of the roots of family and home life, and how ruthlessly they were to be planted in all sorts of soils, under alien skies, with inauspicious hands to tend and raise them. He turned to the young mother, and said, “It won’t seem so far, if a face from the old home greets you there. I shall be there also, and I will not only be glad to see you, but glad to help you, if you need it. Take this,” and opening his card case, he wrote an address in New York city. “If,” he continued, “you do not remain in New York, this will always find me. Good bye.” He extended his hand and shook with unaffected warmth the hand of the young English woman, to whom the future loomed up in misty and insecure, perhaps menacing shadows. How merciful is sympathy, with what a solacing hand it soothes the “ruffled brow of care,” and how genially it bids the springs of life still follow, and, for a moment at least, flow too in the sunlight of affection. The English woman seized Leacraft’s hand and pressed it tightly, and her face looked into his with almost an enamored thankfulness; she raised the baby girl and held it close to Leacraft, and the restrained Englishman kissed it with quaint shyness. At the instant, all the shifting helplessness about him moved him inexpressibly. Again they shook hands and the Englishman betrayed into emotional excess, walked rapidly away, reassuring her at the last that he would indeed be soon in America.
A few feet away a different encounter swept him into a contrasted realm of emotional excitement. A rude brawling loafer, none too sober, and reckless in oaths and obscenity, had seized the small flags of two little boys—union jacks—and throwing them down on the ground, with an outburst of profanity trampled and defaced them. The Englishman inflamed and ardent, holding a wounded heart, stood stupified and insulted. The next instant and he had snatched the flags from their degradation, and with an instantaneous revulsion struck the culprit of this outrage squarely in the face. The blow was unmistakably adequate. The ruffian reeled and fell and failed to regain his feet, before a shout of applause greeted Leacraft and a concourse of men, who had hastened to the spot on the outcry of the children surrounded him with welcome salutation.
“A fine blow—well hit and straight as a gunshot man! That was the right medicine for his complaint. I’m thinking that a little water might wash it down. I say, boys, let’s duck him, souse him in the lake. A tubbing might clean his sassy mouth, and a man is none too good to be rolled in the mud himself, who treads on the English flag.” The subject of this criticism was on his feet again in rather a belligerent mood, blinking and rolling his fists in a minatory fashion, and sputtering defiance, and presenting a transient spectacle of inebriety and coarseness that would have been ludicrous, if the temper of the men behind the new speaker had not seemed so hostile. Leacraft felt that they would do some serious mischief to the miserable delinquent, and he stepped in front of them interposing his body between the foremost of the ranks, and the, now somewhat intimidated drunkard.
“I think my friends, that you should spare yourselves the trouble to punish this miscreant just now. Let him alone. Neither he or his kind are likely to hurt our flag. He has learned his lesson. To-day my friends it becomes us to command ourselves, and hold ourselves above resentment. We are all sad, our hearts are heavy, the old Manse is to be left and new conquests across the waters made, new homes. Ah! how large the vision grows.” The men had enclosed Leacraft in a dense circle. He saw that he had their attention, while the stumbling object of their first anger effected a shuffling retreat with ignominious haste. His ruse now was to entirely capture their thoughts. “It is a vision of a new England, one made so by our devotion, the fixed quality of our patriotism, an undeviating union among ourselves, and just pride in our history, our race, our King. It may be a better England; it can not be a more beautiful England. We are deeply stricken. While we bow to this necessity, let us make the grandest display of fortitude of resource, of hope, of courage, of skill, of judgment, ever known. In our disaster we shall again conquer the world and hold it submissive at our feet.”
Leacraft had enough disengagement of thought to half smile to himself at this grandiloquent pretense, but he knew his audience. It was quite British, embued with that cloutish conceit which all popular masses in every successful nation instinctively display. He had appealed to their conceit, though not only to that, and they responded enthusiastically. As he finished this mild buncombe, not without some misgivings as to his own honesty, as he intended at first to repair to the United States, the men nearest to him grasped his hand, others shouted approbation, and still others in silence moved away shaking their heads. Leacraft talked with the men about him. He found that they had been assigned places in the scheme of emigration; some were going to Australia, with a systematic dispersion over the region, which most needed their labor, others to New Zealand into socialistic farming; others to the cape and Rhodesia and still others to Canada; so that his exalted sentiment of solidarity lost a little of its impressiveness. Leacraft lingered a while longer, and as the day ended in a refulgent sunset with church bells, near and far ringing to the services, that now for a week would be held at all hours, inaugurating an unbroken intercession at the throne of grace for the guidance and protection of the people, he left his cordial acquaintances and went westward.
He reached Park Lane near the Kensington Gardens, Gloucester House, and the fountain of Thornycroft, the region of Mayfair, the dazzling centre, the illustrious apse of English social splendor, where the inherited privileges of life were not discordantly blended with the no less inherited gifts of fortune; that spot in all London which to relinquish, would seem to sound the depths of national disgrace. The moon swam in the lucent sky, the air was clear, but cold, and the familiar ravishing softness of the June nights as London knew them once, was gone; those illumined mists, the dewyness that spread from the ground to the enveloping air, and threw veil over veil of shimmering opacity upon arch and tower, sward, tree, bridge and storied palace, was all gone, too, and the beautiful neighborhood, as Leacraft wandered through it, from Cumberland Gate—where he saw snow still resting in sheltered recesses—along Park Lane to Hyde Park Corners, through Grosvenor Place to Chapel street, to Belgrave Square, was revealed in an aerial sincerity, that gave its splendor an almost scintillant loveliness, and drove still deeper into Leacraft’s heart the sense of a bewildering bereavement.