"Every drop of blood in my body rushed into my forehead; the court, the windows, and the faces, whirled round and round, and I fell senseless on the floor of the dock."
Alas for poor Snip! They gave him three years.
Three years passed in prison afford ample time for reflection, and are calculated to lead to amendment. We are sorry, however, to say that Mr Alton Locke by no means turned them to profit. He had many long interviews with the chaplain, who attempted to reclaim him to Christianity; but it would seem that the reverend gentleman did not set about it in the right way, as he advanced only old-fashioned arguments against infidelity, whereas the inspired tailor "was fighting for Strauss, Hennell, and Emerson." So the chaplain gave him up at last, and he turned for recreation and solace to the works of M.M. Prudhon and Louis Blanc, which he got somehow smuggled into his cell. During his imprisonment he experienced great tribulation by the sight of a handsome new church rising not far from his window, and occasional glimpses of a person whom he took to be the incumbent, and who bore a marvellous likeness to his cousin George. Sometimes this personage was accompanied by a lady, who might possibly be Lillian—for the mooncalf, notwithstanding the court-scene, and the consciousness that he was a sentenced felon, still seems to have supposed that he was beloved, and to have expected a visit to his cell—and the bare idea was distraction. And it turns out that he was right. George Locke, the incumbent, was about to be married—a fact which he learned immediately before his own release, coinciding in point of time with the French Revolution of 1848.
Back to London goes Alton, and, as a matter of course, instantaneously consorts with Cuffey. Then come the preparations for the memorable demonstration of 10th April, the provision of arms, and the wild schemes for resorting to physical force. That a large, ramified, and by no means contemptible conspiracy then existed, no man can doubt; and there is but too much reason to believe that social suffering was as much the cause of the projected outbreak as abstract political doctrines, however pernicious, or even the influence of the revolutionary example extended and propagated from the Continent. Alton had by this time worked himself up to such a pitch that he was ready to mount a barricade, and so was his companion and coadjutor, the valorous John Crossthwaite. But old Sandy Mackaye, who had some acquaintanceship with pikes in his youth, and experience of the extreme doubtfulness of the popular pluck, especially under the guidance of such leaders as the imbecile and misguided fools who made themselves most prominent in the Convention, astonished his friends by denouncing the whole concern as not only silly but sinful, and prophesying, almost with his dying breath as it proved, its complete and shameful failure. Very beautifully, indeed, and very naturally drawn, is the deathbed scene of the old reformer; the spirit, ere quitting for ever the tenement of clay, wandering back and recurring to the loved scenes of childhood and of youth—the bonny braes, and green hillsides, and clear waters of his native land.
Old Sandy dies, and Alton watches by his corpse till the morning of the 10th of April, the day on which the liberties of England were to be decided, and a general muster of the adherents of the Charter held on Kensington Common. Going forth, he encounters at the door a lady dressed in deep mourning, who had come to visit Mackaye, and who should this prove to be but the widowed Countess of Ellerton! It now comes out that Alton had been altogether mistaken in her character: instead of being a proud imperious aristocrat, she proves to be a lowly, devoted, and self-sacrificing friend of the poor, who has surrendered her whole means for the relief of unfortunate needle-women, and even lived and worked among them, in order personally to experience the hardships of their condition. There is nothing in this to provoke a sneer; for it is impossible to exaggerate the extent of that sacrifice which women in all ages have been content to make, either at the call of love, the claim of duty, or the demand of religion; and the noble and unswerving heroism, which they have exhibited in the accomplishment of their task. To tend the sick and dying even in public, hospitals—to brave the pestilence and the plague—to visit prisons—utterly to abjure the world, and to give up everything for the sake of their Divine Master—all these things have been done by women, and done so quietly and unobtrusively as to escape the notice of the multitude; for good deeds are like the sweetest flowers, they blossom in the most secret places. But our author goes a great deal further, and, as usual, plunges into the ludicrous. Lady Ellerton has, from the first, recognised Alton Locke as an inspired being; she has kept her eye upon him throughout the whole of his career; has paid his debts through old Mackaye, with whom she seems to have been in constant correspondence; has supplied the means for his defence at his trial; and has now come to arrest, if possible, the headlong career of the outrageous and revolutionary tailor! We must indulge ourselves with one more extract, and it shall be the last.
"'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!' she said; 'so young to be lost thus!'
"I was intensely moved. I felt—I knew that she had a message for me. I felt that hers was the only intellect in the world to which I would have submitted mine; and, for one moment, all the angel and all the devil in me wrestled for the mastery. If I could but have trusted her one moment.... No! all the pride, the suspicion, the prejudice of years, rolled back upon me. 'An aristocrat! and she, too, the one who has kept me from Lillian!' And in my bitterness, not daring to speak the real thought within me, I answered with a flippant sneer—
"'Yes, Madam! like Cordelia, so young, yet so untender!—Thanks to the mercies of the upper classes!'