"Did she turn away in indignation? No, by heaven!—there was nothing upon her face but the intensest yearning pity. If she had spoken again, she would have conquered; but before those perfect lips could open, the thought of thoughts flashed across me.
"'Tell me one thing! Is my cousin George to be married to——?' and I stopped.
"'He is.'
"'And yet,' I said, 'you wish to turn me back from dying on a barricade!' And, without waiting for a reply, I hurried down the street in all the fury of despair."
But Alton Locke did not die on a barricade, any more than Mr John O'Connell on the floor of the House of Commons. He did not sever with his shears the thread of life either of soldier or policeman. He got down from the waggons with the rest when Feargus showed the white feather, and by way of change of scene and subject, contrived to get into the house where Lillian was residing, and in a very sneaking way to become witness of sundry love passages between her and his cousin George. As a matter of course, he was kicked into the street by two able-bodied servitors in plush. Then follows a scene with a former comrade of his, a drunken, worthless, treacherous Dung, by name Jemmy Downes, who had become a sweater and kidnapper, and descended through every stage of degradation to the very cesspool of infamy. His wife and children are lying dead, fever-stricken, half-consumed by vermin in a horrible den, overhanging a rankling ditch, into which Downes in his delirium falls, and Alton staggers home with the typhus raging in his blood. Then come the visions of delirium, ambitiously written, but without either myth or meaning, so far as we can discover. Sometimes Alton fancies himself a mylodon eating his way through a forest of cabbage palms, and "browsing upon the crisp tart foliage,"—sometimes he is impressed with the painful conviction that he is a baboon agitated "by wild frenzies, agonies of lust, and aimless ferocity." The conscience, it would seem, was not utterly overpowered by the disease. He at length awakes to reality—
"Surely I know that voice! She lifted her veil. The face was Lillian's! No! Eleanor's!
"Gently she touched my hand—I sunk down into soft, weary, happy sleep."
Of course, with the Countess for his nurse, Alton gradually recovers, at least from the fever, but his constitution is plainly breaking up. He then hears of the death of his cousin George, caused by infection conveyed in a coat which he had seen covering the wasted remains of Downes' wife and children. His first impulse is again to persecute Lillian; but the Countess will not allow him, not because he is an impertinent, odious, contemptible, convicted snip and coxcomb, but because "there is nothing there for your heart to rest upon—nothing to satisfy your intellect"!! So she reads Tennyson to him, and expounds her views throughout several chapters upon Christianity as bearing upon Socialism—views which we regret to say that the noble lady, by adopting that peculiar exaltation of speech which was said to characterise the oracles of Johanna Southcote and Luckie Buchan, has rendered unintelligible to us, though they appear to have had a different effect upon her audience.
The end of the story is, that Alton is sent out to Mexico by the desire and at the expense of the Countess, in order that he may become "a tropical poet," not only rhetorically, but physically; and he is accompanied by Crossthwaite and his wife. We are led to infer that failing health, upon both sides, was an insuperable obstacle to his union with the Countess. He pens this autobiography during the voyage, and dies within sight of land, after having composed his death-song, than which, we trust, for the credit of tradition, that the last notes of the swans of Cayster were infinitely more melodious.
Such is an epitome of the story of Alton Locke; a book which exhibits, in many passages, decided marks of genius, but which, as a whole, is so preposterously absurd, as rather to excite ridicule than to move sympathy. What sympathy we do feel is not with Alton Locke, the hero, if we dare to desecrate that term by applying it to such an abortion: it arises out of the episodes which are carefully constructed from ascertained and unquestionable facts, and in which the proprieties of nature and circumstance are not exaggerated or forsaken, whilst the pictorial power of the author is shown to the greatest advantage. Of this character are the scenes in the needlewoman's garret—in the sweating-house, from which the old farmer rescues his son—in the den inhabited by Downes—and the description of Mackaye's deathbed. These are, however, rather the eddies of the story than the stream: the moment we have to accompany Alton Locke as a principal actor, we are involved in such a mass of absurdities, that common-sense revolts, and credulity itself indignantly refuses to entertain them.