"Servitude! Why, we are all servants one of the other. Society is like the human body, in which all the limbs belong to each other. There must be rich and poor, idlers and workers; we depend one upon the other; if the rich do not work with and for the poor, retribution falls upon them. The poor must work for the rich, or they will starve; poor or rich, I think it is better to be poor; idler or worker, I know it is better to be worker."
He thought of Lord Jocelyn; of the pleasant chambers in Piccadilly, of the club, of his own friends, of society, of little dinners, of stalls at the theatre; of suppers among actors and actresses; of artists and the smoking-parties; of the men who write, and the men who talk, and the men who know everybody, and are full of stories; of his riding, and hunting, and shooting; of his fencing, and billiards, and cards.
All these things passed through his brain swiftly, in a moment. And then he thought of the beautiful woman beside him, whose voice was the sweetest music to him that he had ever heard.
"You must take the offer," she went on, and her words fell upon his ear like the words of an oracle to a Greek in doubt. "Work at the brewery is not hard. You will have no task-master set over you; you are free to go and come, to choose your own time; there will be in so great a place, there must be, work, quite enough to occupy your time. Give up yearning after an idle life, and work in patience."
"Is there anything," he said, "to which you could not persuade me?"
"Oh, not for me!" she replied impatiently. "It is for yourself. You have your life before you, to throw away or to use. Tell me," she hesitated a little; "you have come back to your own kith and kin, after many years. They were strange to you at first, all these people of the East End—your own people. Now that you know them, should you like to go away from them, altogether away and forget them? Could you desert them? You know, if you go, that you will desert them, for between this end of London and the other there is a great gulf fixed, across which no one ever passes. You will leave us altogether if you leave us now."
At this point Harry felt the very strongest desire to make it clear that what concerned him most would be the leaving her, but he repressed the temptation and merely remarked that, if he did desert his kith and kin, they would not regret him. His Uncle Bunker, he explained, had even offered him five-and-twenty pounds to go.
"It is not that you have done anything, you know, except to help us in our little experiment," said Angela. "But it is what you may do, what you shall do, if you remain."
"What can I do?"
"You have knowledge; you have a voice; you have a quick eye and a ready tongue; you could lead, you could preside. Oh! what a career you might have before you!"