The route of the three hundred was towards Stockport; but when they reached the bridge they found it occupied by the Yeomanry and a troop of the Life Guards. To attempt to force a passage was impossible; but numbers threw themselves into the river, and so crossed. The soldiers then withdrew into Stockport town, and the bridge was left open to the main body. When they got into the street on the other side the soldiers and police dashed at them, and arrested everybody whom they could catch. The Major was foremost in the crowd, endeavouring to preserve some sort of discipline, and one of the Yeomanry, suspecting him to be a leader, rode up to him, and, leaning from his horse, collared him. He was unarmed; but he was a powerful man, and wrenched himself free. The soldier drew his sword, and although Caillaud was close by, and attempted to parry the blow with a stick, the Major lay a dead man on the ground. The next moment, however, the soldier himself was dead—dead from a pistol-shot fired by Caillaud, who was instantly seized, handed over to a guard, and marched off with a score of others to Manchester jail. A remnant only of the Blanketeers escaped from Stockport, and a smaller remnant got to Macclesfield. There there was no shelter for them, and many of them lay in the streets all night. When the morning dawned only twenty went on into Staffordshire, and these shortly afterwards separated, and wandered back to Manchester. The sword of Gideon was, alas! not the sword of the Lord, and aching hearts in that bitter March weather felt that there was something worse than the cold to be borne at they struggled homewards. Others, amongst whom was our Methodist orator, were not discouraged. It is a poor religion which makes no provision for disaster, and even for apparently final failure. The test of faith is its power under defeat, and these silly God-fearing souls argued to themselves that their Master’s time was not their time; that perhaps they were being punished for their sins, and that when it pleased Him they would triumph. Essentially right they were, right in every particular, excepting, perhaps, that it was not for their own sins that this sore visitation came upon them. Visitation for sin it was certainly, but a visitation for the sins of others—such is the way of Providence, and has been ever since the world began, much to the amazement of many reflective persons. Thou hast laid on Him the iniquity of us all, and Jesus is crucified rather than the Scribes and Pharisees! Yet could we really wish it otherwise? Would it have been better in the end that Caiaphas and the elders should have been nailed upon Calvary, and Jesus die at a good old age, crowned with honour? It was not yet God’s time in 1817, but God’s time was helped forward, as it generally is, by this anticipation of it. It is a commonplace that a premature outbreak puts back the hands of the clock and is a blunder. Nine times out of ten this is untrue, and a revolt instantaneously quenched in blood is not merely the precursor, but the direct progenitor of success.
We will spend no time over the death of Major Maitland. The tragic interest, as one of our greatest masters has said, lies not with the corpse but with the mourners, and we turn back to Zachariah. Ogden’s office was shut. On the night after the breakdown at Stockport a note in pencil was left at Zachariah’s house, in Pauline’s handwriting. It was very short:—“Fly for your life—they will have you to-night—P.”
Fly for his life! But how could he fly, with his wife in bed and with no work before him? Would it not be base to leave her? Then it occurred to him that if he were taken and imprisoned, he would be altogether incapable of helping her. He determined to speak to Mrs. Carter. He showed her the note, and she was troubled with no hesitation of any kind.
“My good man,” she said, “you be off this minute. That’s what you’ve got to do. Never mind your wife; I’ll see after her. Expense? Lord, Mr. Coleman what’s that? She don’t eat much. Besides, we’ll settle all about that afterwards.”
Zachariah hesitated.
“Now don’t stand shilly-shallying and a-thinking and a-thinking,—that never did anybody any good. I can’t a-bear a man as thinks and thinks when there’s anything to be done as plain as the nose in his face. Where’s your bag?”
Mrs. Carter was out of the room in an instant, and in ten minutes came back with a change of clothes.
“Now, let us know where you are; but don’t send your letters here. You write to my sister; there’s her address. You needn’t go up there; your wife’s asleep. I’ll bid her good-bye for you. Take my advice—get out of this county somewhere, and get out of Manchester to-night.”
“I must go upstairs to get some money,” and Zachariah stole into his bedroom to take half a little hoard which was in a desk there. His wife, as Mrs. Carter had said, was asleep. He went to her bedside and looked at her. She was pale and worn. Lying there unconscious, all the defects which had separated him from her vanished. In sleep and death the divine element of which we are compounded reappears, and we cease to hate or criticise; we can only weep or pray. He looked and looked again. The hours of first love and courtship passed before him; he remembered what she was to him then, and he thought that perhaps the fault, after all, might have been on his side, and that he had perhaps not tried to understand her. He thought of her loneliness—taken away by him into a land of strangers—and now he was about to desert her; he thought, too, that she also was one of God’s children just as much as he was; perhaps more so. The tears filled his eyes, although he was a hard, strong man not used to tears, and something rose in his throat and almost choked him. He was about to embrace her; but he dared not disturb her. He knelt down at the foot of the bed, and in an agony besought his God to have mercy on him. “God have mercy on me! God have mercy on her!” That was all he could say—nothing else, although he had been used to praying habitually. His face was upon her feet, as she lay stretched out there, and he softly uncovered one of them, so gently that she could not perceive it. Spotlessly white it was, and once upon a time she was so attractive to him because she was so exquisitely scrupulous! He bent his lips over it, kissed it—she stirred, but did not wake; a great cry almost broke from him, but he stifled it and rose. There was a knock at the door, and he started. It was Mrs. Carter.
“Come,” she said as he went out, “you have been here long enough. Poor dear man!—there, there—of course it’s hard to bear—poor dear man!”—and the good creature put her hand affectionately on his shoulder.