Tears that have wet the floor of solitary dungeons, still more bitter but for the consciousness of the deathless sympathy of one faithful bosom somewhere; crimes, arrested by the persuasive voice of woman; wrongs, goaded to madness but for her soothing whispers; poverty, pitiless and intolerable, but for her acts and her patient labours; darkness, unpierced, but by the light of one heaven-kindled smile; hopes, kept alive only by the eloquence of feminine truth; strength, born of the weakness of never-vanquished faith; despair, scattered by the words of one God-inspired bosom, stand forth and testify to the unproclaimed achievements of the mother-half of mankind! Great Mother! not only of men and women, but of the energies, hopes, virtues and triumphs that bloom out of them and their generations, stand forth! Be the herald of that immortal recognition of this great truth, which shall have its fullest acknowledgement in that region of perfect recompense, where sits our Divine Master on the crystalline throne of immaculate justice, and says to every advancing hero and heroine who has—
Done good by stealth and blushed to find it fame—
“For as much as thou hast done it to the very least of these little ones, thou hast done it unto Me. Enter into the joy of thy Lord!”
CHAPTER IX.
THE LONG LINE AND THIS BOOK END.
The time was at hand which should bring the antagonism of Sir Roger Rockville to our friends in this history to an end. The severity which he had for so many years exercised towards all sorts of offenders, independent of his unconquerable repugnance to all the views and principles of advancing society, had made him the object of deepest vengeance. Eyes watched for him, ears listened for him, dark hearts burned in murderous breasts in lonely places, to discharge upon his head the collected fury of a thousand injuries. In a lonely hollow of his woods, watching at midnight with two of his men, there came a sturdy knot of poachers. An affray ensued. The men perceived that their old enemy, Sir Roger, was there, and the blow of a hedge-stake stretched him on the earth. His keepers fled. And thus ignominiously terminated the long line of the Rockvilles. The actual nature of the catastrophe was concealed at the time from the public, and the conservative newspaper of Castleborough announced that Sir Roger had died suddenly in his bed. It was true that he died in his bed, but it was from the lingering effects of the injury received in the wood. Sir Roger was the last of his line, but not of his class. There is a feudal art of sinking, which requires no study, and the Rockvilles are but one family amongst thousands who have perished in its practice.
Scarcely had Sir Roger breathed his last, when his title and estate fell into litigation. Owing to two generations having passed with no other issue of the Rockville family than a single son and heir, the claims, though numerous, were so mingled with obscuring circumstances, and so equally balanced, that the lawyers raised quibbles and difficulties enough to keep it in chancery till they had not only consumed all the ready money and rental, but had made frightful inroads into the estate itself. To save the remnant, the contending parties came to a compromise. A neighbouring squire, whose grandfather had married a Rockville, was allowed to secure the title, on the condition that the residuum of the estate should be divided amongst the whole of the claimants. The woods and lands of Rockville were accordingly announced for sale.
It was at this juncture that old William Watson reminded Simon Degge of a conversation in the great grove at Rockville which they had held at the time that Sir Roger was endeavouring to drive the people thence.
“What a divine pleasure,” said Mr. Degge, “might this man enjoy if he had a heart capable of letting others enjoy themselves. If he could but see that the laws of property should be maintained in consistency with the laws of God: that He has given the rentals of the earth to individuals, but that He has never repealed his great law which gives the whole earth to the undivided race of man: that the rentals may be enjoyed by the individual possessors without infringement of the general enjoyment of the pleasures of nature by society at large. These different kinds of possession may surely co-exist without one interfering with the other.”
“But we talk without the estate,” William Watson had said; “what might we do if we were tried with it?”