Sybil, or the Two Nations Part 21

"Yes; that is the reason why Stephen quits us. He only remained here until Sybil could keep my house, and that happy day is at hand."

"That is a great compensation for the loss of your friend," said Egremont.

"And yet she talks of flitting," said Gerard, in a rather melancholy tone. "She hankers after the cloister. She has pa.s.sed a still, sweet life in the convent here; the Superior is the sister of my employer and a very saint on earth; and Sybil knows nothing of the real world except its sufferings. No matter," he added more cheerfully; "I would not have her take the veil rashly, but if I lose her it may be for the best. For the married life of a woman of our cla.s.s in the present condition of our country is a lease of woe," he added shaking his head, "slaves, and the slaves of slaves? Even woman's spirit cannot stand against it; and it can bear against more than we can, master."

"Your daughter is not made for the common cares of life," said Egremont.

"We'll not talk of them," said Gerard. "Sybil has an English heart, and that's not easily broken. And you, comrade, you are a traveller in these parts, eh?"

"A kind of traveller; something in the way of your friend Morley--connected with the press."

"Indeed! a reporter, eh? I thought you had something about you a little more knowing than we provincials."

"Yes; a reporter; they want information in London as to the real state of the country, and this time of the year, Parliament not sitting--Ah; I understand, a flying commission and a summer tour. Well, I often wish I were a penman; but I never could do it. I'll read any day as long as you like, but that writing, I could never manage. My friend Morley is a powerful hand at it. His journal circulates a good deal about here; and if as I often tell him he would only sink his high-flying philosophy and stick to old English politics, he might make a property of it. You'll like to know him?"

"Much."

"And what first took you to the press, if I may ask!"

"Why--my father was a gentleman--", said Egremont in a hesitating tone, "and I was a younger son."

"Ah!" said Gerard, "that is as bad as being a woman."

"I had no patrimony," continued Egremont, "and I was obliged to work; I had no head I believe for the law; the church was not exactly in my way; and as for the army, how was I to advance without money or connexions! I had had some education, and so I thought I would turn it to account."

"Wisely done! you are one of the working cla.s.ses, and will enlist I hope in the great struggle against the drones. The natural friends of the people are younger sons, though they are generally enlisted against us.

The more fools they; to devote their energies to the maintenance of a system which is founded on selfishness and which leads to fraud; and of which they are the first victims. But every man thinks he will be an exception."

"And yet," said Egremont, "a great family rooted in the land, has been deemed to be an element of political strength."

"I'll tell you what," said Gerard, "there is a great family in this country and rooted in it, of which we have heard much less than they deserved, but of which I suspect we shall hear very soon enough to make us all think a bit."

"In this county?"

"Ay; in this county and every other one; I mean the PEOPLE."

"Ah!" said Egremont, "that family has existed for a long time."

"But it has taken to increase rapidly of late, my friend--how may I call you?"

"They call me, Franklin."

"A good English name of a good English cla.s.s that has disappeared.

Well, Mr Franklin, be sure of this, that the Population Returns of this country are very instructive reading."

"I can conceive so."

"I became a man when the bad times were beginning," said Gerard; "I have pa.s.sed through many doleful years. I was a Franklin's son myself, and we had lived on this island at least no worse for a longer time than I care to recollect as little as what I am now. But that's nothing; I am not thinking of myself. I am prosperous in a fashion; it is the serfs I live among of whom I am thinking. Well, I have heard, in the course of years, of some specifics for this constant degradation of the people; some thing or some person that was to put all right; and for my part, I was not unready to support any proposal or follow any leader. There was reform, and there was paper money, and no machinery, and a thousand other remedies; and there were demagogues of all kinds, some as had as myself, and some with blood in their veins almost as costly as flows in those of our great neighbour here. Earl de Mowbray, and I have always heard that was very choice: but I will frankly own to you, I never had much faith in any of these proposals or proposers; but they were a change, and that is something. But I have been persuaded of late that there is something going on in this country of more efficacy; a remedial power, as I believe, and irresistible; but whether remedial or not, at any rate a power that will mar all or cure all. You apprehend me?

I speak of the annual arrival of more than three hundred thousand strangers in this island. How will you feed them? How will you clothe them? How will you house them? They have given up butcher's meat; must they give up bread? And as for raiment and shelter, the rags of the kingdom are exhausted and your sinks and cellars already swarm like rabbit warrens.

"'Tis an awful consideration," said Egremont musing.

"Awful," said Gerard; "'tis the most solemn thing since the deluge.

What kingdom can stand against it? Why go to your history--you're a scholar,--and see the fall of the great Roman empire--what was that?

Every now and then, there came two or three hundred thousand strangers out of the forests and crossed the mountains and rivers. They come to us every year and in greater numbers. What are your invasions of the barbarous nations, your Goths and Visigoths, your Lombards and Huns, to our Population Returns!"

END OF THE SECOND BOOK

BOOK III

Book 3 Chapter 1

The last rays of the sun, contending with clouds of smoke that drifted across the country, partially illumined a peculiar landscape. Far as the eye could reach, and the region was level, except where a range of limestone hills formed its distant limit, a wilderness of cottages or tenements that were hardly ent.i.tled to a higher name, were scattered for many miles over the land; some detached, some connected in little rows, some cl.u.s.tering in groups, yet rarely forming continuous streets, but interspersed with blazing furnaces, heaps of burning coal, and piles of smouldering ironstone; while forges and engine chimneys roared and puffed in all directions, and indicated the frequent presence of the mouth of the mine and the bank of the coal-pit. Notwithstanding the whole country might be compared to a vast rabbit warren, it was nevertheless intersected with ca.n.a.ls crossing each other at various levels, and though the subterranean operations were prosecuted with so much avidity that it was not uncommon to observe whole rows of houses awry, from the shifting and hollow nature of the land, still, intermingled with heaps of mineral refuse or of metallic dross, patches of the surface might here and there be recognised, covered, as if in mockery, with gra.s.s and corn, looking very much like those gentlemen's sons that we used to read of in our youth, stolen by the chimneysweeps and giving some intimations of their breeding beneath their grimy livery. But a tree or a shrub--such an existence was unknown in this dingy rather than dreary region.

It was the twilight hour; the hour at which in southern climes the peasant kneels before the sunset image of the blessed Hebrew maiden; when caravans halt in their long course over vast deserts, and the turbaned traveller bending in the sand, pays his homage to the sacred stone and the sacred city; the hour, not less holy, that announces the cessation of English toil, and sends forth the miner and the collier to breathe the air of earth, and gaze on the light of heaven.

They come forth: the mine delivers its gang and the pit its bondsmen; the forge is silent and the engine is still. The plain is covered with the swarming mult.i.tude: bands of stalwart men, broad-chested and muscular, wet with toil, and black as the children of the tropics; troops of youth--alas! of both s.e.xes,--though neither their raiment nor their language indicates the difference; all are clad in male attire; and oaths that men might shudder at, issue from lips born to breathe words of sweetness. Yet these are to be--some are--the mothers of England! But can we wonder at the hideous coa.r.s.eness of their language when we remember the savage rudeness of their lives? Naked to the waist, an iron chain fastened to a belt of leather runs between their legs clad in canvas trousers, while on hands and feet an English girl, for twelve, sometimes for sixteen hours a-day, hauls and hurries tubs of coals up subterranean roads, dark, precipitous, and plashy: circ.u.mstances that seem to have escaped the notice of the Society for the Abolition of Negro Slavery. Those worthy gentlemen too appear to have been singularly unconscious of the sufferings of the little Trappers, which was remarkable, as many of them were in their own employ.

See too these emerge from the bowels of the earth! Infants of four and five years of age, many of them girls, pretty and still soft and timid; entrusted with the fulfilment of most responsible duties, and the nature of which entails on them the necessity of being the earliest to enter the mine and the latest to leave it. Their labour indeed is not severe, for that would be impossible, but it is pa.s.sed in darkness and in solitude. They endure that punishment which philosophical philanthropy has invented for the direst criminals, and which those criminals deem more terrible than the death for which it is subst.i.tuted. Hour after hour elapses, and all that reminds the infant Trappers of the world they have quitted and that which they have joined, is the pa.s.sage of the coal-waggons for which they open the air-doors of the galleries, and on keeping which doors constantly closed, except at this moment of pa.s.sage, the safety of the mine and the lives of the persons employed in it entirely depend.

Sir Joshua, a man of genius and a courtly artist, struck by the seraphic countenance of Lady Alice Gordon, when a child of very tender years, painted the celestial visage in various att.i.tudes on the same canva.s.s, and styled the group of heavenly faces--guardian angels!

We would say to some great master of the pencil, Mr Landseer or Mr Etty, go thou to the little trappers and do likewise!

A small party of miners approached a house of more pretension than the generality of the dwellings, and announcing its character by a very flagrant sign of the Rising Sun. They entered it as men accustomed, and were greeted with smiles and many civil words from the lady at the bar, who inquired very cheerfully what the gentlemen would have. They soon found themselves seated in the tap, and, though it was not entirely unoccupied, in their accustomed places, for there seemed a general understanding that they enjoyed a prescriptive right.

With hunches of white bread in their black hands, and grinning with their sable countenances and ivory teeth, they really looked like a gang of negroes at a revel.

The cups of ale circulated, the pipes were lighted, the preliminary puffs achieved. There was at length silence, when he who seemed their leader and who filled a sort of president's seat, took his pipe from his mouth, and then uttering the first complete sentence that had yet been expressed aloud, thus delivered himself.

"The fact is we are tommied to death."

"You never spoke a truer word, Master Nixon," said one of his companions.

"It's gospel, every word of it," said another.

"And the point is," continued Master Nixon, "what are we for to do?"