The Revolution in Tanner's Lane Part 16

Zachariah could not restrain himself.

"Good G.o.d!" he cried, "you hear that one of my best friends is about to be hung, and you sit there like a statue--not a single word of sympathy or horror--you care no more than a stone. USE of going! I tell you I will go if I starve, or have to rot in jail all my lifetime. Furthermore, I will go this instant."

He went out of the room in a rage, rammed a few things into a bag, and was out of the house in ten minutes. He was excusably unjust to his wife--excusably, because he could not help thinking that she was hard, and even cruel. Yet really she was not so, or if she was, she was not necessarily so, for injustice, not only to others, but to ourselves, is always begotten by a false relationship. There were mult.i.tudes of men in the world, worse than Zachariah, with whom she would have been, not only happier, but better. He, poor man, with all his virtues, stimulated and developed all that was disagreeable in her.

He was in no mood to rest, and walked on all that night. Amidst all his troubles he could not help being struck with the solemn, silent procession overhead. It was perfectly clear--so clear that the heavens were not a surface, but a depth, and the stars of a lesser magnitude were so numerous and brilliant that they obscured the forms of the greater constellations. Presently the first hint of day appeared in the east. We must remember that this was the year 1817, before, so it is commonly supposed, men knew what it was properly to admire a cloud or a rock. Zachariah was not, therefore, on a level with the most ordinary subscriber to a modern circulating library.

Nevertheless he could not help noticing--we will say he did no more-- the wonderful, the sacredly beautiful, drama which noiselessly displayed itself before him. Over in the east the intense deep blue of the sky softened a little. Then the trees in that quarter began to contrast themselves against the background and reveal their distinguishing shapes. Swiftly, and yet with such even velocity that in no one minute did there seem to be any progress compared with the minute preceding, the darkness was thinned, and resolved itself overhead into pure sapphire, shaded into yellow below and in front of him, while in the west it was still almost black. The gra.s.sy floor of the meadows now showed its colour, grey green, with the dew lying on it, and in the glimmer under the hedge might be discerned a hare or two stirring. Star by star disappeared, until none were left, save Venus, shining like a lamp till the very moment almost when the sun's disc touched the horizon. Half a dozen larks mounted and poured forth that ecstasy which no bird but the lark can translate.

More amazing than the loveliness of scene, sound, and scent around him was the sense of irrestisible movement. He stopped to watch it, for it grew so rapid that he could almost detect definite pulsations.

Throb followed throb every second with increasing force, and in a moment more a burning speck of gold was visible, and behold it was day! He slowly turned his eyes away and walked onwards.

Lancaster was reached on the second evening after he left Liverpool.

He could not travel fast nor long together, for he was not yet completely strong. He secured a bed in a low part of the town, at a public-house, and on the morning of the third day presented himself at the prison door. After some formalities he was admitted, and taken by a warder along a corridor with whitewashed walls to the condemned cell where Caillaud lay. The warder looked through a grating, and said to Zachariah that a visitor was already there. Two were not allowed at a time, but he would tell the prisoner that somebody was waiting for him.

"Let's see, what's your name?" said the warder. Then it suddenly struck him that he had been fool enough, in the excitement of entering the prison, to sign his real name in the book. There was no help for it now, and he repeated that it was Coleman.

"Ah yes, Coleman," echoed the man, in a manner which was significant.

"Who is the other visitor?" said Zachariah.

"It is his daughter."

His first thought was to ask to be let in, but his next was, that it would be profanity to disturb the intercourse of father and child, and he was silent. However, he had been announced, and Caillaud appeared at the grating begging permission for his friend to enter.

It was at first refused; but presently something seemed to strike the jailer, for he relented with a smile.

"You won't want to come again?" he observed interrogatively.

"No; that is to say, I think not."

"No; that is to say, I think not," he repeated slowly, word for word, adding, "I shall have to stay with you while you are together."

Zachariah entered, the warder locking the door behind him, and seating himself on the edge of the bedstead, where he remained during the whole of the interview, jingling his keys and perfectly unmoved.

The three friends spoke not a word for nearly five minutes.

Zachariah was never suddenly equal to any occasion which made any great demands upon him. It often made him miserable that it was so.

Here he was, in the presence of one whom he had so much loved, and who was about to leave him for ever, and he had nothing to say. That could have been endured could he but have FELT and showed his feeling, could he but have cast himself upon his neck and wept over him, but he was numbed and apparently immovable. It was Caillaud who first broke the silence.

"It appears I shall have to console you rather than you me; believe me, I care no more about dying, as mere dying, than I do about walking across this room. There are two things which disturb me--the apprehension of some pain, and bidding good-bye to Pauline and you, and two or three more."

There was, after all, but just a touch needed to break up Zachariah and melt him.

"You are happier than I," he cried. "Your work is at an end. No more care for things done or undone; you are discharged, and n.o.bly discharged, with honour. But as for me!"

"With honour!" and Caillaud smiled. "To be hung like a forger of bank-notes--not even to be shot--and then to be forgotten. Forgotten utterly! This does not happen to be one of those revolutions which men remember."

"No! men will not remember," said Pauline, with an elevation of voice and manner almost oratorical. "Men will not remember, but there is a memory in the world which forgets nothing."

"Do you know," said Caillaud, "I have always loved adventure, and at times I look forward to death with curiosity and interest, just as if I were going to a foreign country."

"Tell me," said Zachariah, "if there is anything I can do."

"Nothing. I would ask you to see that Pauline comes to no harm, but she can take care of herself. I have nothing to give you in parting.

They have taken everything from me."

"What a brute I am! I shall never see you again, and I cannot speak," sobbed Zachariah.

"Speak! What need is there of speaking? What is there which can be said at such a time? To tell you the truth, Coleman, I hardly cared about having you here. I did not want to imperil the calm which is now happily upon me; we all of us have something unaccountable and uncontrollable in us, and I do not know how soon it may wake in me.

But I did wish to see you, in order that your mind might be at peace about me. Come, good-bye!"

Caillaud put his hand on Zachariah's shoulder.

"This will not do," he said. "For my sake forbear. I can face what I have to go through next Monday if am not shaken. Come, Pauline, you too, my child, must leave me for a bit."

Zachariah looked at Pauline, who rose and threw her shawl over her shoulders. Her lips were tightly shut, but she was herself. The warder opened the door. Zachariah took his friend's hand, held it for a moment, and then threw his arms round his neck. There is a pathos in parting which the mere loss through absence does not explain. We all of us feel it, even if there is to be a meeting again in a few months, and we are overcome by incomprehensible emotion when we turn back down the pier, unable any longer to discern the waving of the handkerchief, or when the railway train turns the curve in the cutting and leaves us standing on the platform.

Infinitely pathetic, therefore, is the moment when we separate for ever.

Caillaud was unsettled for an instant, and then, slowly untwining the embrace, he made a sign to Pauline, who took Zachariah's hand and led him outside; the heavy well-oiled bolt of the lock shooting back under the key with a smooth strong thud between them. She walked down the corridor alone, not noticing that he had not followed her, and had just pa.s.sed out of sight when an officer stepped up to him and said:

"Your name is Coleman?"

"Yes."

"Sorry to hear it. My name is Nadin. You know me, I think. You must consider yourself my prisoner."

Zachariah was in prison for two years. He had not been there three months when his wife died.

Let us now look forward to 1821; let us walk down one of the new streets just beginning to stretch northwards from Pentonville; let us stop opposite a little house, with a little palisade in front, enclosing a little garden five and twenty feet long and fifteen feet broad; let us peep through the c.h.i.n.k between the blind and the window. We see Zachariah and Pauline. Another year pa.s.ses; we peep through the same c.h.i.n.k again. A cradle is there, in which lies Marie Pauline Coleman; but where is the mother? She is not there, and the father alone sits watching the child.

CHAPTER XVI--COWFOLD

Cowfold, half village, half town, lies about three miles to the west of the great North Road from London to York. As you go from London, about fifty miles from the Post-Office in St. Martin's le Grand--the fiftieth milestone is just beyond the turning--you will see a hand- post with three arms on it; on one is written in large letters, "To LONDON;" on the second, in equally large letters, "To YORK;" and on the third, in small italic letters, "To Cowfold." Two or three years before the events narrated in the following chapters took place--that is to say, about twenty years after the death of Zachariah's second wife--a hundred coaches a day rolled past that hand-post, and about two miles beyond it was a huge inn, with stables like cavalry barracks, where horses were changed. No coach went through Cowfold.

When the inhabitants wished to go northwards or southwards they walked or drove to the junction, and waited on the little gra.s.sy triangle till a coach came by which had room for them. When they returned they were deposited at the same spot, and the pa.s.sengers who were going through from London to York or Scotland, or who were coming up to London, always seemed to despise people who were taken up or who were left by the roadside there.

There was, perhaps, some reason for this contempt. The North Road was at that time one of the finest roads in the world, broad, hard- metalled, and sound in the wettest weather. That which led to Cowfold was under the control of the parish, and in winter-time was very bad indeed. When you looked down it it seemed as if it led nowhere, and indeed the inhabitants of the town were completely shut off from any close communication with the outer world. How strange it was to emerge from the end of the lane and to see those wonderful words, "To LONDON," "To YORK!" What an opening into infinity! Boys of a slightly imaginative turn of mind--for there were boys with imagination even in Cowfold--would, on a holiday trudge the three miles eastward merely to get to the post and enjoy the romance of those mysterious fingers. No wonder; for the excitement begotten by the long stretch of the road--London at one end, York at the other-- by the sight of the Star, Rover, Eclipse, or Times racing along at twelve miles an hour, and by the inscriptions on them, was worth a whole afternoon's cricket or wandering in the fields. Cowfold itself supplied no such stimulus. The only thing like it was the mail-cart, which every evening took the letters from the post-office, disappeared into the dark, n.o.body could tell whither, and brought letters in the morning, n.o.body could tell whence, before the inhabitants were out of bed. There was a vague belief that it went about fifteen miles and "caught" something somewhere; but n.o.body knew for certain, except the postmistress and the mail-cart driver, who were always remarkably reticent on the point. The driver was dressed in red, carried a long horn slung at the side of the cart, and was popularly believed also to have pistols with him. He never accosted anybody; sat on a solitary perch just big enough for him; swayed always backwards and forwards a little in a melancholy fashion as he rode; was never seen during the day-time, and was not, in any proper sense, a Cowfold person.

Cowfold had four streets, or, more correctly, only two, which crossed one another at right angles in the middle of the town, and formed there a kind of square or open place, in which, on Sat.u.r.days, a market was held.

The "Angel" was in this square, and the shops grouped themselves round it. In the centre was a large pump with a great leaden spout that had a hole bored in it at the side. By stopping up the mouth of the spout with the hand it was possible through this hole to get a good drink, if a friend was willing to work the handle; and as the square was a public playground, the pump did good service, especially amongst the boys, all of whom preferred it greatly to a commonplace mug. On Sundays it was invariably chained up; for although it was no breach of the Sabbath to use the pump in the backyard, the line was drawn there, and it would have been voted by nine-tenths of Cowfold as decidedly immoral to get water from the one outside. The shops were a draper's, a grocer's, an ironmonger's, a butcher's and a baker's. All these were regular shops, with shop-windows, and were within sight of one another.

There were also other houses where things were sold; but these were mere dwelling-houses, and were at the poorer and more remote ends of Cowfold. None of the regular shops aforesaid were strictly what they professed to be. Each of them diverged towards "the general." The draper sold boots and shoes; the grocer sold drugs, stationery, horse and cow medicines, and sheep ointment; and the ironmonger dealt in crockery. Even the butcher was more than a butcher, for he was never to be seen at his chopping block, and his wife did all the retail work. He himself was in the "jobbing" line, and was always jogging about in a cart, in the hind part of which, covered with a net, was a calf or a couple of pigs. Three out of the four streets ran out in cottages; but one was more aristocratic. This was Church Street, which contained the church and the parsonage. It also had in it four red brick houses, each surrounded with large gardens. In one lived a brewer who had a brewery in Cowfold, and owned a dozen beer-shops in the neighbourhood; another was a seminary for young ladies; in the third lived the doctor; and in the fourth old Mr. and Mrs. Muston, who had no children, had been there for fifty years; and this, so far as Cowfold was aware, was all their history. Mr. and Mrs. Muston and the seminary were the main strength of the church. To be sure the doctor and the landlord of the "Angel" professed devotion to the Establishment, but they were never inside the church, except just now and then, and were charitably excused because of their peculiar calling. The rest of Cowfold was Dissenting or "went nowhere."

There were three chapels; one the chapel, orthodox, Independent, holding about seven hundred persons, and more particularly to be described presently; the second Wesleyan, new, stuccoed, with grained doors and cast-iron railing; the third, strict Baptist, ultra- Calvinistic, Antinomian according to the other sects, dark, down an alley, mean, surrounded by a small long-gra.s.sed graveyard, and named ZOAR in large letters over the long window in front. The "went nowhere" cla.s.s was apparently not very considerable. On Sunday morning at twelve o'clock Cowfold looked as if it had been swept clean. It was only by comparison between the total number of church- goers and chapel-goers and the total population that it could be believed that there was anybody absent from the means of grace; but if a view could have been taken of the back premises an explanation would have been discovered. Men and women "did up their gardens," or found, for a variety of reasons, that they were forced to stay at home. In the evening they grew bolder, and strolled through the meadows. It is, however, only fair to respectable Cowfold to say that it knew nothing of these creatures, except by employing them on week-days.

With regard to the Wesleyan Chapel, nothing much need be said. Its creed was imported, and it had no roots in the town. The Church disliked it because it was Dissenting, and the Dissenters disliked it because it was half-Church, and, above all, Tory. It was supported mainly by the brewer, who was drawn thither for many reasons, one of which was political. Another was, that he was not in trade, and although he objected to be confounded with his neighbours who stood behind counters, the Church did not altogether suit him, because there Mr. and Mrs. Muston and the seminary stood in his way. Lastly, as he owned beer-shops, supplied liquor which was a proverb throughout the county, and did a somewhat doubtful business according to the more pious of the Cowfold Christians, he preferred to be accredited as a religious person by Methodism than by any other sect, the stamp of Methodism standing out in somewhat higher relief.