It was the first time George had ever heard anything from any public speaker which came home to him, and he wondered if Mr. Bradshaw knew his history. He interpreted the discourse after his own way, and Priscilla was ever before him.
They came back to the little house, and sat down to dinner in the little front room. There were portraits on the walls—nothing else but portraits—and the collection at first sight was inconsistent. Major Cartwright was still there; there were also Byron, Bunyan, Scott, Paine, Burns, Mr. Bradshaw, and Rousseau. It was closely expressive of its owners. Zachariah and Pauline were private persons; they were, happily for them, committed to nothing, and were not subsidised by their reputations to defend a system. They were consequently free to think at large, and if they admired both Bunyan and Rousseau, they were at liberty to do so. Zachariah, in a measure, and a very large measure, had remained faithful to his earliest beliefs—who is there that does not?—and although they had been modified, they were still there; and he listened to Mr. Bradshaw with the faith of thirty years ago. He also believed in a good many things he had learned without him, and perhaps the old and the new were not so discordant as at first sight they might have seemed to be. He was not, in fact, despite all his love of logic, the “yes or no” from which most people cannot escape, but a “yes and no”; not immorally and through lack of resolution, but by reason of an original receptivity and the circumstances of his training. If he had been merely a student the case would have been different but he was not a student. He was a journeyman printer; and hard work has a tendency to demolish the distinctions of dialectics. He had also been to school outside his shop, and had learned many lessons, often confusing and apparently contradictory. Blanketeer marches; his first wife; the workhouse imprisonment; his second wife; the little Pauline had each come to him with its own special message, and the net result was a character, but a character disappointing to persons who prefer men and women of linear magnitude to those of three dimensions.
After dinner the conversation turned upon politics and Mr. Allen described his interview with Mr. Broad, regretting that the movement in the district round Cowfold would receive no countenance from the minister of the very sect which ought to be its chief support.
“A sad falling off,” said Zachariah, “from the days, even in my time, when the Dissenters were the insurrectionary class. Mr. Bradshaw, last Sunday, after his sermon, shut his Bible, and told the people that he did not now interfere much in political matters; but he felt he should not be doing his duty if he did not tell those whom he taught which way they ought to vote, and that what he had preached to them for so many years would be poor stuff if it did not compel them into a protest against taxing the poor for the sake of the rich.”
“Yes,” replied Mr. Allen; “but then Broad never has taught what Bradshaw teaches; he never seems to me to see anything clearly; at least he never makes me see anything clearly; the whole world is in a fog to him.”
“From what I have heard of Mr. Broad,” said Pauline, “I should think the explanation of him is very simple; he is a hypocrite—an ordinary hypocrite. What is the use of going out of the way to seek for explanations of such commonplace persons?”
“Pauline,
