“Oh, as for that,” said George, “Miss Coleman needn’t mind me. I haven’t married Mr. Broad, and my father is quite right. For that matter, I believe Miss Coleman is right too.”
“Well,” said Mr. Allen, “it is rather strong to say a man is an ordinary hypocrite, and it is not easy to prove it.”
“Not easy to prove it,” said Pauline, shifting a little her chair and looking straight at Mr. Allen, with great earnestness; “hypocrisy is the one thing easiest to prove. I can tell whether a man is a hypocrite before I know anything else about him. I may not for a long time be able to say what else he may be, but before he speaks, almost, I can detect whether he is sincere.”
“You women,” said Zachariah, with a smile, “or you girls rather, are so positive. Just as though the world were divided like the goats and the sheep in the gospel. That is a passage that I never could quite understand. I never, hardly, see a pure breed either of goat or sheep. I never see anybody who deserves to go straight to heaven or who deserves to go straight to hell. When the judgment day comes it will be a difficult task. Why, Pauline, my dear, I am a humbug myself.”
“Ah well, I have heard all that before; but, nevertheless, what I say is true. Some men, using speech as God meant men to use it, are liars, and some are not. Of course not entirely so, nor at all times. We cannot speak mere truth; we are not made to speak it. For all that you are not a liar.”
“Anyhow, I shall go on,” said Mr. Allen. “We shall have a desperate fight, and shall most likely lose; but no Tory shall sit for our county if I can help it.”
“Of course you will go on,” said Zachariah. “So shall I go on. We are to have a meeting in Clerkenwell tomorrow night, although, to tell you the truth, I don’t feel exactly the interest in the struggle which I did in those of five-and-twenty years ago, when we had to whisper our treasons to one another in locked rooms and put sentries at the doors. You know nothing about those times, George.”
“I wish I had,” said George, with an unusual passion, which surprised his father and caused Pauline to lift her eyes from the table and look at him. “I only wish I had. I can’t speak as father can, and I often say to myself I should like to take myself off to some foreign country where men get shot for what they call conspiracy. If I knew such a country I half believe I would go tomorrow.”
“Which means,” said Pauline, “that there would be an end of you and your services. If you care anything for a cause, you can do something better than get shot for it; and if you want martyrdom, there is a nobler martyrdom than death. The Christians who were trundled in barrels with spikes in them deserve higher honour than those who died in a moment, before they could recant. The highest form of martyrdom, though, is not even living for the sake of a cause, but living without one, merely because it is your duty to live. If you are called upon to testify to a great truth, it is easy to sing in flames. Yes, yes, Mr. George, the saints whom I would canonise are not martyrs for a cause, but those who have none.”
George thought that what Pauline said—just as he had thought of Mr. Bradshaw’s sermon—seemed to be said for him; and yet what did she know about him? Nothing. He was silent. All were silent, for it is difficult to follow anybody who pitches the conversation at so high a level; and Zachariah, who alone could have maintained it, was dreaming over his lost Pauline and gazing on the sacred pictures which were hung in the chamber of his heart. Just at that moment he was looking at the one of his wife as a girl; the room in which he was sitting had gone; he was in the court near Fleet Street; she had cleared the space for the dance; she had begun, and he was watching her with all the passion of his youth. The conversation gradually turned to something more indifferent, and the company broke up.
On the Monday George and his father went home. It is very depressing, after being with people who have been at their best, and with whom we have been at our best, to descend upon ordinary existence. George felt it particularly as he stood in the shop on Tuesday morning and reflected that for the whole of that day—for his father was out—he should probably not say nor hear a word for which he cared a single straw. But there was to be an election meeting that evening, and Mr. Allen was to speak, and George, of course, must be there. The evening came, and the room at the Mechanics’ Institute, which had just been established in Cowfold, was crowded. Admission was not by ticket, so that, though the Whigs had convened it, there was a strong muster of the enemy. Mr. Allen moved the first resolution in a stirring speech, which was constitutionally interrupted with appeals to him to go home and questions about a grey mare—“How about old Pinfold’s grey mare?”—which seemed conclusive and humorous to the last degree. Old Pinfold was a well-known character in Cowfold, horse-dealer, pig-jobber, attendant at races, with no definite occupation, and the grey mare was an animal which he managed to impose upon Mr. Allen, who sued him and lost. When Mr. Allen’s resolution had been duly seconded, one Rogers, a publican, got up and said he had something to say. There was indescribable confusion, some crying, “Turn him out;” others “Pitch
