In Kedars Tents | Page 2

a hundred
others held in England at the same time. It was illegal, and yet the
authorities dared not to pronounce it so. It might prove dangerous to
those taking part in it. Lawyers said that the leaders laid themselves
open to the charge of high treason. In this assembly as in others there
were wirepullers--men playing their own game, and from the safety of
the rear pushing on those in front. With one of these we have to do.
With his mistake Fate raised the curtain, and on the horizon of several
lives arose a cloud no bigger than a man's hand.
Geoffrey Horner lived before his time, insomuch as he was a
gentleman-Radical. He was clever, and the world heeded not. He was
brilliant, well educated, capable of great achievements, and the world
refused to be astonished. Here were the makings of a malcontent. A
well-born Radical is one whom the world has refused to accept at his
own valuation. A wise man is ready to strike a bargain with Fate. The
wisest are those who ask much and then take half. It is the coward who
asks too little, and the fool who imagines that he will receive without
demanding.
Horner had thrown in his lot with the Chartists in that spirit of pique
which makes a man marry the wrong woman because the right one will
have none of him. At the Chester-le-Street meeting he had declared
himself an upholder of moral persuasion, while in his heart he pandered
to those who knew only of physical force and placed their reliance
thereon. He had come from Durham with a contingent of malcontents,
and was now returning thither on foot in company with the local
leaders. These were intelligent mechanics seeking clumsily and blindly
enough what they knew to be the good of their fellows. At their heels

tramped the rank and file of the great movement. The assembly was a
subtle foreshadowing of things to come--of Newport and the march of
twenty thousand men, of violence and bloodshed, of strife between
brethren, and of justice nonplussed and hesitating.
The toil-worn miners were mostly silent, their dimly enlightened
intellects uneasily stirred by the words they had lately heard-- their
stubborn hearts full of a great hope with a minute misgiving at the back
of it. With this dangerous material Geoffrey Horner proposed to play
his game.
Suddenly a voice was raised.
'Mates,' it cried, at the cross-roads, 'let's go and smash Pleydell's
windows!'
And a muttered acquiescence to the proposal swept through the moving
mass like a sullen breeze through reeds.
The desire for action rustled among these men of few words and
mighty arms.
Horner hurriedly consulted his colleagues. Was it wise to attempt to
exert an authority which was merely nominal? The principles of
Chartism were at this time to keep within the limits of the law, and yet
to hint, when such a course was safe, that stronger measures lay behind
mere words. Their fatal habit was to strike softly.
In peace and war, at home and abroad, there is but one humane and safe
rule: Hesitate to strike--strike hard.
Sir John Pleydell was a member of that Parliament which had treated
the Charter with contempt. He was one of those who had voted with the
majority against the measures it embodied.
In addition to these damnatory facts, he was a local Tory of some
renown--an ambitious man, the neighbours said, who wished to leave
his son a peerage.

To the minds of the rabble this magnate represented the tyranny against
which their protest was raised. Geoffrey Horner looked on him as a
political opponent and a dangerous member of the winning party. The
blow was easy to strike. Horner hesitated--at the cross roads of other
lives than his own--and held his tongue.
The suggestion of the unknown humorist in the crowd commended
itself to the more energetic of the party, who immediately turned
towards the by-road leading to Dene Hall. The others--the minority--
followed as minorities do, because they distrusted themselves. Some
one struck up a song with words lately published in the 'Northern
Liberator' and set to a well-known local air.
The shooting party assembled at Dene Hall was still at the dinner table
when the malcontents entered the park, and the talk of coverts and guns
ceased suddenly at the sound of their rough voices. Sir John Pleydell,
an alert man still, despite his grey hair and drawn, careworn face,
looked up sharply. He had been sitting silently fingering the stem of his
wineglass--a habit of his when the ladies quitted the room--and,
although he had shot as well as, perhaps better than, any present, had
taken but little part in the conversation. He had, in fact, only half
listened, and when a