“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 to-morrow 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 to-morrow.”
“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.