and limit it at once to the finite, and within that limit we can be entirely satisfied. But the absolute concord of perfectly wrought instruments, and the perfect beauty of the compositions they utter, rouse in us a burning sense of the infinite which cannot be assuaged.”
“I agree with you,” I said.
I thought she sighed. We were silent. The ghost of the evening in the Rue du Puits rose between us. As I stood so near her, I could observe that tremulous movement in the throat which is the sure sign of suppressed emotion among women. The face remains calm, the eyes cold, the mouth even is still, but they cannot silence this treacherous pulse.
At this moment some one passed me, and whispered in a mocking, stage whisper:
“Remember No. 9, Rue du Puits.”
I turned and saw the laughing face of Auguste. She heard him also. She looked at him, and then full in my face. It flashed upon me that she thought I had betrayed her secret to this worldly trifler. What steadfast questioning in her eyes! No reproach, but a kind of mournful wonder, a sense of undeserved wrong, a perception of unexpected baseness. My eyes fell. But the fiend within me had been roused, and was not to be thus appeased.
“By-the-bye,” I said, “will you allow me to assume the privileges of a native, counselling a stranger upon the usages of his country? I have lived in Paris so long that I know it well. You should not enter the street in which I met you some nights ago.” (She started.) “There are all kinds of dangers in it. No one should enforce such an obligation upon you.”
She turned white to the lips, but I went on.
“There are all kinds of dangers”
“For me there are no dangers.”
“Dangers to the purse, the life”
“Go on.”
“The reputation of those seen in it. But I suppose you are unacquainted with its character, and passed through it accidentally?”
I became confused. My impertinence, excited by a kind of blind revenge for the pain I had suffered and was suffering, was not natural to me, and I used the weapon awkwardly, and possibly gave more pain than even in that moment of resentment I intended.
“You are mistaken,” she said quietly, and rose from her seat. “I know the street well: I go there constantly: I go to-night again.” And with superb disdain she bowed and left me.
Again was I foiled. What a fool I had been! And how each blow I aimed at her recoiled upon myself. The ground seemed to become suddenly hot beneath my feet, and I too left the room.
JOIN HANDS—LEAVE NOBODY OUT.
No nation can, at any time, be secure from that cold qualm of social fear which is one of the most peculiar of human sensations. We English know nothing, personally, of the terror of looking and listening for an invading army, actually marching on our soil. We know only the milder forms of national fear; but their effect, once felt, is never effaced. The sensation, on being overtaken by the crash of 1825-6, by the Cholera of 1832 and 1849, by the Potato-rot of 1846, and the financial panics of 1847 and 1857, is as distinct in each case as the cases themselves; and yet the experience is unlike that of any other kind of dread. The same peculiar qualm has been sickening our hearts now, for some time past. If any hearts are not yet sick at the doom of Lancashire and Cheshire, they have to become so; and it certainly seems to me that those are happiest who were the earliest to perceive the truth. Ours is a country blessed beyond every other, in regard to the blessings which we prize most. It is impossible to overrate the privilege of living in England: but even here we are not safe from national afflictions, taking the form of rebuke for our follies and sins. We have the sensation now of being under rebuke, and of having to suffer for some time to come, after many years of welfare which seemed to have grown into a confirmed habit of prosperity. The sensation is very painful. It is not to be shirked on that account, but rather treated with reverence, that it may impress upon us what it is that we ought to do.
The worst part of the whole misfortune is that the greatest sufferers are those who are in no way to blame for the calamity. We who are outside of the manufacturing interest may fine ourselves, punish ourselves, fatigue ourselves to any extent; but we cannot suffer anything like the anguish of the operatives in their decline into destitution. Those of us who have known them see but too well what that anguish must be. That class of operatives are a proud people, hitherto filled with comfort and complacency, and holding a social rank which appeared high to them, however little might be known in aristocratic regions of the depth of gradation between the cotton-spinner and the town Arab or Union pauper. The mill-people have been opulent in their own rank in life. They could lay by considerable amounts of money; and many of them did. Of those who did not, and perhaps of some who did, it was understood that they were better customers to tradesmen than the gentry. The earliest and chiefest delicacies in the market were bought up by the operatives; the gayest silks and shawls, and head-trimmings, were worn by the factory-women; the most expensive picnics in the country were those organised by the operatives. Better than this, they have been buyers of books, students of music and drawing, supporters of institutes, and not a few of them members of co-operative societies which have won the respect of thousands of persons prejudiced against the very name. These are the people who are now, all at once and all together, deprived of employment and of income. By a stroke which they could not avert they are now reduced to absolute want. Instead of their dainty dinners and suppers, they have actually not enough of dry bread. Their expensive clothes are all gone, and they can hardly dress themselves so as to appear outside their own doors. Their furniture is gone, and they are sleeping on the bare floor. Their books are gone, with the names of each of the family in some or other of them: the treasure of
