Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/109

 Shilling now than ever he did in his time. Eh? Talking Greek to you, am I, or worse than Greek, for that you'd understand, I dare say, and you'll never understand my old mutterings and croakings. You can read Greek?"

"Yes," Joyce said; "I am reckoned a tolerable Grecian."

"Indeed!" said the old man, with a grin; "ah! no doubt you were an honour to your college!"

"Unfortunately," said Walter, "I have never been to college."

"Then your state is the more gracious! By George! I thought I'd picked up with a sucking don, all trencher cap, and second aorist, and Conservative principles, Church and State, a big Bible with a sceptre stretched across it, and a fear of the 'Swart mechanics' bloody thumbs' printed off on my lord's furniture, as provided by Messrs. Jackson and Graham! You don't follow me, young fellow? Like enough, like enough. I think myself I'm a little enigmatical when I get on my hobby, and it requires a good steady stare of honest wonderment, such as I see on your face now, to bring me up short. I'm brought up short now, and can attend to more sublunary matters, such as yours. Tell me about yourself."

"What shall I tell you?" asked Joyce. "I can tell nothing beyond what you already know, or can guess. I'm without friends, without work, I've lost hope"

"No, no, my boy! not lost, only mislaid it. We never lose hope so long as we're good for anything! Sometimes, when I've been most depressed and down, about the only thing in life that has any interest for me now—and you've no idea what that is, have you, Joyce, eh?"

"No, indeed; unless, perhaps, your children!"

"Children! Thank God I never had a wife or a child to give me a care! No; the People's cause, my boy, the people's cause! That's what I live for; and sometimes, as I've been saying, I've been downhearted about that. I've seen the blood beating us down on the one side, and the money beating us down on the other, and I've thought that it was useless kicking against the pricks, and that we had better cave in and give up!"

"But you say you never lost hope?"

"Never, entirely! When I've been at my lowest ebb, when I've come home here with the blood in my veins tingling from aristocratic insult, and with worse than that, contempt for my own fellow working men surging up in my heart, I've looked up at that case there over the mantelshelf, and my pluck's revived! That's a fine bit of work that is, done by an old pupil of mine, who worked his soul out in the People's cause in '48, and died in a deep decline soon after. But what a fancy the lad had! Look at that heron! Is not it for all the world like one of your long, limp, yaw-yaw, nothing-knowing, nothing-doing young swells? Don't you read 'used-up' in his delicate plumage, drooping wings, lack-lustre eye? And remark how the jolly little hawk has got him! No breed about him, keen of sight, swift of wing, active with beak and talon—that's all he can boast of, but he's got the swell in his grip, mind you! And he's only a prototype of what's to come!"

The old man rose as he spoke, and taking the lamp from the table, raised it towards the glass case. As he set it down again he looked earnestly at Joyce, and said: "You think I'm off my head, perhaps—and I'm not sure that I'm not when I get upon this topic—and you're thinking that at the first convenient opportunity you'll slip away, with a 'Thank ye!' and leave the old lunatic to his democratic ravings? But, like many other lunatics, I'm only mad on one subject, and when that isn't mentioned I can converse tolerably rationally, can perhaps even be of some use in advising one friendless and destitute. And you, you say, are both."

"I am, indeed! but I scarcely think you can help me, Mr. Byrne, though I don't for an instant doubt your friendship or your wish to be of service. But it happens that the only people from whom I can hope to get anything in the way of employment, employment that brings money, belong to that class against which you have such violent antipathies, the—the 'swells,' as yon call them."

"My dear young fellow, you mistake me! If you do as I should like you, as an honest Englishman with a freeman's birthright, to do, if you do as I myself—old Jack Byrne, one of the prisoners of '48, 'Bitter Byrne,' as they call me at the club—if you do as I do, you'll hate the swells with all your heart, but you'll use 'em! When I was a young man, young and foolish, blind and headstrong, as all young men are, I wouldn't take off my cap to a swell, wouldn't take a swell's orders, wouldn't touch a swell's money! Lord bless you, I saw the folly of that years ago! I