Transcribed from the 1909 Smith, Elder and Co. edition by Les Bowler.
[Picture: Book cover]
IN
KEDAR’S TENTS
[Picture: Decorative graphic]
BY
HENRY SETON MERRIMAN
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LONDON
SMITH, ELDER, & CO.
15 WATERLOO PLACE
1909
* * * * *
Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
At the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh
* * * * *
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. ONE SOWETH 1
II. ANOTHER REAPETH 11
III. LIKE SHIPS UPON THE SEA 23
IV. LE PREMIER PAS 34
V. CONTRABAND 48
VI. AT RONDA 59
VII. IN A MOORISH GARDEN 70
VIII. THE LOVE LETTER 82
IX. A WAR OF WIT 94
X. THE CITY OF DISCONTENT 105
XI. A TANGLED WEB 117
XII. ON THE TOLEDO ROAD 129
XIII. A WISE IGNORAMUS 140
XIV. A WEIGHT OF EVIDENCE 151
XV. AN ULTIMATUM 163
XVI. IN HONOUR 174
XVII. IN MADRID 185
XVIII. IN TOLEDO 197
XIX. CONCEPÇION TAKES THE ROAD 208
XX. ON THE TALAVERA ROAD 220
XXI. A CROSS-EXAMINATION 231
XXII. REPARATION 242
XXIII. LARRALDE’S PRICE 254
XXIV. PRIESTCRAFT 265
XXV. SWORDCRAFT 276
XXVI. WOMANCRAFT 287
XXVII. A NIGHT JOURNEY 298
XXVIII. THE CITY OF STRIFE 309
XXIX. MIDNIGHT AND DAWN 320
XXX. THE DAWN OF PEACE 331
CHAPTER I
ONE SOWETH
‘If it be a duty to respect other men’s claims, so also is it a duty
to maintain our own.’
IT is in the staging of her comedies that fate shows herself superior to
mere human invention. While we, with careful regard to scenery, place
our conventional puppets on the stage and bid them play their old old
parts in a manner as ancient, she rings up the curtain and starts a
tragedy on a scene that has obviously been set by the carpenter for a
farce. She deals out the parts with a fine inconsistency, and the
jolly-faced little man is cast to play Romeo, while the poetic youth with
lantern jaw and an impaired digestion finds no Juliet to match his love.
Fate, with that playfulness which some take too seriously or quite amiss,
set her queer stage as long ago as 1838 for the comedy of certain lives,
and rang up the curtain one dark evening on no fitter scene than the high
road from Gateshead to Durham. It was raining hard, and a fresh breeze
from the south-east swept a salt rime from the North Sea across a tract
of land as bare and bleak as the waters of that grim ocean. A hard, cold
land this, where the iron that has filled men’s purses has also entered
their souls.
There had been a great meeting at Chester-le-Street of those who were at
this time beginning to be known as Chartists, and, the Act having been
lately passed that torchlight meetings were illegal, this assembly had
gathered by the light of a waning moon long since hidden by the clouds.
Amid the storm of wind and rain, orators had expounded views as wild as
the night itself, to which the hard-visaged sons of Northumbria had
listened with grunts of approval or muttered words of discontent. A
dangerous game to play—this stirring up of the people’s heart, and one
that may at any moment turn to the deepest earnest.
Few thought at this time that the movement awakening in the working
centres of the North and Midlands was destined to spread with the strange
rapidity of popular passion—to spread and live for a decade. Few of the
Chartists expected to see the fulfilment of half of their desires. Yet,
to-day, a moiety of the People’s Charter has been granted. These voices
crying in the night demanded an extended suffrage, vote by ballot, and
freedom for rich and poor alike to sit in Parliament. Within the scope
of one reign these demands have been granted.
The meeting at Chester-le-Street was no different from 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 rare smile passed across his grey face it invariably
owed its existence to some sally made by his son, Alfred Pleydell, gay,
light-hearted, _débonnaire_, at the far end of the table. When Sir
John’s thoughtful eyes rested on his motherless son, a dull and
suppressed light gleamed momentarily beneath his heavy lids. Superficial
observers said that John Pleydell was an ambitious man; ‘not for
himself,’ added the few who saw deeper.
When his quick mind now took in the import of the sound that broke the
outer silence of the night, Sir John’s glance sought his son’s face. In
moments of alarm the glance flies to where the heart is.
‘What is that?’ asked Alfred Pleydell, standing up.
‘The Chartists,’ said Sir John.
Alfred looked round. He was a soldier, though the ink had hardly dried
upon the parchment that made him one—the only soldier in the room.
‘We are eleven here,’ he said, ‘and two men downstairs—some of you
fellows have your valets too—say fifteen in all. We cannot stand this,
you know.’
As he spoke the first volley of stones crashed through the windows, and
the broken glass rattled to the floor behind the shutters. The cries of
the ladies in the drawing-room could be heard, and all the men sprang to
their feet. With blazing eyes Alfred Pleydell ran to the door, but his
father was there before him.
‘Not you,’ said the elder man, quiet but a little paler than usual; ‘I
will go and speak to them. They will not dare to touch me. They are
probably running away by this time.’
‘Then we’ll run after ’em,’ answered Alfred with a fine spirit, and
something in his attitude, in the ring of his voice, awoke that demon of
combativeness which lies dormant in men of the Anglo-Saxon race.
‘Come on, you fellows!’ cried the boy with a queer glad laugh, and
without knowing that he did it Sir John stood aside, his heart warm with
a sudden pride, his blood stirred by something that had not moved it
these thirty years. The guests crowded out of the room—old men who
should have known better—laughing as they threw aside their dinner
napkins. What a strange thing is man, peaceful through long years, and
at a moment’s notice a mere fighting devil.
‘Come on, we’ll teach them to break windows!’ repeated Alfred Pleydell,
running to the stick rack. The rain rattled on the skylight of the
square hall, and the wind roared down the open chimney. Among the men
hastily arming themselves with heavy sticks and cramming caps upon their
heads were some who had tasted of rheumatism, but they never thought of
an overcoat.
‘We’ll know each other by our shirt fronts,’ said a quiet man who was
standing on a chair in order to reach an Indian club suspended on the
wall.
Alfred was at the door leading through to the servants’ quarters, and his
summons brought several men from the pantry and kitchens.
‘Come on!’ he cried, ‘take anything you can find—stick or poker—yes, and
those old guns, use ’em like a club, hit very hard and very often. We’ll
charge the devils—there’s nothing like a charge—come on!’
And he was already out of the door with a dozen at his heels.
The change from the lighted rooms to the outer darkness made them pause a
moment, during which time the defenders had leisure to group themselves
around Alfred Pleydell. A hoarse shout, which indeed drowned Geoffrey
Horner’s voice, showed where the assailants stood. Horner had found his
tongue after the first volley of stones. It was the policy of the
Chartist leaders and wirepullers to suggest rather than demonstrate
physical force. Enough had been done to call attention to the
Chester-le-Street meeting, and give it the desired prominence in the eyes
of the nation.
‘Get back, go to your homes!’ he was shouting, with upraised arms, when
the hoarse cry of his adherents and the flood of light from the opened
door made him turn hastily. In a moment he saw the meaning of this
development, but it was too late.
With a cheer, Alfred Pleydell, little more than a boy, led the charge,
and seeing Horner in front, ran at him with upraised stick. Horner half
warded the blow, which came whistling down his own stick and paralysed
his thumb. He returned the stroke with a sudden fury, striking Pleydell
full on the head. Then, because he had a young wife and child at home,
he pushed his way through the struggling crowd, and ran away in the
darkness. As he ran he could hear his late adherents dispersing in all
directions, like sheep before a dog. He heard a voice calling:
‘Alfred! Alfred!’
And Horner, who an hour—nay, ten minutes—earlier had had no thought of
violence, ran his fastest along the road by which he had lately come.
His heart was as water within his breast, and his staring eyes played
their part mechanically. He did not fall, but he noted nothing, and had
no knowledge whither he was running.
Alfred Pleydell lay quite still on the lawn in front of his father’s
house.