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Crossthwaite died in the spring and the place has been sold this summer to a very rich young man trade, I think, but quite a gentleman; you would never know the difference, and has been educated at Cambridge, I am told.
"Men they are," said Sandy; "an' therefore they'll no be fools eneugh to stan' by an' see ye pu' down a' that is, to build up ye yourselves dinna yet rightly ken what. Men? Ay, an' wi' mair common sense in them than some that had mair opportunities." "I think I've settled everything," went on Crossthwaite, who seemed not to have heard the last speech "settled everything for poor Katie, I mean.
"Of course," went on Crossthwaite, without taking notice of this interruption, "he allows full liberty of conscience. All he wishes for is the emancipation of intellect. He will allow every one, he says, to realize that idea to himself, by the representations which suit him best." "An' so he has no objection to a wee playing at Papistry, gin a man finds it good to tickle up his soul?"
How he got a clue to the scandal I cannot conceive. Mackaye and Crossthwaite, I had thought, were the only souls to whom I had ever breathed the secret, and they denied indignantly the having ever betrayed my weakness.
"Well" said I to myself, smiling in spirit, "what would my Chartist friends say if they saw me here? Not even Crossthwaite himself could find a flaw in the appreciation of merit for its own sake, the courtesy and condescension ah! but he would complain of it, simply for being condescension." But, after all, what else could it be?
He came sneaking in to tell me the sogers were a' ready to gie up their arms if I'd come forward to them to-morrow. So I tauld him, sin' he was so sure o't, he'd better gang and tak the arms himsel; an' then he let out he'd been a policeman " "A policeman!" said both Crossthwaite and Kelly, with strong expletives. "A policeman doon in Manchester; I thought I kenned his face fra the first.
You know as well as I, that in Parliament or out, nine out of ten of them will stick at no lie, even if it has been exposed and refuted fifty times over, provided it serves the purpose of the moment; and I often think that, after all, Mackaye's right, and what's the matter with Ireland is just that and nothing else that from the nobleman in his castle to the beggar on his dunghill, they are a nation of liars, John Crossthwaite!"
"We feel that; I assure you, we feel that," said Crossthwaite. "There are thousands of us who delight in His moral teaching, as the perfection of human excellence." "And what gospel is there in a moral teaching? What good news is it to the savage of St. Giles, to the artizan, crushed by the competition of others and his own evil habits, to tell him that he can be free if he can make himself free?
Crossthwaite went on to speak of Mackaye. "When old Mackaye's will was read, he had left £400 he'd saved, to be parted between you and me, on condition that we'd go and cool down across the Atlantic, and if it hadn't been for your illness, I'd have been in Texas now."
Even his most potent excuse that "a boy must live somehow," Crossthwaite treated as contemptuously as if he had been a very Leonidas, while Mackaye chimed in with "An' ye a Papist! ye talk o' praying to saints an' martyrs, that died in torments because they wad na do what they should na do?
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