The Fortress by Walpole Hugh

Author:Walpole, Hugh [Walpole, Hugh]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Historical Fiction
Publisher: epubBooks Classics
Published: 2015-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

WAX FLOWERS AND THE REVOLUTION

Adam tried, with all the self–control that belonged to his training, to forget what the day after tomorrow meant to him, but, try as he would, again and again something repeated inside himself: The day after tomorrow … The day after tomorrow. Everything hangs on Monday, my whole life … everything I've worked for.'

Margaret, in a brown bonnet, hanging on his arm, caught sight of the magnificent Beadle, whiskered, gold–laced, standing superbly at the door of the Pantheon Bazaar.

'Oh, let us go into the Pantheon … I can find something there for poor little Daisy Bain, whose foot was crushed by that wagon last week. It won't occupy us a minute. Do you mind, Adam?'

They were both making a sublime attempt at proving that nothing was toward. Today was like any other day. And yet, with how many thousands around them, they were, it might be, on the eve of a new era, a new world, a world of light, justice and brotherhood. All London was making preparation for Monday's great Chartist rising. All clerks and officials were ordered to be sworn garrisons. Every gentleman in London was become a constable. (What a very grand carriage outside the Princess Theatre, and what a hideous befrilled Pug in the window!)

After all, what an incredible year! In the month of March alone fearful street fighting in Berlin, flight of the Prince of Prussia, riots in Vienna and Milan, Hungary in revolt, revolution in Austria, and, above all, France tumbling either into a chaos of disaster or a triumph of a new grand order!

And on Monday—Monday, April 10th, 1848—England too might see the turning–point of all her history. But Margaret had always a child– like desire for pleasure, and Adam was, nowadays, a great deal more easily pleased than he had once been. They had walked out into the mild spring air that they might quiet some of their almost trembling agitation. How odd it was to see the bird–stuffer's shop with the birds of paradise and parrots, crimson and gold and violent green, a statuary shop, with Canova's Graces, the staymaker's, the fitter's shop with the little cork ball bounding up and down on the perpendicular jet of water, the provision shop with the Durham mustard, the Abernethy biscuits, Iceland moss, Narbonne honey, Bologna sausages—these and many many more, and to think that in another two days all these splendours might be at the mercy of the mob, that the poor might have their wrongs righted, the just come to their own … It must be truthfully added that any stranger seeing Adam and Margaret as they passed the bowing Beadle at the Pantheon door would have been astonished indeed at such revolutionary sentiments, for never did a pair look more respectable and kindly—Adam, set and solid, with his dark side– whiskers, his handsome high hat and gentlemanly cravat, and Margaret in her brown bonnet and overjacket of white embroidered muslin. Revolutionaries? Surely not this respectable pair!

In fact they did forget for ten minutes inside the Pantheon that they WERE revolutionaries.

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