All round Gwynplaine arose cries of “Hear, hear!”

Meanwhile, rigid and superhuman, he succeeded in maintaining on his features that severe and sad contraction under which the laugh was fretting like a wild horse struggling to escape.

He resumed,—­

“I am he who cometh out of the depths.  My lords, you are great and rich.  There lies your danger.  You profit by the night; but beware!  The dawn is all-powerful.  You cannot prevail over it.  It is coming.  Nay! it is come.  Within it is the day-spring of irresistible light.  And who shall hinder that sling from hurling the sun into the sky?  The sun I speak of is Right.  You are Privilege.  Tremble!  The real master of the house is about to knock at the door.  What is the father of Privilege?  Chance.  What is his son?  Abuse.  Neither Chance nor Abuse are abiding.  For both a dark morrow is at hand.  I am come to warn you.  I am come to impeach your happiness.  It is fashioned out of the misery of your neighbour.  You have everything, and that everything is composed of the nothing of others.  My lords, I am an advocate without hope, pleading a cause that is lost; but that cause God will gain on appeal.  As for me, I am but a voice.  Mankind is a mouth, of which I am the cry.  You shall hear me!  I am about to open before you, peers of England, the great assize of the people; of that sovereign who is the subject; of that criminal who is the judge.  I am weighed down under the load of all that I have to say.  Where am I to begin?  I know not.  I have gathered together, in the vast diffusion of suffering, my innumerable and scattered pleas.  What am I to do with them now?  They overwhelm me, and I must cast them to you in a confused mass.  Did I foresee this?  No.  You are astonished.  So am I. Yesterday I was a mountebank; to-day I am a peer.  Deep play.  Of whom?  Of the Unknown.  Let us all tremble.  My lords, all the blue sky is for you.  Of this immense universe you see but the sunshine.  Believe me, it has its shadows.  Amongst you I am called Lord Fermain Clancharlie; but my true name is one of poverty—­Gwynplaine.  I am a wretched thing carved out of the stuff of which the great are made, for such was the pleasure of a king.  That is my history.  Many amongst you knew my father.  I knew him not.  His connection with you was his feudal descent; his outlawry is the bond between him and me.  What God willed was well.  I was cast into the abyss.  For what end?  To search its depths.  I am a diver, and I have brought back the pearl, truth.  I speak, because I know.  You shall hear me, my lords.  I have seen, I have felt!  Suffering is not a mere word, ye happy ones!  Poverty I grew up in; winter has frozen me; hunger I have tasted; contempt I have suffered; pestilence I have undergone; shame I have drunk of.  And I will vomit all these up before you, and this ejection of all misery shall sully your feet and flame about them.  I hesitated before I allowed myself to be brought to the place where I