“Then I suppose you think you’d be turned out of your cottages, dismissed your work, made to smart for it somehow.  Just you try!  There are people all over the country ready to back you, if you’d only back yourselves.  But you won’t.  You won’t fight—­that’s the worst of you; that’s what makes all of us sick when we come down to talk to you.  You won’t spare twopence halfpenny a week from boozing—­not you!—­to subscribe to a union, and take the first little step towards filling your stomachs and holding your heads up as free men.  What’s the good of your grumbling?  I suppose you’ll go on like that—­grumbling and starving and cringing—­and talking big of the things you could do if you would:—­and all the time not one honest effort—­not one!—­to better yourselves, to pull the yoke off your necks!  By the Lord!  I tell you it’s a damned sort of business talking to fellows like you!”

Marcella started as he flung the words out with a bitter, nay, a brutal, emphasis.  The smooth-faced minister coughed loudly with a sudden movement, half got up to remonstrate, and then thought better of it.  Mrs. Boyce for the first time showed some animation under her veil.  Her eyes followed the speaker with a quick attention.

As for the men, as they turned clumsily to stare at, to laugh, or talk to each other, Marcella could hardly make out whether they were angered or fascinated.  Whichever it was, Wharton cared for none of them.  His blood was up; his fatigue thrown off.  Standing there in front of them, his hands in his pockets, pale with the excitement of speaking, his curly head thrown out against the whitened wall of the chapel, he lashed into the men before him, talking their language, their dialect even; laying bare their weaknesses, sensualities, indecisions; painting in the sombrest colours the grim truths of their melancholy lives.

Marcella could hardly breathe.  It seemed to her that, among these cottagers, she had never lived till now—­under the blaze of these eyes—­within the vibration of this voice.  Never had she so realised the power of this singular being.  He was scourging, dissecting, the weather-beaten men before him, as, with a difference, he had scourged, dissected her.  She found herself exulting in his powers of tyranny, in the naked thrust of his words, so nervous, so pitiless.  And then by a sudden flash she thought of him by Mrs. Hurd’s fire, the dying child on his knee, against his breast.  “Here,” she thought, while her pulses leapt, “is the leader for me—­for these.  Let him call, I will follow.”

It was as though he followed the ranging of her thought, for suddenly, when she and his hearers least expected it, his tone changed, his storm of speech sank.  He fell into a strain of quiet sympathy, encouragement, hope; dwelt with a good deal of homely iteration on the immediate practical steps which each man before him could, if he would, take towards the common end; spoke of the help and support lying ready for the