Eustace Marchmont

“ The face she turned upon him was as it were transfigured already, and it seemed to Eustace as though for a moment a curtain lifted before his eyes and showed him a glimpse of some unspeakable glory which lay beyond the ken of mortal man. For the first time since he had known her he began to understand that what had seemed to him as the outcome of a mystic fanaticism might be in reality the development of some purer spiritual understanding than he had been able to attain to. ”

“ Her heart often grew heavy within her as she realised the terrible wickedness of the great world without.
“No seat is worth that,” she said softly; but Eustace could not agree with her.
“We must purify legislation; we must so work that a new and perfect system rises from the ashes of the old!” he cried, his quick enthusiasm firing at the thought. “Men can and shall be raised. We shall one day see the dawn of a brighter and purer day. This is but the hour of darkness which precedes the dawn. The brightness [208] of the day will atone for all. You will live to see a new world yet, Bride!” ”

“ He has greatly grown in wisdom and moderation—greatly improved. I believe he will turn out one of those men whom the world needs. He is after all a Marchmont, and the Marchmonts have generally the gift of government in some form or another. A young and ardent temperament may be led astray at the outset; but the experience of life gives ballast; and there seem to have been many influences at work upon Eustace, moderating his impetuosity, and showing him the reverse side of the shield. ”

“ I will not make a second friend of one above me in rank. I will keep the right to fight against them and to hate—hate—HATE them—and not all your honeyed pleadings can change that. Now I have told you all, and you can choose whether you will have me or not; for it will be war to the death when I fight, and you may as well know it first as last!”
Eustace smiled at the vehemence of his disciple as he said quietly—
“We will have you, Saul, hatred and all. You are too useful a tool to be spared because your edge is over sharp.” ”

“ When the polling day really came, and her father settled to drive in in the coach, taking Eustace with him—Sir Roland had his rooms at the hotel in Pentreath, and had ceased to make headquarters at the castle—Bride suddenly asked to accompany the party, a request so foreign to her ordinary habits that both the men looked at her in surprise.
“It will be very noisy and rowdy in the town,” said Eustace, “and we may get into some street-fights, and have a warm reception ourselves. Would you not be better and safer at home?” ”

“ Tell him that we will stay happily together here, and have only one home, here at Penarvon. I know you do not want to lose me, yet I know (for you have told me) that you would like to see me Eustace’s wife. Well, it is all so easy. Do you not see it so yourself? Dearest father, I love him, and he loves me. What can anything else matter? Does not his weakness and his helplessness make me love him all the more? I want to have the right to be with him always, to lighten the load which will weigh on him, however brave and patient he is, heavily sometimes. I shall never love anybody else ”

“ EUSTACE’S DILEMMA
“SHE is right in theory—she is perfectly right. She holds the stronger position. But yet I cannot give it up. One cannot live in the world, and breathe an atmosphere so far above it as she does. The thing is not possible. What!—go back to London—go back to my friends there, and say that I cannot accept my kinsman’s seat, because in right and justice he should not have it to give! ”

“ Eustace had lent him histories of other nations—down-trodden peoples who had revolted at last from their oppressors, and had won for themselves freedom—sometimes of body, sometimes of mind, at the sword’s point. Eustace had tried to choose writers of impartiality; but his own bias had been too strong to make him a very good director of such a mind as Saul’s; and when a man of that temperament reaches passages which are not to his liking, he simply skips over them till he reaches what is more to his taste ”

“ It is Eustace who has done it all—Eustace who is the author of all. Oh, papa, the punishment must not fall on Saul’s head. I think it would break Eustace’s heart if he were to know that Saul had come to his death like that.”
The Duke’s face was very dark and stern, but his sternness was not for his child, as Bride knew by the pressure of the fingers upon her hand.
“Eustace should think of this before he sets about playing with explosives. Could he not see that young Tresithny was not a man to be stirred up with impunity? What a man sows, that shall he also reap.” ”

“ Bride’s mind was hard at work; her feelings were keenly stirred within her. The burden of the song which kept ringing in her ears [166] was, “This is Eustace’s doing, this is Eustace’s work. Oh, how can we let another die, and die perhaps unfit and impenitent through his act, through his teaching? It must not be. Oh, it shall not be! Saul must not die through Eustace’s fault!”
Bride had come to think of Eustace in a way she scarcely understood herself. ”

“ I think you must feel glad. There is so little to do at Penarvon—for one like you.”
“I fear your father thinks I have done too much, as it is,” answered Eustace hastily. “Bride, have I made him hate me? Has he spoken with disapproval of me to you?”
“Oh, no!” answered Bride. “My father seldom speaks disparagingly of any one who is not there to defend himself. ”

“ We are all born in sin, [115] but we are not all born to utter want and wretchedness. God loves all His children alike: why should such things be? Oh, why should they be?”
She clasped her hands together in a passion of perplexity and pain. The eyes which were so deep and inscrutable to Eustace were full of a pleading intensity of gaze, as though she would wring an answer to her appeal from the heavens themselves. Abner looked at her with a softening of the lines of his rugged face ”

“ There was a subtle sense of exhilaration and happiness in her pulses which made active exercise needful to her. She had her pony saddled, and started to ride along the cliffs to St. Erme. She wanted to be alone for awhile to think and muse upon the sudden sense of new happiness that had come into her life. She had visits to pay at St. Erme’s which had been waiting for a day of leisure. Eustace had filled much of her time of late, but now she must learn to do without him. ”

“ Eustace had certainly learnt more moderation of thought during the past year, and was more cautious both in what he advocated and what he approved. He had had several experiences of a kind likely to awaken in him some distrust of the methods which once had seemed entirely right and praiseworthy; and he began to have an inkling that there was something wanting in his system before it could be called in any way perfect. The passions of the people could easily be stirred ”

“ The very intelligence and quickness of the young man made him the more dangerous. He could turn upon Eustace with some argument of his own, used perhaps for another purpose, and by no means intended to be universally applied, and deduce from it conclusions only too mercilessly logical, tending to the subversion of the empire and the awakening of a spirit of lawless violence, which of all things Eustace desired to prevent. ”

“ But Lady Bride can guide her with a silken thread. She took to her ladyship from the first moment she mounted her.”
“And she seems to take to you too. I think your name is Tresithny, isn’t it? You are grandson to the gardener at the castle?”
“Yes, sir,” answered Saul, and said no more, holding the stirrup for Eustace to mount, but without anything the least servile or obsequious in his attitude. The young man noted also in his speech the absence of the vernacular peculiarities that characterised all the ordinary rustics of the place. ”

“ Eustace better analysed the meaning of those shouts and yells and cries, and turning to the Duke, he said, “I think we must leave the carriage. If we were alone we might sit it out and brave them; but we have a lady with us, and it will not do to provoke them too far. They will stop short, I fully believe, at personal violence, and there is a house just opposite where they are making friendly signals to us, and will give us shelter if we can reach the door. Bride, will you be afraid to face the mob for one minute? They will howl and yell ”

“ It is yu who are going about teaching our country-folk that they are being ground down and oppressed, is it not? Well, may be it will please yu tu know that young Tresithny is following in your steps and making all St. Bride writhe under a sense of a deep and terrible oppression she never found out for herself before.”
Eustace flushed very slightly. He was keen to note a touch of irony when directed against the cause he had at heart. He looked to meet it in many quarters, but he had hardly expected to find it here, nor was he absolutely certain of the drift of Mr. Tremodart’s remark. ”

“ This was not by any means the spirit Eustace had desired to kindle in his disciple; but, after all, might not such sentiments be but the natural ebullition of enthusiasm in one who was young, untrained, and ardent? Certainly it was preferable in his eyes to apathy, and he was not disposed to strain the relations newly set up between them by opposing such sanguinary statements.
“The wrongs of humanity do indeed set up a strong [91] sense of righteous indignation,” he said quietly ”

“ Tremodart, it has been the doing of a Marchmont that Saul Tresithny and these poor ignorant fishermen are abroad with evil intent to-night. You must not hinder me from striving to do my share to avert the threatened danger, and I know I shall not be hurt. You will be with me, and no one will lay a finger on either of us. They may not listen to us; but they will not hurt us. Our West-Country men are not savages. ”

“ Grandfather and grandson walked down the hill together, the old man’s mind full of the mystery of death, the young man’s flooded by that kindred mystery of love—the two most wonderful mysteries of the world. ”

“ Do you think I can love any one, save with the love of a deep pity, who can place a mere earthly love before everything else, and talk as though his soul were his own to give into the keeping of another? ”

“ He looked like a man born to be an Ishmaelite in his life’s pilgrimage—his hand against every man, and every man’s hand against him—a man in revolt against the world, against society, against himself. ”

“ If I were to stand aside for a man who would take the seat and strive to hold back the cause of reform, I should be a traitor to the cause and to my country. I ought not to stand idly by without striving to win it for myself. ”

“ The town presented an extraordinary appearance to Bride, as the great coach rumbled through its streets, ordinarily so quiet and silent and sleepy. The whole place was alive. It seemed as though every inhabitant of the town and neighbourhood was abroad in the streets, and shouts and yells, hootings and cheers, greeted the appearance of the ducal equipage as it turned every corner. ”

“ Impenitent, rebellious, cursing his own fate and crippled condition, and cursing yet more bitterly those he held responsible for the accident—the tyrants who set soldiers upon poor and harmless people, to trample them to death beneath their iron heel for no other offence than claiming the rights of human beings and citizens of the commonwealth. ”

“ BRIDE was riding homewards from Pentreath to the castle on a sunny day early in June. The sound of joy-bells was in the air, the faces of men were glad and triumphant, all nature seemed in tune with the general rejoicing which some recent event had plainly set on foot; and the young wife’s face was glad, too, though thoughtfully and temperately. For she knew that the news of which she was the bearer would gladden the heart of her husband, though it would not be to him now that source of triumphant exhilaration which it would have been a year before. ”

“ It was a day late on in March—one of those days not unfrequent at that season, especially in the south and west—a day that seems filled with a promise of coming summer—a day in which all nature rejoices, which stirs the pulses and sets the blood coursing joyously, and fills the air with subtle promises of life and hope. ”

“ Whilst the lovers were thus standing in the corner of the orchard, exchanging vows of constancy which meant more than their quiet homely phrases seemed to imply, an elderly man with a slight stoop in his tall figure and a singularly thoughtful and attractive face, was coming slowly up the long steep slope of down which led to the farm, guided alike by the brilliance of the moonbeams and by the voices singing the rude chant round the apple-trees. ”

“ Stacked like pigs in a stye, crowded together in hunger and dirt, and wretchedness unspeakable, the best man amongst them hanged by the neck till he died, and all for preaching the gospel of truth to a down-trodden people, that is what England has to look for from her rulers! ”

“ Lying for days at the gate of the unseen world as he had done, he had learned that many things formerly slighted and almost despised were the very things which brought a man peace at the last, and which glowed and strengthened beneath the mysterious fire of peril that turned to dross and nothingness the wisdom in which he had trusted, and the staff upon which he had tried to lean. ”

“ Donning her plainest dress and cloak, and softly summoning from the anteroom a great hound, who was the invariable companion of her lonely walks, she opened another door into one of the turreted chambers of the castle, and found her way down a spiral staircase, lighted by broad squares of moonlight from unclosed windows, to a door at the base, the bolts of which she drew back easily—for this was her own ordinary mode of access to the gardens—and found herself out in the soft night-air with the moon overhead, and that glow in the sky behind her which told such a terrible tale of its own. ”