Marbury

“ Since which time, he has struggled for recognition; while he has not earned it for himself or wife, young George Marbury and his sister Judith are received, and we all like them. They know their parents' limitations but they are not ashamed; to them, they are Marburys, without any claim to social recognition or regard. They have won it for themselves. ”

“ Marbury settled to his breakfast, shook out the Highbury Gazette, and was absorbed. Soon he was smiling.
"What is it, Tony?" asked Lady Mary, eating an apple.
"Listen to this," said Marbury. "It's one of Jordan's speeches."
"Who's Jordan?" Peter interrupted.
"My opponent," said Marbury. "He seems to be dangerous. He knows how to appeal to the people. He has just bought a house and some acres in the constituency, and he tells the Yorkshiremen that he's a farmer, with a stake in the county. ”

“ Marbury as much kindness and civility as we possibly can, for she is a most excellent woman, is very liberal to us now, and at her death will undoubtedly leave us the greatest part of her large property. ”

“ At Oxford Marbury, with his imperturbable sanity and good humour, kept him a little in check. They were inseparable. Peter would not again go on the river. He bought a horse and rode with Marbury through the winter and spring in the country about Oxford, or sailed with him in the desolate river beyond Port Meadow. Meantime he gored at his books like an angry bull, was the favourite hot gospeller of the Oxford Socialists, and was elected Secretary of the Union as an independent candidate—a fact recorded with misguided enthusiasm in the Labour press. ”

“ Marbury, a woman teacher of gymnastics in a high school, a chief clerk from the Great Northern Railway offices, a young lawyer. But there was also a stranger, a thick tall man of thirty-six or -seven, with stolid brown hair, lips used to giving orders, eyes which followed everything good-naturedly, and clothes which you could never quite remember.
Mr. Marbury boomed, "Carol, come over here and meet Doc Kennicott—Dr. Will Kennicott of Gopher Prairie. He does all our insurance-examining up in that neck of the woods, and they do say he's some doctor!" ”

“ Peter eagerly accepted. Next day he met Marbury at York, leaving the train to avoid a tedious slow journey of forty miles.
Lord Haversham's principal seat was at Highbury Towers, a lonely house on the edge of a moor. The nearest town was ten miles away.
It was a fortress of civilisation planted in a wilderness. In a bad winter, with snow lying deep, it was sometimes cut off for days from the world outside.
"There's something impudent about the place," said Marbury, as the car rushed over the moors. "It flies in the face of Nature. ”

“ Marbury lies in Marbury Bay, which is very large, but so shallow that at low tide the mud-flats are all exposed for a long distance out. A long tongue of land, principally sand-banks, stretches half around the bay, making a break-water from the ocean, and rendering the harbour a very safe one for sailing. Will and Archie Somers were capital sailors, inheriting their grandfather's love of the sea. Back of the house, over a short, steep hill, lay the beginning of the sand-banks, where mamma and auntie had buried their money-bags long ago. ”

“ You are a public man, and the facts about the lives of public men are more or less public property. You are represented in this work of popular reference as coming to this country in 1902, from Argentina, where you made a considerable fortune. You have told us, however, that you were in London, acquainted with Marbury, about the years, say 1890 to 1892. Did you then leave England soon after knowing Marbury?”
“I did. I left England in 1891 or 1892—I am not sure which.”
“We are wanting to be very sure about this matter, Mr. Aylmore. ”

“ We've men out making various enquiries. We're enquiring about Marbury's voyage to England. All that we know up to now is that he was certainly a passenger on a liner which landed at Southampton in accordance with what he told those people at the Anglo-Orient, that he left the ship in the usual way and was understood to take the train to town—as he did. That's all. There's nothing in that. We've cabled to Melbourne for any news of him from there. But I expect little from that."
"All right," said Spargo. "And—what are you doing—you, yourself? ”

“ Spargo, and the murderer, if he knew his ground well, could easily hide himself until he could get away in the morning. He might be a man who had access to chambers or offices—think how easy it would be for such a man, having once killed and robbed his victim, to lie hid for hours afterwards? For aught we know, the man who murdered Marbury may have been within twenty feet of you when you first saw his dead body that morning. Eh?"
Before Spargo could reply to this suggestion an official entered the room and whispered a few words in the detective's ear.
"Show him in at once," said Rathbury. ”

“ Spargo fingered the shining bit of stone.
"That's a diamond—right enough, " he said. "Put it away, Mrs. Walters—I shall see Rathbury presently, and I'll tell him about it. Now, that other gentleman! You told us you saw him. Could you recognize him—I mean, a photograph of him? Is this the man?"
Spargo knew from the expression of Mrs. Walters' face that she had no more doubt than Webster had.
"Oh, yes!" she said. "That's the gentleman who came in with Mr. Marbury—I should have known him in a thousand. ”

“ In view of this the writer of the ballad addressed the following letter to the historian:
Oak Knoll, Danvers, 5 mo. 18, 1880. My dear Friend; I heartily thank thee for a copy of thy History of Marblehead. I have read it with great interest and think good use has been made of the abundant material. No town in Essex County has a record more honorable than Marblehead; no one has done more to develop the industrial interests of our New England seaboard, and certainly none have given such evidence of self-sacrificing patriotism. I am glad the story of it has been at last told, and told so well. ”

“ The country to the north of the little old town is very beautiful. The precipitous wall of the Marlborough Downs, with several lovely and little-known villages at its foot, is a remarkable feature of the landscape. The high road to Marlborough, that climbs the hills for three fatiguing miles, passes through the small village of Oare, where there is a modern red-brick church. Not far away to the west are the hamlets of West and East Towel, lost in the lonely by ways beneath the hills. ”

“ But with neither courthouse nor port activity nor manufacture, the town became a paradox in an economy and society of planters.
Remote and inaccessible, uninhabited by individuals whose skills could have given it vigor, Marlborough no longer had any reason for being. It lingered on for a short time, but when John Mercer came to transform the abandoned village into a flourishing plantation, “Most of the other Buildings were suffered to go to Ruin, so that in the year 1726, when your Petitioner [i.e., Mercer] went to live there, but one House twenty-feet square was standing.” ”

“ In this seeming anomaly Marlborough is a true illustration of its age, when men like Mercer were strong individuals but at the same time typifying and expressing the milieu in which they lived.
Mercer’s rise to wealth and leadership occurred at a time when favorable laws held out the promise of prosperity, while boundless lands offered unparalleled opportunities for investment. ”

“ That they included no lawbooks at a time when Mercer was preparing for the law is an indication of his broad taste for literature and learning.
Marlborough, we can see, was occupied by a young man of talent, energy, and creativity. He alone, of the many men who had envisioned a center of enterprise on Potomac Neck, was possessed of the drive and the simple directness to make it succeed. For George Mason and the Waughs, Mercer was the ideal solution for their Marlborough difficulties. ”

“ THE DEATH OF MARLBOROUGH AS A TOWN
Could this poor village have survived had the courthouse not burned? It was an unhappy contrast to the vision of a town governed by “benchers of the guild hall,” bustling with mercantile activity, swarming on busy market days with ordinaries filled with people. This fantasy may have pulsated briefly through the minds of a few. But, after the abrogation of the Port Act in 1710, there was little left to justify the town’s existence other than the courthouse. ”

“ Marlborough “teaches the battle to rage;” the angel “directs the storm:” Marlborough is “unmoved in peaceful thought;” the angel is “calm and serene:” Marlborough stands “unmoved amidst the shock of hosts;” the angel rides “calm in the whirlwind.” The lines on Marlborough are just and noble, but the simile gives almost the same images a second time. But perhaps this thought, though hardly a simile, was remote from vulgar conceptions, and required great labour and research, or dexterity of application. Of this Dr. Madden, a name which Ireland ought to honour, once gave me his opinion. ”

“ For some years after the accession of George the First, Marlborough continued to be a healthy and an active man; riding on horseback or driving about, and delighting, when he was at Blenheim, in walking about the grounds, inspecting those beautiful 268ornate scenes which his taste and wealth had caused to flourish around him. In the evening he received his friends without ceremony, and joined in the games of ombre, basset, and picquet, or of whist, his favourite game; and the illustrious and amiable Marlborough often descended to a pool of commerce with his grandchildren. ”

“ We may be assured that the petty penuriousness which was ascribed to Marlborough has at all events been greatly exaggerated,—as such errors are always magnified by report. His early narrowness of fortune produced notions of exactness, into which men of business-like habits are prone to fall; and when wealth flows in, it is not easy to discard the small practices which have crept in upon us, step by step, imperceptibly, and which originated in a virtuous principle. Marlborough, however, had one great attribute, possessing which, no man ought to be severely deprecated for penuriousness. ”

“ George Andrews and Peter Beach, somewhat less distinguished, were perhaps the only full-time residents from among the first grantees. After 1708 Thomas Ballard and possibly William Barber were also householders.
Thus, few of the ingredients of an active community were to be found at Marlborough, the skilled craftsmen or ship’s chandlers or merchants who might have provided the vitality of commerce and trade not having at any time been present. ”

“ Marlborough, the slave of his country, the instrument and the controller at once of states and allied armies,—Marlborough, at length, was free,—at length he was permitted, even constrained, to return to the ordeal of private life; for to all men who have played a conspicuous part on the great theatre of the busy world, a domestic sphere must prove an ordeal which few, so situated, sustain with credit.
Since the first years of their early marriage, the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough had scarcely passed a year of uninterrupted conjugal enjoyment. ”

“ In 1716 Marlborough died. The British idea seems to be that his career of victory did not end at that sad event. In the Tower of London some years ago, I was shown a cannon which the warden who spoke by the authority of the three kingdoms, declared was taken by Marlborough at the battle of Dettingen. When I let fall a timid doubt, he repeated the statement with an indignant emphasis which silenced cavil. History does indeed record one other case of the sort. You remember at Rome, near the Cloaca Maxima, a spring where women were washing. ”

“ Mercer’s Consolidation of Marlborough, 1730-1740 MERCER THE YOUNG LAWYER
The 1730’s opened a golden age in the Virginia colony. There was an interval of peace in which trade might flourish; there were new laws which favored the tobacco planter and led to the building of resplendent mansions along Virginia’s shores. John Mercer wasted no time in grasping the opportunities that lay about him. With shrewd foresight he made law his major objective, thus raising himself above most of his contemporaries. ”

“ Passing from Marlborough hither, ’tis the common topic of amusement for travellers, to observe the gray weathers on Marlborough downs, which are the same kind of stones as this of our antiquity, lying dispers’d, on the surface of the ground, as nature originally laid them. When we come to this village, we see the largest of those stones in great numbers, set upright in the earth, in circles, in parallel lines and other regular figures, and a great part inclos’d in a vast circular ditch, of above 1000 foot diameter. ”

“ Aside from being elongated, Marlborough derives from the ubiquitous informal brick cottage of Virginia. So indigenous is this vernacular form that it is often found in houses of considerable pretension, even in the 18th century. Such are the Abingdon glebe house in Gloucester County, Gunston Hall in Fairfax, and the Chiswell Plantation, known as “Scotchtown,” in Hanover. Robert Beverley noted the Virginians’ fondness for this style, commenting that they built many rooms on a floor because frequent high winds would “incommode a towering Fabrick”—an explanation as delightful as it is absurd. ”

“ Whilst these minor events were disturbing the peace of the royal household, the first campaign in Ireland called Marlborough away from the home and the wife whom he loved so well. Every letter to the Countess which he penned during his absence, breathes a devotion which time and distance seem only to have heightened. ”