“Name the day, then.”
In short the bells rang a merry peal, and to reconcile Susan to her unavoidable happiness, Mr. Eden came down and gave an additional weight (in her way of viewing things) to the marriage ceremony by officiating. It must be owned that this favorable circumstance cost her a few tears, too.
How so, Mr. Reade?
Marry, sir, thus: Mr. Eden was what they call eccentric; among his other deviations from usage he delivered the meaning of sentences in church along with the words.
This was a thunder-clap to poor Susan. She had often heard a chanting machine utter the marriage service all on one note, and heard it with a certain smile of unintelligent complacency her sex wear out of politeness; but when the man Eden told her at the altar with simple earnestness what a high and deep and solemn contract she was making then and there with God and man, she began to cry, and wept like April through the ceremony.
I have not quite done with this pair, but leave them a few minutes, for some words are due to other characters, and to none, I think, more than to this very Mr. Eden, whose zeal and wisdom brought our hero and unheroine happily together through the subtle sequence of causes I have related, the prime thread a converted thief.
Mr. Eden's strength broke down under the prodigious effort to defeat the effect of separate confinement on the bodies and souls of his prisoners. Dr. Gulson ordered him abroad. Having now since the removal of Hawes given the separate and silent system a long and impartial trial, his last public act was to write at the foot of his report a solemn protest against it, as an impious and mad attempt to defy God's will as written on the face of man's nature—to crush too those very instincts from which rise communities, cities, laws, prisons, churches, civilization—and to wreck souls and bodies under pretense of curing souls, not by knowledge, wisdom, patience, Christian love, or any great moral effort, but by the easy and physical expedient of turning one key on each prisoner instead of on a score.
“These,” said Mr. Eden, “are the dreams of selfish, lazy, heartless dunces and reckless bigots, dwarf Robespierres, with self-deceiving hearts that dream philanthropy, fluent lips that cant philanthropy and hands swift to shed blood—which is not blood to them—because they are mere sensual brutes, so low in intelligence that, although men are murdered and die before their eyes, they cannot see it was murder, because there was no knocking on the head or cutting of throats.”
The reverend gentleman then formally washed his hands of the bloodshed and reason-shed of the separate system, and resigned his office, earnestly requesting at the same time that, as soon as the government should come round to his opinion, they would permit him to co-operate in any enlightened experiment where God should no longer be defied by a knot of worms as in —— Jail.
Then he went abroad, but though professedly hunting health he visited and inspected half the principal prisons in Europe. After many months events justified his prediction. The government started a large prison on common sense and humanity, and Mr. Lacy's interest procured Mr. Eden the place of its chaplain.