Eustace Marchmont: A friend of the people

by Evelyn Everett-Green

At first a shriek and a cry of human anguish would rend the silence for a moment, and then sink again. But now many moments had passed and no such sound had been heard. Moments grew into minutes, and perhaps a quarter of an hour passed thus in watching the one light rising and falling as the vessel rose on the crests of the waves only to be dashed down again with renewed fury, whilst the rending of timbers and snapping of spars told a tale that was intelligible enough to the fierce men only a stone’s throw from the doomed vessel.

At last they deemed they had waited long enough. From the very nature of the catastrophe, it was unlikely there would be many survivors. All who were below must have perished like rats in a trap, and the few on deck would quickly have been swept overboard. It was time the plundering began, else there might be little left to plunder. As it was, there would be peril in trying to rifle the hull; but these men knew what they were about, and producing their dark lanterns, they cautiously approached the floating mass, and after due precautions, scrambled one after another upon her, and commenced a rapid but cautious search.

With this sort of thing Saul had no concern. He knew that his comrades must be gratified in their thirst for plunder, but his work had been accomplished when the great vessel struck without hope of succour. As the larger boat could not approach too nearly to the wreck, all the men had gone off in the smaller one, and were to bring to him from time to time such valuables as they could find and secure. Twice already had this been done, and the men reported that there was more still to come, and that they might make a second journey to the wreck perhaps, if she would only hold together whilst both the laden boats put ashore and came out again empty. His comrades were daring and skilful, and ran less risk than they appeared to do in thus treading the decks of the vessel. She had lodged now, and though still swept by heavy seas, was not tossed about as she had been at first. The tide was falling and had landed her fast upon a serrated ledge of rock. Unless she broke up, she would lie there till the next tide dashed her off again and sucked her into the quicksand. But as the water fell, more and more booty became accessible. The greed in the men’s hearts rose with what they found. They told themselves that this night’s work would make them rich for life.

But Saul would not leave the spot. A curious fascination held him rooted to it. When the boats were filled and the men insisted on going, he said he would get upon the wreck and await their return there. The wind was abating. The sea was running less high. It was clear to experienced eyes that for some hours at least the vessel would lie where she was, and that there would be no great peril in remaining on her. Saul was not a man easy to thwart or contradict. His comrades raised no objection to what he proposed. It was his affair, not theirs, and they helped him to a station on the deck and left him. They left a light with him—it would serve them as a beacon in returning.

Saul sat where he had been placed and watched them row away, their light growing fainter and fainter over the great crested waves. He sat alone upon the shivering, heaving wreck, pondering on the night’s work, and on all he had seen and done. He pictured the scene that these decks must have witnessed but one short hour ago, and thought of all the dead men—and fair women, perhaps—lying drowned and dead in the cabins beneath his feet. A savage light came into his eyes. A wild triumphant laugh rang out in the silence and the darkness. He thought for a moment of trying to get below and looking upon the dead faces of his foes—men and women he had hated for no other cause than that they lived in a world that was for him a place of evil and oppression, and deserved to die for the tyranny and oppression of the race they represented to his disordered imagination.

But he did not go. For one thing, his lameness hindered him; for another, there was something almost too ghastly even for him in the thought. But as he sat brooding and thinking of it all out in the cold and the darkness of the night, well might he have been taken for the very spirit of the storm, sitting wild-eyed and sullenly triumphant in the midst of all this destruction, gloating over the death of his fellow-men, and picturing the ghastly details with the fascination of a mind on the verge of madness.

Suddenly an object floating in the water, quite near to the vessel, took his eyes, and roused him from his lethargy. In another moment his experienced and cat-like eyes had grasped its outline, and he knew what it was.

A human creature—a man, in all probability—supported in the water by a life-belt, for he could see the outlines of head and shoulders above the crests of the waves. Well could Saul guess what had happened. This man—sailor or passenger, whichever he might be—had been on deck when the ship struck. He had had the good fortune and presence of mind to secure a life-belt about him during the few minutes that the ship kept above water, and probably struck out for shore when washed from the deck. In all probability he had quickly been dashed against the rocks and deprived of consciousness, and the ebb of the tide had dragged and sucked him back from the shore and in the direction of the wreck. A little more and he would be washed upon the shoals of treacherous quicksand—and then!

A sudden fierce desire came upon Saul to see the face of this man. He was floating almost close to the wreck now, rising and falling upon the heaving waves without any motion save what they endowed him with. Saul turned and possessed himself of his lantern, and moving cautiously to the very edge of the wreck, turned the light full upon the floating object in the water.

Then the silence of the night was rent by a wild and exceeding bitter cry; and in the midst of the darkness and terror of that winter’s night, the soul of Saul Tresithny suddenly awoke, amid throbs of untold anguish, from its long lethargy and death. In one moment of intense illumination, in which for a moment he seemed wrapped in flame—scorched by a remorse and despair that was in essence different from anything he had experienced hitherto, he saw his past life and the crime of the night in a totally new aspect. It was a moment not to be analysed, not to be described; but the impression was such that its memory was graven on his mind ever after in characters of fire. It was as if in that awful moment something within him had died and something been born. Heart and soul, for those few brief seconds in which he stood mute and paralysed with horror, were crowded with all the bitterness of death and the pangs of birth. Yet it was scarce five seconds that the spell held him in its thrall.