Eustace Marchmont: A friend of the people

by Evelyn Everett-Green

“Saul,” she said softly, “Abner’s boy! Ah! what a sorrow it will be for him! And that is Eustace’s doing! It was he who is responsible, not the poor hot-headed youth himself. O Eustace! Eustace! will you ever see the danger of the path you are treading, and the peril into which you are leading others?”

The woman was loth to speak at first, but the charm of Bride’s gentleness, and her absolute sense of security in the goodwill of the young lady, overcame her reticence at last, and she told the girl all she knew. It was not much; but she had gathered from some news that reached her at dusk that she might expect a party some time in the small hours of the morning, who would stand in need of refreshment, but would pay her well for her trouble. Reading between the lines of the message, she had got a shrewd notion that the marauders under Saul Tresithny would pay a visit to the neighbourhood of St. Bride’s that night, and it might be presumed that the Duke’s new machinery might suffer in consequence. This was by no means certain, however. The Duke was known to take precautions not possible for smaller farmers with fewer servants and less issue at stake, and it might be that the attack would be made upon the smaller men, who would less easily recoup themselves for the loss. Of that the woman knew nothing; as a matter of fact, she did not know, but only guessed, that an attack might be made at all. She had soon come to an end of such information as she possessed, and Bride was left to consider what she ought to do under the circumstances.

Should she go home and rouse her father’s men? or would that only bring about the very collision she so much wished to avoid? Was the information received sufficient for her to act upon, or had it originated with the woman herself, who was evidently not in the confidence of the men? Musing for a few moments over this question, Bride made a quick resolve, and after saying a brief but kindly farewell to Mother Clat, who was anxiously studying her face all the while, she slipped out of the cottage, and along the silent little street of the village beneath the cliff, till she found herself upon the bit of rough road which led upwards from the shore, through a narrow gully, towards the church and the rectory.

Bride knew the habits of Mr. Tremodart. He was seldom in bed before one or two o’clock in the morning. He was a man of eccentric ways, and almost invariably after his supper at half-past eight, sat down to smoke in one of his untidy rooms, and at ten o’clock started out on a long walk over the moors or along the cliffs, coming home about midnight, and sitting up with a book for an hour or two later. It was not much after one o’clock now, and she had good hopes of catching him before he retired. With all his peculiarities, and his lack of the spirituality that was to Bride as the breath of life, the Cornishman was a shrewd, hard-headed man, with a large fund of common-sense, and a wide experience of St. Bride’s folks and their ways. He would be by far the best person to acquaint with the danger of the hour. He was (as was usual in those days) magistrate as well as clergyman, had a secular as well as sacred charge over his people. To her great relief, as she unlatched the garden-gate, she saw him standing out in his untidy plot of ground and looking at the red light in the sky. As her light footfall fell upon his ear, he turned with a start, and his face expressed a great amazement when he saw who had come to disturb his solitude at such an hour.

“Lady Bride! Will wonders never cease! And what are yu doing out here alone at this time of night, my child? It is hardly fit yu should be abroad with no protector but your dog. Is anything amiss at home? And why did yu not send rather than come?”

In a few words Bride told the story of her evening’s vigil and its result, the clergyman standing and looking down at her in the moonlight, and making patterns on the gravel with the point of his stick.

“The foolish lads! the foolish, wrong-headed lads! they will bring mischief on their heads one of these days, I take it. Well, well, well, it is perhaps less their fault than those who egg them on, and puzzle their heads by half-truths. Dear, dear, we must stop the mischief if we can. I wonder now where they are like to go first. To the Duke’s, think you, Lady Bride? ’Twas he who first brought in this new machinery, and there would be most glory in destroying his property, as they would think it, poor misguided souls!”

“Yes, but they know my father’s men have firearms, and that the dogs are left loose in the great yard where the machines are kept, and that there is always one man sleeping in the room by the great alarm-bell that was put up, who would rouse the whole castle if he heard any sound of attack.”

“If they know that, they are hardly likely to be daring enough to try to injure his Grace’s property,” remarked Mr. Tremodart thoughtfully. “But there are several more in their black books—Farmer Teazel, for instance—and that misguided young Tresithny, whom yu say is at the head of all this, knows the place well, and would be able to lead them to it.”

“Oh, I cannot believe it of Saul!” cried Bride, with a note of pain in her voice, “to turn into a leader of cowardly mobs, after the teaching and the training he has had! It doesn’t seem possible; yet I fear it is too true. And it is, I fear, the doing of my cousin Eustace. Oh, it seems too sad that we should first lead them on to riot, and then sit in judgment upon them for what we have taught them to do.”