Eustace Marchmont: A friend of the people

by Evelyn Everett-Green

“And why are you so keenly interested in the fate of this Saul Tresithny, Bride? What is he more to you than the cobbler, for instance, of whom Captain O’Shaughnessy spoke? Is it because he is a St. Bride man—Abner’s grandson? Poor old Abner!—it will be a terrible blow to him!”

“I think it will kill him if Saul is condemned to death,” said the girl, with shining eyes. “Yes, papa, it is all that—I have known Saul ever since I can remember anything—ever since I was a tiny child, and he used to collect shells and seaweed for me, and make me boats to sail. But it is not that quite—it is not only that he belongs to our village, and that he is Abner’s grandson. That would always make me interested in him, and dreadfully sorry if he got into trouble. But there is another and a much greater reason than that. Oh, papa! surely you know what it is!”

He was still looking at her earnestly. Little as Bride knew it, there was at this moment in her face a look of her mother which the Duke had never observed there before; her face was pale from her night’s vigil, and from the stress of her emotion. Her dark eyes were full of a liquid light, reminding him painfully of the dying brightness of his wife’s eyes as she gave him her last solemn charge. Even the note of appeal in the girl’s voice had something of the mother’s sweetness and softness. Bride had been growing increasingly like her mother during the past months—many people had observed it; but her father had never noticed it till now. Now the likeness struck him with a curious force, and Bride noted that he seemed arrested by her words as had seldom been the case before. But he made no verbal response, and she suddenly rose and came over to him and knelt down at his feet, clasping her hands upon the arm of his chair, and turning her sweet, quivering, earnest face up towards him. Probably she would never have ventured upon this demonstration before her unapproachable father, had it not been that her sensitive spirit had received some instinctive consciousness of sympathy new between him and herself. He laid his hand now upon her clasped fingers, and the touch sent a quick thrill through her.

“Papa, Saul must not die!” she said, with intense earnestness of resolve. “He must not die a traitor’s death, for the things he has done are not prompted by his own imaginings. The words he has spoken are not his own. 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.”

“Ah! truly he does! Oh, papa, I fear me the harvest Eustace will have to reap will be a very bitter one; but, indeed, indeed Saul must not die for Eustace’s fault. Eustace is our kinsman. He was here as our guest. We cannot altogether shirk the responsibility of his deeds. Papa, you will not let Saul die for what is the folly and sin of Eustace. Ah! no. You will save him, I know. You will save him, for the honour of the name of Marchmont!”

“What can I do. Bride? I have no power. I am not one of the magistrates.”

“You are not a magistrate, but you have more power than any one in the county,” answered Bride, with a smile so like her mother’s, that the heart of the old man contracted first with pain, and then swelled with a sense of new happiness. “Eustace would perhaps call it an abuse, that one man should have so much power in his hands just because he had wealth and lands; but I do not think that. I hold that if he uses his power on behalf of true justice and true mercy, and in the cause of Christ, it can be a power of great good to be used for the glory of God and the blessing of man. You will use your power so, dearest father, will you not? Saul would have striven to do you hurt last night, not from any personal enmity, but because he has been wrongly taught by our own kinsman. You will go to-day and plead for him before his accusers, and show him that the rich do not hate and oppress the poor, that the great ones of the world can feel compassion and tenderness for those who are deceived and led away, and that in them, and not in those who raise the cry of hatred and bitterness, their friends are to be found.”

The Duke was silent for several minutes, and Bride did not disturb him by so much as a word. He had laid his hand upon her head, and was looking into her eyes with a glance she could not understand. In very truth he was recalling the parting scene with his wife, the last charge she had given him before the hand of death had been laid upon those lips. It seemed to him as if now, all these months later, he was listening to the echo of those words; and a strange wave of tenderness swept over him, softening the hard lines of his face, and bringing into it something which Bride had scarcely seen there before.