Eustace Marchmont: A friend of the people

by Evelyn Everett-Green

It was a day late on in March—one of those days not unfrequent at that season, especially in the south and west—a day that seems filled with a promise of coming summer—a day in which all nature rejoices, which stirs the pulses and sets the blood coursing joyously, and fills the air with subtle promises of life and hope.

Bride’s face had been tranquil and happy as she rode up the heights towards Farmer Teazel’s farm, but it was sorrowful and troubled now as she returned, for she had failed in the mission on which she had been bound, and was experiencing one of those revulsions of feeling which often follow upon a period of solitary meditation and resolve, when the dreamer is brought face to face with the stern realities of human life and human nature.

Bride’s mission to the farm had been to plead with the farmer to offer a place in his service to Saul Tresithny, now just out of prison. His sentence had been up a few weeks earlier, but he had been ill of fever in the prison hospital when the period of release came, and had only that week been set at liberty.

All through the term of his imprisonment Bride’s thoughts and her prayers had been much exercised with him. The compassion she felt towards him partook of the nature of a great yearning tenderness, curious in a girl of her age and station, and she could not help believing that her feelings must be in some sort reflected in the minds of others. Her father she knew felt compassion for Saul, though he seldom spoke his name. Abner, as was natural, yearned over his grandson with a great love and tenderness, and both Mr. Tremodart and Mr. St. Aubyn were interested in him, and were willing to give him occupation in their service on his release, if he would accept it. But Saul’s known aversion to service in any of its branches was too well known in the place for any one to have much hope of his falling in with either of these offers. Abner shook his head whenever he was questioned on the subject, and said he feared Saul had not changed or softened with his incarceration. But the thought came to Bride that if his old master the farmer, with whom he had always got on so well, would offer him his old place at the farm, that offer would be accepted, and she had gone up to talk poor Saul’s case over with the kind-hearted yeoman, and get him to see the matter in the light that she herself viewed it.

But only disappointment and sorrowful surprise awaited her here. Farmer Teazel was a thoroughly kind-hearted man, and very fond indeed of the little Lady Bride, whom he had known ever since her infancy. He loved to see her riding up to his farm on the pony of his own breeding and choosing. He was all smiles and kindness till her subject was broached, and then she found that there was a limit to his benevolence, and to the influence she had over him—a barrier like a ledge of hard rock against which her arguments rebounded helplessly.

Saul Tresithny had sinned in a fashion the farmer could not forgive, and he had no pity upon misfortune deliberately run into by a man who has had every opportunity of knowing better. The fact that Saul had averted the attack upon his own homestead did not weigh with him here. He argued that Saul had had his revenge on his (the farmer’s) machines before this. The sturdy yeoman had his own grievance against Saul and his teaching, and was not disposed to be grateful for the other deliverance. No, Saul was a reprobate and a jail-bird, and he would have none of him. He had had enough of the mischief his tongue did before. It wasn’t in reason he should put up with it again. No, no; he was sorry to refuse Lady Bride anything; but ladies did not understand these things—did not understand the nature of great, ill-conditioned demi-gods (as he called it in his haste) such as Saul had become. It was no use talking to him of forgiveness and mercy. It would be time enough for that when the man had repented. He hadn’t ever learned that there was any call to forgive before the sinner was sorry. From all he heard, Saul wasn’t a bit humbled or penitent. It would only be the old trouble over again if he came back; the farmer would take care he had nothing more to do with such a fellow.

When Bride had exhausted her eloquence upon the farmer, and he had gone out to his work again, she tried what she could do with the daughter; but Genefer was even more impracticable than her father. Half ashamed of ever having given encouragement to Saul, who had behaved so cavalierly to her afterwards, she was bitterly set against him, and did not pick her words when launching forth about him. Moreover, Genefer was now openly betrothed in marriage to young Farmer Hewett, and was mortally afraid lest he should ever hear that she had permitted Saul to make love to her. She would not for anything in the world have had him again at the farm, and Bride was forced to ride away downcast and sorrowful, wondering in her heart how it was that people of the same class were so hard upon one another, and musing by degrees on the result to the community of a gradual change which should practically throw the governing power into the hands of the masses. Would that power be exercised on the side of mercy and love, or would it become only a new form of tyranny and hardness, far more difficult to modify and soften than any monarchical harshness of rule? It was a question she could not answer, but it helped to keep her face grave and her brow sad as she rode slowly down the hill, rode right down by the rough lane to the cottages upon the shore, where she had an errand of mercy to perform; and leaving her pony to nibble at the salt herbage at the base of the rocks, as he loved to do, she walked forward alone towards the margin of the sea, and came suddenly and quite unexpectedly face to face with Saul Tresithny, who was sitting in the hot sunshine on a rock, and gazing out over the sea, with those strange dark eyes of his that gleamed with sombre fire.

She knew that he was free, but thought him still at Pentreath, he having refused to come to his grandfather’s cottage on his release. The recognition was mutual, and the man instinctively, though sullenly, rose to his feet. Bride glanced up at the tall towering figure, which looked taller than before in the gauntness of recent illness. There was something rather terrible in the gloom of the cadaverous face. Saul had been stricken down with that terrible fever which was so common in prisons during the previous century, and went by the significant name of jail-fever, and which still lingered about those prisons which were overcrowded or unsanitary, and generally claimed for its victims those who were unused to confinement and a close atmosphere, and had led an open-air life hitherto.

The terrible sufferings Saul had endured during six months of imprisonment were too clearly written on his face to evade observation. What such incarceration meant to one of his nature and training can only be realised by those who have lived the life he had hitherto led, and have been out in the open air from dawn till dark every day of their lives, summer and winter, from boyhood. Bride shrank back as she saw his face, with a sense akin almost to terror; but then her sense of Divine compassion and tenderness for the wild impenitent prisoner came back with a bound, and she put out her little gloved hand and laid it on his arm.

“Saul, I have been so sorry for you, so very sorry,” she said, softly and gently. “But it is over now, and you have life still before you. You will learn to——”