SIR ROLAND MENTEITH was slightly known to Eustace, who had spent much time in the lobbies of the House of Commons, and was personally known to the majority of its members, by sight if not by name. He was a fine-looking man of some five-and-thirty summers, and although a Tory by descent and tradition, was by no means an enemy of such moderate measures of parliamentary reform as were at present under discussion. He had voted for the reading of the recent bill, and was by no means prepared to pledge himself to his constituency as its enemy. There were many amongst his enemies who said he had no right, with the views he held, to call himself a Tory; but he would defend himself by the argument that Tories would soon cease to exist if they never moved one step forward with the times they lived in. A system originally sound and good could well become corrupt and bad under a changed condition of affairs, and if Tories were pledged to resist any sort of change, bad or good—well, they at once placed themselves in a false position, and made their own extinction only a matter of time. He maintained that the true Tory aimed always for the best and soundest policy, the policy that would make England respected abroad and prosperous at home. Tearing down and splitting up were actions bad and degrading to a government, but gradual change, especially of a constructive character, was essential to the development of the national life. So he argued, and Eustace cordially agreed, whilst the old Duke listened with his slight peculiar smile, and said little, but kept true to the point in the little he did say. Sir Roland had come over to the castle in great excitement only one day following the arrival of Eustace there, and he had easily been persuaded to remain on as a guest whilst these important and stirring themes were under discussion. He was very well pleased to find in young Marchmont so moderate and temperate a reformer. Eustace had certainly learnt more moderation of thought during the past year, and was more cautious both in what he advocated and what he approved. He had had several experiences of a kind likely to awaken in him some distrust of the methods which once had seemed entirely right and praiseworthy; and he began to have an inkling that there was something wanting in his system before it could be called in any way perfect. The passions of the people could easily be stirred; but there was no power he knew of as yet strong enough to hold them in a just and proper repression. It was a hateful thing to him to be accused (as he knew he was in many quarters) of being one of those demagogues bent on rousing all that was worst and most cruel and wild in the natures over which he acquired influence. Sir Roland, after one of his many morning rides into Pentreath, told him flatly that he had the credit of being at the bottom of those riots which had caused such loss and destruction of property there in the autumn, and it was soon ascertained that the feeling there was so strongly against him that it would be hopeless for him to stand as a candidate on either one side or the other.
This piece of intelligence came as rather a severe shock to him. After the interview with the Duke on the day of his arrival, he had thought more and more of the suggestion that he should contest the seat at Pentreath, sparing Sir Roland the cost and the worry. His own income was large, and could well stand the strain, and the Duke was a man of known wealth and liberality. Eustace, too, was indulging in halcyon dreams of contesting the seat with rigid purity of method, hoping even to shame his adversary into better ways by his own absolute probity. Sir Roland, although fond of his constituents, and rather fond of the excitement and bustle of an election and the sound of his own clever speeches on the hustings, was by no means averse to be spared the trouble and expense for once, stepping quietly into the Duke’s pocket borough, and throwing in his influence for young Marchmont, with whom upon the essential matter of the coming strife he agreed. Eustace was feeling something of the keen exhilaration of the coming strife, and was enjoying the release from the anomalous position he would have occupied (at least in the eyes of Bride) as his kinsman’s nominee, when this fresh blow was dealt to his pride and his hopes. Sir Roland had heard enough to be very certain that the very name of Eustace Marchmont would arouse an uproar of fury amongst the class who had the voting power; also, there could be no manner of doubt that his appearance as a candidate would provoke fresh riots of a very serious nature. Investigation of these rumours only confirmed them. Eustace Marchmont’s name had been on the lips of all the rioters who made havoc of the town during the recent outbreak. Their young leader, Saul Tresithny, had quoted him as his authority for almost every wild argument by which he had stirred the people to madness, and roused them to any act of violence, in order to overthrow, or at least be revenged upon, their tyrants and foes. If he were to appear on the hustings, he would be at once the idol of the lawless (and voteless) mob; but the object of reprobation, if not of execration, to all the sober-minded citizens, whatever might be their political views. Had Eustace come amongst them as a stranger with the Penarvon and Menteith interest at his back, he might have carried all before him, for there was no popular man in the place likely to oppose him under those conditions; but branded as he now was by the names of Radical and revolutionary, all men looked askance at him, and it was with a keen sense of disappointment, not to say humiliation, that he had to abandon the idea of contesting the seat, and revert to his original plan of accepting his kinsman’s nomination.
“I suppose you think that my sin has found me out,” he said rather bitterly to Bride, when this unpalatable news had become verified as actual fact. “I suppose you believe that I went about the country last year inciting men to arson and pillage and every sort of brutality. You know that is what is said of me by the respectable people of Pentreath, that I provoked and incited riot, and took very good care to be out of the way when it took place, that others might bear the punishment.”
“It is cruel to say such things of you,” answered Bride, with a quiet indignation which was very grateful to him. “I know they are not true, and I almost think the people who say them know that there is only a very small substratum of truth in them. But, Eustace,” and she looked up at him with one of her rare smiles, “do you not think you sometimes say things almost as untrue on the other side? Do you not sometimes make out men in high places to be little else than monsters, when all the time they are almost as helpless, and perhaps even less to blame for the effects of a system, than you for those riots at Pentreath, which above all things you disapprove and deprecate?”
“I know what you mean,” he said; “I think we all go too far in our attack and defence. But those men do uphold a system of tyranny and iniquity, even if they are not responsible for it, whilst I never uphold violence and lawlessness. I hate and abominate it with my whole heart.”
“I know you do; but you will not get ignorant men to believe it, when you teach them how bad the laws are. Their idea of mending the existing state of things is to rebel against it by force.”
“Yes; and great present mischief is the result; but, Bride, if all men held your doctrine of patience and submission, no reformation or reform, no redress of abuses, no respite from tyranny and oppression, would ever have been effected in the world’s history. When you have such imperfect material to deal with, imperfections are everywhere. Good is always mixed with evil, and will be to the end of the chapter.”
“Yes; until the Kingdom,” answered Bride sadly, yet with a sudden lighting of the eyes. “Yes, Eustace, I know that so long as human nature is what it is, nothing can be done without evil creeping in. But I still think that if men would be content to leave results, and simply strive themselves after the best and highest good, and try and teach the ignorant and the degraded the one true and only way of raising themselves—if men would look to God for His teaching—from the highest to the lowest—trying in all things to do not their will but His—then I think the world would gradually raise itself without these cruel scenes of strife and bloodshed, without these heart-burnings and miserable factions. ‘Thy kingdom come!’ It is a prayer always on our lips; but do men try to apply the laws of God’s kingdom to this earth which He has made and they have marred?”
“I think that is about the last thing men of the present day think of,” answered Eustace, with a curious sidelong look at the earnest face beside him. “They want something more practical to go by. When it comes to be a question what God wills, every divine and every school of theology and philosophy has a different answer to give. Such an appeal as that would only make confusion worse confounded.”
A very wistful, sorrowful look crept into the fair young face.
“I was not thinking of schools of theology or philosophy,” she answered very quietly, “I was thinking of God Himself as revealed in His Incarnate Son; but I do not think we understand each other when we speak of that, Eustace.”
In very truth he did not understand her. Did she seriously believe that the affairs of the world could be directed by a Divine voice straight from heaven? It almost appeared sometimes as though she did, and yet in most matters Lady Bride, mystic and dreamer though she was, was not lacking in quiet common-sense and a fair amount of experience of such life as she had seen.
For a moment he stood silent beside her—they were on the terrace, looking down at the sparkling sea below. Then he roused himself, and changed the subject suddenly.
“Shall we go down to the shore and see Saul Tresithny? I have not succeeded in catching him yet. I do not think he tries to avoid me. Your gardener says he is much attached to me; but he has always been out with the boats. There seems plenty of fishing just now. I hope the poor fellow is not suffering from lack of employment.”
“I think not. There is always plenty of work with the boats in the summer months. It is the winter that is so hard for our people, except when they take to smuggling, as too many do. I am afraid that is what Saul will do when fishing gets slack. He always had a leaning towards any sort of adventure and danger. Abner managed to keep him away from the fishing-village as a lad, and when he went to the farm he had other work, and was too far off; but I am afraid how it will be with him now. I had hoped he would go to Mr. St. Aubyn and take care of his garden and horse, but he will not. Nobody can do anything with him—poor Saul!”
“I will see what I can do,” said Eustace, with hopeful confidence. “He is too good to turn into a mere fisherman and smuggler. There are traits of great promise in him. I suppose birth and blood does tell, and there is reason to believe that his father was a man of birth, I hear, although he may have been a villain. Certainly the man is very different from his fellows. I wonder whether he would come to London as my servant. I could do very well with another groom, and I know he has a great knack with horses. He might be very useful.”
“I wish he would,” said Bride earnestly. “It might be a turning-point in his life to get away from old associates and old ideas.”
They were by this time walking down towards the shore by the little ridge-like path before described. Eustace was behind, and Bride in front, so that she could not see the sudden light which leaped into his eyes; but she heard something new in the tone of his voice as he said—
“Then you do not hold that I have been the ruin of Saul—body and soul, as so many do? You do not think that to take him away with me would be but to consummate that ruin?”
“No, indeed I do not,” answered Bride gently. “I think that the people who say such things do not understand you, Eustace. I think you might perhaps do poor Saul more good than anybody just now, because I think he will listen to you, and he will listen to no one else. I should like to think of him going away with you. If you cannot teach him all he will have to learn before he can be a truly happy man, you can teach him a great deal that he will be better for the knowing; and perhaps some day, when the right time has come, he will be ready to be taught the rest.”
“Then you do not call me a demagogue, an infidel—a man dangerous to the whole community, and to the world at large?” questioned Eustace, with the insistance of one whose heart has been deeply wounded by accusations hurled against him—all the more deeply from the consciousness that the censure has not been wholly undeserved.
“No,” answered Bride softly, “I do not call you any of those names—not even in my thoughts. I know you have not been very wise; I think you know that yourself, and will learn wisdom for the future. But I know that you believed yourself right in what you said and did, and were generous and disinterested in your teaching. About your faith I know very little. I think you know very little yourself; but we can leave that in God’s hands. It does not come by man, or through man, but by the will of God. I think it is His will, Eustace, to draw you to Himself one day; but that day must come in His good time. I think we sometimes make a great mistake in striving to urge and drive those whom we love. Waiting is hard, and sometimes it seems very, very long. But things are so different with God—His patience as well as His love are so much greater than ours. And we can always pray—that helps the time of waiting best.”
Eustace was intensely thrilled by these low-spoken words, which he only just caught through the plash of the waves beneath. That magnetic influence which Bride always exercised upon him was almost overpoweringly strong at that moment. He could almost have fallen at her feet in adoration. After the good-natured strictures of Sir Roland, the slight grim reproofs of the Duke, and his knowledge of the cutting criticisms and violent abuse levelled at him by the world of Pentreath, these words of Bride’s fell like balm upon his spirit. He felt lifted into a different atmosphere, and the question could not but present itself to him—
“If faith and those unseen things in which that pure girl believes, which are to her the greatest realities of life, are nothing but a myth, a figment of the imagination, what gives them such power over a nature like mine? Why do I thrill at the thought of them? Why do I see glimpses, as through a rifted cloud, of a glory, a beauty, a peace beyond anything I have ever conceived? Why, even by the teachings of my own philosophy, the fact of this stirring of spirit indicates a reality of some sort. And is there, after all, nothing higher than philosophy? Is there no object of objective worship? Is there, after all, a God?”
Little did Bride suspect the quick stirrings of spirit her words had evoked. She walked on, with her sweet face set in earnest lines, thinking of Saul and his grandfather’s ceaseless prayers on his behalf, praying herself for him in a half-unconscious fashion, as was her habit when thoughts of the erring one presented themselves. Her mind was more with him just at that moment than with the kinsman behind her, with whom, however, thoughts of Saul were always more or less mixed up; therefore the question, when it came, did not in any wise startle her.
“Bride, do you mean that you ever pray for me?”
“Yes, Eustace. I always pray for those whom I love, and for those who seem to need my prayers.”
He was silent for several minutes, and then his thoughts surging back to a question that had been on the tip of his tongue before, he asked, “Bride, you said I could not teach Saul to be a truly happy man. Do you think that I am not a happy man myself?”
“Not a truly happy one,” she answered, with quiet certainty. “I believe you are happy in one way—in the world’s way. But that is not what I mean by true happiness. There is another happiness I hope you will learn some day—I think you will; and then you will understand. I do not think you can understand yet.”
He was not sure that he could not. He remembered the Duchess in former years; he had Bride before his eyes now. Even old Abner, in the midst of all his trouble, showed a substratum of unchanging serenity which nothing seemed able to shake. He believed he apprehended without understanding what manner of thing this happiness was—a thing altogether different from and independent of the fluctuations of enjoyment and pleasure which went by the name of happiness in his world. Eustace was receiving impressions just now with a force and a rapidity that was startling to him. Every day something seemed added to his list of experiences, and not the least was the peculiar wave of emotion that swept over him now.
Yet Bride noticed nothing different in his manner as they reached the beach, and were able to walk on side by side. He was a little absent and thoughtful perhaps, as was natural with the interview just hanging over him; and it soon appeared that their journey was not in vain, for the tall form of Saul was seen seated upon a rock not far away, and Bride said softly to Eustace, “There he is. I think you had better go to him alone. I will go and see some of the poor people and join you later on.”
Eustace was grateful to her for this suggestion. Now that he was almost face to face with his quondam pupil, he felt that he would rather be alone. He did not know in what mood Saul would meet him, and it was better perhaps that they should be without the fetter which the presence of Bride must necessarily impose.
Without pausing to rehearse any speech, Eustace walked straight up to the lonely figure on the rock, and holding out his hand in greeting (a demonstration very rare in those days between men of such different stations), said, with warm feeling, “Tresithny, you have suffered in what you took to be the cause of the people. That must make a fresh bond between us, whatever else we may have to say upon the subject.”
Saul started at the sound of the familiar, unexpected voice (the plash of the waves had drowned approaching footsteps); he started again at sight of the outstretched hand; but after a moment of visible hesitation, he took it in his grasp and wrung it till Eustace could have winced. The sombre face was working strangely. The mask of stolid indifference and contempt had fallen from it. There was a new light in the hollow eyes as they met the searching gaze of Eustace’s, and the first words came out with something of a gasp.
“Then you have come at last, sir, and you have not changed!”
“Why should I change?” asked Eustace, with a smile, wonderfully relieved to find that this unapproachable man, who was puzzling all the world besides, did not turn a deaf ear upon him. Shocked as he was at the change he saw in the outward aspect of Saul, he saw that it was the same Saul as of old, a man full of strength and fight—a tool that might be dangerous to work with, or of inestimable value, according as it could be guided and tempered. A sense of true admiration and fellowship sprang up within him towards this stern-faced son of toil, with his sorrowful story and suffering face.
“Why should I change?” he asked; and then Saul’s pent-up feeling burst out.
Every one had changed—the whole world—the very cause itself. All had left him in his hour of need—all had turned upon him and betrayed and deserted him. Months of solitary brooding, the delirium of fever, the overwrought nervous condition into which imprisonment had driven him, had all combined to produce in Saul a distorted image of life, of the world, and of every single being in it. Hitherto he had locked these feelings in his own heart; but now, before Eustace, the one man who had proffered him friendship in the midst of his trouble, the friendship of comrade to comrade, man to man, it all came pouring out in one great flood of impassioned eloquence and imprecation, terrible sometimes to listen to. It was not easy at times even to follow his rapid speech, which alternated between the roughest vernacular and the purest English he had ever spoken, rehearsed a hundred times in his prison-house, as he had prepared the speeches which were to raise all Devon and Cornwall to arms, if need be, against the monstrous class tyranny under which the country lay groaning. Eustace let him have his fling, never stopping him by argument or opposition, leading him on by a sympathetic word now and again to outpour everything that was in his heart without fear. He knew by instinct what the relief would be, how much good it would do for the outlet to be found at length; and though unable to repress a sense of shuddering loathing at some of the words of his companion, he could well excuse them in the thought of his great sufferings and state of mental distraction, and was very hopeful by slow degrees of winning him back to a better and more reasonable frame of mind.
It was much to have gained his confidence—much that Saul was able to depend on the sympathy of his former master, and was not afraid of baring his inmost soul before him. Eustace was seized sometimes with a sense of something like dismay to find how absolutely Saul believed he would echo even the most blasphemous of his thoughts, how securely he reckoned upon finding in his leader the same absolute denial of all revealed religion—religion which he himself fiercely decried and ridiculed, as part and parcel of a corrupt system soon to be exploded. Much that the young man thus hotly declaimed against—much of his wild and random vituperation must have been learned from others. Eustace could honestly affirm he had never allowed such expressions to pass his lips; but here and there a phrase of his own would mingle with the wilder words of Saul, and half startle Eustace by the method of its application. Also he could not help recognising, as this man poured out his soul before him by the shore that day, that his own standpoint had very slightly and insensibly changed from those days, more than a year back now, when he had first sought to awaken in Saul a response to his own ardent imaginings. What the change was he could scarcely define, but he was aware that arguments and assertions which would then have passed by as only slight exaggerations of a legitimate truth, now came to him with something of a shock, bringing a realisation of some unheeded change or development in himself which had silently leavened during the past months, till it had attained a proportion he never suspected.
Rousing himself with a start from the train of thought thus suggested, he tried to bring his companion back to the world of real things, and to leave these idle denunciations and invectives alone for the present. When Saul had about tired himself with his own impetuosity, and had kept silence for a few moments, Eustace spoke a few well-chosen words of sympathy, and gradually bringing round the subject of the forthcoming election, he explained to the ex-prisoner what had been going on in the world during his incarceration, and what bright hopes were now entertained in this country of better days in store for it, when a strong Government, pledged to redress the gravest of political abuses, should be in power.
Saul was not entirely ignorant of what had passed, but had very distorted ideas as to the amount and character of the opposition offered to the bill and the prospects of its speedy success. He listened eagerly to what Eustace told him, and his remarks and questions again struck his master as showing a quickness of insight and a power of appreciation most remarkable in one of his class. He was a more excitable, a more sombre, a more embittered man than he had been a year before. His class hatred had sunk deeper into his soul, and become a more integral part of his nature. Eustace recognised how the humiliation, if not the destruction, of the moneyed classes was to him almost more of an object than the redress of the grievances of the poor. The two were linked together in his mind, it was true; but it was easy to see which of them held the foremost place. Eustace realised, as perhaps he had never done so well before, the temper of the French revolutionaries of forty years back. He could well picture Saul in their midst, and think with a shudder of the deeds he would commit at the head of a furious mob, wrought up to a pitch of ungovernable fury by the rude eloquence of such a leader. Perhaps he realised, too, what might come to England if her sons were stirred up to a like madness, instead of being worked upon by gentler methods. He well knew that there had been moments when his own country had been on the brink of revolution, and that such moments might even come again. Surely it was needful for the men who stood in the forefront of the van of reform to walk warily. They had an immense power behind them; but it was, as Abner had said, the power of an explosive whose properties and whose energies were but imperfectly understood. Reform may be the best hindrance to revolution, but it may also incite the very danger it strives to avert. Eustace had been told this a hundred times before, but he had never been so convinced of the truth of the warning as he was whilst walking on the shore that day in the company of Saul.
He suggested taking him away from St. Bride, and showing him the other side of life in the great centres of the world; but Saul, though visibly attracted by the thought of continuing near to Eustace, for whom his love and admiration were most loyal, gave no decided answer. He shrank from the confinement even of freedom in a great city, shrank from even such slight bondage as service under such a master as this would entail. Moreover, there was no need for a speedy decision. Eustace would be some weeks at the castle; he would probably remain there till the result of the election was known. It would be time enough to settle then what should be done. For the present, Saul would remain unfettered and untrammelled.
“For I must be in Pentreath if there is to be an election,” he said, the light of battle leaping into his eyes. He remembered elections in past times, and the attendant excitement and fighting and fun, as in those days it seemed to him. He was no politician then, and had only the vaguest notion as to what it was all about; but he was always foremost in the crowd about the hustings, cheering, howling, flinging missiles, according to the spirit of the moment and the wave of public opinion, which would ebb and rise and change a dozen different times in as many hours. He had always been instinctively the enemy of the Tory and the supporter of the Whig candidate, because he had always taken on every matter the contrary opinion of the Castle—almost as a matter of religion. Otherwise he could not be said to have had an opinion heretofore in such things. But the excitement, the indiscriminate treating, the rowdyism of the whole place, and the fights and scrimmages that were constantly arising, were like the elixir of life to the ardent temperament of one who was forced by circumstances into a life of monotonous toil. He always obtained a few days’ holiday on such occasions, and spent them in a fashion dear to his heart. Now he looked forward to a longer spell of excitement, and to struggles of a very different kind. Then it had all been fun, now it would be stern earnest with him. There was a fierce light of battle in his eyes. The hope sprang up again in his heart of striking a blow for the cause. Eustace saw the look, heard the half hissed words of joy and anticipation, and smilingly laid a hand on the young fisherman’s arm.
“Yes, I think you will do well to be there. You are one of those who may do us good, and help on the cause of right and liberty; but not by violence, Saul—always remember that. Violence is not our friend, but our most deadly foe. It puts a sword in the hands of our enemies to slay us withal. There must be no unseemly violence at the Pentreath election—remember that. We must give our opponents no reason to say that the cause of reform is advocated by cowardly and unworthy means. Leave all that sort of thing to our foes. Let them get up as many riots as they please. Our part is to be just and wise and patient, secure in the righteousness and justice of our object. You will find we shall come out in a far stronger position by remembering this than if we organise disturbances and lead angry mobs to deeds of reckless lawlessness.”
Saul made no response; Eustace was not even sure that he heard. His eyes were flashing, his nostrils working; he clenched and unclenched his hand in a fashion indicative of strong excitement.
Eustace judged it wiser to say no more for the present. There would be plenty of time before the elections came off to gain an increasing ascendency over this wild spirit. His first beginning had been by no means bad.
Yet Eustace, as he walked homewards silently with Bride, could hardly help smiling at the thought of the part he should be forced to play with Saul. That there were stirring days coming upon the country he could not doubt, and he meant to take his part in them with a will; but he realised that, with Saul watching his every movement, and pledged to follow him to the utmost limit to which his own arguments could be pushed, he should be forced to weigh his words, and direct his actions with a greater prudence end moderation than he had originally purposed. Perhaps it might be well for him to have this reminder well before his eyes, but he could not but smile at the peculiar result which had been brought about by his own endeavour to work some sort of small agitation amongst the people at St. Bride’s, St. Erme, and Penarvon.