Yes,
without words, for I was as certain as if he had told me that Eustace
had undergone some sorrow deeper than even loss of health, home, and
country. I felt it in the chastened and sobered tone in which he
talked to me of my cares, as if he likewise had crossed the stream of
tears that divides us from the sunshine of our lives.
He did not think what I had attempted in Anjou foolish and
chimerical--he could look at the matter with the eyes of an English
lord of the manor, accustomed not to view the peasant as a sponge to
be squeezed for the benefit of the master, but to regard the landlord
as accountable for the welfare, bodily and spiritual, of his people.
He thought I had done right, though it might be ignorantly and
imprudently in the present state of things; but his heart had
likewise burned within him at the oppression of the peasantry, and,
loyal cavalier as he was, he declared that he should have doubted on
which side to draw his sword had things thus in England. He had
striven to make my mother and Queen Henrietta understand the meaning
of what I had been doing, and he said the complaints sent up had
evidently been much exaggerated, and envenomed by spite and distrust
of me as a foreigner. He could well enter into my grief at the
desertion of my poor people, for how was it with those at Walwyn,
deprived of the family to whom they had been used to look, with many
widows and orphans made by the war, and the Church invaded by a loud-
voiced empty-headed fanatic, who had swept away all that had been
carefully preserved and honoured! Should he ever see the old home
more?
However, he took thought for my predicament.
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