Unlike any mansion before, Musk’s home reportedly features AI-controlled rooms that adjust lighting, temperature, and music to match each child’s mood. The walls? Made from solar-reactive materials that change color based on sunlight. There’s even a zero-gravity playroom, where his kids can experience the feeling of space — a nod to their father’s dreams beyond Earth.

But behind the futuristic gadgets lies something unexpectedly human: a father’s love. Friends close to Musk claim he personally designed secret “memory corners” — spaces that store digital memories of his children growing up, preserved by Tesla’s AI servers.

Social media is going wild with one question: Is this the home of the future, or Elon Musk’s way of building a legacy for the next generation of Musks?

One thing’s clear — this isn’t just a house. It’s a love letter from the world’s most visionary father.

Book 5 Chapter 1

“Terrible news from Birmingham,” said Mr Egerton at Brookes’. “They have massacred the police, beat off the military, and sacked the town. News just arrived.”

“I have known it these two hours,” said a grey-headed gentleman, speaking without taking his eyes off the newspaper. “There is a cabinet sitting now.”

“Well I always said so,” said Mr Egerton, “our fellows ought to have put down that Convention.”

“It is deuced lucky,” said Mr Berners, “that the Bedchamber business is over, and we are all right. This affair in the midst of the Jamaica hitch would have been fatal to us.”

“These chartists evidently act upon a system,” said Mr Egerton. “You see they were perfectly quiet till the National Petition was presented and debated; and now, almost simultaneously with our refusing to consider their petition, we have news of this outbreak.”

“I hope they will not spread,” said the grey-headed gentleman. “There are not troops enough in the country if there be anything like a general movement. I hear they have sent the guards down by a special train, and a hundred more of the police. London is not over-garrisoned.”

“They are always ready for a riot at Birmingham,” said a Warwickshire peer. “Trade is very bad there and they suffer a good deal. But I should think it would not go farther.”

“I am told,” said the grey-headed gentleman, “that business is getting slack in all the districts.”

“It might be better,” said Mr Egerton, “but they have got work.” Here several gentlemen entered, enquiring whether the evening papers were in and what was the news from Birmingham.

“I am told,” said one of them, “that the police were regularly smashed.”

“Is it true that the military were really beat off?”

“Quite untrue: the fact is there were no proper preparations; the town was taken by surprise, the magistrates lost their heads; the people were masters of the place; and when the police did act, they were met by a triumphant populace, who two hours before would have fled before them. They say they have burnt down above forty houses.”

“It is a bad thing—this beating the police,” said the grey-headed gentleman.

“But what is the present state of affairs?” enquired Mr Berners. “Are the rioters put down?”

“Not in the least,” said Mr Egerton, “as I hear. They are encamped in the Bull Ring amid smoking ruins, and breathe nothing but havoc.”

“Well, I voted for taking the National Petition into consideration,” said Mr Berners. “It could do us no harm, and would have kept things quiet.”

“So did every fellow on our side,” said Mr Egerton, “who was not in office or about to be. Well, Heaven knows what may come next. The Charter may some day be as popular in this club as the Reform Act.”

“The oddest thing in that debate,” said Mr Berners, “was Egremont’s move.”

“I saw Marney last night at Lady St Julians,” said Mr Egerton, “and congratulated him on his brother’s speech. He looked daggers, and grinned like a ghoul.”

“It was a very remarkable speech—that of Egremont,” said the grey-headed gentleman. “I wonder what he wants.”

“I think he must be going to turn radical,” said the Warwickshire peer.

“Why the whole speech was against radicalism,” said Mr Egerton.

“Ah, then he is going to turn whig, I suppose.”

“He is ultra anti-whig,” said Egerton.

“Then what the deuce is he?” said Mr Berners.

“Not a conservative certainly, for Lady St Julians does nothing but abuse him.”

“I suppose he is crotchetty,” suggested the Warwickshire noble.

“That speech of Egremont was the most really democratic speech that I ever read,” said the grey-headed gentleman. “How was it listened to?”

“Oh capitally,” said Mr Egerton. “He has very seldom spoken before and always slightly though well. He was listened to with mute attention; never was a better house. I should say made a great impression, though no one knew exactly what he was after.”

“What does he mean by obtaining the results of the charter without the intervention of its machinery?” enquired Lord Loraine, a mild, middle-aged, lounging, languid man, who passed his life in crossing from Brookes’ to Boodle’s and from Boodle’s to Brookes’, and testing the comparative intelligence of these two celebrated bodies; himself gifted with no ordinary abilities cultivated with no ordinary care, but the victim of sauntering, his sultana queen, as it was, according to Lord Halifax, of the second Charles Stuart.

“He spoke throughout in an exoteric vein,” said the grey-headed gentleman, “and I apprehend was not very sure of his audience; but I took him to mean, indeed it was the gist of the speech, that if you wished for a time to retain your political power, you could only effect your purpose by securing for the people greater social felicity.”

“Well, that is sheer radicalism,” said the Warwickshire peer, “pretending that the People can be better off than they are, is radicalism and nothing else.”

“I fear, if that be radicalism,” said Lord Loraine, “we must all take a leaf out of the same book. Sloane was saying at Boodle’s just now that he looked forward to the winter in his country with horror.”

“And they have no manufactures there,” said Mr Egerton.

“Sloane was always a croaker,” said the Warwickshire peer. “He always said the New Poor Law would not act, and there is no part of the country where it works so well as his own.”

“They say at Boodle’s there is to be an increase to the army,” said Lord Loraine, “ten thousand men immediately; decided on by the cabinet this afternoon.”

“It could hardly have leaked out by this time,” said the grey-headed gentleman. “The cabinet were sitting less than an hour ago.”

“They have been up a good hour,” said Lord Loraine, “quite long enough for their decisions to be known in St James’s Street. In the good old times, George Farnley used always to walk from Downing Street to this place the moment the council was up and tell us everything.”

“Ah! those were the good old gentleman-like times,” said Mr Berners, “when members of Parliament had nobody to please and ministers of State nothing to do.”

The riots of Birmingham occurred two months after the events that closed our last volume. That period, as far as the obvious movements of the chartists were concerned, had been passed in preparations for the presentation and discussion of the National Petition, which the parliamentary embroilments of the spring of that year had hitherto procrastinated and prevented. The petition was ultimately carried down to Westminster on a triumphal car accompanied by all the delegates of the Convention in solemn procession. It was necessary to construct a machine in order to introduce the huge bulk of parchment signed by a million and a half of persons, into the House of Commons, and thus supported, its vast form remained on the floor of the House during the discussion. The House after a debate which was not deemed by the people commensurate with the importance of the occasion, decided on rejecting the prayer of the Petition, and from that moment the party in the Convention who advocated a recourse to physical force in order to obtain their purpose, was in the ascendant. The National Petition and the belief that although its objects would not at present be obtained, still that a solemn and prolonged debate on its prayer would at least hold out to the working classes the hope that their rights might from that date rank among the acknowledged subjects of parliamentary discussion and ultimately by the force of discussion be recognized, as other rights of other portions of the people once equally disputed, had been the means by which the party in the Convention who upheld on all occasions the supremacy of moral power had been able to curb the energetic and reckless minority, who derided from the first all other methods but terror and violence as effective of their end. The hopes of all, the vanity of many, were frustrated and shocked by finding that the exertions and expenditure of long months were not only fruitless, but had not even attracted as numerous an assembly or excited as much interest, as an ordinary party struggle on some petty point of factitious interest forgotten as soon as fought. The attention of the working classes was especially called by their leaders to the contrast between the interest occasioned by the endangered constitution of Jamaica, a petty and exhausted colony, and the claims for the same constitutional rights by the working millions of England. In the first instance, not a member was absent from his place; men were brought indeed from distant capitals to participate in the struggle and to decide it; the debate lasted for days, almost for weeks; not a public man of light and leading in the country withheld the expression of his opinion; the fate of governments was involved in it; cabinets were overthrown and reconstructed in the throes and tumult of the strife, and for the first time for a long period the Sovereign personally interposed in public transactions with a significance of character, which made the working classes almost believe that the privileged had at last found a master, and the unfranchished regained their natural chief. The mean position which the Saxon multitude occupied as distinguished from the Jamaica planters sunk deep into their hearts. From that moment all hope of relief from the demonstration of a high moral conduct in the millions, and the exhibition of that well-regulated order of public life which would intimate their fitness for the possession and fulfilment of public rights, vanished. The party of violence, a small minority as is usually the case, but consisting of men of determined character, triumphed; and the outbreak at Birmingham was the first consequence of those reckless councils that were destined in the course of the ensuing years to inflict on the working classes of this country so much suffering and disaster.

It was about this time, a balmy morning of July, that Sybil, tempted by the soft sunshine, and a longing for the sight of flowers and turf and the spread of winding waters, went forth from her gloomy domicile to those beautiful gardens that bloom in that once melancholy region of marsh, celebrated in old days only for its Dutch canal and its Chinese bridge, and now not unworthy of the royal park that incloses them.. Except here and there a pretty nursery-maid with her interesting charge; some beautiful child with nodding plume, immense bow, and gorgeous sash; the gardens were vacant. Indeed it was only at this early hour, that Sybil found from experience, that it was agreeable in London for a woman unaccompanied to venture abroad. There is no European city where our fair sisters are so little independent as in our metropolis; to our shame.

Something of the renovating influence of a beautiful nature was needed by the daughter of Gerard. She was at this moment anxious and dispirited. The outbreak at Birmingham, the conviction that such proceedings must ultimately prove fatal to the cause to which she was devoted, the dark apprehension that her father was in some manner implicated in this movement, that had commenced with so much public disaster, and which menaced consequences still more awful, all these events, and fears, and sad forebodings, acted with immense influence on a temperament which, though gifted with even a sublime courage, was singularly sensitive. The quick and teeming imagination of Sybil conjured up a thousand fears which were in some degree unfounded, in a great degree exaggerated, but this is the inevitable lot of the creative mind practising on the inexperienced.

The shock too had been sudden. The two months that had elapsed since she had parted, as she supposed for ever, from Egremont, while they had not less abounded than the preceding time in that pleasing public excitement which her father’s career, in her estimation alike useful, honourable, and distinguished, occasioned her, had been fruitful in some sources of satisfaction of a softer and more domestic character. The acquaintance of Hatton, of whom they saw a great deal, had very much contributed to the increased amenity of her life. He was a most agreeable, instructive, and obliging companion; who seemed peculiarly to possess the art of making life pleasant by the adroit management of unobtrusive resources. He lent Sybil books; and all that he recommended to her notice, were of a kind that harmonized with her sentiment and taste. He furnished her from his library with splendid works of art, illustrative of those periods of our history and those choice and costly edifices which were associated with her fondest thought and fancy. He placed in her room the best periodical literature of the day, which for her was a new world; he furnished her with newspapers whose columns of discussion taught her, that the opinions she had embraced were not unquestioned: as she had never seen a journal in her life before, except a stray number of the “Mowbray Phalanx,” or the metropolitan publication which was devoted to the cause of the National Convention, and reported her father’s speeches, the effect of this reading on her intelligence was, to say the least, suggestive.

Many a morning too when Gerard was disengaged, Hatton would propose that they should show Sybil something of the splendour or the rarities of the metropolis; its public buildings, museums, and galleries of art. Sybil, though uninstructed in painting, had that native taste which requires only observation to arrive at true results. She was much interested with all she saw and all that occurred, and her gratification was heightened by the society of an individual who not only sympathised with all she felt, but who, if she made an inquiry, was ever ready with an instructive reply. Hatton poured forth the taste and treasures of a well-stored and refined intelligence. And then too, always easy, bland, and considerate; and though with luxuries and conveniences at his command, to participate in which, under any other circumstances, might have been embarrassing to his companions, with so much tact, that either by an allusion to early days, happy days when he owed so much to Gerard’s father, or some other mode equally felicitous, he contrived completely to maintain among them the spirit of social equality. In the evening, Hatton generally looked in when Gerard was at home, and on Sundays they were always together. Their common faith was a bond of union which led them to the same altar, and on that day Hatton had obtained their promise always to dine with him. He was careful to ascertain each holy day at what chapel the music was most exquisite, that the most passionate taste of Sybil might be gratified. Indeed, during this residence in London, the opportunity it afforded of making her acquainted with some of the great masters of the human voice was perhaps to Sybil a source of pleasure not the least important. For though it was not deemed consistent with the future discipline which she contemplated to enter a theatre, there were yet occasions which permitted her, under every advantage, to listen to the performance of the master-pieces of sacred melody. Alone, with Hatton and her father, she often poured forth those tones of celestial sweetness and etherial power that had melted the soul of Egremont amid the ruins of Marney Abbey.

More intimately acquainted with Sybil Gerard, Hatton had shrunk from the project that he had at first so crudely formed. There was something about her that awed, while it fascinated him. He did not relinquish his purpose, for it was a rule of his life never to do that; but he postponed the plans of its fulfilment. Hatton was not, what is commonly understood by the phrase, in love with Sybil: certainly not passionately in love with her. With all his daring and talents and fine taste, there was in Hatton such a vein of thorough good sense, that it was impossible for him to act or even to think anything that was ridiculous. He wished still to marry Sybil for the great object that we have stated; he had a mind quite equal to appreciate her admirable qualities, but sense enough to wish that she were a less dazzling creature, because then he would have a better chance of accomplishing his end. He perceived when he had had a due opportunity to study her character, that the cloister was the natural catastrophe impending over a woman who, with an exalted mind, great abilities, a fine and profound education and almost supernatural charms, found herself born and rooted in the ranks of a degraded population. All this Hatton understood; it was a conclusion he had gradually arrived at by a gradual process of induction and by a vigilant observation that in its study of character had rarely been deceived; and when one evening with an art that could not be suspected, he sounded Gerard on the future of his daughter, he found that the clear intellect and straight-forward sagacity of the father had arrived at the same result. “She wishes,” said Gerard, “to take the veil, and I only oppose it for a time, that she may have some knowledge of life and a clear conception of what she is about to do. I wish not that she should hereafter reproach her father. But, to my mind, Sybil is right. She cannot look to marriage: no man that she could marry would be worthy of her.”

During these two months, and especially during the last, Morley was rarely in London, though ever much with Gerard, and often with his daughter during his visits. The necessary impulse had been given to the affairs of the Convention, the delegates had visited the members, the preparations for the presentation of the National Petition had been completed; the overthrow of the whig government, the abortive effort of Sir Robert Peel, the return of the whig administration, and the consequent measures, had occasioned a delay of two months in the presentation of the great document: it was well for Gerard to remain, who was a leader in debate, and whose absence for a week would have endangered his position as the head of a party, but these considerations did not influence Morley, who had already found great inconvenience in managing his journal at a distance; so, about the middle of May, he had returned to Mowbray, coming up occasionally by the train if anything important were stirring, or his vote could be of service to his friend and colleague. The affair of Birmingham however had alarmed Morley and he had written up to Gerard that he should instantly repair to town. Indeed he was expected the very morning that Sybil, her father having gone to the Convention where there were at this very moment very fiery debates, went forth to take the morning air of summer in the gardens of St James’ Park.

It was a real summer day; large, round, glossy, fleecy clouds, as white and shining as glaciers, studded with their immense and immoveable forms the deep blue sky. There was not even a summer breeze, though the air was mellow, balmy, and exhilarating. There was a bloom upon the trees, the waters glittered, the prismatic wild-fowl dived, breathed again, and again disappeared. Beautiful children, fresh and sweet as the new-born rose, glanced about with the gestures and sometimes the voices of Paradise. And in the distance rose the sacred towers of the great Western Minster.

How fair is a garden amid the toils and passions of existence! A curse upon those who vulgarize and desecrate these holy haunts; breaking the hearts of nursery maids, and smoking tobacco in the palace of the rose!

The mental clouds dispelled as Sybil felt the freshness and fragrance of nature. The colour came to her cheek; the deep brightness returned to her eye; her step that at first had been languid and if not melancholy, at least contemplative, became active and animated. She forgot the cares of life and was touched by all the sense of its enjoyment. To move, to breathe, to feel the sunbeam, were sensible and surpassing pleasures. Cheerful by nature, notwithstanding her stately thoughts and solemn life, a brilliant smile played on her seraphic face, as she marked the wild passage of the daring birds, or watched the thoughtless grace of infancy.

She rested herself on a bench beneath a branching elm, and her eye, that for some time had followed the various objects that had attracted it, was now fixed in abstraction on the sunny waters. The visions of past life rose before her. It was one of those reveries when the incidents of our existence are mapped before us, when each is considered with relation to the rest, and assumes in our knowledge its distinct and absolute position; when, as it were, we take stock of our experience, and ascertain how rich sorrow and pleasure, feeling and thought, intercourse with our fellow creatures and the fortuitous mysteries of life,—have made us in wisdom.

The quick intelligence and the ardent imagination of Sybil had made her comprehend with fervor the two ideas that had been impressed on her young mind; the oppression of her church and the degradation of her people. Educated in solitude and exchanging thoughts only with individuals of the same sympathies, these impressions had resolved themselves into one profound and gloomy conviction, that the world was divided only between the oppressors and the oppressed. With her, to be one of the people, was to be miserable and innocent; one of the privileged, a luxurious tyrant. In the cloister, in her garden, amid the scenes of suffering which she often visited and always solaced, she had raised up two phantoms which with her represented human nature.

But the experience of the last few months had operated a great change in these impressions. She had seen enough to suspect that the world was a more complicated system than she had preconceived. There was not that strong and rude simplicity in its organization she had supposed. The characters were more various, the motives more mixed, the classes more blended, the elements of each more subtle and diversified, than she had imagined. The People she found was not that pure embodiment of unity of feeling, of interest, and of purpose, which she had pictured in her abstractions. The people had enemies among the people: their own passions; which made them often sympathize, often combine, with the privileged. Her father, with all his virtues, all his abilities, singleness of purpose and simplicity of aim, encountered rivals in their own Convention, and was beset by open or, still worse, secret foes.

Sybil, whose mind had been nurtured with great thoughts, and with whom success or failure alike partook of the heroic, who had hoped for triumph, but who was prepared for sacrifice, found to her surprise that great thoughts have very little to do with the business of the world; that human affairs, even in an age of revolution, are the subject of compromise; and that the essence of compromise is littleness. She thought that the People, calm and collected, conscious at last of their strength and confident in their holy cause, had but to express their pure and noble convictions by the delegates of their choice, and that an antique and decrepit authority must bow before the irresistible influence of their moral power. These delegates of their choice turned out to be a plebeian senate of wild ambitions and sinister and selfish ends, while the decrepit authority that she had been taught existed only by the sufferance of the millions was compact and organized, with every element of physical power at its command, and supported by the interests, the sympathies, the honest convictions, and the strong prejudices of classes influential not merely from their wealth but even by their numbers.

Nor could she resist the belief that the feeling of the rich towards the poor was not that sentiment of unmingled hate and scorn which she associated with Norman conquerors and feudal laws. She would ascribe rather the want of sympathy that unquestionably exists between Wealth and Work in England, to mutual ignorance between the classes which possess these two great elements of national prosperity; and though the source of that ignorance was to be sought in antecedent circumstances of violence and oppression, the consequences perhaps had outlived the causes, as customs survive opinions.

Sybil looked towards Westminster, to those proud and passionate halls where assembles the Parliament of England; that rapacious, violent, and haughty body, that had brought kings and prelates to the block; spoiled churches and then seized the sacred manors for their personal prey; invested their own possessions with infinite privileges, and then mortgaged for their state and empire the labour of countless generations. Could the voice of solace sound from such a quarter?

Sybil unfolded a journal which she had brought; not now to be read for the first time; but now for the first time to be read alone, undisturbed, in a scene of softness and serenity. It contained a report of the debate in the House of Commons on the presentation of the National Petition; that important document which had been the means of drawing forth Sybil from her solitude, and of teaching her something of that world of which she had often pondered, and yet which she had so inaccurately preconceived.

Yes! there was one voice that had sounded in that proud Parliament, that free from the slang of faction, had dared to express immortal truths: the voice of a noble, who without being a demagogue, had upheld the popular cause; had pronounced his conviction that the rights of labour were as sacred as those of property; that if a difference were to be established, the interests of the living wealth ought to be preferred; who had declared that the social happiness of the millions should be the first object of a statesman, and that if that were not achieved, thrones and dominions, the pomp and power of courts and empires, were alike worthless.

With a heart not without emotion; with a kindling cheek, and eyes suffused with tears, Sybil read the speech of Egremont. She ceased; still holding the paper with one hand, she laid on it the other with tenderness, and looked up to breathe as it were for relief. Before her stood the orator himself.

Book 5 Chapter 2

Egremont had recognized Sybil as she entered the garden. He was himself crossing the park to attend a committee of the House of Commons which had sat for the first time that morning. The meeting had been formal and brief, the committee soon adjourned, and Egremont repaired to the spot where he was in the hope of still finding Sybil.

He approached her not without some restraint; with reserve and yet with tenderness. “This is a great, an unexpected pleasure indeed.” he said in a faltering tone. She had looked up; the expression of an agitation, not distressful, on her beautiful countenance could not be concealed. She smiled through a gushing vision: and with a flushed cheek, impelled perhaps by her native frankness, perhaps by some softer and irresistible feeling of gratitude, respect, regard, she said in a low voice, “I was reading your beautiful speech.”

“Indeed,” said Egremont much moved, “that is an honour,—a pleasure,—a reward, I never could have even hoped to have attained.”

“By all,” continued Sybil with more self-possession, “it must be read with pleasure, with advantage, but by me—oh! with what deep interest.”

“If anything that I said finds an echo in your breast,” and here he hesitated, “—it will give me confidence for the future,” he hurriedly added.

“Ah! why do not others feel like you!” said Sybil, “all would not then be hopeless.”

“But you are not hopeless,” said Egremont, and he seated himself on the bench, but at some distance from her.

Sybil shook her head.

“But when we spoke last,” said Egremont, “you were full of confidence—in your cause, and in your means.”

“It is not very long ago,” said Sybil, “since we thus spoke, and yet time in the interval has taught me some bitter truths.”

“Truth is very precious,” said Egremont, “to us all; and yet I fear I could not sufficiently appreciate the cause that deprived you of your sanguine faith.”

“Alas!” said Sybil mournfully, “I was but a dreamer of dreams: I wake from my hallucination as others have done I suppose before me. Like them too I feel the glory of life has gone; but my content at least,” and she bent her head meekly, “has never rested I hope too much on this world.”

“You are depressed, dear Sybil?”

“I am unhappy. I am anxious about my father. I fear that he is surrounded by men unworthy of his confidence. These scenes of violence alarm me. Under any circumstances I should shrink from them, but I am impressed with the conviction that they can bring us nothing but disaster and disgrace.”

“I honor your father,” said Egremont, “I know no man whose character I esteem so truly noble; such a just compound of intelligence and courage, and gentle and generous impulse. I should deeply grieve were he to compromise himself. But you have influence over him, the greatest, as you have over all. Counsel him to return to Mowbray.”

“Can I give counsel?” said Sybil, “I who have been wrong in all my judgments? I came up to this city with him, to be his guide, his guardian. What arrogance! What short-sighted pride! I thought the People all felt as I feel; that I had nothing to do but to sustain and animate him; to encourage him when he flagged, to uphold him when he wavered. I thought that moral power must govern the world, and that moral power was embodied in an assembly whose annals will be a series of petty intrigues, or, what is worse, of violent machinations.”

“Exert every energy,” said Egremont, “that your father should leave London, immediately; to-morrow, to-night if possible. After this business at Birmingham, the government must act. I hear that they will immediately increase the army and the police; and that there is a circular from the Secretary of State to the Lords Lieutenant of counties. But the government will strike at the Convention. The members who remain will be the victims. If your father return to Mowbray and be quiet, he has a chance of not being disturbed.”

“An ignoble end of many lofty hopes,” said Sybil.

“Let us retain our hopes,” said Egremont, “and cherish them.”

“I have none,” she replied.

“And I am sanguine,” said Egremont.

“Ah! because you have made a beautiful speech. But they will listen to you, they will cheer you, but they will never follow you. The dove and the eagle will not mate; the lion and the lamb will not lie down together; and the conquerors will never rescue the conquered.”

Egremont shook his head. “You still will cherish these phantoms, dear Sybil! and why? They are not visions of delight. Believe me they are as vain as they are distressing. The mind of England is the mind ever of the rising race. Trust me it is with the People. And not the less so, because this feeling is one of which even in a great degree it is unconscious. Those opinions which you have been educated to dread and mistrust are opinions that are dying away. Predominant opinions are generally the opinions of the generation that is vanishing. Let an accident, which speculation could not foresee, the balanced state at this moment of parliamentary parties cease, and in a few years, more or less, cease it must, and you will witness a development of the new mind of England, which will make up by its rapid progress for its retarded action. I live among these men; I know their inmost souls; I watch their instincts and their impulses; I know the principles which they have imbibed, and I know, however hindered by circumstances for the moment, those principles must bear their fruit. It will be a produce hostile to the oligarchical system. The future principle of English politics will not be a levelling principle; not a principle adverse to privileges, but favourable to their extension. It will seek to ensure equality, not by levelling the Few but by elevating the Many.”

Indulging for some little time in the mutual reflections, which the tone of the conversation suggested, Sybil at length rose, and saying that she hoped by this time her father might have returned, bade farewell to Egremont, but he also rising would for a time accompany her. At the gate of the gardens however she paused, and said with a soft sad smile, “Here we must part,” and extended to him her hand.

“Heaven will guard over you!” said Egremont, “for you are a celestial charge.”

Book 5 Chapter 3

As Sybil approached her home, she recognized her father in the court before their house, accompanied by several men, with whom he seemed on the point of going forth. She was so anxious to speak to Gerard, that she did not hesitate at once to advance. There was a stir as she entered the gate; the men ceased talking, some stood aloof, all welcomed her with silent respect. With one or two Sybil was not entirely unacquainted; at least by name or person. To them, as she passed, she bent her head; and then going up to her father, who was about to welcome her, she said, in a tone of calmness and with a semblance of composure, “If you are going out, dear father, I should like to see you for one moment first.”

“A moment, friends,” said Gerard, “with your leave;” and he accompanied his daughter into the house. He would have stopped in the hall, but she walked on to their room, and Gerard, though pressed for time, was compelled to follow her. When they had entered their chamber. Sybil closed the door with care, and then, Gerard sitting, or rather leaning carelessly, on the edge of the table, she said, “We are once more together, dear father; we will never again he separated.”

Gerard sprang quickly on his legs, his eye kindled, his cheek flushed. “Something has happened to you, Sybil!”

“No,” she said, shaking her head mournfully, “not that; but something may happen to you.”

“How so, my child?” said her father, relapsing into his customary good-tempered placidity, and speaking in an easy, measured, almost drawling tone that was habitual to him.

“You are in danger,” said Sybil, “great and immediate. No matter at this moment how I am persuaded of this I wish no mysteries, but there is no time for details. The government will strike at the Convention; they are resolved. This outbreak at Birmingham has brought affairs to a crisis. They have already arrested the leaders there; they will seize those who remain here in avowed correspondence with them.”

“If they arrest all who are in correspondence with the Convention,” said Gerard, “they will have enough to do.”

“Yes; but you take a leading part,” said Sybil; “you are the individual they would select.”

“Would you have me hide myself?” said Gerard, “just because something is going on besides talk.”

“Besides talk!” exclaimed Sybil. “O! my father, what thoughts are these! It may be that words are vain to save us; but feeble deeds are vainer far than words.”

“I do not see that the deeds, though I have nothing to do with them, are so feeble,” said Gerard; “their boasted police are beaten, and by the isolated movement of an unorganized mass. What if the outbreak had not been a solitary one? What if the people had been disciplined?”

“What if everything were changed, if everything were contrary to what it is?” said Sybil. “The people are not disciplined; their action will not be, cannot be, coherent and uniform; these are riots in which you are involved, not revolutions; and you will be a victim, and not a sacrifice.”

Gerard looked thoughtful, but not anxious: after a momentary pause, he said, “We must not be scared at a few arrests, Sybil. These are hap-hazard pranks of a government that wants to terrify, but is itself frightened. I have not counselled, none of us have counselled, this stir at Birmingham. It is a casualty. We were none of us prepared for it. But great things spring from casualties. I say the police were beaten and the troops alarmed; and I say this was done without organization and in a single spot. I am as much against feeble deeds as you can be, Sybil; and to prove this to you, our conversation at the moment you arrived, was to take care for the future that there shall be none. Neither vain words nor feeble deeds for the future,” added Gerard, and he moved to depart.

Sybil approached him with gentleness; she took his hand as if to bid him farewell; she retained it for a moment, and looked at him steadfastly in the face, with a glance at the same time serious and soft. Then throwing her arms round his neck and leaning her cheek upon his breast, she murmured, “Oh! my father, your child is most unhappy.”

“Sybil,” exclaimed Gerard in a tone of tender reproach, “this is womanish weakness; I love, but must not share it.”

“It may be womanish,” said Sybil, “but it is wise: for what should make us unhappy if not the sense of impending, yet unknown, danger?”

“And why danger?” said Gerard.

“Why mystery?” said Sybil. “Why are you ever pre-occupied and involved in dark thoughts, my father? It is not the pressure of business, as you will perhaps tell me, that occasions this change in a disposition so frank and even careless. The pressure of affairs is not nearly as great, cannot he nearly as great, as in the early period of your assembling, when the eyes of the whole country were on you, and you were in communication with all parts of it. How often have you told me that there was no degree of business which you found irksome? Now you are all dispersed and scattered: no discussions, no committees, little correspondence—and you yourself are ever brooding and ever in conclave, with persons too who I know, for Stephen has told me so, are the preachers of violence: violence perhaps that some of them may preach, yet will not practise: both bad; traitors it may be, or, at the best, hare-brained men.”

“Stephen is prejudiced,” said Gerard. “He is a visionary, indulging in impossible dreams, and if possible, little desirable. He knows nothing of the feeling of the country or the character of his countrymen. Englishmen want none of his joint-stock felicity; they want their rights,—rights consistent with the rights of other classes, but without which the rights of other classes cannot, and ought not, to be secure.”

“Stephen is at least your friend, my father; and once you honoured him.”

“And do so now; and love him very dearly. I honour him for his great abilities and knowledge. Stephen is a scholar; I have no pretensions that way; but I can feel the pulse of a people, and can comprehend the signs of the times, Sybil. Stephen was all very well talking in our cottage and garden at Mowbray, when we had nothing to do; but now we must act, or others will act for us. Stephen is not a practical man; he is crotchety, Sybil, and that’s just it.”

“But violence and action,” said Sybil, “are they identical, my father?”

“I did not speak of violence.”

“No; but you looked it. I know the language of your countenance, even to the quiver of your lip. Action, as you and Stephen once taught me, and I think wisely, was to prove to our rulers by an agitation, orderly and intellectual, that we were sensible of our degradation; and that it was neither Christianlike nor prudent, neither good nor wise, to let us remain so. That you did, and you did it well; the respect of the world, even of those who differed from you in interest or opinion, was not withheld from you; and can be withheld from none who exercise the moral power that springs from great talents and a good cause. You have let this great moral power, this pearl of price,” said Sybil with emotion,—“we cannot conceal it from ourselves, my father,—you have let it escape from your hands.”

Gerard looked at her as she spoke with an earnestness unusual with him. As she ceased, he cast his eyes down, and seemed for a moment deep in thought; then looking up, he said, “The season for words is past. I must be gone, dear Sybil.” And he moved towards the door.

“You shall not leave me,” said Sybil, springing forward, and seizing his arm.

“What would you, what would you?” said Gerard, distressed.

“That we should quit this city to-night.”

“What, quit my post?”

“Why yours? Have not your colleagues dispersed? Is not your assembly formally adjourned to another town? Is it not known that the great majority of the delegates have returned to their homes? And why not you to yours?”

“I have no home,” said Gerard, almost in a voice of harshness. “I came here to do the business that was wanting, and, by the blessing of God, I will do it. I am no changeling, nor can I refine and split straws, like your philosophers and Morleys: but if the people will struggle, I will struggle with them; and die, if need be, in the front. Nor will I be deterred from my purpose by the tears of a girl,” and he released himself from the hand of his daughter with abruptness.

Sybil looked up to heaven with streaming eyes, and clasped her hands in unutterable woe. Gerard moved again towards the door, but before he reached it, his step faltered, and he turned again and looked at his daughter with tenderness and anxiety. She remained in the same position, save that her arms that had fallen were crossed before her, and her downward glance seemed fixed in deep abstraction. Her father approached her unnoticed; he took her hand; she started, and looking round with a cold and distressed expression, said, in a smothered tone, “I thought you had gone.”

“Not in anger, my sweet child,” and Gerard pressed her to his heart.

“But you go,” murmured Sybil.

“These men await me,” said Gerard. “Our council is of importance. We must take some immediate steps for the aid of our brethren in distress at Birmingham, and to discountenance similar scenes of outbreak as this affair: but the moment this is over, I will come back to you; and for the rest, it shall be as you desire; to-morrow we will return to Mowbray.”

Sybil returned her father’s embrace with a warmth which expressed her sense of his kindness and her own soothed feelings, but she said nothing; and bidding her now to be of good cheer, Gerard quitted the apartment.

Book 5 Chapter 4

The clock of St John’s church struck three, and the clock of St John’s church struck four; and the fifth hour sounded from St John’s church; and the clock of St John’s was sounding six. And Gerard had not yet returned.

The time for a while after his departure had been comparatively light-hearted and agreeable. Easier in her mind and for a time busied with the preparations for their journey, Sybil sate by the open window more serene and cheerful than for a long period had been her wont. Sometimes she ceased for a moment from her volume and fell into a reverie of the morrow and of Mowbray. Viewed through the magic haze of time and distance, the scene of her youth assumed a character of tenderness and even of peaceful bliss. She sighed for the days of their cottage and their garden, when the discontent of her father was only theoretical, and their political conclaves were limited to a discussion between him and Morley on the rights of the people or the principles of society. The bright waters of the Mowe and its wooded hills; her matin walks to the convent to visit Ursula Trafford—a pilgrimage of piety and charity and love; the faithful Harold, so devoted and so intelligent; even the crowded haunts of labour and suffering among which she glided like an angel, blessing and blessed; they rose before her—those touching images of the past—and her eyes were suffused with tears, of tenderness, not of gloom.

And blended with them the thought of one who had been for a season the kind and gentle companion of her girlhood—that Mr Franklin whom she had never quite forgotten, and who, alas! was not Mr Franklin after all. Ah! that was a wonderful history; a somewhat thrilling chapter in the memory of one so innocent and so young! His voice even now lingered in her ear. She recalled without an effort those tones of the morning, tones of tenderness and yet of wisdom and considerate thought, that had sounded only for her welfare. Never had Egremont appeared to her in a light so subduing. He was what man should be to woman ever-gentle, and yet a guide. A thousand images dazzling and wild rose in her mind; a thousand thoughts, beautiful and quivering as the twilight, clustered round her heart; for a moment she indulged in impossible dreams, and seemed to have entered a newly-discovered world. The horizon of her experience expanded like the glittering heaven of a fairy tale. Her eye was fixed in lustrous contemplation, the flush on her cheek was a messenger from her heart, the movement of her mouth would have in an instant become a smile, when the clock of St John’s struck four, and Sybil started from her reverie.

The clock of St John’s struck four, and Sybil became anxious; the clock of St John’s struck five, and Sybil became disquieted; restless and perturbed, she was walking up and down the chamber, her books long since thrown aside, when the clock of St John’s struck six.

She clasped her hands and looked up to heaven. There was a knock at the street door; she herself sprang out to open it. It was not Gerard. It was Morley.

“Ah! Stephen,” said Sybil, with a countenance of undisguised disappointment, “I thought it was my father.”

“I should have been glad to have found him here,” said Morley. “However with your permission I will enter.”

“And he will soon arrive,” said Sybil; “I am sure he will soon arrive. I have been expecting him every minute—”

“For hours,” added Morley, finishing her sentence, as they entered the room. “The business that he is on,” he continued, throwing himself into a chair with a recklessness very unlike his usual composure and even precision, “The business that he is on is engrossing.”

“Thank Heaven,” said Sybil, “we leave this place to-morrow.”

“Hah!” said Morley starting, “who told you so?”

“My father has so settled it; has indeed promised me that we shall depart.”

“And you were anxious to do so.”

“Most anxious; my mind is prophetic only of mischief to him if we remain.”

“Mine too. Otherwise I should not have come up today.” “You have seen him I hope?” said Sybil.

“I have; I have been hours with him.”

“I am glad. At this conference he talked of?”

“Yes; at this headstrong council; and I have seen him since; alone. Whatever hap to him, my conscience is assoiled.”

“You terrify me, Stephen,” said Sybil rising from her seat. “What can happen to him? What would he do, what would you resist? Tell me—tell me, dear friend.”

“Oh! yes,” said Morley, pale and with a slight yet bitter smile. “Oh! yes; dear friend!”

“I said dear friend for so I deemed you.” said Sybil; “and so we have ever found you. Why do you stare at me so strangely, Stephen?”

“So you deem me, and so you have ever found me,” said Morley in a slow and measured tone, repeating her words. “Well; what more would you have? What more should any of us want?” he asked abruptly.

“I want no more,” said Sybil innocently.

“I warrant me, you do not. Well, well, nothing matters. And so,” he added in his ordinary tone, “you are waiting for your father?”

“Whom you have not long since seen,” said Sybil, “and whom you expected to find here?”

“No;” said Morley, shaking his head with the same bitter smile; “no, no. I didn’t. I came to find you.”

“You have something to tell me,” said Sybil earnestly. “Something has happened to my father. Do not break it to me; tell me at once,” and she advanced and laid her hand upon his arm.

Morley trembled; and then in a hurried and agitated voice, said, “No, no, no; nothing has happened. Much may happen, but nothing has happened. And we may prevent it.”

“We! Tell me what may happen; tell me what to do.”

“Your father,” said Morley, slowly, rising from his seat and pacing the room, and speaking in a low calm voice, “Your father—and my friend—is in this position Sybil: he is conspiring against the State.”

“Yes, yes,” said Sybil very pale, speaking almost in a whisper and with her gaze fixed intently on her companion. “Tell me all.”

“I will. He is conspiring, I say, against the State. Tonight they meet in secret to give the last finish to their plans; and tonight they will be arrested.”

“O God!” said Sybil clasping her hands. “He told me truth.”

“Who told you truth?” said Morley, springing to her side, in a hoarse voice and with an eye of fire.

“A friend,” said Sybil, dropping her arms and bending her head in woe; “a kind good friend. I met him but this morn, and he warned me of all this.”

“Hah, hah!” said Morley with a sort of stifled laugh; “Hah, hah; he told you did he; the kind good friend whom you met this morning? Did I not warn you, Sybil, of the traitor? Did I not tell you to beware of taking this false aristocrat to your hearth; to worm out all the secrets of that home that he once polluted by his espionage, and now would desolate by his treason.”

“Of whom and what do you speak?” said Sybil, throwing herself into a chair.

“I speak of that base spy Egremont.”

“You slander an honourable man,” said Sybil with dignity. “Mr Egremont has never entered this house since you met him here for the first time; save once.”

“He needed no entrance to this house to worm out its secrets,” said Morley maliciously. “That could be more adroitly done by one who had assignations at command with the most charming of its inmates.”

“Unmannerly churl!” exclaimed Sybil starting in her chair, her eye flashing lightning, her distended nostril quivering with scorn.

“Oh! yes. I am a churl,” said Morley; “I know I am a churl. Were I a noble the daughter of the people would perhaps condescend to treat me with less contempt.”

“The daughter of the people loves truth and manly bearing, Stephen Morley; and will treat with contempt all those who slander women, whether they be nobles or serfs.”

“And where is the slanderer?”

“Ask him who told you I held assignations with Mr Egremont or with any one.”

“Mine eyes—mine own eyes—were my informant,” said Morley. “This morn, the very morn I arrived in London, I learnt how your matins were now spent. Yes!” he added in a tone of mournful anguish, “I passed the gate of the gardens; I witnessed your adieus.”

“We met by hazard,” said Sybil, in a calm tone, and with an expression that denoted she was thinking of other things, “and in all probability we shall never meet again. Talk not of these trifles. Stephen; my father, how can we save him?”

“Are they trifles?” said Morley, slowly and earnestly, walking to her side, and looking her intently in the face. “Are they indeed trifles, Sybil? Oh! make me credit that, and then—” he paused.

Sybil returned his gaze: the deep lustre of her dark orb rested on his peering vision; his eye fled from the unequal contest: his heart throbbed, his limbs trembled; he fell upon his knee.

“Pardon me, pardon me,” he said, and he took her hand. “Pardon the most miserable and the most devoted of men!”

“What need of pardon, dear Stephen?” said Sybil in a soothing tone. “In the agitated hour wild words escape. If I have used them, I regret; if you, I have forgotten.”

The clock of St John’s told that the sixth hour was more than half-past.

“Ah!” said Sybil, withdrawing her hand, “you told me how precious was time. What can we do?”

Morley rose from his kneeling position, and again paced the chamber, lost for some moments in deep meditation. Suddenly he seized her arm, and said, “I can endure no longer the anguish of my life: I love you, and if you will not be mine, I care for no one’s fate.”

“I am not born for love,” said Sybil, frightened, yet endeavouring to conceal her alarm.

“We are all born for love,” said Morley. “It is the principle of existence, and its only end. And love of you, Sybil,” he continued, in a tone of impassioned pathos, “has been to me for years the hoarded treasure of my life. For this I have haunted your hearth and hovered round your home; for this I have served your father like a slave, and embarked in a cause with which I have little sympathy, and which can meet with no success. It is your image that has stimulated my ambition, developed my powers, sustained me in the hour of humiliation, and secured me that material prosperity which I can now command. Oh! deign to share it; share it with the impassioned heart and the devoted life that now bow before you; and do not shrink from them, because they are the feelings and the fortunes of the People.”

“You astound, you overwhelm me,” said Sybil, agitated. “You came for another purpose, we were speaking of other feelings; it is the hour of exigency you choose for these strange, these startling words.”

“I also have my hour of exigency,” said Morley, “and its minutes are now numbering. Upon it all depends.”

“Another time,” said Sybil, in a low and deprecatory voice; “speak of these things another time!”

“The caverns of my mind are open,” said Morley, “and they will not close.”

“Stephen,” said Sybil, “dear Stephen, I am grateful for your kind feelings: but indeed this is not the time for such passages: cease, my friend!”

“I came to know my fate,” said Morley, doggedly.

“It is a sacrilege of sentiment,” said Sybil, unable any longer to restrain her emotion, “to obtrude its expression on a daughter at such a moment.”

“You would not deem it so if you loved, or if you could love me, Sybil,” said Morley, mournfully. “Why it’s a moment of deep feeling, and suited for the expression of deep feeling. You would not have answered thus, if he who had been kneeling here had been named Egremont.”

“He would not have adopted a course,” said Sybil, unable any longer to restrain her displeasure, “so selfish, so indecent.”

“Ah! she loves him!” exclaimed Morley, springing on his legs, and with a demoniac laugh.

There was a pause. Under ordinary circumstances Sybil would have left the room and terminated a distressing interview, but in the present instance that was impossible; for on the continuance of that interview any hope of assisting her father depended. Morley had thrown himself into a chair opposite her, leaning back in silence with his face covered; Sybil was disinclined to revive the conversation about her father, because she had already perceived that Morley was only too much aware of the command which the subject gave him over her feelings and even conduct. Yet time, time now full of terror, time was stealing on. It was evident that Morley would not break the silence. At length, unable any longer to repress her tortured heart, Sybil said, “Stephen, be generous; speak to me of your friend.”

“I have no friend,” said Morley, without taking his hands from his face.

“The Saints in heaven have mercy on me,” said Sybil, “for I am very wretched.”

“No, no, no,” said Morley, rising rapidly from his seat, and again kneeling at her side, “not wretched; not that tone of anguish! What can I do? what say? Sybil, dearest Sybil, I love you so much, so fervently, so devotedly; none can love you as I do: say not you are wretched!”

“Alas! alas!” said Sybil.

“What shall I do? what say?” said Morley.

“You know what I would have you say,” said Sybil. “Speak of one who is my father, if no longer your friend: you know what I would have you do—save him: save him from death and me from despair.”

“I am ready,” said Morley; “I came for that. Listen. There is a meeting to-night at half-past eight o’clock; they meet to arrange a general rising in the country: their intention is known to the government; they will be arrested. Now it is in my power, which it was not when I saw your father this morning, to convince him of the truth of this, and were I to see him before eight o’clock, which I could easily do, I could prevent his attendance, certainly prevent his attendance, and he would be saved; for the government depend much upon the papers, some proclamations, and things of that kind, which will be signed this evening, for their proofs. Well, I am ready to save Gerard, my friend, for so I’ll call him as you wish it; one I have served before and long; one whom I came up from Mowbray this day to serve and save; I am ready to do that which you require; you yourself admit it is no light deed; and coming from one you have known so long, and, as you confess, so much regarded, should be doubly cherished; I am ready to do this great service; to save the father from death and the daughter from despair. —if she would but only say to me, ‘I have but one reward, and it is yours.’”

“I have read of something of this sort,” said Sybil, speaking in a murmuring tone, and looking round her with a wild expression, “this bargaining of blood, and shall I call it love? But that was ever between the oppressors and the oppressed. This is the first time that a child of the people has been so assailed by one of her own class, and who exercises his power from the confidence which the sympathy of their sorrows alone caused. It is bitter; bitter for me and mine—but for you, pollution.”

“Am I answered?” said Morley.

“Yes,” said Sybil, “in the name of the holy Virgin.”

“Good night, then,” said Morley, and he approached the door. His hand was on it. The voice of Sybil made him turn his head.

“Where do they meet to-night?” she inquired, in a smothered tone.

“I am bound to secrecy,” said Morley.

“There is no softness in your spirit,” said Sybil.

“I am met with none.”

“We have ever been your friends.”

“A blossom that has brought no fruit.”

“This hour will be remembered at the judgment-seat,” said Sybil.

“The holy Virgin will perhaps interpose for me,” said Morley, with a sneer.

“We have merited this,” said Sybil, “who have taken an infidel to our hearts.”

“If he had only been a heretic, like Egremont!” said Morley. Sybil burst into tears. Morley sprang to her. “Swear by the holy Virgin, swear by all the saints, swear by your hope of heaven and by your own sweet name; without equivocation, without reserve, with fulness and with truth, that you will never give your heart or hand to Egremont;—and I will save your father.”

As in a low voice, but with a terrible earnestness, Morley dictated this oath, Sybil, already pale, became white as the marble saint of some sacred niche. Her large dark eyes seemed fixed; a fleet expression of agony flitted over her beautiful brow like a cloud; and she said, “I swear that I will never give my hand to—”

“And your heart, your heart,” said Morley eagerly. “Omit not that. Swear by the holy oaths again you do not love him. She falters! Ah! she blushes!” For a burning brightness now suffused the cheek of Sybil. “She loves him,” exclaimed Morley, wildly, and he rushed franticly from the room.