CHAPTER I

WHEREIN AN EXCURSION IS MADE IN A CELTIC MIND

A young Irish gentleman of the numerous clan O'Donnells, and a Patrick,

hardly a distinction of him until we know him, had bound himself, by

purchase of a railway-ticket, to travel direct to the borders of North

Wales, on a visit to a notable landowner of those marches, the Squire

Adister, whose family-seat was where the hills begin to lift and spy into

the heart of black mountains. Examining his ticket with an apparent

curiosity, the son of a greener island debated whether it would not be

better for him to follow his inclinations, now that he had gone so far as

to pay for the journey, and stay. But his inclinations were also subject

to question, upon his considering that he had expended pounds English for

the privilege of making the journey in this very train. He asked himself

earnestly what was the nature of the power which forced him to do it--a

bad genius or a good: and it seemed to him a sort of answer, inasmuch as

it silenced the contending parties, that he had been the victim of an

impetus. True; still his present position involved a certain outlay of

money simply, not at all his bondage to the instrument it had procured

for him, and that was true; nevertheless, to buy a ticket to shy it away

is an incident so uncommon, that if we can but pause to dwell on the

singularity of the act, we are unlikely to abjure our fellowship with

them who would not be guilty of it; and therefore, by the aid of his

reflections and a remainder of the impetus, Mr. Patrick O'Donnell stepped

into a carriage of the train like any ordinary English traveller, between

whom and his destination there is an agreement to meet if they can.

It is an experience of hesitating minds, be they Saxon or others, that

when we have submitted our persons to the charge of public companies,

immediately, as if the renouncing of our independence into their hands

had given us a taste of a will of our own, we are eager for the

performance of their contract to do what we are only half inclined to;

the train cannot go fast enough to please us, though we could excuse it

for breaking down; stoppages at stations are impertinences, and the

delivery of us at last on the platform is an astonishment, for it is not

we who have done it--we have not even desired it. To be imperfectly in

accord with the velocity precipitating us upon a certain point, is to be

going without our heads, which have so much the habit of supposing it

must be whither we intend, when we go in a determined manner, that a,

doubt of it distracts the understanding--decapitates us; suddenly to

alight, moreover, and find ourselves dropped at the heels of flying Time,

like an unconsidered bundle, is anything but a reconstruction of the

edifice. The natural revelry of the blood in speed suffers a violent

shock, not to speak of our notion of being left behind, quite isolated

and unsound. Or, if you insist, the condition shall be said to belong

exclusively to Celtic nature, seeing that it had been drawn directly from

a scion of one of those tribes.

Young Patrick jumped from the train as headless as good St. Denis. He was

a juvenile thinker, and to discover himself here, where he both wished

and wished not to be, now deeming the negative sternly in the ascendant,

flicked his imagination with awe of the influence of the railway service

upon the destinies of man. Settling a mental debate about a backward

flight, he drove across the land so foreign to his eyes and affections,

and breasted a strong tide of wishes that it were in a contrary

direction. He would rather have looked upon the desert under a

sand-storm, or upon a London suburb yet he looked thirstingly. Each

variation of landscape of the curved highway offered him in a moment

decisive features: he fitted them to a story he knew: the whole circle

was animated by a couple of pale mounted figures beneath no happy light.

For this was the air once breathed by Adiante Adister, his elder brother

Philip's love and lost love: here she had been to Philip flame along the

hill-ridges, his rose-world in the dust-world, the saintly in his

earthly. And how had she rewarded him for that reverential love of her?

She had forborne to kill him. The bitter sylph of the mountain lures men

to climb till she winds them in vapour and leaves them groping, innocent

of the red crags below. The delicate thing had not picked his bones:

Patrick admitted it; he had seen his brother hale and stout not long

back. But oh! she was merciless, she was a witch. If ever queen-witch

was, she was the crowned one!

For a personal proof, now: he had her all round him in a strange district

though he had never cast eye on her. Yonder bare hill she came racing up

with a plume in the wind: she was over the long brown moor, look where he

would: and vividly was she beside the hurrying beck where it made edges

and chattered white. He had not seen, he could not imagine her face:

angelic dashed with demon beauty, was his idea of the woman, and there is

little of a portrait in that; but he was of a world where the elemental

is more individual than the concrete, and unconceived of sight she was a

recognised presence for the green-island brain of a youth whose manner of

hating was to conjure her spirit from the air and let fly his own in

pursuit of her.

It has to be stated that the object of the youngster's expedition to

Earlsfont was perfectly simple in his mind, however much it went against

his nature to perform it. He came for the purpose of obtaining Miss

Adister's Continental address; to gather what he could of her from her

relatives, and then forthwith to proceed in search of her, that he might

plead with her on behalf of his brother Philip, after a four years'

division of the lovers. Could anything be simpler? He had familiarised

himself with the thought of his advocacy during those four years. His

reluctance to come would have been accountable to the Adisters by a

sentiment of shame at his family's dealings with theirs: in fact, a

military captain of the O'Donnells had in old days played the adventurer

and charmed a maid of a certain age into yielding her hand to him; and

the lady was the squire of Earlsfont's only sister: she possessed funded

property. Shortly after the union, as one that has achieved the goal of

enterprise, the gallant officer retired from the service nor did

north-western England put much to his credit the declaration of his

wife's pronouncing him to be the best of husbands. She naturally said it

of him in eulogy; his own relatives accepted it in some contempt, mixed

with a relish of his hospitality: his wife's were constant in citing his

gain by the marriage. Could he possibly have been less than that? they

exclaimed. An excellent husband, who might easily have been less than

that, he was the most devoted of cousins, and the liberal expenditure of

his native eloquence for the furtherance of Philip's love-suit was the

principal cause of the misfortune, if misfortune it could subsequently be

called to lose an Adiante.

The Adister family were not gifted to read into the heart of a young man

of a fanciful turn. Patrick had not a thought of shame devolving on him

from a kinsman that had shot at a mark and hit it. Who sees the shame of

taking an apple from a garden of the Hesperides? And as England

cultivates those golden, if sometimes wrinkled, fruits, it would have

seemed to him, in thinking about it, an entirely lucky thing for the

finder; while a question of blood would have fired his veins to rival

heat of self-assertion, very loftily towering: there were Kings in

Ireland: cry for one of them in Uladh and you will hear his name, and he

has descendants yet! But the youth was not disposed unnecessarily to

blazon his princeliness. He kept it in modest reserve, as common

gentlemen keep their physical strength. His reluctance to look on

Earlsfont sprang from the same source as unacknowledged craving to see

the place, which had precipitated him thus far upon his road: he had a

horror of scenes where a faithless girl had betrayed her lover. Love was

his visionary temple, and his idea of love was the solitary light in it,

painfully susceptible to coldair currents from the stories of love abroad

over the world. Faithlessness he conceived to be obnoxious to nature; it

stained the earth and was excommunicated; there could be no pardon of the

crime, barely any for repentance. He conceived it in the feminine; for

men are not those holy creatures whose conduct strikes on the soul with

direct edge: a faithless man is but a general villain or funny monster, a

subject rejected of poets, taking no hue in the flat chronicle of

history: but a faithless woman, how shall we speak of her! Women,

sacredly endowed with beauty and the wonderful vibrating note about the

very mention of them, are criminal to hideousness when they betray. Cry,

False! on them, and there is an instant echo of bleeding males in many

circles, like the poor quavering flute-howl of transformed beasts, which

at some remembering touch bewail their higher state. Those women are

sovereignly attractive, too, loathsomely. Therein you may detect the

fiend.

Our moralist had for some time been glancing at a broad, handsome old

country mansion on the top of a wooded hill backed by a swarm of mountain

heads all purple-dark under clouds flying thick to shallow, as from a

brush of sepia. The dim silver of half-lighted lakewater shot along below

the terrace. He knew the kind of sky, having oftener seen that than any

other, and he knew the house before it was named to him and he had flung

a discolouring thought across it. He contemplated it placably and

studiously, perhaps because the shower-folding armies of the fields above

likened its shadowed stillness to that of his Irish home. There had this

woman lived! At the name of Earlsfont she became this witch, snake,

deception. Earlsfont was the title and summary of her black story: the

reverberation of the word shook up all the chapters to pour out their

poison.