Celt and Saxon | Page 2

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