Celt and Saxon | Page 3

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.
CHAPTER II
MR. ADISTER
Mr. Patrick O'Donnell drove up to the gates of Earlsfont
notwithstanding these emotions, upon which light matter it is the habit
of men of his blood too much to brood; though it is for our better future
to have a capacity for them, and