Celt and Saxon | Page 6

of whom not a word was uttered. No portrait of her was
shown. Why was she absent from her home so long? where was she?
How could her name be started? And was it she who was the sinner in
her father's mind? But the idolatrous love between Adiante and her
father was once a legend: they could not have been cut asunder. She
had offered up her love of Philip as a sacrifice to it: Patrick recollected
that, and now with a softer gloom on his brooding he released her from
the burden of his grand charge of unfaithfulness to the truest of lovers,
by acknowledging that he was in the presence of the sole rival of his
brother. Glorious girl that she was, her betrayal of Philip had nothing of
a woman's base caprice to make it infamous: she had sacrificed him to
her reading of duty; and that was duty to her father; and the point of
duty was in this instance rather a sacred one. He heard voices murmur
that she might be praised. He remonstrated with them, assuring them,
as one who knew, that a woman's first duty is her duty to her lover; her
parents are her second thought. Her lover, in the consideration of a real
soul among the shifty creatures, is her husband; and have we not the
word of heaven directing her to submit herself to him who is her
husband before all others? That peerless Adiante had previously erred
in the upper sphere where she received her condemnation, but such a
sphere is ladder and ladder and silver ladder high above your
hair-splitting pates, you children of earth, and it is not for you to act on
the verdict in decrying her: rather 'tis for you to raise hymns of worship
to a saint.
Thus did the ingenious Patrick change his ground and gain his
argument with the celerity of one who wins a game by playing it

without an adversary. Mr. Adister had sprung a new sense in him on
the subject of the renunciation of the religion. No thought of a possible
apostasy had ever occurred to the youth, and as he was aware that the
difference of their faith had been the main cause of the division of
Adiante and Philip, he could at least consent to think well of her down
here, that is, on our flat surface of earth. Up there, among the immortals,
he was compelled to shake his head at her still, and more than sadly in
certain moods of exaltation, reprovingly; though she interested him
beyond all her sisterhood above, it had to be confessed.
They traversed a banqueting-hall hung with portraits, to two or three of
which the master of Earlsfont carelessly pointed, for his guest to be
interested in them or not as he might please. A reception-hall flung
folding-doors on a grand drawing-room, where the fires in the grates
went through the ceremony of warming nobody, and made a show of
keeping the house alive. A modern steel cuirass, helmet and plume at a
corner of the armoury reminded Mr. Adister to say that he had worn the
uniform in his day. He cast an odd look at the old shell containing him
when he was a brilliant youth. Patrick was marched on to Colonel
Arthur's rooms, and to Captain David's, the sailor. Their father talked of
his two sons. They appeared to satisfy him. If that was the case, they
could hardly have thrown off their religion. Already Patrick had a dread
of naming the daughter. An idea struck him that she might be the
person who had been guilty of it over there on the Continent. What if
she had done it, upon a review of her treatment of her lover, and gone
into a convent to wait for Philip to come and claim her?--saying, 'Philip,
I've put the knife to my father's love of me; love me double'; and so she
just half swoons, enough to show how the dear angel looks in her sleep:
a trick of kindness these heavenly women have, that we heathen may
get a peep of their secret rose-enfolded selves; and dream 's no word,
nor drunken, for the blessed mischief it works with us.
Supposing it so, it accounted for everything: for her absence, and her
father's abstention from a mention of her, and the pretty good sort of
welcome Patrick had received; for as yet it was unknown that she did it
all for an O'Donnell.

These being his reflections, he at once accepted a view of her that so
agreeably quieted his perplexity, and he leapt out of his tangle into the
happy open spaces where the romantic things of life are as natural as
the sun that rises and