Llaneol, the dilapidated farm-house of the expelled steward, old Bevan,
stood beautifully in a wooded glen, watered by a shallow stream, between
a brook and river in size. A pretty greensward, of perpetual vivid hue,
stretched quite up to the threshold--its "fold," or farm-yard, being
small, and situated behind. A wooded mountain rose opposite, topped by a
range of many-tinted cliffs, splintered like thunder-stricken
battlements, and resembling, in their fretted and timeworn fronts, rich
cathedral architecture in ruins. Extensive sheep-walks rose in russet,
lofty barrenness behind, but allowing below breadth for venerable oaks,
and a profusion of underwood, to shelter the white, but no longer
well-thatched, farm-cottage, and screening that umbrageous valley from
the colder wind; while the many sheep, seen, and but just seen, dotting
the lofty barrier, beautified the scene by the pastoral ideas which
their dim-seen white inspired. Only the songs of birds distinguished the
noonday from the night, unless when the flail was heard in the barn,
through the open doors of which, coloured by mosses, the river
glistened, and the green, with its geese, gleamed the more picturesquely
for this rustic perspective.
As Winifred was approaching this tranquil vale--her native vale--after
an absence at the town of Cardigan, where she had been seeking
assistance for her father, with little success, she was startled by the
unusual sound of many voices, and soon saw, aghast, the whole of the
rustic furniture standing about on the pretty green, her infant
play-place; the noisy auctioneer mounted on the well-known old oaken
table; even her mother's wheel was already knocked down and sold, and
her father's own great wicker chair was ready to be put up, while rude
boys were trying its rickety antiquity by a furious rocking.
On no occasion is so much joviality indulged (in Wales) as on that of an
auction "under a distress for rent," (which was the case here)--an
occasion of calamity and ruin to the owner. Even in the event of an
auction caused by a death, where the common course of nature has removed
the possessor from those "goods and chattels" which are now useless to
him, a sale is surely a melancholy spectacle to creatures who use their
minds, and possess feelings befitting a brotherhood of Christians, or
even heathens. To see the inmost recesses of "home, sweet home," thrown
open to all strangers; the most treasured articles (often descended as
heir-looms from ancestors, and therefore possessing an intrinsic value,
quite unsuspected by others, for the owner,) ransacked, tossed from hand
to hand, and at last "knocked down" at a nominal price--even this is a
mournful exhibition. But where the ruthless hand of his brother man has
wrested those valuables from their possessor, instead of inevitable
death's tearing him from them--where that very owner and his family are
present, sadly listening to the ceaseless jokes (thoughtlessly inhuman)
lavished by the auctioneer, and re-echoed by the crowd, over those old
familiar objects--witnessing the happy excitement of rival bidders, and
the universal pleasure over his ruin, like the cry and flocking of
vultures over a battle-field, witnessed by wretches still alive, though
mortally wounded; what can exceed the shocking transgression of human
brotherhood presented by such a scene! A scene of every-day
occurrence--a scene never seeming to excite even one reflection kindred
to these natural, surely, and obvious feelings--yet one terribly
recalling to the pensive observer that axiom, _Homo ad hominem lupus
est!_ Doubtless the fraudulent or utterly reckless debtor is, in the eye
of reason, the first "wolfish" assailant of his brother. But how many of
these familiar tragedies are as truly the result of unforeseen,
unforeseeable contingencies, as diseases or other events, considered the
visitations of God! One, or two, or three, sick and heavy hearts and
wounded minds, in the midst of a hundred happy, light ones, buoyed up by
fierce cupidity and keen bargain-hunting, and exhilarated by drink and
by fun, and all drawn together by the misery of those outcast few.
Poor Bevan had been taken by surprise in this sudden execution, put in
by his treacherous supplanter, Lewis Lewis. But what most excited the
anger of his old attached neighbours, was the fact that many of these
goods were bought by an agent of Lewis, to finish furnishing his own
newly repaired house by the old park wall. Winifred learned that her
parents had removed to a friendly neighbour's, at some distance, but
suspected the worst--his removal to jail.
Not now the weakness of woman prevailed over her presence of mind, as we
have lately seen it do in her interview with a beloved object. She
commanded her agitation, so far as to bid for her father's old chair,
but in vain; for her timid bidding, faltered from behind a crowd, failed
to catch the ear of the jocular auctioneer, (who, in Wales, must always
be somewhat of a mountebank,) and the favourite chair was gone at once,
after the wheel, and the many old familiar chattels which she saw
standing, now the property of strangers.
Events crowded fast on each other, hurrying on that terrible hour in
which a revolting act of self-devotion was to render even this domestic
horror of little injury to her parents. "I will buy 'daddy' a better
chair, or he shall have enough to buy a better, when I am gone," she
murmured to herself. For now the rumour grew rife, that Mr Fitzarthur
had actually landed, was daily expected; and, in confirmation, she
received through a neighbour present, a letter left for her by her
father, stating that he had now actually received, under the Nabob's own
hand, a proposal of marriage, which the generous old man (who well knew
her engagements to another) solemnly charged her to reject, at all
hazards to himself. He further begged her to come quickly to the
temporary place of refuge he and her mother had found under the roof of
a hill cottage, just now tenantless through the death of a relative.
Thither, with heavy heart, Winifred hastened by the first light of
morning.
"_The_ hill," an expression much in the mouths of Welsh rural people,
signifies not any particular one, as it would in England, but the whole
desolate regions of the mountain heights; the homeless place of
ever-whistling winds, and low bellowing clouds, mingling with the mist
of the mountain, into one black smoke-like rolling volume--the place of
dismal pools and screaming kites, full of bogs, concealed by a sickly
yellowish herbage in the midst of the russet waste, boundlessly wearying
the eye with its sober monotony of tint. If a pool or lake relieve it by
reflecting the sky, on approach it is found choked all round by high
rushes, and shadowed by low strangely-shaped rocks, tinted by mosses of
dingy hue; the water that glistened pleasantly in the distance, shrinks
now to a mere pond, (the middle space, too deep for bullrushes and other
weeds to take root.) The deep stillness, or the unintermitted hollow
blowing of the wind (according to the weather) are equally mournful.
The rotten soil is cleft and torn into gulleys and small channels, in
which the mahogany-coloured rivulets, springing from the peat morass,
straggle silently with a sluggish motion in harmony with the lifeless
scene. There, if a weedy-roofed hut do appear, (detected by its thin
feeble smoke column) or the shepherd who tenants it should show his
solitary figure in the distance, the only upright object where is not
one tree-trunk, neither the home of man nor man's appearance lessens the
sense of almost savage solitude; the one so lonely, not a smoke-wreath
being visible all round, beside; the other, as he loiters by, watching
some sheep on some distant bank, so shy and wild-looking, and, to
appearance, so melancholy, so forlorn. Meanwhile, as we "plod our weary
way," some dip in the wavy round of olive-hued lumpish mountains, or an
abrupt huge chasm of awful rocks, each side being almost perpendicular,
startles the traveller with a far-down prospect of some sunshiny, rich,
leafy, valley region, at once showing at what a bleak elevation he has
been roaming so long, and tantalizing him with the contrast of that far,
far off, low, luring landscape, rendering more irksome than before the
dead, heathery desert, interminably undulating before, behind, and all
round him.
The little farm whither old Bevan had retired, stood high in such a
desert as this, on the very verge of such a mountain-portal, (a _bwlch_,
pronounced boolch, the Welsh call it,) an antique stone cottage, hanging
like a nest on one of the side banks, dismal itself, but all that under
world of pastoral pleasantness below, in full though dim perspective. A
premature decay is always visible on these kind of wild, weather-beaten
homes, in the torn thatch; the walls tinged with green, and generally
propped to resist the effects of the powerful winds. If white-washed,
which they really are, broad streaks of green are visible, from the
frequent heavy rains, tinged by the mosses and weeds of the roof. The
clouds, attracted by the heights, career on the strong blast, so low and
close, as often to shut up the dingy human nest in a dreary day of its
own, while all below is blue serene.
To this melancholy abode, its few rustic chattels still standing there,
left since the death of its tenant, Winifred toiled up by a steep, wild,
but well-known track, but found not father, mother, or living thing,
except one, so much in unison with the wild melancholy of the scene, as
to exalt it almost to horror. This was a wretched idiot man, dressed in
female attire, perfectly harmless, and kept, as a parish pauper, at an
adjacent farm. He was noted for fidelity to any one who flattered him by
some little commission. This ragged object presented to her the key of
the padlock on the door, with the words "gone, gone, gone!" She entered,
and found, to her surprise, excellent refreshment provided in the
desolate house, evidently but lately deserted. But what riveted her
eyes, was a letter to herself in the handwriting of David, but
tremulously written, announcing his inability to keep an appointment,
(one more!) which they had made, to part for ever--her terrible
distress, it will be remembered, on the last occasion, deterring the
young man from any further trial of her feelings. He further informed
her that Mr Fitzarthur was certainly arrived, and had taken up his
temporary abode at the pretty house by the park, designed by Lewis Lewis
for his own residence. Moreover, she learned that her father and mother
anxiously expected her at that house to which they had removed, but did
not reveal that he had _been removed_ in the care of two bailiffs, and
the house named was but a resting place in his transit to jail.
When the mind is enfeebled by repeated blows, it often happens that some
one, which to others may appear the slightest of all, produces the
greatest effect, its pain being quite disproportioned to its real
importance. Thus it happened, that, amidst all her trials, Winifred felt
the loss of her father's favourite chair as a crowning misery, trivial
as was that loss, when hope itself was lost. She had identified that
very humble chattel with his figure almost her life long. She almost
expected to see the two fair hands (for, truth to tell, the aged steward
had never worked hard) on each side, and the venerable kind face
projected forwards from its deep concave, arched over that white head,
to smile welcome to her even as it stood out on the little green. The
intrusion of boy clowns, one after another, into its seat seemed a
grievous insult to the unhappy owner, though absent. Yet a sad comfort
rose in the thought of her ability to reinstate her father in all his
lost comforts, through this terrible marriage. Then she grew impatient
in her longing to console him by assurance of this, notwithstanding his
generous wish that her hand should go where he knew her heart had
irretrievably been given. But these repeated disappointments in finding
the parents she longed to fold to her bosom, postponing this little
gratification, (the telling him she would repurchase the old family
chair,) now quite overcame the fortitude she had till now exhibited. She
sate down sick at heart--turned with aversion from the refreshment her
fatigue required, and wept bitterly. Superstition, and two mysterious
incidents, even while she remained on the hill, if indeed they were more
than superstition's coinage, helped to depress her. Just before she
reached this forlorn house with the haggard, aged, horrid-looking idiot
prowling round it, with his rags fluttering in the wind, she thought
that the figure of the hated steward and spy moved along a wild path on
the opposite side of that great mountain cleft, traversed by a noisy
torrent almost the depth of the whole hill, near the top of which this
cottage was perched. His being there alone was nothing marvellous, but
an ominous horror seemed, in her mind, to hover round that man, who (as
if conscious of some deadly evil which was through him to overwhelm her
some time) studiously avoided direct intercourse with his victim.
The second incident which might have sprung from the dwelling of her
mind's eye on the absent features of him, who, it seemed, refused to
meet her again, was an apparition, or what she deemed such, of her dear
Night-harper! One of those dense flying clouds, so common even at
moderate elevations when the mists roll down the hills, suddenly
enveloping the lone lofty spot, left but a little area of a few yards
for vision, a dungeon walled with fog, which kept circulating furiously
on the blast like a great smoke, in continuous whirls. And through some
momentary fissure in this white wall, she imagined the pallid and almost
ghastly visage of her forsaken lover appeared intensely looking toward
her, as she stood on the rude threshold, looking out on the temporary
storm that had shut her up. Her vague apprehension of some evil arising
to David, her mind's perpetual object, from the man she believed herself
to have espied just before, was rarely absent from her thought.
Combining the two appearances, she became more and more fancy-fraught,
thus confined, as it were, in an elemental solitude of the mountain and
the cloud, where, for the present, we leave her, to narrate the fate of
her father.
The novel calamity of arrest for debt was borne by the respectable old
man, John Bevan, with a patience and dignity that no study of philosophy
could have inspired. Though somewhat inactive, he felt that, in the
honest discharge of his duty, he stood acquitted in the sight of God,
though not in the eye of the law, of all fault, at least of any one
meriting the terrible punishment of imprisonment. It was near nightfall
when two emissaries of the law appeared, announcing that horses waited
at the neighbouring inn to convey him to jail with the first light of
morning. The poor old dame, his wife, was not to be pacified by the
efforts of the two bailiffs, who executed their commission with the
utmost gentleness, by order, as it appeared, of the Nabob himself,
notwithstanding that the old man's stern self-denying rejection of his
overture for his daughter's hand had determined him to let his agent
proceed to extremities. Soothing as well as he could both her grief and
her rage--for the latter rose unreflectingly against the mere agents in
this grievous infliction--old Bevan smoked his pipe as usual to the end,
and then requested permission to take a little walk only to the church,
which stood a short way from the solitary house where they surprised
him.
"You see I cannot run, for I can hardly walk with these rheumatics, my
friend," he observed; "but I have a fancy to visit the churchyard
to-night, as it will be moonlight, and we shall be pretty busy in the
morning. My dame is gone to bed with the good woman of this cottage, as
I begged her to go; so pray let us walk--you shall see me all the
while by the moon, without coming into the churchyard with me."
Arrived at the low stone stile, he crossed it by the help of the man,
and proceeded alone to the tomb of his old master's grave, surrounded by
a rail, with a yew growing inside, marking the site of the ancient
family vault. The moon now shining clearly, the bailiff saw him kneel
and uncover his head, which shone in its light, in the distance
resembling a scull bleached by the wind. He remained a long time in this
position, and his murmuring voice was partly audible to the man. At last
he returned, thanking him for his patience, and shaking him very
cordially by the hand. So touched was even this rugged lower limb of the
law by this proof of his affectionate remembrance of his old patron,
that he behaved throughout with great courtesy, and even respect. Bevan
and his departed master had lived, as has been said, almost on the
footing of cronies, a certain phlegmatic ease of nature being the
characteristic of both. So proud, indeed, was Bevan of his brotherlike
intercourse with the great man, that he made himself for years almost a
personal _fac-simile_ of him, even to the cut and colour of his coat,
wig, everything; and being a fine specimen of a "noble peasant,"
externally as well as internally, his assumption of the _squire_ in
costume well became his tall figure, mild countenance, (streaked with
the lingering pink of his youthful bloom,) and gentle demeanour. A rigid
observer might have thought, that to this indulgent but indolent master
the poor steward owed his ruin; his habits of "forgiving" his tenants
their rent debts so often, having extended themselves to the former,
further increased by the strange inattention of the new landlord. The
gratitude of Bevan was, however, deserved--for never was a kinder
master.
"It is a thing not to be thought," he said, while returning with the
man, "that I shall ever come back here, to the old church again, alive
or dead; seeing that I am too poor for any one to bring my old bones all
the way from Cardigan, to put them in the same ground with _his_, as I
did dream of in my better days, and too old for a man used to free air
and the hill-sides all his life, to live long in a prison, or indeed out
of one--but we must all die. I assure you, my honest man and kind, you
have done me good, in mind and body, by letting me take leave of his
honour! Well I may call him so, now he is in heaven, whom I did honour
when here, from my very heart of hearts; kind he was to me--a second
father to my child--God bless him! Sure I am, if he were still among us,
how his good heart would melt, how it would _bleed_ for us--for _her_--I
_know_ it would." Here the old man sobbed and kept silence a space, then
proceeded--"You see how weak old age and over-love of this world make a
man, sir. Yet I am content. Next to God, I owe to him whose dear corpse
I have just now been so near, a long and happy life,--thanks, thanks,
thanks! To both, up yonder, I do here render them from my inmost soul;"
and he bared his head again, looking up to the placid moon with a visage
of kindred placidity, and an eye of blue lustre, so brightened by his
emotion as almost to be likened to the heaven in which that moon shone.
"Why should I repine, or fear the walls of a prison, as my passage to
that wide glorious world without wall or bound or end, where I hope to
live free and for ever, in the sight of my Redeemer, and, perhaps, of
him who was Hugh Fitzarthur, Esq., of Tallylynn hall, when here? I hope
I am not irreverent, but in truth, friend, I fear I have almost as
vehemently longed for the presence of him once more, as for that more
awful presence: heaven pardon me if it was wicked! So welcome prison,
welcome death! Half a hundred and nineteen years spent pleasantly on
these green hills, free, and fresh, and hale, I can surely afford a few
weeks or months to a closer place, were it but as in a school for my
poor earthly and ignorant soul, to purify itself, to prepare itself for
that glorious place, to learn to die."
Next morning the old couple, dame Bevan being mounted on a pillion
behind him, proceeded on their melancholy journey. They reached the
house by the park, where it was proposed that an interview should take
place between the old man and the landlord himself, with some view to
arrangement prior to his imprisonment. While they there expect the long
delayed comfort of Winifred's embrace, let us return to that good
daughter, now more eager to fly to that dreaded suitor, to reverse her
father's resolve, to offer herself a victim, than ever she had been to
reach that dearer one who had now cruelly disappointed her in the hope
of one more meeting--that, perhaps, the last she could have innocently
allowed!
The dreaded day of trial arrived. But we must revert to her sad
meditations, and wild irresolute thoughts, while shut up by the
storm-cloud, and alone, in the mountain house. Doating passion, pain of
heart, terrible suggestions of despair, kept altering her countenance as
she leaned against the mouldering door-post, imprisoned by the black
mists that prevented her safely leaving the hovel. A sudden, dire,
revolution in her religious impressions was wrought, or rather
completed, in that dismal scene. David had more than once wrung her very
soul by dark hints of self-destruction in the event of her ever
forsaking him. He had thus been led into discussions on suicide, and had
even argued for the moral right of man to end his own being under
circumstances. Persuasion hangs on the lips of those we love. What she
would have rejected as impious, from some immoral man, in dispute, sank
deep into her soul, emanating from a heart she loved, through lips that,
to her, seemed formed for eloquence as much as love to make its throne.
Wild and tragical modes of reconciling her two furious, fighting,
irreconcilable wishes--that of saving her father--that of blessing her
lover--began to take terrible form and reality in her mind, as the wind
howled, the ruinous house shook, and its timbers groaned, and the
blackness of the sky, as the storm increased, deepened the lurid hue of
the foul and turbulent fog, (for such the mountain cloud thus in contact
with her eyes appeared.) The world, as it were, already left behind, or
rather below, the elements alone warring round her, her high-wrought
imagination began to regard life and death, and the world itself, as
things no longer appertaining to her, except as a passive instrument
toward one great object, the preservation of her father's freedom, and,
if it _were_ possible, also of her own inviolate person--that person
which she had, indeed, most solemnly vowed to one alone, David the
Telynwr. Not _to_ him--for her innate delicacy rendered such vows
repugnant to her; but alone, by the moon or stars, by the cataract, and
in the lonely lanes and woods, she had vowed herself to one alone--had
dedicated her virgin beauty (in the spirit of those romances she had
fatally devoured) to her "night-harper" with as true devotion as ever
did white vestal, at the end of her noviciate, devote herself alive and
dead to the one God. Instilled by the touching tone, the wild pathos,
the swimming eye of a wayward passionate character, weak, yet bold, of
whom she knew almost nothing, this devoted girl yielded up her better
reason to his rash innovations in morals, his examples of suicidal
heroes, and even _moralists_, among the ancients; and in the wild
height, alone, among the clouds, she almost wrought up her fond
agonizing soul to a terrible part--the accomplishing her father's
preservation, _on her wedding-day_, through the influence she might
naturally expect to obtain in such a season, and that done, make her
peace with God; and, before night--black pools--rock precipices, fearful
as Leucadia's--mortal plants, and even the horrid knife and
halter--floated before her mind's eye without her trembling, even like
terrible, yet kind, ministrants proffering escape--escape from legalised
violation!--escape from _perjury_, to her, the self-doomed Iphigenia!
For her morbid fancy, whispered to by her intense tenderness, conjured
up that dilemma between faith broken to her lover and abandonment of a
dear parent to his fate. Despair suggested that self-destruction itself
might seem venial, even before God, when rushed upon as the only
alternative to perjury--to prostitution; for such her romantic purity
taught her to consider submission to the embrace of any living man
except her heart's own--her affianced--"her beautiful!"--her lost!
Such were the feelings under whose influence our humble heroine pursued
her mountain journey, of a few miles, to the place of meeting with her
parents; and it was probably beneath the roof of the lone cottage in the
cloud that, under the same morbid mood of mind, she penned a letter to
Mr Fitzarthur, which was afterwards discovered, dated at top "My Wedding
Day," containing a passionate appeal on behalf of her father, for a bond
of legal indemnification to be executed before night, as a present which
she had set her heart on giving her father, as a bridal one, _that very
day_. Arrived at the house fitted up for the hated supplanter of her
father, "Lewis the Spy," her heart beat so violently before she could
firm her nerves to ring the bell, that she stood leaning some time
against the wall. This old house was now almost rebuilt, and not without
regard to rural beauty, in harmony with the fine scenery of an antique
park, with its mossy ivied remains of walls and venerable trees
overshadowing it, and was called "The Little Hall of the Park." She
sighed deeply as she glanced at its comfortable aspect, remembering how
long it had formed the secret object of her mother's little ambition
(for the dame had a touch of pride in her composition beyond her
ever-contented mate) to occupy that _little_ hall. It seemed so
appropriate that the lesser squire--the _great_ squire's friend--should
also have _his_ "hall," though a little one!
Indeed, it had been in incipient repair for him, that the old men might
spend their winter evenings together at the real hall, divided but by a
short path, across an angle of the park, without a dreary walk for Bevan
impending over the end of their carouse, with never-wearied
reminiscences of their boyhood--when sudden death stopped all
proceedings, and left poor Bevan alone in the world, as it seemed to
him--"in simplicity a child," and as imbecile in conflict with it as any
child.
She nerved her mind and hand by an effort, and rang the bell--(the
_bell_, there a modern innovation.) No sound but its own distant
deadened one, was heard within; but some dog in the rear barked, and
then howled, as if alarmed at the sudden breach of long prevailing
silence. Again she rang--again the troubled growl and bark, suppressed
by fear of the only living thing, as it seemed, within hearing, alone
responded. The situation was very solitary, the only adjacent house, the
hall, being yet tenantless, and night was gathering fast; for that storm
which had first detained her in the lofty region, (where a darker storm
had gathered round her mind and soul,) had desolated the lower country
all day, flooded the brooks, and delayed her on the road during several
hours.
She fancied a sort of suppressed commotion within, as of whisperings and
stealthy steps, and one voice she clearly overheard, but it was not her
father's. Whether it was that of Lewis (who, however, was not yet
residing there) she knew not, never having heard it in her life; he
avoiding, as was stated, direct intercourse with her--disappearing "like
a guilty thing" whenever her figure appeared in distant approach. What
should this mean? Wild fears, even superstitious ones, of some
indefinite ill or horror impending, began to shake her forced fortitude,
as she stood, half-fearing to ring again--again to hear the melancholy
voice of the dog, as of one lost--to wait--listen--and dream
of--David--death--murder--or even worse, till even the giant horror--the
jail!--and the white-headed prisoner, shrank before the present ominous
mystery--ominous of she _knew_ not what, therefore involving every thing
dreadful. Meanwhile, the swinging of the large oak branches in the close
of a squally day, their groaning, and the vast glooms that their foliage
shed all below, the twilight rapidly deepening into confirmed night, all
tended to the inspiration of a wild unearthly melancholy. Suddenly the
door was opened, while she hesitated to ring again, and by a _black_
man! Persons of colour are rarely seen inland, in Wales, and Winifred
had never visited a seaport of any consequence; so that even this was
almost a shock. She quickly, however, guessed that this was a servant of
the "Nabob," brought over with him. The man, learning her name, bade her
enter, adding, that she would see her father _soon_, but that "massa"
was within, settling some affairs with Mr Lewis, and begged to see her.
A sort of grim grin, though joined to a deference that seemed, to her
troubled and broken spirit, and sunken heart, a cruel mockery, relaxed
the man's features, and half shocked, half irritated her. Her spirits,
however, rose with the occasion, demanding all her fortitude and all
her tact; for now she was to make that impression on this terrible
suitor's fancy, through which alone she could work out her father's
salvation. In a few minutes more, she stood in the same apartment with
her David's detested rival! The embers of a large fire, decayed, cast
red twilight, which made it appear already dark without; and there he
stood, at the long room's extreme end, between her and the hearth.
To Winifred, the personal attributes of the man, whom in her awful
resolve she regarded merely as the instrument of that filial good work,
were utterly indifferent; yet she stopped--she shuddered--and trembled
all over, as she caught the mere outline of his figure by the
fire-light. There he was! to her idea, the embodied evil genius of her
family! the sullen apostate from the finer part of love--the victim of
satiety, (as rumour said,) the selfish contemner of women's better
feelings!--indifferent to all but person in his election of a wife;
willing to unite himself with one whose heart and mind were stranger to
him, on bare report of her health and beauty, and some slight
recollections of her childhood! Seeing her stop, and even totter, he
advanced a few steps; but she, with the instinctive recoil and antipathy
of some feeble creature from its natural enemy, retreated at his first
movement--and, shocked by this betrayed repugnance, he again stood
irresolute. Then rushed back upon her heart, with all the horror of
novelty, the renunciation of poor David, now it was on the point of
being sealed for ever. Now father, mother, all beside, was
forgotten--the ghastliness of a terrible struggle within, the stern
horror of confirmed despair, began to disguise her beauty as with a
death-pale mask--the features grew rigid, her heart beat audibly, her
ears rang and tingled, and sight grew dim. She was fainting, falling. Mr
Fitzarthur sprang to support her, but putting his arms too boldly round
her waist, that detested freedom at once startled her into temporary
self-possession, back into life. She gasped, struggled against him, as
if she had rather have fallen than have been supported by _him_; and
turned to him that white face, white even to the lips, imploringly,
where was still depicted her unconquerable aversion. Some astonishment
seemed to rivet that look upon his face, but half-visible by the dusky
light--astonishment no longer painful, when the Nabob, emboldened,
renewed his now permitted clasp, and only uttering "My _dear_! don't you
know me?" in the tenderest tone to which ever manly voice was modulated,
increased his grasp to a passionate embrace, advanced his face--his
mouth to hers, advanced and pressed unresisted--and before her
bewildered eyes closed in that fainting fit which had been but
suspended, stood revealed to them (as proved by one delighted smile,
flashed out of all the settled gloom of that countenance,) as her
heart's own David--no longer the night--wandering poor _Telynwr_, but
David Fitzarthur of Talylynn, Esq.
The story of the eccentric East Indian may be shortly told. From
childhood he was the victim of excessive morbid sensibility, and
constitutional melancholy. The jovial habits of his good-natured Welsh
uncle were repugnant to his nature; and after becoming an orphan, the
solitary boy had no human object on which the deep capacity for
tenderness of his _occult_ nature could be exerted. Thus forced by his
fate into solitariness of habits, and secreted emotions, he was deemed
unsocial, and reproached for what he felt was his misfortune--the being
wholly misunderstood by those his early lot was cast among. Hence his
perverted ardour of affection was misplaced on the lower living
world--dog, cat, or owl, whatever chance made his companions. Returning
to India, where he had known two parents, to meet no longer the
tenderness of even one, the melancholy boy-exile (for Wales he ever
regarded as his country) increased in morbid estrangement from mankind,
as he increased in years; till his maturity nearly realized the
misanthropic unsocial character for which his youth had been unjustly
reproached. Though in the high road to a splendid fortune, he loathed
East Indian society, far beyond all former loathing of fox-hunters and
topers in Wales, whose green mountains now became (conformably to the
nature, "_semper varium et mutabile_," of the melancholic) the very
idols of his romantic regrets and fondest memory. In India were neither
green fields nor green hearts. External nature and human nature appeared
equally to languish under that enfeebling hot death in the atmosphere,
which seemed to wither female beauty in the moment that it ripened. The
pallidness of the European beauties, sickly as the clime, disgusted
him--their venality still more. Female fortune-hunters were far more
intolerable to his delicacy than the coarsest hunter of vermin--fox or
hare--ever had been at his uncle's hall, whom he began to esteem, and
sincerely mourned--when death had removed all of him from his memory but
his kindness, his desire to amuse him, the "sulky boy," his substantial
goodness and warm-heartedness. Knowing that every female in his circle
was well informed of his ample fortune, still accumulating, he fancied
art, deceit, coquetry in every smile and glance, (for suspicion of human
hearts and motives ever besets the melancholic character;) and thus, it
was natural that he should sometimes sigh over the idea of some fresh
mountain beauty, not trained by parents in the art and to the task of
husband-hunting. Even the soft-faced child, just growing into woman, who
had held her pinafore for fruit, in the orchard, whose half-fallen
apple-tree was his almost constant seat, floated across his vacant, yet
restless mind. In truth, when she surprised him in his part of sexton to
his owl, she had evinced rather more sympathy than she had admitted to
his other self, David the wood-wanderer; and though she had indeed
laughed, it was with tears in her eyes, elicited by one she detected in
the shy averted orbs of his. Yet was the sweetness of the little Welsh
girl left behind, for a long time, even when manhood failed to banish
its idea, no more than his statue to Pygmalion, or his watery image to
Narcissus. But having no female society, save those marketable forms
that he distrusted and despised; yet pining, in his romantic refinement,
for _pure_ passion--for reciprocal passion--panting to be loved _for
himself alone_, he kept imagining her developed graces, exaggerating the
conceit of some childish tenderness toward himself, his position and his
nervous infirmity keeping a solitude of soul and heart ever round him,
into which no female form had free and constant admission, but that
aërial one, the little Winifred, of far, far off, green Wales! The
promise of pure beauty, which her childhood gave, his _dream_ fulfilled;
and his imagination seized and cherished the beautiful cloud, painted by
fancy, till it became the goddess of his idolatry, though conscious of
the self-delusion, and retained with that tenacity conceivable, perhaps,
to the morbidly sensitive alone. The habit of yielding to the
importunity of one idea, strengthens itself; every recurrence of it
produces quicker sensibility to the next; deeper and deeper impression
follows, till one form of mania supervenes--that which consists in the
undue mastery and eternal presence of one idea.
Childish and _fugitive_ as it _seemed_, a passion had actually commenced
in his _boy's_ heart, which clung to that of the man, though under the
same light, fragile, and dreamlike form. Poetry might liken it to the
mere frothy foam of the infant cataract, when it gushes out of the
breast of the mountain to the rising sun, which, arrested by an intense
frost, ere it can fall, in the very act of evanishing, there hangs,
still hangs, the mere air-bubbles congealed into crystal vesicles,
defying all the force of the mounted sun to dissipate their delicate
white beauty, evanescent as it _looks_. The chill and the
impenetrability of heart, kept by circumstances within him, such frost
might typify--that pure, fragile-seeming, yet durable passion, that
snow-foam of the waterfall. True it was that this fantastic fancy had
the power to draw him to his Welsh patrimony earlier than worldly
ambition would have warranted. But his after conduct--his actual
overtures were not so wildly romantic, as might appear from the
foregoing narrative; but of this in the sequel.
And where was her father--mother? Why had the law been allowed by this
eccentric lover to violate the humble sanctuary of home, at the desolate
Llaneol? What was become of the wicker chair? Was the hated Lewis to be
maintained in his usurpation of the chair of Bevan's _ancestral_ post of
steward, (for his father had been steward to the father of the squire
deceased?) Above all, was Dame Bevan to see that home of her heart's
hope, the permanent home of the harsh supplanter of her husband?
Passing over the affecting scene of poor Winifred's fainting, which drew
round her father and mother, and others from below, proceed we to answer
those queries and conclude our tale.
When perfectly restored, Winifred, leaning on the arm of her future
husband, accompanied her parents down into the comfortable kitchen,
where, by a huge fire, stood the veritable wicker chair, familiar to her
eyes from infancy, rickety as ever, but surviving its desecration by the
boys at the auction; and looking round, she saw standing the whole solid
old oaken furniture, coffers, dressers, &c., even to the same bright
brazen skillets, pewter dishes, and sundries--the pride of Mistress
Bevan's heart, the splendour of better days. Mr Fitzarthur led the old
man by the hand to his own chair, his wife to another; and then, having
seated himself by their daughter, began, over the fumes of tea and
coffee, (the honours of which pleasant meal, so needful after her
agitation, he solicited Winifred to perform,) to narrate various
matters, which we must condense into a nutshell.
To their surprise and amusement, they now learned that the hated "spy"
who had prowled round their folds and fields so long, would resign to
Mistress Bevan the house in which they sat, and that atonement made,
vanish into thin air--_a vox et preterea nihil!_ being in reality the
Proteus-like, mysterious, handsome, though sallow stranger, and no
stranger, sitting among them!
We said that Mr Fitzarthur's conduct in espousing this long-unseen
mistress of his fancy, was not quite so extraordinary and wild as it
appeared. For coming back grown into maturity, and altered by climate in
complexion and all characteristics, he found himself quite unrecognised,
and conceived the idea of at once reconnoitring his dilapidated estate,
and watching the conduct of his long-remembered Winifred. _Two_
disguises seemed necessary toward these two purposes, and he adopted the
two we have seen, one on the "hither side Tivy," the other on the "far
side Tivy," which his coracle allowed him to cross at pleasure. His
close watch of the blameless girl's whole life confirmed the warm and
romantic wishes of his soul, which her beauty inspired--that beauty as
fully confirming the vision of his love-dream when far and long away.
It was during the alarm of her prolonged fainting, produced by the
surprise of this discovery, and the previous agitations, (whereby,
perhaps, the prudence rather than the affection of the eccentric lover
was impeached,) that her mother, searching her pocket for a bottle of
volatile salts, turned forth the letter lately referred to, melancholy
evidence of the desperate extremity to which two powerful antagonist
passions--love, and filial love--had driven a mind not unfortified by
religion, but beleaguered by despair and all its powers, till resolution
failed, and peril impended over an otherwise almost spotless soul.
As the old man's affections were not wholly weaned from Llaneol, ruinous
as it was, his son-in-law had it restored as a temporary summer
residence for the old people, as well as occasionally for himself and
his beloved bride.
It hardly needs to be told, that the arrest and its executors were but
parts of the delusion, the amount of real infliction being no more than
a ride in a fine morning of some miles. Whether the whole, as involving
some little added trouble of mind to that whose whole weight he was
going so soon to remove, was too severe a penance for the steward's
neglect, may be variously judged by various readers. In the halcyon days
that followed, Winifred never forgot the place on the Tivy bank where
she slept and dropped her book; nor did the happy husband, melancholic
no more, forsake his coracle or his harp utterly, but would often
serenade his lady-love (albeit his wedded love also) on some golden
evening, as she sat among the cowslips and harebells, that enamelled
with floral blue and gold the greensward bank of the Tivy, under the
fine sycamore tree--the "trysting-place" of their romantic assignations.