With the utmost candour, and without the least reservation, he told the humbleness of his origin, the blemish in his birth, his wretched bringing-up, and withal, the mysterious matter of his glorious vision. The assertion that the moment he beheld her, on rescuing her from the robber, he identified her face and figure with the lady of his dream, called forth her deepest blushes, and she audibly whispered “Incredible!” His repeated assertions, passionately urged, of the truth of his assertion, silenced and perhaps convinced her.
Certain it is that, like the gentle Desdemona, “She gave him for his pains a world of sighs;” and time evinced to him that the lady had a tale to tell also, which proved that although highly born, and affluent as she was, her lot had not been entire sunshine.
“I am yet hardly twenty-one,” replied she, “although I have been twice married. To neither of these husbands have I been able to give my entire heart. My first union was at my father’s command, when solicitations proved useless, to his contemporary and old schoolfellow, who was old-fashioned enough to restore the long-exploded abs in his name, vaunting himself as Thomas ab Rhys ab Thomas Gock, of Ystrad Feen; who could carry on the antique and rusty chain of abs, without a broken link, through several centuries up to the patriarch of his tribe, Elystan Glodrydd.
“Poor old gentleman! I fed him with a pap-spoon, in his large gothic arm-chair, when a stroke of paralysis had withered his right hand; but in six months after our marriage (marriage!) he fell a victim to his ruling passion, which I will not name to his disparagement, and died of apoplexy. My year’s mourning for him had barely expired, when my mother claimed her right of choosing my next husband; and, in the course of time, poor Sir George (peace to the memory of a harmless man!) became my second husband. Had I lived to these days unwedded,” said she, with a look and tone of resolute firmness, almost foreign to her usual gentleness, “it is more than probable that I should not have become the victim of either of my parents’ whims.”
“My poor mother has been long deceased; but well I know my father’s future aim respecting me—to have me united to some other choice of his own; but no! the sapling may bend to the storm, but, springing up again, who shall re-bend the youthful oak that time matures? If my good father inclines to play the tyrant with me, he will find some difference between the woman and the child.” Applauding her resolution, Twm, kissed her hand with rapture; and, she added in a tone of gaiety, “if ever I change my state, I shall become the votary of a different shrine to any that I have yet bowed to;”
“The little god shall shoot the porch,
Ere faithful Hymen waves his torch.”
With that expressive couplet, she rose, and our hero, with enlarged hopes, took a tender, but restrained and respectful leave of her.
If Twm was heartily welcomed by Lady Devereaux, he was no less heartily disliked by her father. Sir John had learnt that he was a natural son of Sir John Wynn of Gwydir’s, and no earthly merit could compensate, in his estimation, the bar of bastardy in his escutcheon. He sternly desired his daughter to break off all intercourse with our hero, as he had discovered, he said, the baseness of his origin. Although Twm appeared no more in his house, he had the mortification to learn that at the play, the ball, and in the Park and Mall, their meetings had been frequent. In a bitter spirit of resentment against his daughter, without the least previous warning, he one morning compelled her roughly to enter a coach at the door, which soon drove off, taking her she knew not whither.
Our hero’s surmises became numerous and agonizing, when for three long weeks he had neither seen nor heard from his charmer, although he had not missed one opportunity of encountering her at any of their accustomed places of meeting, and his days became burdensome, and his nights sleepless. Just as he was sinking into a state of despondency, he one evening received a note in the hand of Lady Devereaux, informing him of her forcible conveyance to, and safe arrival at Ystrad Feen. His father having long since returned to North Wales, he took an affectionate but hasty leave of the hospitable family of the Martyns, and commenced his journey to his native principality.