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.