'Was I?' said Patrick, asking it of himself, for his conscience would not
acknowledge an absolute ignorance. 'No: I fought it, I wouldn't have a
blot on her be suspected. She's married! She's married to one of their
princes!--married for a title!--and changed her religion! And Miss
Adister, you're speaking of Adiante?'
'My cousin Adiante.'
'Well did I hate the name! I heard it first over in France. Our people
wrote to me of her; and it's a name to set you thinking: Is she tender,
or nothing like a woman,--a stone? And I put it to my best friend there,
Father Clement, who's a scholar, up in everything, and he said it was a
name with a pretty sound and an ill meaning--far from tender; and a bad
history too, for she was one of the forty-nine Danaides who killed their
husbands for the sake of their father and was not likely to be the
fiftieth, considering the name she bore. It was for her father's sake
she as good as killed her lover, and the two Adiantes are like enough:
they're as like as a pair of hands with daggers. So that was my brother
Philip's luck! She's married! It's done; it's over, like death: no
hope. And this time it's against her father; it's against her faith.
There's the end of Philip! I could have prophesied it; I did; and when
they broke, from her casting him off--true to her name! thought I.
She cast him off, and she couldn't wait for him, and there's his heart
broken. And I ready to glorify her for a saint! And now she must have
loved the man, or his title, to change her religion. She gives him her
soul! No praise to her for that: but mercy! what a love it must be.
Or else it's a spell. But wasn't she rather one for flinging spells than
melting? Except that we're all of us hit at last, and generally by our
own weapon. But she loved Philip: she loved him down to shipwreck and
drowning: she gave battle for him, and against her father; all the place
here and the country's alive with their meetings and partings:--she can't
have married! She wouldn't change her religion for her lover: how can
she have done it for this prince? Why, it's to swear false oaths!--
unless it's possible for a woman to slip out of herself and be another
person after a death like that of a love like hers.'
Patrick stopped: the idea demanded a scrutiny.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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