LITERATURE.

Globe, Volume IV, Issue 357, 4 August 1875, Page 3

LITERATURE.

THE ATHELSTONS OF MOETE D ATHELSTON. [Dublin University Magazine.) The Athelstons, of Morte dAthelston, were a very ancient race, dating from long before the Norman Conquest. Pure Saxon blood : there had been Cedrics, Modreds, and Edgars, Eleanors, and Rowenas in the family, time out of mind, and William the Norman was looked upon as quite a person of the other day, while pedigrees dating from his era Avere considered as nothing worth mentioning. Nevertheless, they were not an over-haughty or arrogant race—at least, the present head of the house, the only one we have to deal with, was not ; he was a genial, courteous, affable gentleman to all; and if he was proud of his old name, and the fair and pleasant acres on which his ancestors had for so long dwelt, it was not the pride of arrogancy, but rather that which showed itself in deeds of love and kindness amongst a tenantry which idolized him. For all that they were such an ancient race, the house of Morte dAthelston—or the Castle, as it was commonly called—was a very modern building, having, indeed, been built by the present owner's father ; the old house, and almost everything valuable it contained, having been destroyed by fire when the now reigning lord was little more than a baby. The old Earl of Athelston—for with all, their pride of Saxon birth there bad lived a degenerate ancestor, who, it seemed, was not too proud to accept an earldom from the hand of a Norman rival for service done, albeit unrecorded in history, and doubtless wisely so, as the deeds for which in those bygone days monarchs rewarded their subjects, were seldom such as would come up to our modern ideas of honour or virtue—the old Earl, then, had built the present mansion, a magnificent building in the Grecian style of architecture, and standing about half a mile from the remains of the old Castle, now a picturesque ruin, ivy covered, three sides of which were surrounded with the nearly dried-up moat, while the fourth was built on the very edge of a precipice, some hundred feet deep, where the sea raged and roared round its base, foaming and struggling through the narrow entrance of a cave said to run for miles inland, but into the vast extent of whose subterranean passages, with their vaulted roofs and glittering walls, no rash explorer had been known to penetrate since the days when an Athelston and an outraged friend had perished in a death struggle there.

It was a tale of foul dishonour done, treachery, and revenge. The Saxon lord lied to his cave for refuge, but was followed to its inmost recesses by his Norman foe, deaf to the wild prayers and agonised entreaties of the fair, false woman who had wrought the woe. Neither ever came forth again, but a crimson stream of blood was seen issuing from the mouth of the cave, and trickling over the yellow sand until it tinged the crested waves with red;and the mad laugb of a woman was heard echoing wildly over the cliffs till it started the very sea-birds in their rocky nests. Hence, the cave gained the name oi Morte d'Athelston, which soon spread to 'the Castle and its surrounding lands, and whenever sorrow or death, so goes the legend, threaten the ancient house, the red stream may be seen mingling with the waves, and the maniac's laugh may be heard echoing through the vaulted roof of the cave.

The present Earl of Athelston was a man of about sixty years of age, but looking many, many years older ; a bent and broken man of his age. His life had been a sad one for all his broad lands, and sorrow and care had told upon a naturally delicate constitution. At twenty years of age he had come home from foreign travel to celebrate his majority in the magnificent new house just finished, his father, looking hale and hearty, welcoming with lavish splendour his only son, and for six weeks the house was full of gay company, and revelry, dancing, and feasting lasted long into each night; but it was scarcely all over, and the last guest barely departed, when the Earl was struck down, and in little more than the prime of his life was laid beside his wife, some two years dead, in the vault of the Athelstons. Confiding the Lady Eleanor, a child of four years old, and his only surviving daughter, to the care of her maternal grandmother, the new lord shut up the house which had blazed forth so brilliantly for so short a time, and returned to his old life of travel. Some said he had no choice in the matter, for that when he came to look into his affairs he found that the vast sums of money raised at enormous interest by his father for the building of the new house had almost swamped the estate. Be that as it may, Lord-Athelston went abroad, where he remained for ten years, and then suddenly returned, bringing with him a beantiful young wife. Once more the spacious halls of Morte d'Athelston were thrown open, and the lord of the manor and his beauteous dame kept open house for his neighbours; or, rather, they would have done so, had their hospitalities been cordially received by the surrounding gentry. But the fair woman who had come among them was a foreigner—a Greek, and with that proneness to suspicion, and dislike to everything that is in the least out of the common routine of ordinary life, inherent to the English nature, they accepted invitations, giving formal parties in return at intervals, but they never unbent towards the foreign wife. An invisible but insurmountable barrier of prejudice hedged them round, and the poor lady lived and died amongst them, a stranger still. And she had heavy domestic griefs, this lovely woman in a strange land. One after another three sons and one daughter were laid in the family fault; and Eleanor, the sister, who loved her, and whom she loved, was banished the Castle, and all correspondence between them forbidden, by a stern brother's decree, in that the young lady had chosen to place her affections upon, and cast in her lot with, a young Oxford divine, the once dear friend of her relentless brother. (To be continued.)