As a
child, he had been elevated to the consequence of a man before his years
gave any mental check to the selfishness which such conduct was likely to
engender; he could remember when his will was law to the servants and
dependants, and his sympathy necessary to his father: now he was as a
cipher in his father’s house; and the Squire, estranged in the first
instance by a feeling of the injury he had done his son in not sooner
acquainting him with his purposed marriage, seemed rather to avoid than
to seek him as a companion, and too frequently showed the most utter
indifference to the feelings and wishes which a young man of a high and
independent spirit might be supposed to indulge. Perhaps Owen was not fully aware of the force of all these circumstances;
for an actor in a family drama is seldom unimpassioned enough to be
perfectly observant. But he became moody and soured; brooding over his
unloved existence, and craving with a human heart after sympathy. This feeling took more full possession of his mind when he had left
college, and returned home to lead an idle and purposeless life. As the
heir, there was no worldly necessity for exertion: his father was too
much of a Welsh squire to dream of the moral necessity, and he himself
had not sufficient strength of mind to decide at once upon abandoning a
place and mode of life which abounded in daily mortifications; yet to
this course his judgment was slowly tending, when some circumstances
occurred to detain him at Bodowen. It was not to be expected that harmony would long be preserved, even in
appearance, between an unguarded and soured young man, such as Owen, and
his wary stepmother, when he had once left college, and come, not as a
visitor, but as the heir to his father’s house. Some cause of difference
occurred, where the woman subdued her hidden anger sufficiently to become
convinced that Owen was not entirely the dupe she had believed him to be. Henceforward there was no peace between them. Not in vulgar altercations
did this show itself; but in moody reserve on Owen’s part, and in
undisguised and contemptuous pursuance of her own plans by his
stepmother. Bodowen was no longer a place where, if Owen was not loved
or attended to, he could at least find peace, and care for himself: he
was thwarted at every step, and in every wish, by his father’s desire,
apparently, while the wife sat by with a smile of triumph on her
beautiful lips. So Owen went forth at the early day dawn, sometimes roaming about on the
shore or the upland, shooting or fishing, as the season might be, but
oftener “stretched in indolent repose” on the short, sweet grass,
indulging in gloomy and morbid reveries. He would fancy that this
mortified state of existence was a dream, a horrible dream, from which he
should awake and find himself again the sole object and darling of his
father. And then he would start up and strive to shake off the incubus. There was the molten sunset of his childish memory; the gorgeous crimson
piles of glory in the west, fading away into the cold calm light of the
rising moon, while here and there a cloud floated across the western
heaven, like a seraph’s wing, in its flaming beauty; the earth was the
same as in his childhood’s days, full of gentle evening sounds, and the
harmonies of twilight—the breeze came sweeping low over the heather and
blue-bells by his side, and the turf was sending up its evening incense
of perfume. But life, and heart, and hope were changed for ever since
those bygone days! Or he would seat himself in a favourite niche of the rocks on Moel Gêst,
hidden by a stunted growth of the whitty, or mountain-ash, from general
observation, with a rich-tinted cushion of stone-crop for his feet, and a
straight precipice of rock rising just above. Here would he sit for
hours, gazing idly at the bay below with its back-ground of purple hills,
and the little fishing-sail on its bosom, showing white in the sunbeam,
and gliding on in such harmony with the quiet beauty of the glassy sea;
or he would pull out an old school-volume, his companion for years, and
in morbid accordance with the dark legend that still lurked in the
recesses of his mind—a shape of gloom in those innermost haunts awaiting
its time to come forth in distinct outline—would he turn to the old Greek
dramas which treat of a family foredoomed by an avenging Fate. The worn
page opened of itself at the play of the Œdipus Tyrannus, and Owen dwelt
with the craving disease upon the prophecy so nearly resembling that
which concerned himself. With his consciousness of neglect, there was a
sort of self-flattery in the consequence which the legend gave him. He
almost wondered how they durst, with slights and insults, thus provoke
the Avenger. The days drifted onward. Often he would vehemently pursue some sylvan
sport, till thought and feeling were lost in the violence of bodily
exertion. Occasionally his evenings were spent at a small public-house,
such as stood by the unfrequented wayside, where the welcome, hearty,
though bought, seemed so strongly to contrast with the gloomy negligence
of home—unsympathising home. One evening (Owen might be four or five-and-twenty), wearied with a day’s
shooting on the Clenneny Moors, he passed by the open door of “The Goat”
at Penmorfa. The light and the cheeriness within tempted him, poor
self-exhausted man! as it has done many a one more wretched in worldly
circumstances, to step in, and take his evening meal where at least his
presence was of some consequence. It was a busy day in that little
hostel. A flock of sheep, amounting to some hundreds, had arrived at
Penmorfa, on their road to England, and thronged the space before the
house. Inside was the shrewd, kind-hearted hostess, bustling to and fro,
with merry greetings for every tired drover who was to pass the night in
her house, while the sheep were penned in a field close by. Ever and
anon, she kept attending to the second crowd of guests, who were
celebrating a rural wedding in her house. It was busy work to Martha
Thomas, yet her smile never flagged; and when Owen Griffiths had finished
his evening meal she was there, ready with a hope that it had done him
good, and was to his mind, and a word of intelligence that the
wedding-folk were about to dance in the kitchen, and the harper was the
famous Edward of Corwen. Owen, partly from good-natured compliance with his hostess’s implied
wish, and partly from curiosity, lounged to the passage which led to the
kitchen—not the every-day, working, cooking kitchen, which was behind,
but a good-sized room, where the mistress sat, when her work was done,
and where the country people were commonly entertained at such
merry-makings as the present. The lintels of the door formed a frame for
the animated picture which Owen saw within, as he leaned against the wall
in the dark passage.