The Celt and Saxon, Complete

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CELT AND SAXON

By George Meredith

1910.

CONTENTS

BOOK 1.
I. WHEREIN AN EXCURSION IS MADE IN A CELTIC MIND
II. MR. ADISTER
III. CAROLINE
IV. THE PRINCESS
V. AT THE PIANOS CHIEFLY WITHOUT MUSIC
VI. A CONSULTATION: WITH OPINIONS UPON WELSH WOMEN AND THE CAMBRIAN
RACE
VII. THE MINIATURE
VIII. CAPTAIN CON AND MRS. ADISTER O'DONNELL
IX. THE CAPTAIN'S CABIN
X. THE BROTHERS
XI. INTRODUCING A NEW CHARACTER

BOOK 2.
XII. MISS MATTOCK
XIII. THE DINNER-PARTY
XIV. OF ROCKNEY
XV. THE MATTOCK FAMILY
XVI. OF THE GREAT MR. BULL AND THE CELTIC AND SAXON VIEW OF HIM:
AND SOMETHING OF RICHARD ROCKNEY
XVII. CROSSING THE RUBICON
XVIII. CAPTAIN CON'S LETTER
X1X. MARS CONVALESCENT

CHAPTER I

WHEREIN AN EXCURSION IS MADE IN A CELTIC MIND

A young Irish gentleman of the numerous clan O'Donnells, and a Patrick,
hardly a distinction of him until we know him, had bound himself, by
purchase of a railway-ticket, to travel direct to the borders of North
Wales, on a visit to a notable landowner of those marches, the Squire
Adister, whose family-seat was where the hills begin to lift and spy into
the heart of black mountains. Examining his ticket with an apparent
curiosity, the son of a greener island debated whether it would not be
better for him to follow his inclinations, now that he had gone so far as
to pay for the journey, and stay. But his inclinations were also subject
to question, upon his considering that he had expended pounds English for
the privilege of making the journey in this very train. He asked himself
earnestly what was the nature of the power which forced him to do it--a
bad genius or a good: and it seemed to him a sort of answer, inasmuch as
it silenced the contending parties, that he had been the victim of an
impetus. True; still his present position involved a certain outlay of
money simply, not at all his bondage to the instrument it had procured
for him, and that was true; nevertheless, to buy a ticket to shy it away
is an incident so uncommon, that if we can but pause to dwell on the
singularity of the act, we are unlikely to abjure our fellowship with
them who would not be guilty of it; and therefore, by the aid of his
reflections and a remainder of the impetus, Mr. Patrick O'Donnell stepped
into a carriage of the train like any ordinary English traveller, between
whom and his destination there is an agreement to meet if they can.

It is an experience of hesitating minds, be they Saxon or others, that
when we have submitted our persons to the charge of public companies,
immediately, as if the renouncing of our independence into their hands
had given us a taste of a will of our own, we are eager for the
performance of their contract to do what we are only half inclined to;
the train cannot go fast enough to please us, though we could excuse it
for breaking down; stoppages at stations are impertinences, and the
delivery of us at last on the platform is an astonishment, for it is not
we who have done it--we have not even desired it. To be imperfectly in
accord with the velocity precipitating us upon a certain point, is to be
going without our heads, which have so much the habit of supposing it
must be whither we intend, when we go in a determined manner, that a
doubt of it distracts the understanding--decapitates us; suddenly to
alight, moreover, and find ourselves dropped at the heels of flying Time,
like an unconsidered bundle, is anything but a reconstruction of the
edifice. The natural revelry of the blood in speed suffers a violent
shock, not to speak of our notion of being left behind, quite isolated
and unsound. Or, if you insist, the condition shall be said to belong
exclusively to Celtic nature, seeing that it had been drawn directly from
a scion of one of those tribes.

Young Patrick jumped from the train as headless as good St. Denis. He was
a juvenile thinker, and to discover himself here, where he both wished
and wished not to be, now deeming the negative sternly in the ascendant,
flicked his imagination with awe of the influence of the railway service
upon the destinies of man. Settling a mental debate about a backward
flight, he drove across the land so foreign to his eyes and affections,
and breasted a strong tide of wishes that it were in a contrary
direction. He would rather have looked upon the desert under a
sand-storm, or upon a London suburb yet he looked thirstingly. Each
variation of landscape of the curved highway offered him in a moment
decisive features: he fitted them to a story he knew: the whole circle
was animated by a couple of pale mounted figures beneath no happy light.
For this was the air once breathed by Adiante Adister, his elder brother
Philip's love and lost love: here she had been to Philip flame along the
hill-ridges, his rose-world in the dust-world, the saintly in his
earthly. And how had she rewarded him for that reverential love of her?
She had forborne to kill him. The bitter sylph of the mountain lures men
to climb till she winds them in vapour and leaves them groping, innocent
of the red crags below. The delicate thing had not picked his bones:
Patrick admitted it; he had seen his brother hale and stout not long
back. But oh! she was merciless, she was a witch. If ever queen-witch
was, she was the crowned one!

For a personal proof, now: he had her all round him in a strange district
though he had never cast eye on her. Yonder bare hill she came racing up
with a plume in the wind: she was over the long brown moor, look where he
would: and vividly was she beside the hurrying beck where it made edges
and chattered white. He had not seen, he could not imagine her face:
angelic dashed with demon beauty, was his idea of the woman, and there is
little of a portrait in that; but he was of a world where the elemental
is more individual than the concrete, and unconceived of sight she was a
recognised presence for the green-island brain of a youth whose manner of
hating was to conjure her spirit from the air and let fly his own in
pursuit of her.

It has to be stated that the object of the youngster's expedition to
Earlsfont was perfectly simple in his mind, however much it went against
his nature to perform it. He came for the purpose of obtaining Miss
Adister's Continental address; to gather what he could of her from her
relatives, and then forthwith to proceed in search of her, that he might
plead with her on behalf of his brother Philip, after a four years'
division of the lovers. Could anything be simpler? He had familiarised
himself with the thought of his advocacy during those four years. His
reluctance to come would have been accountable to the Adisters by a
sentiment of shame at his family's dealings with theirs: in fact, a
military captain of the O'Donnells had in old days played the adventurer
and charmed a maid of a certain age into yielding her hand to him; and
the lady was the squire of Earlsfont's only sister: she possessed funded
property. Shortly after the union, as one that has achieved the goal of
enterprise, the gallant officer retired from the service nor did
north-western England put much to his credit the declaration of his
wife's pronouncing him to be the best of husbands. She naturally said it
of him in eulogy; his own relatives accepted it in some contempt, mixed
with a relish of his hospitality: his wife's were constant in citing his
gain by the marriage. Could he possibly have been less than that? they
exclaimed. An excellent husband, who might easily have been less than
that, he was the most devoted of cousins, and the liberal expenditure of
his native eloquence for the furtherance of Philip's love-suit was the
principal cause of the misfortune, if misfortune it could subsequently be
called to lose an Adiante.

The Adister family were not gifted to read into the heart of a young man
of a fanciful turn. Patrick had not a thought of shame devolving on him
from a kinsman that had shot at a mark and hit it. Who sees the shame of
taking an apple from a garden of the Hesperides? And as England
cultivates those golden, if sometimes wrinkled, fruits, it would have
seemed to him, in thinking about it, an entirely lucky thing for the
finder; while a question of blood would have fired his veins to rival
heat of self-assertion, very loftily towering: there were Kings in
Ireland: cry for one of them in Uladh and you will hear his name, and he
has descendants yet! But the youth was not disposed unnecessarily to
blazon his princeliness. He kept it in modest reserve, as common
gentlemen keep their physical strength. His reluctance to look on
Earlsfont sprang from the same source as unacknowledged craving to see
the place, which had precipitated him thus far upon his road: he had a
horror of scenes where a faithless girl had betrayed her lover. Love was
his visionary temple, and his idea of love was the solitary light in it,
painfully susceptible to coldair currents from the stories of love abroad
over the world. Faithlessness he conceived to be obnoxious to nature; it
stained the earth and was excommunicated; there could be no pardon of the
crime, barely any for repentance. He conceived it in the feminine; for
men are not those holy creatures whose conduct strikes on the soul with
direct edge: a faithless man is but a general villain or funny monster, a
subject rejected of poets, taking no hue in the flat chronicle of
history: but a faithless woman, how shall we speak of her! Women,
sacredly endowed with beauty and the wonderful vibrating note about the
very mention of them, are criminal to hideousness when they betray. Cry,
False! on them, and there is an instant echo of bleeding males in many
circles, like the poor quavering flute-howl of transformed beasts, which
at some remembering touch bewail their higher state. Those women are
sovereignly attractive, too, loathsomely. Therein you may detect the
fiend.

Our moralist had for some time been glancing at a broad, handsome old
country mansion on the top of a wooded hill backed by a swarm of mountain
heads all purple-dark under clouds flying thick to shallow, as from a
brush of sepia. The dim silver of half-lighted lakewater shot along below
the terrace. He knew the kind of sky, having oftener seen that than any
other, and he knew the house before it was named to him and he had flung
a discolouring thought across it. He contemplated it placably and
studiously, perhaps because the shower-folding armies of the fields above
likened its shadowed stillness to that of his Irish home. There had this
woman lived! At the name of Earlsfont she became this witch, snake,
deception. Earlsfont was the title and summary of her black story: the
reverberation of the word shook up all the chapters to pour out their
poison.

CHAPTER II

MR. ADISTER

Mr. Patrick O'Donnell drove up to the gates of Earlsfont notwithstanding
these emotions, upon which light matter it is the habit of men of his
blood too much to brood; though it is for our better future to have a
capacity for them, and the insensible race is the oxenish.

But if he did so when alone, the second man residing in the Celt put that
fellow by and at once assumed the social character on his being requested
to follow his card into Mr. Adister's library. He took his impression of
the hall that had heard her voice, the stairs she had descended, the door
she had passed through, and the globes she had perchance laid hand on,
and the old mappemonde, and the severely-shining orderly regiment of
books breathing of her whether she had opened them or not, as he bowed to
his host, and in reply to, 'So, sir! I am glad to see you,' said
swimmingly that Earlsfont was the first house he had visited in this
country: and the scenery reminded him of his part of Ireland: and on
landing at Holyhead he had gone off straight to the metropolis by
appointment to meet his brother Philip, just returned from Canada a full
captain, who heartily despatched his compliments and respects, and hoped
to hear of perfect health in this quarter of the world. And Captain Con
the same, and he was very flourishing.

Patrick's opening speech concluded on the sound of a short laugh coming
from Mr. Adister.

It struck the young Irishman's ear as injurious and scornful in relation
to Captain Con; but the remark ensuing calmed him:

'He has no children.'

'No, sir; Captain Con wasn't born to increase the number of our clan,'
Patrick rejoined; and thought: By heaven! I get a likeness of her out of
you, with a dash of the mother mayhap somewhere. This was his Puck-manner
of pulling a girdle round about from what was foremost in his head to the
secret of his host's quiet observation; for, guessing that such features
as he beheld would be slumped on a handsome family, he was led by the
splendid severity of their lines to perceive an illimitable pride in the
man likely to punish him in his offspring, who would inherit that as
well; so, as is the way with the livelier races, whether they seize first
or second the matter or the spirit of what they hear, the vivid
indulgence of his own ideas helped him to catch the right meaning by the
tail, and he was enlightened upon a domestic unhappiness, although Mr.
Adister had not spoken miserably. The 'dash of the mother' was thrown in
to make Adiante, softer, and leave a loophole for her relenting.

The master of Earlsfont stood for a promise of beauty in his issue,
requiring to be softened at the mouth and along the brows, even in men.
He was tall, and had clear Greek outlines: the lips were locked metal,
thin as edges of steel, and his eyes, when he directed them on the person
he addressed or the person speaking, were as little varied by motion of
the lids as eyeballs of a stone bust. If they expressed more, because
they were not sculptured eyes, it was the expression of his high and
frigid nature rather than any of the diversities pertaining to sentiment
and shades of meaning.

'You have had the bequest of an estate,' Mr. Adister said, to compliment
him by touching on his affairs.

'A small one; not a quarter of a county,' said Patrick.

'Productive, sir?'

''Tis a tramp of discovery, sir, to where bog ends and cultivation
begins.'

'Bequeathed to you exclusively over the head of your elder brother, I
understand.'

Patrick nodded assent. 'But my purse is Philip's, and my house, and my
horses.'

'Not bequeathed by a member of your family?'

'By a distant cousin, chancing to have been one of my godmothers.'

'Women do these things,' Mr. Adister said, not in perfect approbation of
their doings.

'And I think too, it might have gone to the elder,' Patrick replied to
his tone.

'It is not your intention to be an idle gentleman?'

'No, nor a vagrant Irishman, sir.'

'You propose to sit down over there?'

'When I've more brains to be of service to them and the land, I do.'

Mr. Adister pulled the arm of his chair. 'The professions are crammed. An
Irish gentleman owning land might do worse. I am in favour of some degree
of military training for all gentlemen. You hunt?'

Patrick's look was, 'Give me a chance'; and Mr. Adister continued: 'Good
runs are to be had here; you shall try them. You are something of a shot,
I suppose. We hear of gentlemen now who neither hunt nor shoot. You
fence?'

'That's to say, I've had lessons in the art.'

'I am not aware that there is now an art of fencing taught in Ireland.'

'Nor am I,' said Patrick; 'though there's no knowing what goes on in the
cabins.'

Mr. Adister appeared to acquiesce. Observations of sly import went by him
like the whispering wind.

'Your priests should know,' he said.

To this Patrick thought it well not to reply. After a pause between them,
he referred to the fencing.

'I was taught by a Parisian master of the art, sir.'

'You have been to Paris?'

'I was educated in Paris.'

'How? Ah!' Mr. Adister corrected himself in the higher notes of
recollection. 'I think I have heard something of a Jesuit seminary.'

'The Fathers did me the service to knock all I know into me, and call it
education, by courtesy,' said Patrick, basking in the unobscured frown of
his host.

'Then you are accustomed to speak French?' The interrogation was put to
extract some balm from the circumstance.

Patrick tried his art of fence with the absurdity by saying: 'All but
like a native.'

'These Jesuits taught you the use of the foils?'

'They allowed me the privilege of learning, sir.'

After meditation, Mr. Adister said: 'You don't dance?' He said it
speculating on the' kind of gentleman produced in Paris by the disciples
of Loyola.

'Pardon me, sir, you hit on another of my accomplishments.'

'These Jesuits encourage dancing?'

'The square dance--short of the embracing: the valse is under interdict.'

Mr. Adister peered into his brows profoundly for a glimpse of the devilry
in that exclusion of the valse.

What object had those people in encouraging the young fellow to be a
perfect fencer and dancer, so that he should be of the school of the
polite world, and yet subservient to them?

'Thanks to the Jesuits, then, you are almost a Parisian,' he remarked;
provoking the retort:

'Thanks to them, I've stored a little, and Paris is to me as pure a place
as four whitewashed walls:' Patrick added: 'without a shadow of a monk on
them.' Perhaps it was thrown in for the comfort of mundane ears afflicted
sorely, and no point of principle pertained to the slur on a monk.

Mr. Adister could have exclaimed, That shadow of the monk! had he been in
an exclamatory mood. He said: 'They have not made a monk of you, then.'

Patrick was minded to explain how that the Jesuits are a religious order
exercising worldly weapons. The lack of precise words admonished him of
the virtue of silence, and he retreated--with a quiet negative: 'They
have not.'

'Then, you are no Jesuit?' he was asked.

Thinking it scarcely required a response, he shrugged.

'You would not change your religion, sir?' said Mr. Adister in seeming
anger.

Patrick thought he would have to rise: he half fancied himself summoned
to change his religion or depart from the house.

'Not I,' said he.

'Not for the title of Prince?' he was further pressed, and he replied:

'I don't happen to have an ambition for the title of Prince.'

'Or any title!' interjected Mr. Adister, 'or whatever the devil can
offer!--or,' he spoke more pointedly, 'for what fools call a brilliant
marriage?'

'My religion?' Patrick now treated the question seriously and raised his
head: 'I'd not suffer myself to be asked twice.'

The sceptical northern-blue eyes of his host dwelt on him with their full
repellent stare.

The young Catholic gentleman expected he might hear a frenetic zealot
roar out: Be off!

He was not immediately reassured by the words 'Dead or alive, then, you
have a father!'

The spectacle of a state of excitement without a show of feeling was
novel to Patrick. He began to see that he was not implicated in a wrath
that referred to some great offender, and Mr. Adister soon confirmed his
view by saying: 'You are no disgrace to your begetting, sir!'

With that he quitted his chair, and hospitably proposed to conduct his
guest over the house and grounds.

CHAPTER III

CAROLINE

Men of the Adister family having taken to themselves brides of a very
dusty pedigree from the Principality, there were curious rough heirlooms
to be seen about the house, shields on the armoury walls and
hunting-horns, and drinking-horns, and spears, and chain-belts bearing
clasps of heads of beasts; old gold ornaments, torques, blue-stone
necklaces, under glass-cases, were in the library; huge rings that must
have given the wearers fearful fists; a shirt of coarse linen with a pale
brown spot on the breast, like a fallen beech-leaf; and many sealed
parchment-skins, very precious, for an inspection of which, as Patrick
was bidden to understand, History humbly knocked at the Earlsfont
hall-doors; and the proud muse made her transcripts of them kneeling. He
would have been affected by these wonders had any relic of Adiante
appeased his thirst. Or had there been one mention of her, it would have
disengaged him from the incessant speculations regarding the daughter of
the house, of whom not a word was uttered. No portrait of her was shown.
Why was she absent from her home so long? where was she? How could her
name be started? And was it she who was the sinner in her father's mind?
But the idolatrous love between Adiante and her father was once a legend:
they could not have been cut asunder. She had offered up her love of
Philip as a sacrifice to it: Patrick recollected that, and now with a
softer gloom on his brooding he released her from the burden of his grand
charge of unfaithfulness to the truest of lovers, by acknowledging that
he was in the presence of the sole rival of his brother. Glorious girl
that she was, her betrayal of Philip had nothing of a woman's base
caprice to make it infamous: she had sacrificed him to her reading of
duty; and that was duty to her father; and the point of duty was in this
instance rather a sacred one. He heard voices murmur that she might be
praised. He remonstrated with them, assuring them, as one who knew, that
a woman's first duty is her duty to her lover; her parents are her second
thought. Her lover, in the consideration of a real soul among the shifty
creatures, is her husband; and have we not the word of heaven directing
her to submit herself to him who is her husband before all others? That
peerless Adiante had previously erred in the upper sphere where she
received her condemnation, but such a sphere is ladder and ladder and
silver ladder high above your hair-splitting pates, you children of
earth, and it is not for you to act on the verdict in decrying her:
rather 'tis for you to raise hymns of worship to a saint.

Thus did the ingenious Patrick change his ground and gain his argument
with the celerity of one who wins a game by playing it without an
adversary. Mr. Adister had sprung a new sense in him on the subject of
the renunciation of the religion. No thought of a possible apostasy had
ever occurred to the youth, and as he was aware that the difference of
their faith had been the main cause of the division of Adiante and
Philip, he could at least consent to think well of her down here, that
is, on our flat surface of earth. Up there, among the immortals, he was
compelled to shake his head at her still, and more than sadly in certain
moods of exaltation, reprovingly; though she interested him beyond all
her sisterhood above, it had to be confessed.

They traversed a banqueting-hall hung with portraits, to two or three of
which the master of Earlsfont carelessly pointed, for his guest to be
interested in them or not as he might please. A reception-hall flung
folding-doors on a grand drawing-room, where the fires in the grates went
through the ceremony of warming nobody, and made a show of keeping the
house alive. A modern steel cuirass, helmet and plume at a corner of the
armoury reminded Mr. Adister to say that he had worn the uniform in his
day. He cast an odd look at the old shell containing him when he was a
brilliant youth. Patrick was marched on to Colonel Arthur's rooms, and to
Captain David's, the sailor. Their father talked of his two sons. They
appeared to satisfy him. If that was the case, they could hardly have
thrown off their religion. Already Patrick had a dread of naming the
daughter. An idea struck him that she might be the person who had been
guilty of it over there on the Continent. What if she had done it, upon a
review of her treatment of her lover, and gone into a convent to wait for
Philip to come and claim her?--saying, 'Philip, I've put the knife to my
father's love of me; love me double'; and so she just half swoons, enough
to show how the dear angel looks in her sleep: a trick of kindness these
heavenly women have, that we heathen may get a peep of their secret
rose-enfolded selves; and dream 's no word, nor drunken, for the blessed
mischief it works with us.

Supposing it so, it accounted for everything: for her absence, and her
father's abstention from a mention of her, and the pretty good sort of
welcome Patrick had received; for as yet it was unknown that she did it
all for an O'Donnell.

These being his reflections, he at once accepted a view of her that so
agreeably quieted his perplexity, and he leapt out of his tangle into the
happy open spaces where the romantic things of life are as natural as the
sun that rises and sets. There you imagine what you will; you live what
you imagine. An Adiante meets her lover another Adiante, the phantom
likeness of her, similar to the finger-tips, hovers to a meeting with
some one whose heart shakes your manful frame at but a thought of it. But
this other Adiante is altogether a secondary conception, barely descried,
and chased by you that she may interpret the mystical nature of the
happiness of those two, close-linked to eternity, in advance. You would
learn it, if she would expound it; you are ready to learn it, for the
sake of knowledge; and if you link yourself to her and do as those two
are doing, it is chiefly in a spirit of imitation, in sympathy with the
darting couple ahead . . . .

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