The Celt and Saxon, Complete
G >>
George Meredith >> The Celt and Saxon, Complete
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 | 13 |
14 |
15
'I shall recollect the evening with the utmost pleasure. You were kind
enough to instruct me in a good many things I shall be sure to profit by.
I wish I could have spent more time in Ireland. As it is, I like Irishmen
so well that if the whole land were in revolt I should never call it the
enemy's country.'
'Excellently spoken, Mr. Colesworth,' said the priest. 'We 'll hope your
writings may do service to mend the breach. For there is one, as you
know, and more 's the pity; there's one, and it's wide and deep. As my
friend Captain Con O'Donnell says, it's plain to the naked eye as a pair
of particularly fat laundry drawers hung out to dry and ballooned in
extension--if mayhap you've ever seen the sight of them in that
state:--just held together by a narrow neck of thread or button, and
stretching away like a corpulent frog in the act of swimming on the wind.
His comparison touches the sentiment of disunion, sir.'
Mr. Colesworth had not ever seen such a pair of laundry drawers inflated
to symbolise the breach between Ireland and England; nor probably, if he
had, would the sentiment of national disunion have struck his mind: it
was difficult to him in the description. He considered his Rev. friend to
be something of a slippery fish, while Father Boyle's opinion of him
likewise referred him to an elemental substance, of slow movement-earth,
in short: for he continued to look argumentative after all had been said.
Or perhaps he threw a coveting eye on sweet Miss Kathleen and had his own
idea of mending a stitch of the breach in a quite domestic way. If so,
the Holy Father would have a word to say, let alone Kathleen. The maids
of his Church do not espouse her foes. For the men it is another matter:
that is as the case may be. Temporarily we are in cordial intercourse,
Mr. Colesworth.
Miss Kathleen returned to deck carrying her bags. The gentleman had to
descend, and subsequently an amiable dissension arose on the part of the
young lady and Mr. Colesworth. She, however, yielded one of her bags, and
he, though doubly laden, was happy. All very transparent to pastoral
observation, but why should they not be left to their chirruping
youthfulness? The captain was not in view, and Father Boyle wanted to go
to bed for refreshment, and Kathleen was an airy gossamer, with a boy
running after it, not by any means likely to catch it, or to keep it if
he did. Proceed and trip along, you young ones!
At the hotel they heard that Captain Con O'Donnell was a snug sleeper
upstairs. This, the captain himself very soon informed them, had not been
the kernel of the truth. He had fancied they would not cross the Channel
on so rattlesome a night, or Kathleen would have had an Irish kiss to
greet her landing in England. But the cousinly salute was little delayed,
news of the family in Ireland and England was exchanged, and then Mr.
Colesworth and the captain bowed to an introduction; and the captain, at
mention of his name, immediately cried out that Mr. Colesworth might
perchance be a relative of the highly intelligent admirable lady who had
undertaken the secretaryship, and by her vast ability got the entire
management, of Miss Mattock's benevolent institution, and was conducting
it with such success that it was fast becoming a grief to the generous
heart of the foundress of the same to find it not only self-paying, but
on the road to a fortune, inasmuch as it was already an article in the
decrees of fashion among the nobility and gentry of both sexes in the
metropolis to have their linen and laces washed at the Mattock laundry.
Mr. Colesworth said he was the brother of the lady in question, he had
also the pleasure of an acquaintance with Miss Mattock. He was vehemently
congratulated on the relationship, which bore witness, the captain armed,
to a certain hereditary share of brains greatly to be envied: brother of
Miss Colesworth, a title of distinction in itself! He was congratulated
not less cordially for his being so fortunate as to know Miss Mattock,
one of a million.
Captain Con retained the hand of Father Boyle and squeezed it during his
eulogies, at the same time dispensing nods and winks and sunny sparkles
upon Kathleen. Mr. Colesworth went upstairs to his room not unflattered.
The flattery enveloped him in the pleasant sense of a somehow now
established companionship for the day with a pleasant person from whom he
did not wish to separate.
'You made the gentleman's acquaintance, my dear . . . ?' said Con.
Kathleen answered: 'He made friends with our Patrick on the Continent, I
think it was in Germany, and came to us to study the old country, bearing
a letter from Patrick. He means to be one of their writers on the
newspapers. He studies everything; he has written books. He called on us
coming and called on us going and we came over together,' said Miss
Kathleen. 'But tell me: our Philip?'
'Books!' Con exclaimed. 'It's hard to discover a man in these days who
hasn't written books. Oh! Philip! Ease your heart about Philip. They're
nursing him, round. He was invalided at the right moment for him, no
fear. I gave him his chance of the last vacant seat up to the last hour,
and now the die is cast and this time I 'm off to it. Poor Philip--yes,
yes! we 're sorry to see him flat all his length, we love him; he's a
gallant soldier; alive to his duty; and that bludgeon sun of India
knocked him down, and that fall from his horse finished the business, and
there he lies. But he'll get up, and he might have accepted the seat and
spared me my probation: he's not married, I am, I have a wife, and Master
Philip divides me against my domestic self, he does. But let that be: I
serve duty too. Not a word to our friend up yonder. It's a secret with a
time-fuse warranted to explode safe enough when the minutes are up, and
make a powerful row when it does. It is all right over there, Father
Boyle, I suppose?'
'A walk over! a pure ceremonial,' said the priest, and he yawned
frightfully.
'You're for a nap to recompose you, my dear friend,' remarked the
captain.
'But you haven't confided anything of it to Mrs. Adister?'
'Not a syllable; no. That's to come. There's my contest! I had urgent
business in Ireland, and she 's a good woman, always willing to let me
go. I count on her kindness, there 's no mightier compliment to one's
wife. She'll know it when it's history. She's fond of history. Ay, she
hates fiction, and so I'm proud to tell her I offer her none. She likes a
trifling surprise too, and there she has it. Oh! we can whip up the
business to a nice little bowl of froth-flummery. But it's when the
Parliamentary voting is on comes the connubial pull. She's a good woman,
a dear good soul, but she's a savage patriot; and Philip might have saved
his kinsman if he had liked. He had only to say the word: I could have
done all the business for him, and no contest to follow by my fireside.
He's on his couch--Mars convalescent: a more dreadful attraction to the
ladies than in his crimson plumes! If the fellow doesn't let slip his
opportunity! with his points of honour and being an Irish Bayard. Why
Bayard in the nineteenth century's a Bedlamite, Irish or no. So I tell
him. There he is; you'll see him, Kathleen: and one of them as big an
heiress as any in England. Philip's no fool, you'll find.'
'Then he's coming all right, is he?' said Kathleen.
'He 's a soldier, and a good one, but he 's nothing more, and as for
patriotic inflammation, doesn't know the sensation.'
'Oh! but he's coming round, and you'll go and stroke down mother with
that,' Kathleen cried. 'Her heart's been heavy, with Patrick wandering
and Philip on his back. I'll soon be dressed for breakfast.'
Away she went.
'She's got an appetite, and looks like a strapped bit of steel after the
night's tumbling,' said the captain, seeing her trip aloft. 'I'm young as
that too, or not far off it. Stay, I'll order breakfast for four in a
quiet corner where we can converse--which, by the way, won't be possible
in the presence of that gaping oyster of a fellow, who looks as if he
were waiting the return of the tide.'
Father Boyle interposed his hand.
'Not for . . .' he tried to add 'four.' The attempt at a formation of the
word produced a cavernous yawn a volume of the distressful deep to the
beholder.
'Of course,' Captain Con assented. He proposed bed and a sedative
therein, declaring that his experience overnight could pronounce it good,
and that it should be hot. So he led his tired old friend to the bedroom,
asked dozens of questions, flurried a withdrawal of them, suggested the
answers, talked of his Rubicon, praised his wife, delivered a moan on her
behalf, and after assisting to half disrobe the scarce animate figure,
which lent itself like an artist's lay-model to the operation, departed
on his mission of the sedative.
At the breakfast for three he was able to tell Kathleen that the worthy
Father was warm, and on his way to complete restoration.
'Full fathom five the Father lies, in the ocean of sleep, by this time,'
said Con. 'And 'tis a curious fact that every man in that condition seems
enviable to men on their legs. And similarly with death; we'd rather not,
because of a qualm, but the picture of the finish of the leap across is a
taking one. These chops are done as if Nature had mellowed their
juiciness.'
'They are so nice,' Kathleen said.
'You deserve them, if ever girl in this world!'
'I sat on deck all night, and Mr. Colesworth would keep me company.'
'He could hardly do less, having the chance. But that notwithstanding,
I'm under an obligation to your cavalier. And how did you find Ireland,
sir? You've made acquaintance with my cousin, young Mr. Patrick
O'Donnell, I rejoice to hear.'
'Yes, through his hearing or seeing my name and suspecting I had a
sister,' said Mr. Colesworth, who was no longer in the resemblance of a
gaping oyster on the borders of the ebb. 'The country is not disturbed.'
'So the doctor thinks his patient is doing favourably! And you cottoned
to Patrick? And I don't wonder. Where was it?'
'We met in Trieste. He was about to start by one of the Austrian boats
for the East.'
'Not disturbed! no! with a rotten potato inside it paralysing digestion!'
exclaimed Con. 'Now Patrick had been having a peep at Vienna, hadn't he?'
'He had; he was fresh from Vienna when I met him. As to Ireland, the
harvest was only middling good last year.'
'And that's the bit of luck we depend on. A cloud too much, and it's
drowned! Had he seen, do you know, anybody in Vienna?--you were not long
together at Trieste?'
Mr. Colesworth had sufficient quickness to perceive that the two
questions could be answered as one, and saying: 'He was disappointed,'
revealed that he and Patrick had been long enough together to come to
terms of intimacy.
'To be sure, he gave you a letter of introduction to his family!' said
Con. 'And permit me to add, that Patrick's choice of a friend is mine on
trust. The lady he was for seeing, Mr. Colesworth, was just then
embarking on an adventure of a romantic character, particularly well
suited to her nature, and the end of it was a trifle sanguinary, and she
suffered a disappointment also, though not perhaps on that account.'
'I heard of it in England last year,' said Mr. Colesworth. 'Did she come
through it safely?'
'Without any personal disfigurement: and is in England now, under her
father's roof, meditating fresh adventures.'
Kathleen cried: 'Ye 're talking of the lady who was Miss Adister--I can
guess--Ah!' She humped her shoulders and sent a shudder up her neck.
'But she's a grand creature, Mr. Colesworth, and you ought to know her,'
said Con. 'That is, if you'd like to have an idea of a young Catherine or
a Semiramisminus an army and a country. There's nothing she's not capable
of aiming at. And there's pretty well nothing and nobody she wouldn't
make use of. She has great notions of the power of the British Press and
the British purse--each in turn as a key to the other. Now for an egg,
Kathleen.'
'I think I'll eat an egg,' Kathleen replied.
'Bless the honey heart of the girl! Life's in you, my dear, and calls for
fuel. I'm glad to see that Mr. Colesworth too can take a sight at the
Sea-God after a night of him. It augurs magnificently for a future
career. And let me tell you that the Pen demands it of us. The first of
the requisites is a stout stomach--before a furnished head! I'd not pass
a man to be anything of a writer who couldn't step ashore from a tempest
and consume his Titan breakfast.'
'We are qualifying for the literary craft, Miss O'Donnell,' said Mr.
Colesworth.
'It's for a walk in the wind up Caer Gybi, and along the coast I mean to
go,' said Kathleen.
'This morning?' the captain asked her.
She saw his dilemma in his doubtful look.
'When I've done. While you're discussing matters with Father Boyle.
I--know you're burning to. Sure it's yourself knows as well as anybody,
Captain Con, that I can walk a day long and take care of my steps. I've
walked the better half of Donegal alone, and this morning I'll have a
protector.'
Captain Con eyed the protector, approved of him, disapproved of himself,
thought of Kathleen as a daughter of Erin--a privileged and inviolate
order of woman in the minds of his countrymen--and wriggling internally
over a remainder scruple said: 'Mr. Colesworth mayhap has to write a bit
in the morning.'
'I'm unattached at present,' the latter said. 'I am neither a
correspondent nor a reporter, and if I were, the event would be wanting.'
'That remark, sir, shows you to be eminently a stranger to the official
duties,' observed the captain. 'Journalism is a maw, and the journalist
has to cram it, and like anything else which perpetually distends for
matter, it must be filled, for you can't leave it gaping, so when nature
and circumstance won't combine to produce the stuff, we have recourse to
the creative arts. 'Tis the necessity of the profession.'
'The profession will not impose that necessity upon me,' remarked the
young practitioner.
'Outside the wheels of the machine, sir, we indulge our hallucination of
immunity. I've been one in the whirr of them, relating what I hadn't
quite heard, and capitulating what I didn't think at all, in spite of the
cry of my conscience--a poor infant below the waters, casting up
ejaculatory bubbles of protestation. And if it is my reproach that I left
it to the perils of drowning, it's my pride that I continued to transmit
air enough to carry on the struggle. Not every journalist can say as
much. The Press is the voice of the mass, and our private opinion is
detected as a discord by the mighty beast, and won't be endured by him.'
'It's better not to think of him quite as a beast,' said Mr. Colesworth.
'Infinitely better: and I like your "guile," sir: But wait and tell me
what you think of him after tossing him his meat for a certain number of
years. There's Rockney. Do you know Rockney? He's the biggest single gun
they've got, and he's mad for this country, but ask him about the public,
you'll hear the menagerie-keeper's opinion of the brute that mauled his
loins.'
'Rockney,' said Mr. Colesworth, 'has the tone of a man disappointed of
the dictatorship.'
'Then you do know Rockney!' shouted Captain Con. 'That's the man in a
neat bit of drawing. He's a grand piece of ordnance. But wait for him
too, and tell me by and by. If it isn't a woman, you'll find, that primes
him, ay, and points him, and what's more, discharges him, I'm not Irish
born. Poor fellow! I pity him. He had a sweet Irish lady for his wife,
and lost her last year, and has been raging astray politically ever
since. I suppose it's hardly the poor creature's fault. None the less,
you know, we have to fight him. And now he 's nibbling at a bait--it 's
fun: the lady I mentioned, with a turn for adventure and enterprise: it's
rare fun: he 's nibbling, he'll be hooked. You must make her
acquaintance, Mr. Colesworth, and hold your own against her, if you can.
She's a niece of my wife's and I'll introduce you. I shall find her in
London, or at our lodgings at a Surrey farm we've taken to nurse my
cousin Captain Philip O'Donnell invalided from Indian awful climate!--on
my return, when I hope to renew the acquaintance. She has beauty, she has
brains. Resist her, and you 'll make a decent stand against Lucifer. And
supposing she rolls you up and pitches you over, her noticing you is a
pretty compliment to your pen. That 'll be consoling.'
Mr. Colesworth fancied, he said, that he was proof against feminine
blandishments in the direction of his writings.
He spoke as one indicating a thread to suggest a cable. The captain
applauded the fancy as a pleasing delusion of the young sprigs of
Journalism.
Upon this, Mr. Colesworth, with all respect for French intelligence,
denied the conclusiveness of French generalisations, which ascribed to
women universal occult dominion, and traced all great affairs to small
intrigues.
The captain's eyes twinkled on him, thinking how readily he would back
smart Miss Kathleen to do the trick, if need were.
He said to her before she started: 'Don't forget he may be a clever
fellow with that pen of his, and useful to our party.'
'I'll not forget,' said she.
For the good of his party, then, Captain Con permitted her to take the
walk up Caer Gybi alone with Mr. Colesworth: a memorable walk in the
recollections of the scribe, because of the wonderful likeness of the
young lady to the breezy weather and the sparkles over the deep, the
cloud that frowned, the cloud that glowed, the green of the earth
greening out from under wings of shadow, the mountain ranges holding
hands about an immensity of space. It was one of our giant days to his
emotions, and particularly memorable to him through the circumstance that
it insisted on a record in verse, and he was unused to the fetters of
metre: and although the verse was never seen by man, his attempt at it
confused his ideas of his expressive powers. Oddly too, while scourging
the lines with criticism, he had a fondness for them: they stamped a
radiant day in his mind, beyond the resources of rhetoric to have done it
equally.
This was the day of Captain Con's crossing the Rubicon between the secret
of his happiness and a Parliamentary career.
CHAPTER XVIII
CAPTAIN CON'S LETTER
Women may be able to tell you why the nursing of a military invalid
awakens tenderer anxieties in their bosoms than those called forth by the
drab civilian. If we are under sentence of death we are all of us
pathetic of course; but stretched upon the debateable couch of sickness
we are not so touching as the coloured coat: it has the distinction
belonging to colour. It smites a deeper nerve, or more than one; and
this, too, where there is no imaginary subjection to the charms of
military glory, in minds to which the game of war is lurid as the plumes
of the arch-slayer.
Jane Mattock assisting Mrs. Adister O'Donnell to restore Captain Philip
was very singularly affected, like a person shut off on a sudden from her
former theories and feelings. Theoretically she despised the soldier's
work as much as she shrank abhorrently from bloodshed. She regarded him
and his trappings as an ensign of our old barbarism, and could peruse
platitudes upon that theme with enthusiasm. The soldier personally, she
was accustomed to consider an inferior intelligence: a sort of schoolboy
when young, and schoolmaster when mature a visibly limited creature, not
a member of our broader world. Without dismissing any of these views she
found them put aside for the reception of others of an opposite
character; and in her soul she would have ascribed it to her cares of
nursing that she had become thoughtful, doubtful, hopeful, even
prayerful, surcharged with zeal, to help to save a good sword for the
country. If in a world still barbarous we must have soldiers, here was
one whom it would be grievous to lose. He had fallen for the country; and
there was a moving story of how he had fallen. She inclined to think more
highly of him for having courted exposure on a miserable frontier war
where but a poor sheaf of glory could be gathered. And he seemed to
estimate his professional duties apart from an aim at the laurels. A
conception of the possibility of a man's being both a soldier and morally
a hero edged its way into her understanding. It stood edgeways within,
desirous of avoiding a challenge to show every feature.
The cares of nursing were Jane's almost undividedly, except for the aid
she had from her friend Grace Barrow and from Miss Colesworth. Mrs.
Adister O'Donnell was a nurse in name only. 'She'll be seen by Philip
like as if she were a nightmare apparition of his undertaker's wraith,'
Captain Con said to Jane, when recommending his cousin to her charitable
nature, after he had taken lodgings at a farmhouse near Mrs. Lackstraw's
model farm Woodside on the hills. 'Barring the dress,' as he added, some
such impression of her frigid mournfulness might have struck a recumbent
invalid. Jane acknowledged it, and at first induced her aunt to join her
in the daily walk of half a mile to sit with him. Mrs. Lackstraw was a
very busy lady at her farm; she was often summoned to London by her
intuition of John's wish to have her presiding at table for the
entertainment of his numerous guests; she confessed that she supervised
the art of nursing better than she practised it, and supervision can be
done at a distance if the subordinate is properly attentive to the rules
we lay down, as Jane appeared to be. So Jane was left to him. She loved
the country; Springtide in the country set her singing; her walk to her
patient at Lappett's farm and homeward was an aethereal rapture for a
heart rocking easy in fulness. There was nothing to trouble it, no hint
of wild winds and heavy seas, not even the familiar insinuation from the
vigilant monitress, her aunt, to bid her be on her guard, beware of what
it is that great heiresses are courted for, steel her heart against
serpent speeches, see well to have the woman's precious word No at the
sentinel's post, and alert there. Mrs. Lackstraw, the most vigilant and
plain-spoken of her sex, had forborne to utter the usual warnings which
were to preserve Miss Mattock for her future Earl or Duke and the reason
why she forbore was a double one; a soldier and Papist could never be
thought perilous to a young woman scorning the sons of Mars and slaves of
sacerdotalism. The picture of Jane bestowing her hand on a Roman Catholic
in military uniform, refused to be raised before the mind.
Charitableness, humaneness, the fact that she was an admirable nurse and
liked to exercise her natural gift, perfectly accounted for Jane's trips
to Lappett's farm, and the jellies and fresh dairy dainties and neat
little dishes she was constantly despatching to the place. A suggestion
of possible danger might prove more dangerous than silence, by rendering
it attractive. Besides, Jane talked of poor Captain Philip as Patrick
O'Donnell's brother, whom she was bound to serve in return for Patrick's
many services to her; and of how unlike Patrick he was. Mrs. Lackstraw
had been apprehensive about her fancy for Patrick. Therefore if Captain
Philip was unlike him, and strictly a Catholic, according to report, the
suspicion of danger dispersed, and she was allowed to enjoy the pleasures
of the metropolis as frequently as she chose. The nursing of a man of
Letters, or of the neighbour to him, a beggar in rags, would not have
been so tolerated. Thus we perceive that wits actively awake inside the
ring-fence of prepossessions they have erected may lull themselves with
their wakefulness. Who would have thought!--is the cry when the strongest
bulwark of the fence is broken through.
Jane least of any would have thought what was coming to pass. The pale
square-browed young officer, so little Irish and winning in his brevity
of speech, did and said nothing to alarm her or strike the smallest
light. Grace Barrow noticed certain little changes of mood in Jane she
could scarcely have had a distinct suspicion at the time. After a recent
observation of him, on an evening stroll from Lappett's to Woodside, she
pronounced him interesting, but hard. 'He has an interesting head . . . I
should not like to offend him.' They agreed as to his unlikeness to fluid
Patrick; both eulogistic of the absent brother; and Jane, who could be
playful in privacy with friends, clapped a brogue on her tongue to
discourse of Patrick and apostrophise him: 'Oh! Pat, Pat, my dear cousin
Pat! why are you so long away from your desponding Jane? I 'll take to
poetry and write songs, if you don't come home soon. You've put seas
between us, and are behaving to me as an enemy. I know you 'll bring home
a foreign Princess to break the heart of your faithful. But I'll always
praise you for a dear boy, Pat, and wish you happy, and beg the good
gentleman your brother to give me a diploma as nurse to your first-born.
There now!'
She finished smiling brightly, and Grace was a trifle astonished, for her
friend's humour was not as a rule dramatic.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 | 13 |
14 |
15