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

'You really have caught a twang of it from your friend Captain Con; only
you don't rattle the eighteenth letter of the alphabet in the middle of
words.'

'I've tried, and can't persuade my tongue to do it "first off," as boys
say, and my invalid has no brogue whatever to keep me in practice,' Jane
replied. 'One wonders what he thinks of as he lies there by the window.
He doesn't confide it to his hospital nurse.'

'Yes, he would treat her courteously, just in that military style,' said
Grace, realising the hospital attendance.

'It 's the style I like best:--no perpetual personal thankings and
allusions to the trouble he gives!' Jane exclaimed. 'He shows perfect
good sense, and I like that in all things, as you know. A red-haired
young woman chooses to wait on him and bring him flowers--he's brother to
Patrick in his love of wild flowers, at all events!--and he takes it
naturally and simply. These officers bear illness well. I suppose it 's
the drill.'

'Still I think it a horrid profession, dear.'

Grace felt obliged to insist on that: and her 'I think,' though it was
not stressed, tickled Jane's dormant ear to some drowsy wakefulness.

'I think too much honour is paid to it, certainly. But soldiers, of all
men, one would expect to be overwhelmed by a feeling of weakness. He has
never complained; not once. I doubt if he would have complained if Mrs.
Adister had been waiting on him all the while, or not a soul. I can
imagine him lying on the battle-field night after night quietly,
resolving not to groan.'

'Too great a power of self-repression sometimes argues the want of any
emotional nature,' said Grace.

Jane shook her head. She knew a story of him contradicting that.

The story had not recurred to her since she had undertaken her service.
It coloured the remainder of an evening walk home through the beechwoods
and over the common with Grace, and her walk across the same tracks early
in the morning, after Grace had gone to London. Miss Colesworth was
coming to her next week, with her brother if he had arrived in England.
Jane remembered having once been curious about this adventurous man of
Letters who lived by the work of his pen. She remembered comparing him to
one who was compelled to swim perpetually without a ship to give him rest
or land in view. He had made a little money by a book, and was expending
it on travels--rather imprudently, she fancied Emma Colesworth to be
thinking. He talked well, but for the present she was happier in her
prospect of nearly a week of loneliness. The day was one of sunshine,
windless, odorous: one of the rare placid days of April when the pettish
month assumes a matronly air of summer and wears it till the end of the
day. The beech twigs were strongly embrowned, the larches shot up green
spires by the borders of woods and on mounds within, deep ditchbanks
unrolled profuse tangles of new blades, and sharp eyes might light on a
late white violet overlooked by the children; primroses ran along the
banks. Jane had a maxim that flowers should be spared to live their life,
especially flowers of the wilds; she had reared herself on our poets;
hence Mrs. Lackstraw's dread of the arrival of one of the minstrel order:
and the girl, who could deliberately cut a bouquet from the garden, if
requested, would refuse to pluck a wildflower. But now they cried out to
her to be plucked in hosts, they claimed the sacrifice, and it seemed to
her no violation of her sentiment to gather handfuls making a bunch that
would have done honour to the procession of the children's May-day--a day
she excused for the slaughter because her idol and prophet among the
poets, wild nature's interpreter, was that day on the side of the
children. How like a bath of freshness would the thick faintly-fragrant
mass shine to her patient! Only to look at it was medicine! She believed,
in her lively healthfulness, that the look would give him a spring to
health, and she hurried forward to have them in water-the next sacred
obligation to the leaving of them untouched.

She had reared herself on our poets. If much brooding on them will
sometimes create a sentimentalism of the sentiment they inspire, that
also, after our manner of developing, leads to finer civilisation; and as
her very delicate feelings were not always tyrants over her clear and
accurate judgement, they rather tended to stamp her character than lead
her into foolishness. Blunt of speech, quick in sensibility, imaginative,
yet idealistic, she had the complex character of diverse brain and nerve,
and was often a problem to the chief person interested in it. She thought
so decisively, felt so shrinkingly; spoke so flatly, brooded so softly!
Such natures, in the painful effort to reconcile apparent antagonism and
read themselves, forget that they are not full grown. Longer than others
are they young: but meanwhile they are of an age when we are driven
abroad to seek and shape our destinies.

Passing through the garden-gate of Lappett's farm she made her way to the
south-western face of the house to beg a bowl of water of the farmer's
wife, and had the sweet surprise of seeing her patient lying under
swallows' eaves on a chair her brother had been commissioned to send from
London for coming uses. He was near the farm-wife's kitchen, but to
windward of the cooking-reek, pleasantly warmed, sufficiently shaded, and
alone, with open letter on the rug covering his legs. He whistled to
Jane's dog Wayland, a retriever, having Newfoundland relationships, of
smithy redness and ruggedness; it was the whistle that startled her to
turn and see him as she was in the act of handing Mrs. Lappett her
primroses.

'Out? I feared it would be a week. Is it quite prudent?' Jane said,
toning down her delight.

He answered with the half-smile that refers these questions to the
settled fact. Air had always brought him round; now he could feel he was
embarked for recovery: and he told her how the farmer and one of his men
had lent a shoulder to present him to his old and surest
physician--rather like a crippled ghost. M. Adister was upstairs in bed
with one of her headaches. Captain Con, then, was attending her, Jane
supposed: She spoke of him as the most devoted of husbands.

A slight hardening of Philip's brows, well-known to her by this time,
caused her to interrogate his eyes. They were fixed on her in his manner
of gazing with strong directness. She read the contrary opinion, and some
hieroglyphic matter besides.

'We all respect him for his single-hearted care of her,' she said. 'I
have a great liking for him. His tirades about the Saxon tyrant are not
worth mentioning, they mean nothing. He would be one of the first to rush
to the standard if there were danger; I know he would. He is truly
chivalrous, I am sure.'

Philip's broad look at her had not swerved. The bowl of primroses placed
beside him on a chair by the farmer's dame diverted it for a moment.

'You gathered them?' he said.

Jane drank his look at the flowers.

'Yes, on my way,' she replied. 'We can none of us live for ever; and
fresh water every day will keep them alive a good long time. They had it
from the clouds yesterday. Do they not seem a bath of country happiness!'
Evidently they did their service in pleasing him.

Seeing his fingers grope on the rug, she handed him his open letters.

He selected the second, passing under his inspection, and asked her to
read it.

She took the letter, wondering a little that it should be in Captain
Con's handwriting.

'I am to read it through?' she said, after a run over some lines.

He nodded. She thought it a sign of his friendliness in sharing family
secrets with her, and read:

'MY DEAR PHILIP,--Not a word of these contents, which will be delivered
seasonably to the lady chiefly concerned, by the proper person. She hears
this morning I 'm off on a hasty visit to Ireland, as I have been
preparing her of late to expect I must, and yours the blame, if any,
though I will be the last to fling it at you. I meet Father B. and pretty
Kitty before I cross. Judging by the wind this morning, the passage will
furnish good schooling for a spell of the hustings. But if I am in the
nature of things unable to command the waves, trust me for holding a mob
in leash; and they are tolerably alike. My spirits are up. Now the die is
cast. My election to the vacancy must be reckoned beforehand. I promise
you a sounding report from the Kincora Herald. They will not say of me
after that (and read only the speeches reported in the local paper) "what
is the man but an Irish adventurer!" He is a lover of his country, Philip
O'Donnell, and one of millions, we will hope. And that stigmatic title of
long standing, more than anything earthly, drove him to the step-to the
ruin of his domestic felicity perhaps. But we are past sighing.

'Think you, when he crossed the tide, Caius Julius Caesar sighed?

'No, nor thought of his life, nor his wife, but of the thing to be done.
Laugh, my boy! I know what I am about when I set my mind on a powerful
example. As the chameleon gets his colour, we get our character from the
objects we contemplate . . .'

Jane glanced over the edge of the letter sheet rosily at Philip.

His dryness in hitting the laughable point diverted her, and her mind
became suffused with a series of pictures of the chameleon captain
planted in view of the Roman to become a copy of him, so that she did not
peruse the terminating lines with her wakefullest attention:

'The liege lady of my heart will be the earliest to hail her hero
triumphant, or cherish him beaten--which is not in the prospect. Let
Ireland be true to Ireland. We will talk of the consolidation of the
Union by and by. You are for that, you say, when certain things are done;
and you are where I leave you, on the highway, though seeming to go at a
funeral pace to certain ceremonies leading to the union of the two
countries in the solidest fashion, to their mutual benefit, after a
shining example. Con sleeps with a corner of the eye open, and you are
not the only soldier who is a strategist, and a tactician too, aware of
when it is best to be out of the way. Now adieu and pax vobiscum. Reap
the rich harvest of your fall to earth. I leave you in the charge of the
kindest of nurses, next to the wife of my bosom the best of women.
Appreciate her, sir, or perish in my esteem. She is one whom not to love
is to be guilty of an offence deserving capital punishment, and a
bastinado to season the culprit for his execution. Have I not often
informed her myself that a flower from her hand means more than treasures
from the hands of others. Expect me absent for a week. The harangues will
not be closely reported. I stand by the truth, which is my love of the
land of my birth. A wife must come second to that if she would be first
in her husband's consideration. Hurrah me on, Philip, now it is action,
and let me fancy I hear you shouting it.'

The drop of the letter to the signature fluttered affectionately on a
number of cordial adjectives, like the airy bird to his home in the corn.

CHAPTER XIX

MARS CONVALESCENT

Jane's face was clear as the sky when she handed the letter back to
Philip. In doing so, it struck her that the prolonged directness of his
look was peculiar: she attributed it to some effect of the fresh Spring
atmosphere on a weakened frame. She was guessing at his reasons for
showing her the letter, and they appeared possibly serious.

'An election to Parliament! Perhaps Mrs. Adister should have a hint of
it, to soften the shock I fear it may be: but we must wait till her
headache has passed,' she said.

'You read to the end?' said Philip.

'Yes, Captain Con always amuses me, and I am bound to confess I have no
positive disrelish of his compliments. But this may prove a desperate
step. The secret of his happiness is in extreme jeopardy. Nothing would
stop him, I suppose?'

Philip signified that it was too late. He was moreover of opinion, and
stated it in his briefest, that it would be advisable to leave the
unfolding of the present secret to the captain.

Jane wondered why the letter had been shown. Her patient might be annoyed
and needing sympathy?

'After all,' she said, 'Captain Con may turn out to be a very good sort
of member of Parliament in his way.'

Philip's eyebrows lifted, and he let fall a breath, eloquent of his
thoughts.

'My brother says he is a serviceable director of the Company they are
associated in.'

'He finds himself among reasonable men, and he is a chameleon.'

'Parliament may steady him.'

'It is too much of a platform for Con's head.'

'Yes, there is more of poet than politician,' said she. 'That is a
danger. But he calls himself our friend; I think he really has a liking
for John and me.'

'For you he has a real love,' said Philip.

'Well, then, he may listen to us at times; he may be trusted not to wound
us. I am unmitigatedly for the one country--no divisions. We want all our
strength in these days of monstrous armies directed by banditti Councils.
England is the nation of the Christian example to nations. Oh! surely it
is her aim. At least she strives to be that. I think it, and I see the
many faults we have.'

Her patient's eyelids were down.

She proposed to send her name up to Mrs. Adister.

On her return from the poor lady racked with headache and lying little
conscious of her husband's powder-barrel under the bed, Jane found her
patient being worried by his official nurse, a farm-labourer's wife, a
bundle of a woman, whose lumbering assiduities he fenced with reiterated
humourous negatives to every one of her propositions, until she prefaced
the last two or three of the list with a 'Deary me!' addressed
consolatorily to herself. She went through the same forms each day, at
the usual hours of the day, and Jane, though she would have felt the
apathetic doltishness of the woman less, felt how hard it must be for him
to bear.

'Your sister will be with you soon,' she said. 'I am glad, and yet I hope
you will not allow her to put me aside altogether?'

'You shall do as you wish,' said Philip.

'Is she like Patrick? Her name is Kathleen, I know.'

'She is a raw Irish girl, of good Irish training, but Irish.'

'I hope she will be pleased with England. Like Patrick in face, I mean.'

'We think her a good-looking girl.'

'Does she play? sing?'

'Some of our ballads.'

'She will delight my brother. John loves Irish ballads.'

A silence of long duration fell between them. She fancied he would like
to sleep, and gently rose to slip away, that she might consult with Mrs.
Lappett about putting up some tentcover. He asked her if she was going.
'Not home,' she said. His hand moved, but stopped. It seemed to have
meant to detain her. She looked at a white fleece that came across the
sun, desiring to conjure it to stay and shadow him. It sailed by. She
raised her parasol.

His eyelids were shut, and she thought him asleep. Meditating on her
unanswered question of Miss Kathleen's likeness to Patrick, Jane imagined
a possibly greater likeness to her patient, and that he did not speak of
his family's exclamations on the subject because of Kathleen's being so
good-looking a girl. For if good-looking, a sister must resemble these
handsome features here, quiescent to inspection in their marble outlines
as a corse. So might he lie on the battle-field, with no one to watch
over him!

While she watched, sitting close beside him to shield his head from the
sunbeams, her heart began to throb before she well knew the secret of it.
She had sight of a tear that grew big under the lashes of each of his
eyelids, and rolled heavily. Her own eyes overflowed.

The fit of weeping was momentary, April's, a novelty with her. She
accused her silly visions of having softened her. A hasty smoothing to
right and left removed the traces; they were unseen; and when she
ventured to look at him again there was no sign of fresh drops falling.
His eyelids kept shut.

The arrival of her diurnal basket of provisions offered a refreshing
intervention of the commonplace. Bright air had sharpened his appetite:
he said he had been sure it would, and anticipated cheating the doctor of
a part of the sentence which condemned him to lie on his back up to the
middle of June, a log. Jane was hungry too, and they feasted together
gaily, talking of Kathleen on her journey, her strange impressions and
her way of proclaiming them, and of Patrick and where he might be now;
ultimately of Captain Con and Mrs. Adister.

'He has broken faith with her,' Philip said sternly. 'She will have the
right to tell him so. He never can be anything but a comic politician.
Still he was bound to consult his wife previous to stepping before the
public. He knows that he married a fortune.'

'A good fortune,' said Jane.

Philip acquiesced. 'She is an excellent woman, a model of uprightness;
she has done him all the good in the world, and here is he deceiving her,
lying--there is no other word: and one lie leads to another. When he
married a fortune he was a successful adventurer. The compact was
understood. His duty as a man of honour is to be true to his bond and
serve the lady. Falseness to his position won't wash him clean of the
title.'

Jane pleaded for Captain Con. 'He is chivalrously attentive to her.'

'You have read his letter,' Philip replied.

He crushed her charitable apologies with references to the letter.

'We are not certain that Mrs. Adister will object,' said she.

'Do you see her reading a speech of her husband's?' he remarked.
Presently with something like a moan:

'And I am her guest!'

'Oh! pray, do not think Mrs. Adister will ever allow you to feel the
lightest shadow . . .' said Jane.

'No; that makes it worse.'

Had this been the burden of his thoughts when those two solitary tears
forced their passage?

Hardly: not even in his physical weakness would he consent to weep for
such a cause.

'I forgot to mention that Mrs. Adister has a letter from her husband
telling her he has been called over to Ireland on urgent business,' she
said.

Philip answered: 'He is punctilious.'

'I wish indeed he had been more candid,' Jane assented to the sarcasm.

'In Ireland he is agreeably surprised by the flattering proposal of a
vacant seat, and not having an instant to debate on it, assumes the
consent of the heavenliest wife in Christendom.'

Philip delivered the speech with a partial imitation of Captain Con
addressing his wife on his return as the elected among the pure Irish
party. The effort wearied him.

She supposed he was regretting his cousin's public prominence in the
ranks of the malcontents. 'He will listen to you,' she said, while she
smiled at his unwonted display of mimicry.

'A bad mentor for him. Antics are harmless, though they get us laughed
at,' said Philip.

'You may restrain him from excesses.'

'Were I in that position, you would consider me guilty of greater than
any poor Con is likely to commit.'

'Surely you are not for disunion?'

'The reverse. I am for union on juster terms, that will hold it fast.'

'But what are the terms?'

He must have desired to paint himself as black to her as possible. He
stated the terms, which were hardly less than the affrighting ones blown
across the Irish sea by that fierce party. He held them to be just,
simply sensible terms. True, he spoke of the granting them as a sure
method to rally all Ireland to an ardent love of the British flag. But he
praised names of Irish leaders whom she had heard Mr. Rockney denounce
for disloyal insolence: he could find excuses for them and their
dupes--poor creatures, verily! And his utterances had a shocking
emphasis. Then she was not wrong in her idea of the conspirator's head,
her first impression of him!

She could not quit the theme: doing that would have been to be
indifferent: something urged her to it.

'Are they really your opinions?'

He seemed relieved by declaring that they were.

'Patrick is quite free of them,' said she.

'We will hope that the Irish fever will spare Patrick. He was at a Jesuit
college in France when he was wax. Now he's taking the world.'

'With so little of the Jesuit in him!'

'Little of the worst: a good deal of the best.'

'What is the best?'

'Their training to study. They train you to concentrate the brain upon
the object of study. And they train you to accept service: they fit you
for absolute service: they shape you for your duties in the world; and so
long as they don't smelt a man's private conscience, they are model
masters. Happily Patrick has held his own. Not the Jesuits would have a
chance of keeping a grasp on Patrick! He'll always be a natural boy and a
thoughtful man.'

Jane's features implied a gentle shudder.

'I shake a scarlet cloak to you?' said Philip.

She was directed by his words to think of the scarlet coat. 'I reflect a
little on the substance of things as well,' she said. 'Would not
Patrick's counsels have an influence?'

'Hitherto our Patrick has never presumed to counsel his elder brother.'

'But an officer wearing . . .'

'The uniform! That would have to be stripped off. There'd be an end to
any professional career.'

'You would not regret it?'

'No sorrow is like a soldier's bidding farewell to flag and comrades.
Happily politics and I have no business together. If the country favours
me with active service I'm satisfied for myself. You asked me for my
opinions: I was bound to give them. Generally I let them rest.'

Could she have had the temerity? Jane marvelled at herself.

She doubted that the weighty pair of tears had dropped for the country.
Captain Con would have shed them over Erin, and many of them. Captain
Philip's tone was too plain and positive: he would be a most practical
unhistrionic rebel.

'You would countenance a revolt?' she said, striking at that extreme to
elicit the favourable answer her tones angled for. And it was instantly:

'Not in arms.' He tried an explanation by likening the dissension to a
wrangle in a civilised family over an unjust division of property.

And here, as he was marking the case with some nicety and difficulty, an
itinerant barrel-organ crashed its tragic tale of music put to torture at
the gate. It yelled of London to Jane, throttled the spirits of the
woods, threw a smoke over the country sky, befouled the pure air she
loved.

The instrument was one of the number which are packed to suit all English
tastes and may be taken for a rough sample of the jumble of them, where a
danceless quadrille-tune succeeds a suicidal Operatic melody and is
followed by the weariful hymn, whose last drawl pert polka kicks aside.
Thus does the poor Savoyard compel a rich people to pay for their wealth.
Not without pathos in the abstract perhaps do the wretched machines
pursue their revolutions of their factory life, as incapable of
conceiving as of bestowing pleasure: a bald cry for pennies through the
barest pretence to be agreeable but Jane found it hard to be tolerant of
them out of London, and this one affecting her invalid and Mrs. Adister
must be dismissed. Wayland was growling; he had to be held by the collar.
He spied an objectionable animal. A jerky monkey was attached to the
organ; and his coat was red, his kepi was blue; his tailor had rigged him
as a military gentleman. Jane called to the farm-wife. Philip assured her
he was not annoyed. Jane observed him listening, and by degrees she
distinguished a maundering of the Italian song she had one day sung to
Patrick in his brother's presence.

'I remember your singing that the week before I went to India,' said
Philip, and her scarlet blush flooded her face.

'Can you endure the noise?' she asked him.

'Con would say it shrieks "murder." But I used to like it once.'

Mrs. Lappett came answering to the call. Her children were seen up the
garden setting to one another with squared aprons, responsive to a
livelier measure.

'Bless me, miss, we think it so cheerful!' cried Mrs. Lappett, and
glanced at her young ones harmonious and out of mischief.

'Very well,' said Jane, always considerate for children. She had
forgotten the racked Mrs. Adister.

Now the hymn of Puritanical gloom-the peacemaker with Providence
performing devotional exercises in black bile. The leaps of the children
were dashed. A sallow two or three minutes composed their motions, and
then they jumped again to the step for lively legs. The similarity to the
regimental band heading soldiers on the march from Church might have
struck Philip.

'I wonder when I shall see Patrick!' he said, quickened in spite of
himself by the sham sounds of music to desire changes and surprises.

Jane was wondering whether he could be a man still to brood tearfully
over his old love.

She echoed him. 'And I! Soon, I hope.'

The appearance of Mrs. Adister with features which were the acutest
critical summary of the discord caused toll to be paid instantly, and
they beheld a flashing of white teeth and heard Italian accents. The
monkey saluted militarily, but with painful suggestions of his foregone
drilling in the ceremony.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15