The Celt and Saxon, Complete

G >> George Meredith >> The Celt and Saxon, Complete

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He subsided again; then deeply beseeching asked:

'Have you by chance a portrait of the gentleman, Miss Adister? Is there
one anywhere?'

Caroline stood at her piano, turning over the leaves of a music-book,
with a pressure on her eyelids. She was near upon being thrilled in spite
of an astonishment almost petrifying: and she could nearly have smiled,
so strange was his fraternal adoption, amounting to a vivification--of
his brother's passion. He seemed quite naturally to impersonate Philip.
She wondered, too, in the coolness of her alien blood, whether he was a
character, or merely an Irish character. As to the unwontedness of the
scene, Ireland was chargeable with that; and Ireland also, a little at
his expense as a citizen of the polite world, relieved him of the extreme
ridicule attached to his phrases and images.

She replied: 'We have no portrait.'

'May I beg to know, have you seen him?' said Patrick. Caroline shook her
head.

'Is there no telling what he is like, Miss Adister?'

'He is not young.'

'An old man!'

She had not said that, and she wished to defend her cousin from the
charge of contracting such an alliance, but Patrick's face had brightened
out of a gloom of stupefaction; he assured her he was now ready to try
his voice with hers, only she was to excuse a touch of hoarseness; he
felt it slightly in his throat: and could he, she asked him, wonder at it
after his morning's bath?

He vindicated the saneness of the bath as well as he was able, showing
himself at least a good reader of music. On the whole, he sang
pleasantly, particularly French songs. She complimented him, with an
emphasis on the French. He said, yes, he fancied he did best in French,
and he had an idea of settling in France, if he found that he could not
live quietly in his own country.

'And becoming a Frenchman?'said Caroline.

'Why not?' said he. 'I 'm more at home with French people; they're mostly
of my creed; they're amiable, though they weren't quite kind to poor
Lally Tollendal. I like them. Yes, I love France, and when I'm called
upon to fix myself, as I suppose I shall be some day, I shan't have the
bother over there that I should find here.'

She spoke reproachfully: 'Have you no pride in the title of Englishman?'

'I 'm an Irishman.'

'We are one nation.'

'And it's one family where the dog is pulled by the collar.'

There was a retort on him: she saw, as it were, the box, but the lid
would not open to assist her to it, and she let it go by, thinking in her
patriotic derision, that to choose to be likened to the unwilling dog of
the family was evidence of a want of saving pride.

Besides, she could not trust to the glibness of her tongue in a contest
with a young gentleman to whom talking was as easy as breathing, even if
sometimes his volubility exposed him to attack. A superior position was
offered her by her being silent and critical. She stationed herself on
it: still she was grieved to think of him as a renegade from his country,
and she forced herself to say: 'Captain O'Donnell talks in that manner.'

'Captain Con is constitutionally discontented because he's a bard by
nature, and without the right theme for his harp,' said Patrick. 'He has
a notion of Erin as the unwilling bride of Mr. Bull, because her lord is
not off in heroics enough to please her, and neglects her, and won't let
her be mistress of her own household, and she can't forget that he once
had the bad trick of beating her: she sees the marks. And you mayn't
believe it, but the Captain's temper is to praise and exalt. It is. Irony
in him is only eulogy standing on its head: a sort of an upside down; a
perversion: that's our view of him at home. All he desires is to have us
on the march, and he'd be perfectly happy marching, never mind the
banner, though a bit of green in it would put him in tune, of course. The
banner of the Cid was green, Miss Adister: or else it's his pennon that
was. And there's a quantity of our blood in Spain too. We've watered many
lands.'

The poor young English lady's brain started wildly on the effort to be
with him, and to understand whether she listened to humour or emotion:
she reposed herself as well as she could in the contemplation of an
electrically-flashing maze, where every line ran losing itself in
another.

He added: 'Old Philip!' in a visible throb of pity for his brother; after
the scrupulous dubitation between the banner and the pennon of the Cid!

It would have comforted her to laugh. She was closer upon tears, and
without any reason for them in her heart.

Such a position brings the hesitancy which says that the sitting is at an
end.

She feared, as she laid aside her music-books, that there would be more
to come about Adiante, but he spared her. He bowed to her departing, and
strolled off by himself.

CHAPTER VI

A CONSULTATION: WITH OPINIONS UPON WELSHWOMEN AND THE CAMBRIAN RACE

Later in the day she heard that he was out scouring the country on one of
her uncle's horses. She had too many distressing matters to think of for
so singular a young man to have any other place than that which is given
to the fantastical in a troubled and serious mind. He danced there like
the whimsy sunbeam of a shaken water below. What would be his opinion of
Adiante if he knew of her determination to sell the two fair estates she
inherited from a grandmother whom she had venerated; that she might
furnish arms to her husband to carry out an audacious enterprise likely
to involve both of them in blood and ruin? Would he not bound up aloft
and quiver still more wildly? She respected, quaint though it was, his
imaginative heat of feeling for Adiante sufficiently to associate him
with her so far; and she lent him in fancy her own bewilderment and grief
at her cousin's conduct, for the soothing that his exaggeration of them
afforded her. She could almost hear his outcry.

The business of the hour demanded more of her than a seeking for
refreshment. She had been invited to join the consultation of her uncle
with his lawyer. Mr. Adister tossed her another letter from Vienna, of
that morning's delivery. She read it with composure. It became her task
to pay no heed to his loss of patience, and induce him to acquiesce in
his legal adviser's view which was, to temporise further, present an
array of obstacles, and by all possible suggestions induce the princess
to come over to England, where her father's influence with her would have
a chance of being established again; and it might then be hoped that she,
who had never when under sharp temptation acted disobediently to his
wishes at home, and who certainly would not have dreamed of contracting
the abhorred alliance had she been breathing the air of common sense
peculiar to her native land, would see the prudence, if not the solemn
obligation, of retaining to herself these family possessions. Caroline
was urgent with her uncle to act on such good counsel. She marvelled at
his opposition, though she detected the principal basis of it.

Mr. Adister had no ground of opposition but his own intemperateness. The
Welsh grandmother's legacy of her estates to his girl, overlooking her
brothers, Colonel Arthur and Captain David, had excessively vexed him,
despite the strong feeling he entertained for Adiante; and not simply
because of the blow he received in it unexpectedly from that old lady, as
the last and heaviest of the long and open feud between them, but also,
chiefly, that it outraged and did permanent injury to his ideas of the
proper balance of the sexes. Between himself and Mrs. Winnion Rhys the
condition of the balance had been a point of vehement disputation, she
insisting to have it finer up to equality, and he that the naturally
lighter scale should continue to kick the beam. Behold now the
consequence of the wilful Welshwoman's insanest of legacies! The estates
were left to Adiante Adister for her sole use and benefit, making almost
a man of her, and an unshackled man, owing no dues to posterity. Those
estates in the hands of a woman are in the hands of her husband; and the
husband a gambler and a knave, they are in the hands of the Jews--or gone
to smoke. Let them go. A devilish malignity bequeathed them: let them go
back to their infernal origin. And when they were gone, his girl would
soon discover that there was no better place to come to than her home;
she would come without an asking, and alone, and without much prospect of
the intrusion of her infamous Hook-nose in pursuit of her at Earlsfont.
The money wasted, the wife would be at peace. Here she would have leisure
to repent of all the steps she had taken since that fatal one of the
acceptance of the invitation to the Embassy at Vienna. Mr. Adister had
warned her both against her going and against the influence of her friend
Lady Wenchester, our Ambassadress there, another Welsh woman, with the
weathervane head of her race. But the girl would accept, and it was not
for him to hold out. It appeared to be written that the Welsh,
particularly Welsh women, were destined to worry him up to the end of his
days. Their women were a composition of wind and fire. They had no
reason, nothing solid in their whole nature. Englishmen allied to them
had to learn that they were dealing with broomstick witches and
irresponsible sprites. Irishwomen were models of propriety beside them:
indeed Irishwomen might often be patterns to their English sisterhood.
Mr. Adister described the Cambrian ladies as a kind of daughters of the
Fata Morgana, only half human, and deceptive down to treachery, unless
you had them fast by their spinning fancy. They called it being romantic.
It was the ante-chamber of madness. Mad, was the word for them. You
pleased them you knew not how, and just as little did you know how you
displeased them. And you were long hence to be taught that in a certain
past year, and a certain month, and on a certain day of the month, not
forgetting the hour of the day to the minute of the hour, and attendant
circumstances to swear loud witness to it, you had mortally offended
them. And you receive your blow: you are sure to get it: the one passion
of those women is for vengeance. They taste a wound from the lightest
touch, and they nurse the venom for you. Possibly you may in their
presence have had occasion to praise the military virtues of the builder
of Carnarvon Castle. You are by and by pierced for it as hard as they can
thrust. Or you have incidentally compared Welsh mutton with
Southdown:--you have not highly esteemed their drunken Bards:--you have
asked what the Welsh have done in the world; you are supposed to have
slighted some person of their family--a tenth cousin!--anything turns
their blood. Or you have once looked straight at them without speaking,
and you discover years after that they have chosen to foist on you their
idea of your idea at the moment; and they have the astounding presumption
to account this misreading of your look to the extent of a full
justification, nothing short of righteous, for their treachery and your
punishment! O those Welshwomen!

The much-suffering lord of Earlsfont stretched forth his open hand, palm
upward, for a testifying instrument to the plain truth of his catalogue
of charges. He closed it tight and smote the table. 'Like mother--and
grandmother too--like daughter!' he said, and generalised again to
preserve his dignity: 'They're aflame in an instant. You may see them
quiet for years, but it smoulders. You dropped the spark, and they time
the explosion.'

Caroline said to Mr. Camminy: 'You are sure you can give us the day?'

'All of it,' he replied, apologising for some show of restlessness. 'The
fact is, Miss Adister, I married a lady from over the borders, and though
I have never had to complain of her yet, she may have a finale in store.
It's true that I love wild Wales.'

'And so do I' Caroline raised her eyes to imagined mountains.

'You will pardon me, Camminy,' said Mr. Adister.

The lawyer cracked his back to bow to the great gentleman so
magnanimously humiliating himself. 'Sir! Sir!' he said. 'Yes, Welsh blood
is queer blood, I own. They find it difficult to forgive; and trifles
offend; and they are unhappily just as secretive as they are sensitive.
The pangs we cause them, without our knowing it, must be horrible. They
are born, it would seem, with more than the common allowance of kibes for
treading on: a severe misfortune for them. Now for their merits: they
have poetry in them; they are valiant; they are hospitable to teach the
Arab a lesson: I do believe their life is their friend's at
need--seriously, they would lay it down for him: or the wherewithal,
their money, their property, excepting the three-stringed harp of three
generations back, worth now in current value sixpence halfpenny as a
curiosity, or three farthings for firewood; that they'll keep against
their own desire to heap on you everything they have--if they love you,
and you at the same time have struck their imaginations. Offend them,
however, and it's war, declared or covert. And I must admit that their
best friend can too easily offend them. I have lost excellent clients, I
have never understood why; yet I respect the remains of their literature,
I study their language, I attend their gatherings and subscribe the
expenses; I consume Welsh mutton with relish; I enjoy the Triads, and can
come down on them with a quotation from Catwg the Wise: but it so chanced
that I trod on a kibe, and I had to pay the penalty. There's an Arabian
tale, Miss Adister, of a peaceful traveller who ate a date in the desert
and flung away the stone, which hit an invisible son of a genie in the
eye, and the poor traveller suffered for it. Well, you commit these
mortal injuries to the invisible among the Welsh. Some of them are hurt
if you call them Welsh. They scout it as the original Saxon title for
them. No, they are Cymry, Cambrians! They have forgiven the Romans. Saxon
and Norman are still their enemies. If you stir their hearts you find it
so. And, by the way, if King Edward had not trampled them into the mire
so thoroughly, we should hear of it at times even now. Instead of
penillions and englyns, there would be days for fiery triplets. Say the
worst of them, they are soundheaded. They have a ready comprehension for
great thoughts. The Princess Nikolas, I remember, had a special fondness
for the words of Catwg the Wise.'

'Adiante,' had murmured Caroline, to correct his indiscretion.

She was too late.

'Nikolas!' Mr. Adister thundered. 'Hold back that name in this house,
title and all, if you speak of my daughter. I refuse admission to it
here. She has given up my name, and she must be known by the one her
feather-brained grandmother proposed for her, to satisfy her pleasure in
a fine sound. English Christian names are my preference. I conceded
Arthur to her without difficulty. She had a voice in David, I recollect;
with very little profit to either of the boys. I had no voice in Adiante;
but I stood at my girl's baptism, and Adiante let her be. At least I
saved the girl from the addition of Arianrod. It was to have been Adiante
Arianrod. Can you credit it? Prince-pah! Nikolas? Have you a notion of
the sort of prince that makes an English lady of the best blood of
England his princess?'

The lawyer had a precise notion of the sort of prince appearing to Mr.
Adister in the person of his foreign son-in-law. Prince Nikolas had been
described to him before, with graphic touches upon the quality of the
reputation he bore at the courts and in the gambling-saloons of Europe.
Dreading lest his client's angry heat should precipitate him on the
prince again, to the confusion of a lady's ears, Mr. Camminy gave an
emphatic and short affirmative.

'You know what he is like?' said Mr. Adister, with a face of disgust
reflected from the bare thought of the hideous likeness.

Mr. Camminy assured him that the description of the prince's lineaments
would not be new. It was, as he was aware, derived from a miniature of
her husband, transmitted by the princess, on its flight out of her
father's loathing hand to the hearthstone and under his heel.

Assisted by Caroline, he managed to check the famous delineation of the
adventurer prince in which a not very worthy gentleman's chronic fever of
abomination made him really eloquent, quick to unburden himself in the
teeth of decorum.

'And my son-in-law! My son-in-law!' ejaculated Mr. Adister, tossing his
head higher, and so he stimulated his amazement and abhorrence of the
portrait he rather wondered at them for not desiring to have sketched for
their execration of it, alluringly foul as it was: while they in concert
drew him back to the discussion of his daughter's business, reiterating
prudent counsel, with a knowledge that they had only to wait for the
ebbing of his temper.

'Let her be informed, sir, that by coming to England she can settle the
business according to her wishes in one quarter of the time it would take
a Commission sent out to her--if we should be authorised to send out
one,' said Mr. Camminy. 'By committing the business to you, I fancy I
perceive your daughter's disposition to consider your feelings: possibly
to a reluctance to do the deed unsanctioned by her father. It would
appear so to a cool observer, notwithstanding her inattention to your
remonstrances.'

The reply was: 'Dine here and sleep here. I shall be having more of these
letters,' Mr. Adister added, profoundly sighing.

Caroline slipped away to mark a conclusion to the debate; and Mr. Camminy
saw his client redden fast and frown.

'Besides,' he spoke in a husky voice, descending upon a subject hateful,
'she tells me to-day she is not in a state to travel! Do you hear? Make
what you can of it.'

The proud and injured gentleman had the aspect of one who receives a blow
that it is impossible for him to resent. He could not speak the shame he
felt: it was literally in his flesh. But the cause had been sufficiently
hinted to set the lawyer staring as men do when they encounter situations
of grisly humour, where certain of the passions of man's developed nature
are seen armed and furious against our mild prevailing ancient mother
nature; and the contrast is between our utter wrath and her simple
exposition of the circumstances and consequences forming her laws. There
are situations which pass beyond the lightly stirred perceptive wits to
the quiet court of the intellect, to be received there as an addition to
our acquaintance with mankind. We know not of what substance to name
them. Humour in its intense strain has a seat somewhere about the mouth
of tragedy, giving it the enigmatical faint wry pull at a corner visible
at times upon the dreadful mask.

That Mr. Adister should be astonished at such a communication from the
princess, after a year of her marriage: and that he should take it for a
further outrage of his paternal sentiments, should actually redden and be
hoarse in alluding to it: the revelation of such points in our human
character set the humane old lawyer staring at the reserve space within
himself apart from his legal being, whereon he by fits compared his own
constitution with that of the individuals revealed to him by their acts
and confidential utterances. For him, he decided that he would have
rejoiced at the news.

Granting the prince a monster, however, as Mr. Adister unforcedly
considered him, it was not so cheering a piece of intelligence that
involved him yet closer with that man's rank blood: it curdled his own.
The marriage had shocked and stricken him, cleaving, in his love for his
daughter, a goodly tree and withering many flowers. Still the marriage
was but Adiante's gulf: he might be called father-in-law of her spangled
ruffian; son-in-law, the desperado-rascal would never be called by him.
But the result of the marriage dragged him bodily into the gulf: he
became one of four, numbering the beast twice among them. The subtlety of
his hatred so reckoned it; for he could not deny his daughter in the
father's child; he could not exclude its unhallowed father in the
mother's: and of this man's child he must know and own himself the
grandfather. If ever he saw the child, if drawn to it to fondle it, some
part of the little animal not his daughter's would partake of his
embrace. And if neither of his boys married, and his girl gave birth to a
son! darkness rolled upon that avenue of vision. A trespasser and
usurper-one of the demon's brood chased his very name out of Earlsfont!

'Camminy, you must try to amuse yourself,' he said briskly. 'Anything you
may be wanting at home shall be sent for. I must have you here to make
sure that I am acting under good advice. You can take one of the keepers
for an hour or two of shooting. I may join you in the afternoon. You will
find occupation for your gun in the north covers.'

He wandered about the house, looking into several rooms, and only
partially at rest when he discovered Caroline in one, engaged upon some
of her aquarelle sketches. He asked where the young Irishman was.

'Are you in search of him?' said she. 'You like him, uncle? He is out
riding, they tell me.'

'The youngster is used to south-western showers in that climate of his,'
Mr. Adister replied. 'I dare say we could find the Jesuit in him
somewhere. There's the seed. His cousin Con O'Donnell has filled him with
stuff about Ireland and England: the man has no better to do than to
train a parrot. What do you think of him, my love?'

The judgement was not easily formed for expression. 'He is not quite like
what I remember of his brother Philip. He talks much more, does he not?
He seems more Irish than his brother. He is very strange. His feelings
are strong; he has not an idea of concealing them. For a young man
educated by the Jesuits, he is remarkably open.'

'The Jesuits might be of service to me just now!' Mr. Adister addressed
his troubled soul, and spoke upon another conception of them: 'How has he
shown his feelings?'

Caroline answered quickly: 'His love of his brother. Anything that
concerns his brother moves him; it is like a touch on a musical
instrument. Perhaps I should say a native one.'

'Concerns his brother?' Mr. Adister inquired, and his look requesting
enlightenment told her she might speak.

'Adiante,' she said softly. She coloured.

Her uncle mused awhile in a half-somnolent gloom. 'He talks of this at
this present day?'

'It is not dead to him. He really appears to have hoped . . . he is
extraordinary. He had not heard before of her marriage. I was a witness
of the most singular scene this morning, at the piano. He gathered it
from what he had heard. He was overwhelmed by it. I could not exaggerate.
It was impossible to help being a little touched, though it was curious,
very strange.'

Her uncle's attentiveness incited her to describe the scene, and as it
visibly relieved his melancholy, she did it with a few vivid indications
of the quaint young Irishman's manner of speech. She concluded: 'At last
he begged to see a portrait of her husband.'

'Not of her?' said Mr. Adister abruptly.

'No; only of her husband.'

'Show him her portrait.'

A shade of surprise was on Caroline's forehead. 'Shall I?' She had a dim
momentary thought that the sight of the beautiful face would not be good
for Patrick.

'Yes; let him see the woman who could throw herself away on that branded
villain called a prince, abjuring her Church for a little fouler than
hangman to me and every gentleman alive. I desire that he should see it.
Submission to the demands of her husband's policy required it of her, she
says! Show it him when he returns; you have her miniature in your
keeping. And to-morrow take him to look at the full-length of her before
she left England and ceased to be a lady of our country. I will order it
to be placed in the armoury. Let him see the miniature of her this day.'

Mr. Adister resolved at the same time that Patrick should have his
portrait of the prince for a set-off to the face of his daughter. He
craved the relief it would be to him to lay his colours on the prince for
the sparkling amazement of one whom, according to Caroline's description,
he could expect to feel with him acutely, which neither his niece nor his
lawyer had done: they never did when he painted the prince. He was
unstrung, heavily plunged in the matter of his chagrin and grief: his
unhealed wound had been scraped and strewn with salt by his daughter's
letter; he had a thirst for the kind of sympathy he supposed he would
find in the young Irishman's horror at the husband of the incomparable
beauty now past redemption degraded by her hideous choice; lost to
England and to her father and to common respect. For none, having once
had the picture of the man, could dissociate them; they were like heaven
and its reverse, everlastingly coupled in the mind by their opposition of
characters and aspects. Her father could not, and he judged of others by
himself. He had been all but utterly solitary since her marriage, brooded
on it until it saturated him; too proud to speak of the thing in sadness,
or claim condolence for this wound inflicted on him by the daughter he
had idolised other than through the indirect method of causing people to
wonder at her chosen yoke-fellow. Their stupefaction refreshed him. Yet
he was a gentleman capable of apprehending simultaneously that he sinned
against his pride in the means he adopted to comfort his nature. But the
wound was a perpetual sickness needing soul-medicine. Proud as he was,
and unbending, he was not stronger than his malady, and he could
disguise, he could not contain, the cry of immoderate grief. Adiante had
been to him something beyond a creature beloved; she had with her
glorious beauty and great-heartedness been the sole object which had ever
inspirited his imagination. He could have thought no man, not the most
illustrious, worthy of her. And there she was, voluntarily in the hands
of a monster! 'Husband!' Mr. Adister broke away from Caroline, muttering:
'Her husband's policy!'

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