The Celt and Saxon, v2

G >> George Meredith >> The Celt and Saxon, v2

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9

'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.

'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.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9