Celt and Saxon. Complete. George Meredith
long time, and it was the capital of Austria, which is a Catholic country, and they’ve Irish blood in the service there, or they had. I could drop on my knees to you!’
The declaration was fortunately hushed by a supplicating ardour, or Mr. Adister would have looked more surprised than his niece. He stepped out of the library window as they were passing, and, evidently with a mind occupied by his own affairs, held up an opened letter for Caroline’s perusal. She took a view of the handwriting.
‘Any others?’ she said.
‘You will consider that one enough for the day,’ was his answer.
Patrick descended the terrace and strolled by the waterside, grieved at their having bad news, and vexed with himself for being a stranger, unable to console them.
Half an hour later they were all three riding to the market-town, where Mr. Adister paid a fruitless call on his lawyer.
‘And never is at home! never was known to be at home when wanted!’ he said, springing back to the saddle.
Caroline murmured some soothing words. They had a perverse effect.
‘His partner! yes, his partner is at home, but I do not communicate upon personal business with his partner; and by and by there will be, I suppose, a third partner. I might as well deposit my family history in the hands of a club. His partner is always visible. It is my belief that Camminy has taken a partner that he may act the independent gentleman at his leisure. I, meantime, must continue to be the mark for these letters. I shall expect soon to hear myself abused as the positive cause of the loss of a Crown!’
‘Mr. Camminy will probably appear at the dinner hour,’ said Caroline.
‘Claret attracts him: I wish I could say as much of duty,’ rejoined her uncle.
Patrick managed to restrain a bubbling remark on the respective charms of claret and duty, tempting though the occasion was for him to throw in a conversational word or two.
He was rewarded for listening devoutly.
Mr. Adister burst out again: ‘And why not come over here to settle this transaction herself?—provided that I am spared the presence of her Schinderhannes! She could very well come. I have now received three letters bearing on this matter within as many months. Down to the sale of her hereditary jewels! I profess no astonishment. The jewels may well go too, if Crydney and Welvas are to go. Disrooted body and soul!—for a moonshine title!—a gaming-table foreign knave!—Known for a knave!—A young gentlewoman?—a wild Welsh…!’
Caroline put her horse to a canter, and the exclamations ended, leaving Patrick to shuffle them together and read the riddle they presented, and toss them to the wind, that they might be blown back on him by the powers of air in an intelligible form.
CHAPTER IV. THE PRINCESS
Dinner, and a little piano-music and a song closed an evening that was not dull to Patrick in spite of prolonged silences. The quiet course of things within the house appeared to him to have a listening ear for big events outside. He dreaded a single step in the wrong direction, and therefore forbore to hang on any of his conjectures; for he might perchance be unjust to the blessedest heroine on the surface of the earth—a truly awful thought! Yet her name would no longer bear the speaking of it to himself. It conjured up a smoky moon under confounding eclipse.
Who was Schinderhannes?
Mr. Adister had said, her Schinderhannes.
Patrick merely wished to be informed who the man was, and whether he had a title, and was much of a knave: and particularly Patrick would have liked to be informed of the fellow’s religion. But asking was not easy.
It was not possible. And there was a barrel of powder to lay a fiery head on, for a pillow!
To confess that he had not the courage to inquire was as good as an acknowledgment that he knew too much for an innocent questioner. And what did he know? His brother Philip’s fair angel forbade him to open the door upon what he knew. He took a peep through fancy’s keyhole, and delighted himself to think that he had seen nothing.
After a turbulent night with Schinderhannes, who let him go no earlier than the opening of a December day, Patrick hied away to one of the dusky nooks by the lake for a bracing plunge. He attributed to his desire for it the strange deadness of the atmosphere, and his incapacity to get an idea out of anything he looked on: he had not a sensation of cold till the stinging element gripped him. It is the finest school for the cure of dreamers; two minutes of stout watery battle, with the enemy close all round, laughing, but not the less inveterate, convinced him that, in winter at least, we have only to jump out of our clothes to feel the reality of things in a trice. The dip was sharpening; he could say that his prescription was good for him; his craving to get an idea ceased with it absolutely, and he stood in far better trim to meet his redoubtable adversary of overnight; but the rascal was a bandit and had robbed him of his purse; that was a positive fact; his vision had gone; he felt himself poor and empty and rejoicing in the keenness of his hunger for breakfast, singularly lean. A youth despoiled of his Vision and made sensible by the activity of his physical state that he is a common machine, is eager for meat, for excess of whatsoever you may offer him; he is on the highroad of recklessness, and had it been the bottle instead of Caroline’s coffee-cup, Patrick would soon have received a priming for a delivery of views upon the sex, and upon love, and the fools known as lovers, acrid enough to win the applause of cynics.
Boasting was the best relief that a young man not without modesty could find. Mr. Adister complimented him on the robustness of his habits, and Patrick ‘would like to hear of the temptation that could keep him from his morning swim.’
Caroline’s needle-thrust was provoked:
‘Would not Arctic weather deter you, Mr. O’Donnell?’ He hummed, and her eyes filled with the sparkle.
‘Short of Arctic,’ he had to say. ‘But a gallop, after an Arctic bath, would soon spin the blood-upon an Esquimaux dog, of course,’ he pursued, to anticipate his critic’s remark on the absence of horses, with a bow.
She smiled, accepting the mental alertness he fastened on her.
We must perforce be critics of these tear-away wits; which are, moreover, so threadbare to conceal the character! Caroline led him to vaunt his riding and his shooting, and a certain time passed before she perceived that though he responded naturally to her first sly attacks, his gross exaggerations upon them had not been the triumph of absurdity she supposed herself to have evoked.
Her wish was to divert her uncle. Patrick discerned the intention and aided her.
‘As for entertainment,’ he said, in answer to Mr. Adister’s courteous regrets that he would have to be a prisoner in the house until his legal adviser thought proper to appear, ‘I’ll be perfectly happy if Miss Caroline will give me as much of her company as she can spare. It ‘s amusing to be shot at too, by a lady who ‘s a good marksman! And birds and hares are always willing to wait for us; they keep better alive. I forgot to say that I can sing.’
‘Then I was in the presence of a connoisseur last night,’ said Caroline. Mr. Adister consulted his watch and the mantelpiece clock for a minute of difference between them, remarking that he was a prisoner indeed, and for the whole day, unless Camminy should decide to come. ‘There is the library,’ he said, ‘if you care for books; the best books on agriculture will be found there. You can make your choice in the stables, if you would like to explore the country. I am detained here by a man who seems to think my business of less importance than his pleasures. And it is not my business; it is very much the reverse but I am compelled to undertake it as my own, when I abhor the business. It is hard for me to speak of it, much more to act a part in it.’
‘Perhaps,’ Caroline interposed hurriedly, ‘Mr. O’Donnell would not be unwilling to begin the day with some duets?’
Patrick eagerly put on his shame-face to accept her invitation, protesting that his boldness was entirely due to his delight in music.
‘But I’ve heard,’ said he, ‘that the best fortification for the exercise of the a voice is hearty eating, so I ‘ll pay court