Celt and Saxon. Complete. George Meredith
at peace, and he thought the Jesuits particularly forbearing in the amount of harm they had done to this young man. So they were still at table when Mr. Camminy was announced and ushered in.
The man of law murmured an excuse or two; he knew his client’s eye, and how to thaw it.
‘No, Miss Adister, I have not breakfasted,’ he said, taking the chair placed for him. ‘I was all day yesterday at Windlemont, engaged in assisting to settle the succession. Where estates are not entailed!’
‘The expectations of the family are undisciplined and certain not to be satisfied,’ Mr. Adister carried on the broken sentence. ‘That house will fall! However, you have lost no time this morning.—Mr. Patrick O’Donnell.’
Mr. Camminy bowed busily somewhere in the direction between Patrick and the sideboard.
‘Our lawyers have us inside out, like our physicians,’ Mr. Adister resumed, talking to blunt his impatience for a private discussion with his own.
‘Surgery’s a little in their practice too, we think in Ireland,’ said Patrick.
Mr. Camminy assented: ‘No doubt.’ He was hungry, and enjoyed the look of the table, but the look of his client chilled the prospect, considered in its genial appearance as a feast of stages; having luminous extension; so, to ease his client’s mind, he ventured to say: ‘I thought it might be urgent.’
‘It is urgent,’ was the answer.
‘Ah: foreign? domestic?’
A frown replied.
Caroline, in haste to have her duties over, that she might escape the dreaded outburst, pressed another cup of tea on Mr. Camminy and groaned to see him fill his plate. She tried to start a topic with Patrick.
‘The princess is well, I hope?’ Mr. Camminy asked in the voice of discretion. ‘It concerns her Highness?’
‘It concerns my daughter and her inheritance from her mad grandmother!’ Mr. Adister rejoined loudly; and he continued like a retreating thunder: ‘A princess with a title as empty as a skull! At best a princess of swamps, and swine that fight for acorns, and men that fight for swine!’
Patrick caught a glance from Caroline, and the pair rose together.
‘They did that in our mountains a couple of thousand years ago,’ said Mr. Camminy, ‘and the cause was not so bad, to judge by this ham. Men must fight: the law is only a quieter field for them.’
‘And a fatter for the ravens,’ Patrick joined in softly, as if carrying on a song.
‘Have at us, Mr. O’Donnell! I’m ashamed of my appetite, Miss Adister, but the morning’s drive must be my excuse, and I’m bounden to you for not forcing me to detain you. Yes, I can finish breakfast at my leisure, and talk of business, which is never particularly interesting to ladies—though,’ Mr. Camminy turned to her uncle, ‘I know Miss Adister has a head for it.’
Patrick hummed a bar or two of an air, to hint of his being fanatico per la musica, as a pretext for their departure.
‘If you’ll deign to give me a lesson,’ said he, as Caroline came away from pressing her lips to her uncle’s forehead.
‘I may discover that I am about to receive one,’ said she.
They quitted the room together.
Mr. Camminy had seen another Miss Adister duetting with a young Irishman and an O’Donnell, with lamentable results to that union of voices, and he permitted himself to be a little astonished at his respected client’s defective memory or indifference to the admonition of identical circumstances.
CHAPTER V. AT THE PIANO, CHIEFLY WITHOUT MUSIC
Barely had the door shut behind them when Patrick let his heart out: ‘The princess?’ He had a famished look, and Caroline glided along swiftly with her head bent, like one musing; his tone alarmed her; she lent him her ear, that she might get some understanding of his excitement, suddenly as it seemed to have come on him; but he was all in his hungry interrogation, and as she reached her piano and raised the lid, she saw it on tiptoe straining for her answer.
‘I thought you were aware of my cousin’s marriage.’
‘Was I?’ said Patrick, asking it of himself, for his conscience would not acknowledge an absolute ignorance. ‘No: I fought it, I wouldn’t have a blot on her be suspected. She’s married! She’s married to one of their princes!—married for a title!—and changed her religion! And Miss Adister, you’re speaking of Adiante?’
‘My cousin Adiante.’
‘Well did I hate the name! I heard it first over in France. Our people wrote to me of her; and it’s a name to set you thinking: Is she tender, or nothing like a woman,—a stone? And I put it to my best friend there, Father Clement, who’s a scholar, up in everything, and he said it was a name with a pretty sound and an ill meaning—far from tender; and a bad history too, for she was one of the forty-nine Danaides who killed their husbands for the sake of their father and was not likely to be the fiftieth, considering the name she bore. It was for her father’s sake she as good as killed her lover, and the two Adiantes are like enough: they’re as like as a pair of hands with daggers. So that was my brother Philip’s luck! She’s married! It’s done; it’s over, like death: no hope. And this time it’s against her father; it’s against her faith. There’s the end of Philip! I could have prophesied it; I did; and when they broke, from her casting him off—true to her name! thought I. She cast him off, and she couldn’t wait for him, and there’s his heart broken. And I ready to glorify her for a saint! And now she must have loved the man, or his title, to change her religion. She gives him her soul! No praise to her for that: but mercy! what a love it must be. Or else it’s a spell. But wasn’t she rather one for flinging spells than melting? Except that we’re all of us hit at last, and generally by our own weapon. But she loved Philip: she loved him down to shipwreck and drowning: she gave battle for him, and against her father; all the place here and the country’s alive with their meetings and partings:—she can’t have married! She wouldn’t change her religion for her lover: how can she have done it for this prince? Why, it’s to swear false oaths!—unless it’s possible for a woman to slip out of herself and be another person after a death like that of a love like hers.’
Patrick stopped: the idea demanded a scrutiny.
‘She’s another person for me,’ he said. ‘Here’s the worst I ever imagined of her!—thousands of miles and pits of sulphur beyond the worst and the very worst! I thought her fickle, I thought her heartless, rather a black fairy, perched above us, not quite among the stars of heaven. I had my ideas. But never that she was a creature to jump herself down into a gulf and be lost for ever. She’s gone, extinguished—there she is, under the penitent’s hoodcap with eyeholes, before the faggots! and that’s what she has married!—a burning torment, and none of the joys of martyrdom. Oh! I’m not awake. But I never dreamed of such a thing as this—not the hard, bare, lump-of-earth-fact:—and that’s the only thing to tell me I’m not dreaming now.’
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