Riding homeward from the hunt at the leisurely trot of men who have
steamed their mounts pretty well, Mr. Adister questioned Patrick
familiarly about his family, and his estate, and his brother's prospects
in the army, and whither he intended first to direct his travels:
questions which Patrick understood to be kindly put for the sake of
promoting conversation with a companion of unripe age by a gentleman who
had wholesomely excited his blood to run. They were answered, except the
last one. Patrick had no immediate destination in view.
'Leave Europe behind you,' said Mr. Adister warming, to advise him,
and checking the trot of his horse. 'Try South America.' The lordly
gentleman plotted out a scheme of colonisation and conquest in that
region with the coolness of a practised freebooter. 'No young man is
worth a job,' he said, 'who does not mean to be a leader, and as leader
to have dominion. Here we are fettered by ancestry and antecedents.
Had I to recommence without those encumbrances, I would try my fortune
yonder. I stood condemned to waste my youth in idle parades, and hunting
the bear and buffalo. The estate you have inherited is not binding on
you. You can realise it, and begin by taking over two or three hundred
picked Irish and English--have both races capable of handling spade and
musket; purchasing some thousands of acres to establish a legal footing
there.
'You increase your colony from the mother country in the ratio of your
prosperity, until your power is respected, and there is a necessity for
the extension of your territory. When you are feared you will be on your
mettle. They will favour you with provocation. I should not doubt the
result, supposing myself to have under my sole command a trained body of
men of English blood--and Irish.'
'Owners of the soil,' rejoined Patrick, much marvelling.
'Undoubtedly, owners of the soil, but owing you service.'
'They fight sir'
'It is hardly to be specified in the calculation, knowing them. Soldiery
who have served their term, particularly old artillerymen, would be my
choice: young fellows and boys among them. Women would have to be taken.
Half-breeds are the ruin of colonists. Our men are born for conquest.
We were conquerors here, and it is want of action and going physically
forward that makes us a rusty people. There are--Mr. Adister's
intonation told of his proposing a wretched alternative,--'the Pacific
Islands, but they will soon be snapped up by the European and North
American Governments, and a single one of them does not offer space. It
would require money and a navy.' He mused. 'South America is the quarter
I should decide for, as a young man. You are a judge of horses; you ride
well; you would have splendid pastures over there; you might raise a
famous breed. The air is fine; it would suit our English stock. We are
on ground, Mr. O'Donnell, which my forefathers contested sharply and did
not yield.'
'The owners of the soil had to do that,' said Patrick. 'I can show the
same in my country, with a difference.'
'Considerably to your benefit.'
'Everything has been crushed there barring the contrary opinion.'
'I could expect such a remark from a rebel.'
'I'm only interpreting the people, sir.'
'Jump out of that tinder-box as soon as you can.'
'When I was in South America, it astonished me that no Englishman had
cast an eye on so inviting a land. Australia is not comparable with
it. And where colonisations have begun without system, and without hard
fighting to teach the settlers to value good leadership and respect
their chiefs, they tumble into Republics.'
Patrick would have liked to fling a word in about the Englishman's cast
of his eye upon inviting lands, but the trot was resumed, the lord of
Earlsfont having delivered his mind, and a minute made it happily too
late for the sarcastic bolt. Glad that his tongue had been kept from
wagging, he trotted along beside his host in the dusky evening over the
once contested land where the gentleman's forefathers had done their
deeds and firmly fixed their descendants. A remainder of dull red fire
prolonged the half-day above the mountain strongholds of the former
owners of the soil, upon which prince and bard and priest, and
grappling natives never wanting for fierceness, roared to-arms in the
beacon-flames from ridge to peak: and down they poured, and back they
were pushed by the inveterate coloniser--stationing at threatened points
his old 'artillerymen' of those days and so it ends, that bard and
priest and prince; holy poetry, and divine prescription, and a righteous
holding; are as naught against him. They go, like yonder embers of the
winter sunset before advancing night: and to morrow the beacon-heaps
are ashes, the conqueror's foot stamps on them, the wind scatters them;
strangest of all, you hear victorious lawlessness appealing solemnly to
God the law.
Patrick was too young to philosophise upon his ideas; or else the series
of pictures projected by the troops of sensations running through
him were not of a solidity to support any structure of philosophy. He
reverted, though rather in name than in spirit, to the abstractions,
justice, consistency, right. They were too hard to think of, so
he abandoned the puzzle of fitting them to men's acts and their
consciences, and he put them aside as mere titles employed for the uses
of a police and a tribunal to lend an appearance of legitimacy to the
decrees of them that have got the upper hand. An insurrectionary rising
of his breast on behalf of his country was the consequence. He kept
it down by turning the whole hubbub within him to the practical
contemplation of a visionary South America as the region for him and a
fighting tenantry. With a woman, to crown her queen there, the prospect
was fair. But where dwelt the woman possessing majesty suitable to such
a dream in her heart or her head? The best he had known in Ireland and
in France, preferred the charms of society to bold adventure.
All the same, thought he, it's queer counsel, that we should set to work
by buying a bit of land to win a clean footing to rob our neighbours:
and his brains took another shot at Mr. Adister, this time without
penetrating. He could very well have seen the matter he disliked in a
man that he disliked; but the father of Adiante had touched him with the
gift of the miniature.
Patrick was not asked to postpone his departure from Earlsfont, nor was
he invited to come again. Mr. Adister drove him to the station in the
early morning, and gave him a single nod from the phaeton-box for a
good-bye. Had not Caroline assured him at the leave-taking between them
that he had done her uncle great good by his visit, the blank of the
usual ceremonial phrases would have caused him to fancy himself an
intruder courteously dismissed, never more to enter the grand old Hall.
He was further comforted by hearing the stationmaster's exclamation
of astonishment and pleasure at the sight of the squire 'in his place'
handling the reins, which had not been witnessed for many a day and so
it appeared that the recent guest had been exceptionally complimented.
'But why not a warm word, instead of turning me off to decipher a bit of
Egyptian on baked brick,' he thought, incurably Celtic as he was.
From the moment when he beheld Mr. Adister's phaeton mounting a hill
that took the first leap for the Cambrian highlands, up to his arrival
in London, scarcely one of his 'ideas' darted out before Patrick, as
they were in the habit of doing, like the enchanted bares of fairyland,
tempting him to pursue, and changing into the form of woman ever, at
some turn of the chase. For as he had travelled down to Earlsfont in the
state of ignorance and hopefulness, bearing the liquid brains of that
young condition, so did his acquisition of a particular fact destructive
of hope solidify them about it as he travelled back: in other words,
they were digesting what they had taken in. Imagination would not have
stirred for a thousand fleeting hares: and principally, it may be,
because he was conscious that no form of woman would anywhere come of
them. Woman was married; she had the ring on her finger! He could at his
option look on her in the miniature, he could think of her as being in
the city where she had been painted; but he could not conjure her out
of space; she was nowhere in the ambient air. Secretly she was a feeling
that lay half slumbering very deep down within him, and he kept the
secret, choosing to be poor rather than call her forth. He was in truth
digesting with difficulty, as must be the case when it is allotted to
the brains to absorb what the soul abhors.
'Poor old Philip!' was his perpetual refrain. 'Philip, the girl you
loved is married; and here's her portrait taken in her last blush; and
the man who has her hasn't a share in that!' Thus, throwing in the ghost
of a sigh for sympathy, it seemed to Patrick that the intelligence would
have to be communicated. Bang is better, thought he, for bad news than
snapping fire and feinting, when you're bound half to kill a fellow, and
a manly fellow.
Determined that bang it should be, he hurried from the terminus to
Philip's hotel, where he had left him, and was thence despatched to the
house of Captain Con O'Donnell, where he created a joyful confusion,
slightly dashed with rigour on the part of the regnant lady; which is
not to be wondered at, considering that both the gentlemen attending
her, Philip and her husband, quitted her table with shouts at the
announcement of his name, and her husband hauled him in unwashed before
her, crying that the lost was found, the errant returned, the Prodigal
Pat recovered by his kinsman! and she had to submit to the introduction
of the disturber: and a bedchamber had to be thought of for the
unexpected guest, and the dinner to be delayed in middle course, and her
husband corrected between the discussions concerning the bedchamber, and
either the guest permitted to appear at her table in sooty day-garb,
or else a great gap commanded in the service of her dishes, vexatious
extreme for a lady composed of orderliness. She acknowledged Patrick's
profound salute and his excuses with just so many degrees in the
inclining of her head as the polite deem a duty to themselves when the
ruffling world has disarranged them.
'Con!' she called to her chattering husband, 'we are in England, if you
please.'
'To be sure, madam,' said the captain, 'and so 's Patrick, thanks to
the stars. We fancied him gone, kidnapped, burned, made a meal of and
swallowed up, under the earth or the water; for he forgot to give us
his address in town; he stood before us for an hour or so, and then the
fellow vanished. We've waited for him gaping. With your permission I'll
venture an opinion that he'll go and dabble his hands and sit with us as
he is, for the once, as it happens.'
'Let it be so,' she rejoined, not pacified beneath her dignity. She
named the bedchamber to a footman.
'And I'll accompany the boy to hurry him on,' said the captain, hurrying
Patrick on as he spoke, till he had him out of the dining-room, when
he whispered: 'Out with your key, and if we can scramble you into your
evening-suit quick we shall heal the breach in the dinner. You dip your
hands and face, I'll have out the dress. You've the right style for her,
my boy: and mind, she is an excellent good woman, worthy of all respect:
but formality's the flattery she likes: a good bow and short speech.
Here we are, and the room's lighted. Off to the basin, give me the key;
and here's hot water in tripping Mary's hands. The portmanteau opens
easy. Quick! the door's shut on rosy Mary. The race is for domestic
peace, my boy. I sacrifice everything I can for it, in decency. 'Tis the
secret of my happiness.'
Patrick's transformation was rapid enough to satisfy the impatient
captain, who said: 'You'll tell her you couldn't sit down in her
presence undressed. I married her at forty, you know, when a woman has
reached her perfect development, and leans a trifle more to ceremonies
than to substance. And where have you been the while?'
'I'll tell you by and by,' said Patrick.
'Tell me now, and don't be smirking at the glass; your necktie's as
neat as a lady's company-smile, equal at both ends, and warranted not to
relax before the evening 's over. And mind you don't set me off talking
over-much downstairs. I talk in her presence like the usher of the Court
to the judge. 'Tis the secret of my happiness.'
'Where are those rascally dress-boots of mine?' cried Patrick.
Captain Con pitched the contents of the portmanteau right and left.
'Never mind the boots, my boy. Your legs will be under the table during
dinner, and we'll institute a rummage up here between that and the
procession to the drawing-room, where you'll be examined head to foot,
devil a doubt of it. But say, where have you been? She'll be asking, and
we're in a mess already, and may as well have a place to name to her,
somewhere, to excuse the gash you've made in her dinner. Here they are,
both of 'm, rolled in a dirty shirt!'
Patrick seized the boots and tugged them on, saying 'Earlsfont, then.'
'You've been visiting Earlsfont? Whack! but that's the saving of us!
Talk to her of her brother he sends her his love. Talk to her of the
ancestral hall--it stands as it was on the day of its foundation. Just
wait about five minutes to let her punish us, before you out with it.
'Twill come best from you. What did you go down there for? But don't
stand answering questions; come along. Don't heed her countenance at
the going in: we've got the talisman. As to the dressing, it's a perfect
trick of harlequinade, and she'll own it after a dose of Earlsfont. And,
by the way, she's not Mrs. Con, remember; she's Mrs. Adister O'Donnell:
and that's best rolled out to Mistress. She's a worthy woman, but she
was married at forty, and I had to take her shaped as she was, for
moulding her at all was out of the question, and the soft parts of me
had to be the sufferers, to effect a conjunction, for where one won't
and can't, poor t' other must, or the union's a mockery. She was cast in
bronze at her birth, if she wasn't cut in bog-root. Anyhow, you'll study
her. Consider her for my sake. Madam, it should be--madam, call her,
addressing her, madam. She hasn't a taste for jokes, and she chastises
absurdities, and England's the foremost country of the globe, indirect
communication with heaven, and only to be connected with such a country
by the tail of it is a special distinction and a comfort for us; we're
that part of the kite!--but, Patrick, she's a charitable soul; she's
a virtuous woman and an affectionate wife, and doesn't frown to see me
turn off to my place of worship while she drum-majors it away to her
own; she entertains Father Boyle heartily, like the good woman she is
to good men; and unfortunate females too have a friend in her, a real
friend--that they have; and that 's a wonder in a woman chaste as ice.
I do respect her; and I'd like to see the man to favour me with an
opportunity of proving it on him! So you'll not forget, my boy; and
prepare for a cold bath the first five minutes. Out with Earlsfont early
after that. All these things are trifles to an unmarried man. I have
to attend to 'm, I have to be politic and give her elbow-room for her
natural angles. 'Tis the secret of my happiness.'
Priming his kinsman thus up to the door of the diningroom, Captain Con
thrust him in.
Mistress Adister O'Donnell's head rounded as by slow attraction to the
clock. Her disciplined husband signified an equal mixture of contrition
and astonishment at the passing of time. He fell to work upon his plate
in obedience to the immediate policy dictated to him.
The unbending English lady contrasted with her husband so signally
that the oddly united couple appeared yoked in a common harness for
a perpetual display of the opposition of the races. She resembled her
brother, the lord of Earlsfont, in her remarkable height and her calm
air of authority and self-sustainment. From beneath a head-dress built
of white curls and costly lace, half enclosing her high narrow forehead,
a pale, thin, straight bridge of nose descended prominently over her
sunken cheeks to thin locked lips. Her aspect suggested the repose of
a winter landscape, enjoyable in pictures, or on skates, otherwise
nipping.... Mental directness, of no greater breadth than her principal
feature, was the character it expressed; and candour of spirit shone
through the transparency she was, if that mild taper could be said to
shine in proof of a vitality rarely notified to the outer world by the
opening of her mouth; chiefly then, though not malevolently to command:
as the portal of some snow-bound monastery opens to the outcast, bidding
it be known that the light across the wolds was not deceptive and a
glimmer of light subsists among the silent within. The life sufficed to
her. She was like a marble effigy seated upright, requiring but to be
laid at her length for transport to the cover of the tomb.
Now Captain Con was by nature ruddy as an Indian summer flushed in all
its leaves. The corners of his face had everywhere a frank ambush, or
child's hiding-place, for languages and laughter. He could worm with a
smile quite his own the humour out of men possessing any; and even under
rigorous law, and it could not be disputed that there was rigour in the
beneficent laws imposed upon him by his wife, his genius for humour and
passion for sly independence came up and curled away like the smoke of
the illicit still, wherein the fanciful discern fine sprites indulging
in luxurious grimaces at a government long-nosed to no purpose. Perhaps,
as Patrick said of him to Caroline Adister, he was a bard without a
theme. He certainly was a man of speech, and the having fearfully to
contain himself for the greater number of the hours of the day, for the
preservation of the domestic felicity he had learnt to value, fathered
the sentiment of revolt in his bosom.
By this time, long after five minutes had elapsed, the frost presiding
at the table was fast withering Captain Con; and he was irritable to
hear why Patrick had gone off to Earlsfont, and what he had done there,
and the adventures he had tasted on the road; anything for warmth. His
efforts to fish the word out of Patrick produced deeper crevasses in the
conversation, and he cried to himself: Hats and crape-bands! mightily
struck by an idea that he and his cousins were a party of hired mourners
over the meat they consumed. Patrick was endeavouring to spare his
brother a mention of Earlsfont before they had private talk together. He
answered neither to a dip of the hook nor to a pull.
'The desert where you 've come from 's good,' said the captain, sharply
nodding.
Mrs. Adister O'Donnell ejaculated: 'Wine!' for a heavy comment upon one
of his topics, and crushed it.
Philip saw that Patrick had no desire to spread, and did not trouble
him.
'Good horses in the stable too,' said the captain.
Patrick addressed Mrs. Adister: 'I have hardly excused myself to you,
madam.'
Her head was aloft in dumb apostrophe of wearifulness over another of
her husband's topics.
'Do not excuse yourself at all,' she said.
The captain shivered. He overhauled his plotting soul publicly: 'Why
don't you out with it yourself!' and it was wonderful why he had not
done so, save that he was prone to petty conspiracy, and had thought
reasonably that the revelation would be damp, gunpowder, coming from
him. And for when he added: 'The boy's fresh from Earlsfont; he went
down to look at the brav old house of the Adisters, and was nobly
welcomed and entertained, and made a vast impression,' his wife sedately
remarked to Patrick, 'You have seen my brother Edward.'
'And brings a message of his love to you, my dear,' the Captain bit his
nail harder.
'You have a message for me?' she asked; and Patrick replied: 'The
captain is giving a free translation. I was down there, and I took the
liberty of calling on Mr. Adister, and I had a very kind reception. We
hunted, we had a good day with the hounds. I think I remember hearing
that you go there at Christmas, madam.'
'Our last Christmas at Earlsfont was a sad meeting for the family. My
brother Edward is well?'
'I had the happiness to be told that I had been of a little service in
cheering him.'
'I can believe it,' said Mrs. Adister, letting her eyes dwell on the
young man; and he was moved by the silvery tremulousness of her voice.
She resumed: 'You have the art of dressing in a surprisingly short
time.'
'There!' exclaimed Captain Con: for no man can hear the words which
prove him a prophet without showing excitement. 'Didn't I say so?
Patrick's a hero for love or war, my dear. He stood neat and trim from
the silk socks to the sprig of necktie in six minutes by my watch.
And that's witness to me that you may count on him for what the great
Napoleon called two-o'clock-in-the-morning courage; not too common even
in his immortal army:--when it's pitch black and frosty cold, and you're
buried within in a dream of home, and the trumpet springs you to your
legs in a trice, boots and trowsers, coat and sword-belt and shako, and
one twirl to the whiskers, and away before a second snap of the fingers
to where the great big bursting end of all things for you lies crouching
like a Java-Tiger--a ferocious beast painted undertaker's colour--for a
leap at you in particular out of the dark;--never waiting an instant to
ask what's the matter and pretend you don't know. That's rare, Philip;
that's bravery; Napoleon knew the thing; and Patrick has it; my hand's
on the boy's back for that.'
The captain was permitted to discourse as he pleased: his wife was
wholly given to the recent visitor to Earlsfont, whom she informed
that Caroline was the youngest daughter of General Adister, her second
brother, and an excellent maiden, her dear Edward's mainstay in his
grief. At last she rose, and was escorted to the door by all present.
But Captain Con rather shame-facedly explained to Patrick that it was
a sham departure; they had to follow without a single spin to the
claretjug: he closed the door merely to state his position; how at
half-past ten he would be a free man, according to the convention, to
which his wife honourably adhered, so he had to do likewise, as regarded
his share of it. Thereupon he apologised to the brothers, bitterly
regretting that, with good wine in the cellar, his could be no house for
claret; and promising them they should sit in their shirts and stretch
their legs, and toast the old country and open their hearts, no later
than the minute pointing to the time for his deliverance.
Mrs. Adister accepted her husband's proffered arm unhesitatingly at the
appointed stroke of the clock. She said: 'Yes,' in agreement with him,
as if she had never heard him previously enunciate the formula, upon his
pious vociferation that there should be no trifling with her hours of
rest.
'You can find your way to my cabin,' he said to Philip over his
shoulder, full of solicitude for the steps of the admirable lady now
positively departing.
As soon as the brothers were alone, Philip laid his hand on Patrick,
asking him, 'What does it mean?'
Patrick fired his cannon-shot: 'She's married!' Consulting his feelings
immediately after, he hated himself for his bluntness.
Philip tossed his head. 'But why did you go down there?'
'I went,' said Patrick, 'well, I went.... I thought you looked wretched,
and I went with an idea of learning where she was, and seeing if I
couldn't do something. It's too late now; all's over.'
'My dear boy, I've worse than that to think of.'
'You don't mind it?'
'That's old news, Patrick.'
'You don't care for her any more, Philip?'
'You wouldn't have me caring for a married woman?'
'She has a perfect beast for a husband.'
'I'm sorry she didn't make a better choice.'
'He's a prince.'
'So I hear.'
'Ah! And what worse, Philip, can you be having to think of?'
'Affairs,' Philip replied, and made his way to the cabin of Captain Con,
followed in wonderment by Patrick, who would hardly have been his dupe
to suppose him indifferent and his love of Adiante dead, had not the
thought flashed on him a prospect of retaining the miniature for his
own, or for long in his custody.