THE DINNER-PARTY
Miss Mattock ventured on a prediction in her mind:
She was sure the letter would go. And there was not much to signify if
it did. But the curious fatality that a person of such a native
uprightness as Mrs. Adister should have been drawn in among Irishmen, set
her thoughts upon the composer of the letter, and upon the contrast of
his ingenuous look with the powerful cast of his head. She fancied a
certain danger about him; of what kind she could not quite distinguish,
for it had no reference to woman's heart, and he was too young to be much
of a politician, and he was not in the priesthood. His transparency was
of a totally different order from Captain Con's, which proclaimed itself
genuine by the inability to conceal a shoal of subterfuges. The younger
cousin's features carried a something invisible behind them, and she was
just perceptive enough to spy it, and it excited her suspicions.
Irishmen both she and her brother had to learn to like, owing to their
bad repute for stability: they are, moreover, Papists: they are not given
to ideas: that one of the working for the future has not struck them. In
fine, they are not solid, not law-supporting, not disposed to be (humbly
be it said) beneficent, like the good English. These were her views, and
as she held it a weakness to have to confess that Irishmen are socially
more fascinating than the good English, she was on her guard against
them.
Of course the letter had gone. She heard of it before the commencement
of the dinner, after Mrs. Adister had introduced Captain Philip O'Donnell
to her, and while she was exchanging a word or two with Colonel Adister,
who stood ready to conduct her to the table. If he addressed any remarks
to the lady under his charge, Miss Mattock did not hear him; and she
listened--who shall say why? His unlike likeness to his brother had
struck her. Patrick opposite was flowing in speech. But Captain Philip
O'Donnell's taciturnity seemed no uncivil gloom: it wore nothing of that
look of being beneath the table, which some of our good English are
guilty of at their social festivities, or of towering aloof a Matterhorn
above it, in the style of Colonel Adister. Her discourse with the latter
amused her passing reflections. They started a subject, and he
punctuated her observations, or she his, and so they speedily ran to
earth.
'I think,' says she, 'you were in Egypt this time last winter.'
He supplies her with a comma: 'Rather later.'
Then he carries on the line. 'Dull enough, if you don't have the right
sort of travelling crew in your boat.'
'Naturally,' she puts her semicolon, ominous of the full stop.
'I fancy you have never been in Egypt?'
'No'
There it is; for the tone betrays no curiosity about Egypt and her Nile,
and he is led to suppose that she has a distaste for foreign places.
Condescending to attempt to please, which he has reason to wish to
succeed in doing, the task of pursuing conversational intercourse
devolves upon him
'I missed Parlatti last spring. What opinion have you formed of her?'
'I know her only by name at present.'
'Ah, I fancy you are indifferent to Opera.'
'Not at all; I enjoy it. I was as busy then as I am now.'
'Meetings? Dorcas, so forth.'
'Not Dorcas, I assure you. You might join if you would.'
'Your most obliged.'
A period perfectly rounded. At the same time Miss Mattock exchanged a
smile with her hostess, of whose benignant designs in handing her to the
entertaining officer she was not conscious. She felt bound to look happy
to gratify an excellent lady presiding over the duller half of a table of
eighteen. She turned slightly to Captain O'Donnell. He had committed
himself to speech at last, without tilting his shoulders to exclude the
company by devoting himself to his partner, and as he faced the table
Miss Mattock's inclination to listen attracted him. He cast his eyes on
her: a quiet look, neither languid nor frigid seeming to her both open
and uninviting. She had the oddest little shiver, due to she knew not
what. A scrutiny she could have borne, and she might have read a
signification; but the look of those mild clear eyes which appeared to
say nothing save that there was fire behind them, hit on some perplexity,
or created it; for she was aware of his unhappy passion for the beautiful
Miss Adister; the whole story had been poured into her ears; she had been
moved by it. Possibly she had expected the eyes of such a lover to
betray melancholy, and his power of containing the expression where the
sentiment is imagined to be most transparent may have surprised her,
thrilling her as melancholy orbs would not have done.
Captain Con could have thumped his platter with vexation. His wife's
diplomacy in giving the heiress to Colonel Adister for the evening had
received his cordial support while he manoeuvred cleverly to place Philip
on the other side of her; and now not a step did the senseless fellow
take, though she offered him his chance, dead sick of her man on the
right; not a word did he have in ordinary civility; he was a burning
disgrace to the chivalry of Erin. She would certainly be snapped up by a
man merely yawning to take the bite. And there's another opportunity
gone for the old country!--one's family to boot!
Those two were in the middle of the table, and it is beyond mortal,
beyond Irish, capacity, from one end of a table of eighteen to whip up
the whole body of them into a lively unanimous froth, like a dish of
cream fetched out of thickness to the airiest lightness. Politics, in
the form of a firebrand or apple of Discord, might knead them together
and cut them in batches, only he had pledged his word to his wife to shun
politics as the plague, considering Mr. Mattock's presence. And yet it
was tempting: the recent Irish news had stung him; he could say sharp
things from the heart, give neat thrusts; and they were fairly divided
and well matched. There was himself, a giant; and there was an
unrecognised bard of his country, no other than himself too; and there
was a profound politician, profoundly hidden at present, like powder in a
mine--the same person. And opposite to him was Mr. John Mattock, a
worthy antagonist, delightful to rouse, for he carried big guns and took
the noise of them for the shattering of the enemy, and this champion
could be pricked on to a point of assertion sure to fire the phlegm in
Philip; and then young Patrick might be trusted to warm to the work.
Three heroes out skirmishing on our side. Then it begins to grow hot,
and seeing them at it in earnest, Forbery glows and couches his gun, the
heaviest weight of the Irish light brigade. Gallant deeds! and now Mr.
Marbury Dyke opens on Forbery's flank to support Mattock hardpressed, and
this artillery of English Rockney resounds, with a similar object: the
ladies to look on and award the crown of victory, Saxon though they be,
excepting Rockney's wife, a sure deserter to the camp of the brave,
should fortune frown on them, for a punishment to Rockney for his
carrying off to himself a flower of the Green Island and holding
inveterate against her native land in his black ingratitude. Oh! but
eloquence upon a good cause will win you the hearts of all women, Saxon
or other, never doubt of it. And Jane Mattock there, imbibing forced
doses of Arthur Adister, will find her patriotism dissolving in the
natural human current; and she and Philip have a pretty wrangle, and like
one another none the worse for not agreeing: patriotically speaking,
she's really unrooted by that half-thawed colonel, a creature snow-bound
up to his chin; and already she's leaping to be transplanted. Jane is
one of the first to give her vote for the Irish party, in spite of her
love for her brother John: in common justice, she says, and because she
hopes for complete union between the two islands. And thereupon we
debate upon union. On the whole, yes: union, on the understanding that
we have justice, before you think of setting to work to sow the land with
affection:--and that 's a crop in a clear soil will spring up harvest-
thick in a single summer night across St. George's Channel, ladies!....
Indeed a goodly vision of strife and peace: but, politics forbidden, it
was entirely a dream, seeing that politics alone, and a vast amount of
blowing even on the topic of politics, will stir these English to enter
the arena and try a fall. You cannot, until you say ten times more than
you began by meaning, and have heated yourself to fancy you mean more
still, get them into any state of fluency at all. Forbery's anecdote now
and then serves its turn, but these English won't take it up as a start
for fresh pastures; they lend their ears and laugh a finale to it; you
see them dwelling on the relish, chewing the cud, by way of mental note
for their friends to-morrow, as if they were kettles come here merely for
boiling purposes, to make tea elsewhere, and putting a damper on the fire
that does the business for them. They laugh, but they laugh
extinguishingly, and not a bit to spread a general conflagration and
illumination.
The case appeared hopeless to Captain Con, bearing an eye on Philip. He
surveyed his inanimate eights right and left, and folded his combative
ardour around him, as the soldier's martial cloak when he takes his rest
on the field. Mrs. Marbury Dyke, the lady under his wing, honoured wife
of the chairman of his imagined that a sigh escaped him, and said in
sympathy: 'Is the bad news from India confirmed?'
He feared it was not bright, and called to Philip for the latest.
'Nothing that you have not had already in the newspapers,' Philip
replied, distinctly from afar, but very bluntly, as through a trumpet.
Miss Mattock was attentive. She had a look as good as handsome when she
kindled.
The captain persevered to draw his cousin out.
'Your chief has his orders?'
'There's a rumour to that effect.'
'The fellow's training for diplomacy,' Con groaned.
Philip spoke to Miss Mattock: he was questioned and he answered, and
answered dead as a newspaper telegraphic paragraph, presenting simply the
corpse of the fact, and there an end. He was a rival of Arthur Adister
for military brevity.
'Your nephew is quite the diplomatist,' said Mrs. Dyke, admiring Philip's
head.
'Cousin, ma'am. Nephews I might drive to any market to make the most of
them. Cousins pretend they're better than pigs, and diverge bounding
from the road at the hint of the stick. You can't get them to grunt more
than is exactly agreeable to them.'
'My belief is that if our cause is just our flag will triumph,' Miss
Grace Barrow, Jane Mattock's fellow-worker and particular friend,
observed to Dr. Forbery.
'You may be enjoying an original blessing that we in Ireland missed in
the cradle,' said he.
She emphasised: 'I speak of the just cause; it must succeed.'
'The stainless flag'll be in the ascendant in the long run,' he assented.
'Is it the flag of Great Britain you're speaking of, Forbery?' the
captain inquired.
'There's a harp or two in it,' he responded pacifically.
Mrs. Dyke was not pleased with the tone. 'And never will be out of it!'
she thumped her interjection.
'Or where 's your music?' said the captain, twinkling for an adversary
among the males, too distant or too dull to distinguish a note of
challenge. 'You'd be having to mount your drum and fife in their places,
ma'am.'
She saw no fear of the necessity.
'But the fife's a pretty instrument,' he suggested, and with a candour
that seduced the unwary lady to think dubiously whether she quite liked
the fife. Miss Barrow pronounced it cheerful.
'Oh, and martial!' he exclaimed, happy to have caught Rockney's
deliberate gaze. 'The effect of it, I'm told in the provinces is
astonishing for promoting enlistment. Hear it any morning in your London
parks, at the head of a marching regiment of your giant foot-Guards.
Three bangs of the drum, like the famous mountain, and the fife announces
himself to be born, and they follow him, left leg and right leg and
bearskin. And what if he's a small one and a trifle squeaky; so 's a
prince when the attendant dignitaries receive him submissively and hear
him informing the nation of his advent. It 's the idea that 's grand.'
'The idea is everything in military affairs,' a solemn dupe, a Mr.
Rumford, partly bald, of benevolent aspect, and looking more copious than
his flow, observed to the lady beside him. 'The flag is only an idea.'
She protested against the barbarism of war, and he agreed with her,
but thought it must be: it had always been: he deplored the fatality.
Nevertheless, he esteemed our soldiers, our sailors too. A city man
himself and a man of peace, he cordially esteemed and hailed the
victories of a military body whose idea was Duty instead of Ambition.
'One thing,' said Mrs. Dyke, evading the ambiguous fife, 'patriotic as I
am, I hope, one thing I confess; I never have yet brought myself to
venerate thoroughly our Royal Standard. I dare say it is because I do
not understand it.'
A strong fraternal impulse moved Mr. Rumford to lean forward and show her
the face of one who had long been harassed by the same incapacity to
digest that one thing. He guessed it at once, without a doubt of the
accuracy of the shot. Ever since he was a child the difficulty had
haunted him; and as no one hitherto had even comprehended his dilemma,
he beamed like a man preparing to embrace a recovered sister.
'The Unicorn!' he exclaimed.
'It is the Unicorn!' she sighed. 'The Lion is noble.'
'The Unicorn, if I may speak by my own feelings, certainly does not
inspire attachment, that is to say, the sense of devotion, which we
should always be led to see in national symbols,' Mr. Rumford resumed,
and he looked humorously rueful while speaking with some earnestness;
to show that he knew the subject to be of the minor sort, though it was
not enough to trip and jar a loyal enthusiasm in the strictly meditative.
'The Saxon should carry his White Horse, I suppose,' Dr. Forbery said.
'But how do we account for the horn on his forehead?' Mr. Rumford sadly
queried.
'Two would have been better for the harmony of the Unicorn's appearance,'
Captain Con remarked, desirous to play a floundering fish, and tender to
the known simple goodness of the ingenuous man. 'What do you say,
Forbery? The poor brute had a fall on his pate and his horn grew of it,
and it 's to prove that he has got something in his head, and is
dangerous both fore and aft, which is not the case with other horses,
who're usually wicked at the heels alone. That's it, be sure, or near
it. And his horn's there to file the subject nation's grievances for the
Lion to peruse at his leisure. And his colour's prophetic of the Horse
to come, that rides over all.'
'Lion and Unicorn signify the conquest of the two hemispheres, Matter and
Mind,' said Dr. Forbery. 'The Lion there's no mistake about. The
Unicorn sets you thinking. So it's a splendid Standard, and means the
more for not being perfectly intelligible at a glance.'
'But if the Lion, as they've whispered of late, Forbery, happens to be
stuffed with straw or with what's worse, with sawdust, a fellow bearing a
pointed horn at close quarters might do him mortal harm; and it must be a
situation trying to the patience of them both. The Lion seems to say "No
prancing!" as if he knew his peril; and the Unicorn to threaten a
playful dig at his flank, as if he understood where he's ticklish.'
Mr. Rumford drank some champagne and murmured with a shrug to the
acquiescent lady beside him: 'Irishmen!' implying that the race could not
be brought to treat serious themes as befitted the seriousness of the
sentiments they stir in their bosoms. He was personally a little hurt,
having unfolded a shy secret of his feelings, which were keenly patriotic
in a phlegmatic frame, and he retired within himself, assuring the lady
that he accepted our standard in its integrity; his objection was not
really an objection; it was, he explained to her, a ridiculous desire to
have a perfect comprehension of the idea in the symbol. But where there
was no seriousness everything was made absurd. He could, he said, laugh
as well as others on the proper occasion. As for the Lion being stuffed,
he warned England's enemies for their own sakes not to be deluded by any
such patent calumny. The strong can afford to be magnanimous and
forbearing. Only let not that be mistaken for weakness. A wag of his
tail would suffice.
The lady agreed. But women are volatile. She was the next moment
laughing at something she had heard with the largest part of her ear,
and she thought the worthy gentleman too simple, though she knew him for
one who had amassed wealth. Captain Con and Dr. Forbery had driven the
Unicorn to shelter, and were now baiting the Lion. The tremendous import
of that wag of his tail among the nations was burlesqued by them, and it
came into collision with Mr. Rumford's legendary forefinger threat. She
excused herself for laughing:
'They are so preposterous!'
'Yes, yes, I can laugh,' said he, soberly performing the act: and Mr.
Rumford covered the wound his delicate sensations had experienced under
an apology for Captain Con, that would redound to the credit of his
artfulness were it not notorious our sensations are the creatures and
born doctors of art in discovering unguents for healing their bruises.
'O'Donnell has a shrewd head for business. He is sound at heart. There
is not a drop of gout in his wine.'
The lady laughed again, as we do when we are fairly swung by the tide,
and underneath her convulsion she quietly mused on the preference she
would give to the simple English citizen for soundness.
'What can they be discussing down there?' Miss Mattock said to Philip,
enviously as poor Londoners in November when they receive letters from
the sapphire Riviera.
'I will venture to guess at nonsense,' he answered.
'Nothing political, then.'
'That scarcely follows; but a host at his own table may be trusted to
shelve politics.'
'I should not object.'
'To controversy?'
'Temperately conducted.'
'One would go a long way to see the exhibition.'
'But why cannot men be temperate in their political arguments?'
'The questions raised are too close about the roots of us.'
'That sounds very pessimist.'
'More duels come from politics than from any other source.'
'I fear it is true. Then women might set you an example.'
'By avoiding it?'
'I think you have been out of England for some time.'
'I have been in America.'
'We are not exactly on the pattern of the Americans.' Philip hinted a
bow. He praised the Republican people.
'Yes, but in our own way we are working out our own problems over here,'
said she. 'We have infinitely more to contend with: old institutions,
monstrous prejudices, and a slower-minded people, I dare say: much
slower, I admit. We are not shining to advantage at present. Still,
that is not the fault of English women.'
'Are they so spirited?'
Spirited was hardly the word Miss Mattock would have chosen to designate
the spirit in them. She hummed a second or two, deliberating; it flashed
through her during the pause that he had been guilty of irony, and she
reddened: and remembering a foregoing strange sensation she reddened
more. She had been in her girlhood a martyr to this malady of youth; it
had tied her to the stake and enveloped her in flames for no accountable
reason, causing her to suffer cruelly and feel humiliated. She knew the
pangs of it in public, and in private as well. And she had not conquered
it yet. She was angered to find herself such a merely physical victim of
the rushing blood: which condition of her senses did not immediately
restore her natural colour.
'They mean nobly,' she said, to fill an extending gap in the conversation
under a blush; and conscious of an ultra-swollen phrase, she snatched at
it nervously to correct it: 'They are becoming alive to the necessity for
action.' But she was talking to a soldier! 'I mean, their heads are
opening.' It sounded ludicrous. 'They are educating themselves
differently.' Were they? 'They wish to take their part in the work of
the world.' That was nearer the proper tone, though it had a ring of
claptrap rhetoric hateful to her: she had read it and shrunk from it in
reports of otherwise laudable meetings.
'Well, spirited, yes. I think they are. I believe they are. One has
need to hope so.'
Philip offered a polite affirmative, evidently formal.
Not a sign had he shown of noticing her state of scarlet. His grave
liquid eyes were unalterable. She might have been grateful, but the
reflection that she had made a step to unlock the antechamber of her
dearest deepest matters to an ordinary military officer, whose notions of
women were probably those of his professional brethren, impelled her to
transfer his polished decorousness to the burden of his masculine
antagonism-plainly visible. She brought the dialogue to a close.
Colonel Adister sidled an eye at a three-quarter view of her face.
'I fancy you're feeling the heat of the room,' he said.
Jane acknowledged a sensibility to some degree of warmth.
The colonel was her devoted squire on the instant for any practical
service. His appeal to his aunt concerning one of the windows was
answered by her appeal to Jane's countenance for a disposition to rise
and leave the gentlemen. Captain Con, holding the door for the passage
of his wife and her train of ladies, received the injunction:
'Ten,' from her, and remarked: 'Minutes,' as he shut it. The shortness
of the period of grace proposed dejection to him on the one hand, and on
the other a stimulated activity to squeeze it for its juices without any
delay. Winding past Dr. Forbery to the vacated seat of the hostess he
frowned forbiddingly.
'It's I, is it!' cried the doctor. Was it ever he that endangered
the peace and placability of social gatherings! He sat down prepared
rather for a bout with Captain Con than with their common opponents,
notwithstanding that he had accurately read the mock thunder of his
brows.