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 ODonnell, with lamentable results to that union of voices, and he permitted himself to be a little astonished at his respected clients 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 cousins marriage.
Was I? said Patrick, asking it of himself, for his conscience would not acknowledge an absolute ignorance. No: I fought it, I wouldnt have a blot on her be suspected. Shes married! Shes married to one of their princes!married for a title!and changed her religion! And Miss Adister, youre 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 its 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, whos a scholar, up in everything, and he said it was a name with a pretty sound and an ill meaningfar 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 fathers sake she as good as killed her lover, and the two Adiantes are like enough: theyre as like as a pair of hands with daggers. So that was my brother Philips luck! Shes married! Its done; its over, like death: no hope. And this time its against her father; its against her faith. Theres the end of Philip! I could have prophesied it; I did; and when they broke, from her casting him offtrue to her name! thought I. She cast him off, and she couldnt wait for him, and theres 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 its a spell. But wasnt she rather one for flinging spells than melting? Except that were 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 countrys alive with their meetings and partings:she cant have married! She wouldnt change her religion for her lover: how can she have done it for this prince? Why, its to swear false oaths!unless its 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.
Shes another person for me, he said. Heres 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. Shes gone, extinguishedthere she is, under the penitents hoodcap with eyeholes, before the faggots! and thats what she has married!a burning torment, and none of the joys of martyrdom. Oh! Im not awake. But I never dreamed of such a thing as thisnot the hard, bare, lump-of-earth-fact:and thats the only thing to tell me Im 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 vivificationof his brothers 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 is not young.
An old man!
She had not said that, and she wished to defend her cousin from the charge of contracting such an alliance, but Patricks face had brightened out of a gloom of stupefaction; he assured her he was now ready to try his voice with hers, only she was to excuse a touch of hoarseness; he felt it slightly in his throat: and could he, she asked him, wonder at it after his mornings bath?
He vindicated the saneness of the bath as well as he was able, showing himself at least a good reader of music. On the whole, he sang pleasantly, particularly French songs. She complimented him, with an emphasis on the French. He said, yes, he fancied he did best in French, and he had an idea of settling in France, if he found that he could not live quietly in his own country.
And becoming a Frenchman? said Caroline.
Why not? said he. I m more at home with French people; theyre mostly of my creed; theyre amiable, though they werent quite kind to poor Lally Tollendal. I like them. Yes, I love France, and when Im called upon to fix myself, as I suppose I shall be some day, I shant have the bother over there that I should find here.
She spoke reproachfully: Have you no pride in the title of Englishman?
I m an Irishman.
We are one nation.
And its one family where the dog is pulled by the collar.
There was a retort on him: she saw, as it were, the box, but the lid would not open to assist her to it, and she let it go by, thinking in her patriotic derision, that to choose to be likened to the unwilling dog of the family was evidence of a want of saving pride.
Besides, she could not trust to the glibness of her tongue in a contest with a young gentleman to whom talking was as easy as breathing, even if sometimes his volubility exposed him to attack. A superior position was offered her by her being silent and critical. She stationed herself on it: still she was grieved to think of him as a renegade from his country, and she forced herself to say: Captain ODonnell talks in that manner.
Captain Con is constitutionally discontented because hes a bard by nature, and without the right theme for his harp, said Patrick. He has a notion of Erin as the unwilling bride of Mr. Bull, because her lord is not off in heroics enough to please her, and neglects her, and wont let her be mistress of her own household, and she cant forget that he once had the bad trick of beating her: she sees the marks. And you maynt believe it, but the Captains temper is to praise and exalt. It is. Irony in him is only eulogy standing on its head: a sort of an upside down; a perversion: thats our view of him at home. All he desires is to have us on the march, and hed be perfectly happy marching, never mind the banner, though a bit of green in it would put him in tune, of course. The banner of the Cid was green, Miss Adister: or else its his pennon that was. And theres a quantity of our blood in Spain too. Weve watered many lands.
The poor young English ladys brain started wildly on the effort to be with him, and to understand whether she listened to humour or emotion: she reposed herself as well as she could in the contemplation of an electrically-flashing maze, where every line ran losing itself in another.
He added: Old Philip! in a visible throb of pity for his brother; after the scrupulous dubitation between the banner and the pennon of the Cid!
It would have comforted her to laugh. She was closer upon tears, and without any reason for them in her heart.
Such a position brings the hesitancy which says that the sitting is at an end.
She feared, as she laid aside her music-books, that there would be more to come about Adiante, but he spared her. He bowed to her departing, and strolled off by himself.
CHAPTER VI. A CONSULTATION: WITH OPINIONS UPON WELSHWOMEN AND THE CAMBRIAN RACE
Later in the day she heard that he was out scouring the country on one of her uncles horses. She had too many distressing matters to think of for so singular a young man to have any other place than that which is given to the fantastical in a troubled and serious mind. He danced there like the whimsy sunbeam of a shaken water below. What would be his opinion of Adiante if he knew of her determination to sell the two fair estates she inherited from a grandmother whom she had venerated; that she might furnish arms to her husband to carry out an audacious enterprise likely to involve both of them in blood and ruin? Would he not bound up aloft and quiver still more wildly? She respected, quaint though it was, his imaginative heat of feeling for Adiante sufficiently to associate him with her so far; and she lent him in fancy her own bewilderment and grief at her cousins conduct, for the soothing that his exaggeration of them afforded her. She could almost hear his outcry.
The business of the hour demanded more of her than a seeking for refreshment. She had been invited to join the consultation of her uncle with his lawyer. Mr. Adister tossed her another letter from Vienna, of that mornings delivery. She read it with composure. It became her task to pay no heed to his loss of patience, and induce him to acquiesce in his legal advisers view which was, to temporise further, present an array of obstacles, and by all possible suggestions induce the princess to come over to England, where her fathers influence with her would have a chance of being established again; and it might then be hoped that she, who had never when under sharp temptation acted disobediently to his wishes at home, and who certainly would not have dreamed of contracting the abhorred alliance had she been breathing the air of common sense peculiar to her native land, would see the prudence, if not the solemn obligation, of retaining to herself these family possessions. Caroline was urgent with her uncle to act on such good counsel. She marvelled at his opposition, though she detected the principal basis of it.
Mr. Adister had no ground of opposition but his own intemperateness. The Welsh grandmothers legacy of her estates to his girl, overlooking her brothers, Colonel Arthur and Captain David, had excessively vexed him, despite the strong feeling he entertained for Adiante; and not simply because of the blow he received in it unexpectedly from that old lady, as the last and heaviest of the long and open feud between them, but also, chiefly, that it outraged and did permanent injury to his ideas of the proper balance of the sexes. Between himself and Mrs. Winnion Rhys the condition of the balance had been a point of vehement disputation, she insisting to have it finer up to equality, and he that the naturally lighter scale should continue to kick the beam. Behold now the consequence of the wilful Welshwomans insanest of legacies! The estates were left to Adiante Adister for her sole use and benefit, making almost a man of her, and an unshackled man, owing no dues to posterity. Those estates in the hands of a woman are in the hands of her husband; and the husband a gambler and a knave, they are in the hands of the Jewsor gone to smoke. Let them go. A devilish malignity bequeathed them: let them go back to their infernal origin. And when they were gone, his girl would soon discover that there was no better place to come to than her home; she would come without an asking, and alone, and without much prospect of the intrusion of her infamous Hook-nose in pursuit of her at Earlsfont. The money wasted, the wife would be at peace. Here she would have leisure to repent of all the steps she had taken since that fatal one of the acceptance of the invitation to the Embassy at Vienna. Mr. Adister had warned her both against her going and against the influence of her friend Lady Wenchester, our Ambassadress there, another Welsh woman, with the weathervane head of her race. But the girl would accept, and it was not for him to hold out. It appeared to be written that the Welsh, particularly Welsh women, were destined to worry him up to the end of his days. Their women were a composition of wind and fire. They had no reason, nothing solid in their whole nature. Englishmen allied to them had to learn that they were dealing with broomstick witches and irresponsible sprites. Irishwomen were models of propriety beside them: indeed Irishwomen might often be patterns to their English sisterhood. Mr. Adister described the Cambrian ladies as a kind of daughters of the Fata Morgana, only half human, and deceptive down to treachery, unless you had them fast by their spinning fancy. They called it being romantic. It was the ante-chamber of madness. Mad, was the word for them. You pleased them you knew not how, and just as little did you know how you displeased them. And you were long hence to be taught that in a certain past year, and a certain month, and on a certain day of the month, not forgetting the hour of the day to the minute of the hour, and attendant circumstances to swear loud witness to it, you had mortally offended them. And you receive your blow: you are sure to get it: the one passion of those women is for vengeance. They taste a wound from the lightest touch, and they nurse the venom for you. Possibly you may in their presence have had occasion to praise the military virtues of the builder of Carnarvon Castle. You are by and by pierced for it as hard as they can thrust. Or you have incidentally compared Welsh mutton with Southdown:you have not highly esteemed their drunken Bards:you have asked what the Welsh have done in the world; you are supposed to have slighted some person of their familya tenth cousin!anything turns their blood. Or you have once looked straight at them without speaking, and you discover years after that they have chosen to foist on you their idea of your idea at the moment; and they have the astounding presumption to account this misreading of your look to the extent of a full justification, nothing short of righteous, for their treachery and your punishment! O those Welshwomen!
The much-suffering lord of Earlsfont stretched forth his open hand, palm upward, for a testifying instrument to the plain truth of his catalogue of charges. He closed it tight and smote the table. Like motherand grandmother toolike daughter! he said, and generalised again to preserve his dignity: Theyre aflame in an instant. You may see them quiet for years, but it smoulders. You dropped the spark, and they time the explosion.
Caroline said to Mr. Camminy: You are sure you can give us the day?
All of it, he replied, apologising for some show of restlessness. The fact is, Miss Adister, I married a lady from over the borders, and though I have never had to complain of her yet, she may have a finale in store. Its true that I love wild Wales.
And so do I Caroline raised her eyes to imagined mountains.